By now, Nigerians have heard much, but certainly not all of the fallouts of last week’s brazen arrest of Federal judges, and three honorable judges of the Supreme Court by agents of the Department of State Security, DSS.

The civil war continues to haunt Nigeria today because its ghosts were never properly buried. The contradictions of that war gave impetus to all the abominations that came to characterize the post-war nation

A terrible and aggravating scene once again played out this past week in Tulsa, Oklahoma where another black man, Terrence Crutcher, was shot and killed by a white police officer, Betty Shelby. The unfolding events leading to the killing of Terence Crutcher captured live by webcam and police helicopter videos showed an unarmed black man with his hands raised walking away with slow unsure steps from the police woman who had pulled and pointed her gun at him.

A terrible and aggravating scene once again played out this past week in Tulsa, Oklahoma where another black man, Terrence Crutcher, was shot and killed by a white police officer, Betty Shelby.

It marvels me when I see people so anxious, so much in a hurry that queuing up is am stumbling block for them. They are quite comfortable jumping the queue regardless of who is looking at them. But why the rush! It is a matter of waiting in line for your turn.

Last weekend in Dearborn, Michigan, old students of the Government College Umuahia – “Umuahians” – as they’re called, under the banner of the GCUOBA-USA, met at their annual convention at the Henry Autograph Collection Hotel in Dearborn. I had flown in an early morning flight from Orlando, Florida.

A man named his dog “Buhari” and he was quickly arrested, brutalized at the police station, and promptly brought to court, according to the police for constituting public nuisance capable of causing a breakdown in law and order. It was a strange charge, and there was public uproar about the abridgment of the rights of a private citizen, doing the most private of things: naming his personal pet. But the indelicacy of the situation has more to do with the act of naming judged subversive.

This week, dear readers of the “Orbit,” I will like to share with you, something else beyond the roaring political issue of our day. I will like to examine an abiding question of the religion and identity of one of Africa’s most vital cultures – the Igbo – many of whom are actually suffering from a profound level of identity crisis that numbs them from what Azikiwe called “Spiritual balance”: a cardinal condition for self-reflection and self-healing. I was born into a very Christian family and baptized, no more than eight weeks old into the Catholic Church. In fact, for his services to the church, my maternal grandfather was inducted into the knighthood of the church and received a papal medal from Pope John Paul 1.

If any lesson must be learned, and any good come from the current political and economic isolation of the Eastern parts of Nigeria, by the current APC-led government of President Muhammadu Buhari, it must be that ultimately, the states of the former Eastern region have more common grounds for political and economic action in the common interest of its people. The East of Nigeria does exist as a geographical reality. The contiguity of its various parts make it one of the most exciting areas for economic integration through strategic infrastructural linkages.

First, let us start by where Rochas Okorocha began: he was swept into government on the wings of the APGA, following a populist revolt at the polls in Imo state that threw out the PDP government of Mr. Ikedi Ohakim in 2011. Ohakim was a man of ideas. He just had trouble with implementation, and so his program sounded too futuristic to a people who wanted immediate relief, and immediate benefit from government programs.

Fifty years ago, on a Friday night at the Western Nigerian Governor’s lodge in Ibadan, a group of soldiers led by Major Theophilus Danjuma committed a terrible act of treason. They accosted their Commander-in-chief, Major-General Johnson Umunnakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces and Military Head of state of Nigeria only six months in the making, stripped him of his epaulettes and his swagger stick shaped in the form of the Crocodile, and proceeded to arrest him and his host, the Military Governor of the West, Colonel Francis Adekunle Fajuyi. These soldiers, some of them far too drug-addled, did not stop there.

It is true that the years under military dictatorships distorted the political development of Nigeria in the crucial postcolonial period. Barely six years after the end of colonialism, soldiers took over the role of political governance of Nigeria. By the way, next week will be exactly fifty-years since the brutal murder of General Aguiyi-Ironsi, Nigeria’s first military Head of state.

Sam Omatseye’s piece in the Nation, “The Ghost of Biafra,” this past week adds to the growing discussion on the inevitable impact of the new secessionist movement in important ways. The kernel of that column is that Nigeria as a nation runs in vain from its obligation to effect closure on the Biafran experience. Omatseye, of course skirts certain issues, and fudges a few, including the important question he raises: “how could a people knowing that they did not have the arms still plunge to war against an overwhelming armed opponent?”

The much vaunted but inefficient fight against corruption has become the basis for which the executive branch under the presidency of Muhammadu Buhari has embarked on the most extensive power grab in the history of civil rule in Nigeria. Well, Nigerians made the first mistake in 1999, when they did not back their legislators in checkmating President Obasanjo’s attempts to muscle the National Assembly. But let me proceed from where the “Orbit” ended last week by making the following observations. The greatest threat against democracy and the survival of the rule of law in Nigeria is an indolent and a badly informed citizenship. Most Nigerians have never bothered to read the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. This includes, many Nigerians who are literate enough to absorb the letters of the constitution, and understand it.

Let us think of the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate as, like a co-pilot. His hands are on the same lever with the president of the senate, navigating the nation through the storms of nation-build. That is right: nation-building does not happen at the executive office, it happens in the chambers of the nation’s legislative houses.