IT is a new year – the year 2010 after the Common Era. So, I welcome every Nigerian, and particularly all readers of the “Orbit” to the New Year, and wish you all the best of the New Year. Even as I utter this heartfelt wish, I also know, deep within me, that this is going to be an interesting and challenging year.

I WAS not at the Chinua Achebe colloquium which took place last week in Rhode Island. But while it was going on in Providence, I was myself at a party in the St. Louis home of the economist, Dr. Remi Onwumere with Dr. Sylvester Ugoh, Harvard-trained economist and Nigerian politician.

REACTIONS from various quarters on President Umar Yar’Adua’s recurrent hospitalization in a Saudi hospital reflect the profound dilemma of the situation for Nigerians. Of all the reactions, the most remarkable and possibly subversive is the proclamation in the Senate that the president could, if he chose, stay in the Saudi hospital for one year.

I SHOULD first register my best wishes to the president, Umar Yar’Adua, in his search for more robust health. I wish him well in his struggles with ill-health and extend my sympathies for his private pains.

The presentation of the budget by the President to the joint session of the National Assembly is undoubtedly one of the most spectacular events of the legislative year.

The various constitutional conferences that shaped Nigeria from 1950-1958 were simply icing on the cake. At the convention of the nations in San Francisco in 1945 at the end of World War II leading towards the convention of the United Nations, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain tried to steer the discussion towards agreeing that the Atlantic charter did not cover the colonies who were standing upon the argument that the charter guarantees freedom for all peoples.

WHEN Odumegwu-Ojukwu sneezes, the nation catches cold. That is to be expected. General Ojukwu showed his paces in war. He led one of the most famous wars of the late 20th century. General Ojukwu led the people of the former Eastern Nigeria with its majority Igbo population in a war in self-defence when they became targets of a genocidal rage.

IN 1890, the French statesman Jules Francois Camille Ferry wrote, “an irresistible movement is bearing the great nations of Europe towards the conquest of fresh territories. It is like a huge steeplechase into the unknown…whole continents are being annexed…especially the huge black continent so full of fierce mysteries and vague hopes.”

LAST week, the famous Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe received an unlikely guest at his home in the Catskills. Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s former anti-corruption cop went to see the sagely fabulist. It might have been a social visit, but one thing led to another, and soon Nuhu Ribadu and Achebe began to talk about the prodigal nation.

MY attempt this week is to bring some attention to the subject of the Asaba massacres, one of the haunting ghosts of Nigeria’s last civil war. I pay particular tribute to Emma Okocha – Onye Amuma Cable – author of Blood on the Niger, the chilling account of the Asaba massacres of October 7, 1967.