God rest late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua. He was a good man, a nice man – a man of peace and laudable aspirations.

It’s going to be a long ,long year. I can see it coming. From this point to election time next year, we shall surely have exciting times. The handwriting is on the wall, and on the ground, and even in the sky. A merry time is sure to be had by all.

There is yet former military Head of State, Buhari, still very articulate and purposeful, but at the moment in dire need of a firm political base. Then there are several state governors whose appeal suffers from the limitations of an overwhelmingly parochial spread, and requires more exposure for acceptance on the national scene.

Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida is still the cause. That was the exact word he used in his congratulatory message to the man many of us now delight to honour with title of the sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. One Prime Ministerial and two Presidential elections had come and gone, in all of which Chief Awolowo contested and lost.

I am sure that you are of the opinion, like the rest of us, that time flies; not just that it passes by, but also that it does so rapidly.

Only the Senate has given the nation a sense of direction; though some of us disagree with the action but we are all at one with regard to the intention

If Nigeria had been a pregnant woman she would now be in line for congratulations on her safe delivery. What should have been a routine administrative act was manipulated and inflated into a near-constitutional crisis, which widely demeaned the state of our nation. But, at last, Vice President Goodluck Jonathan is the Acting President.

The activism of a Nigerian university teacher would be strange to his Western counterpart. If today clerics are joining rallies it is what the times demand. Neither Jesus Christ, the Jewish prophets nor the Prophet Mohammed to mention just a few were naturally made for the role history eventually recorded for them. Circumstances led them to it. As they have apparently led some in the media to take on our slumbering, dying and perhaps dead rulers who are determined to bring down the house on us all.

No country should ever treat its President’s illness the way we have so callously, so carelessly, handled President Umar Yar’Adua’s sickness. Seeking to clothe it in a veil of secrecy, the fragile cover devised only allowed for the emergence of a variety of speculations, suppositions and plain mischief.

*Death came swiftly and suddenly to Otunba Dipo Dina, and it must have been a surprise even to him, as the news of his ghastly murder is to many Nigerians. That was the way it happened to Funsho Williams, and we are no wiser as to those who were responsible till this day. That kind of horror would, in fact, summon a long list today. There is no need to mention more names. That would only recall the sorrow of the black catalogue of irreparable loss.

*At what point does one arrest the national scene that seems to be moving on the wings of a typhoon, when mayhem has erupted once again in a section of the country not unknown to widespread violence, at a time when the not unusual comprehensive shortage of fuel supply has all but prostrated the country, […]

Out of the miasma of what must be a trying period in their lives, the AbdulMutallab family hass emerged with impeccable conduct, sitting astride of the situation and calmly riding the storm, Thank heavens; no blood was spilled, no bones broken. We can soon put all this behind us. And we’d better

The sounds of the Yuletide have now subsided, yielding place to the daily bustle in the pursuit of honest, and maybe not-so-honest, livelihood. So, Happy New Year, and welcome once again to the frenzy of making two ends meet. But, you will agree, it was good fun while it lasted.

It is somewhat curious that the initial stages of the project attracted attention in the facelift they afforded the waterfront of the city, the Marina. The natives call that part of Lagos, “Ehin’gbeti’, and follow it up with the popular saw, “B’oju o ba ti Ehin’gbeti, oju o ni t’Eko”.

I knew Peter Enahoro enough to recognize him and speak to him in a familiar tone of voice, though I had little claim to any kind of familiarity more than the fact that 1 was working in the same office with his elder brother, Ben (or “Benito, for short”, as we used to playfully call him – God rest him) and we met now and then when they lived in Yaba.