It has been used often to conjure the spectre of discrimination to attract sympathy for a just claim and, at times, for an unmerited advantage. One can hardly fault that stance though, since self-love is hardly as unprofitable as self-neglect.

President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is free to contest the presidential election next year. The Peoples Democratic Party, his party, announced the decision in tandem with the affirmation that its “zoning” policy remains intact.

Why must we continue to do everything in an untidy manner? It seems we never learn.

Maybe one should also briefly touch on the “encounter on the bridge” in Ogun State recently. There we saw a State Governor wantonly refer in derogatory terms to no less than the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He called the “fourth gentleman on the realm” his “Aburo” which in Yoruba means a younger relation, but can be derogatorily applied to connote inferiority or even inconsequentiality.

There was hardly any newspaper that you could open recently, without reading about yet another group of politicians, civil society, ethnic group or plain opportunists endorsing the candidacy of President Goodluck Jonathan. The gentleman is yet to announce it, but no matter; several people have done that for him already.

My difficulty centered on why we may dodge, but cannot entirely avoid the tag of a failed nation, judging by our woeful record which lacks an appreciable measure of progress as a nation in the past fifty years. Please pardon me for having to quote at length from these statements. Stay with me; I’m going somewhere (as the preachers fondly entreat their congregations these days.)

It is now more than three days – at the time of writing – since three Nigerian journalists were kidnapped in Abia State on their way from a meeting in Uyo. Adolphus Okoronkwo, Silva Okeke and Wahab Oba, the Chairman of the Lagos State Council of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, suddenly found themselves making headlines, in stead of casting them. It would be rather droll in its own way, if it were not so serious.

In all of my thirty years as a football official at the national level, I never got to know Goodluck Jonathan as a football expert. His knowledge of the rules and regulations of FIFA would be hardly more than modest, in my estimate.

There should be a law against any form of physical argument or contention within the walls of the hallowed chambers where the laws of this nation are made. We should no longer tolerate or accommodate such reprehensible behaviour as recently wantonly displayed among citizens who smugly answer to the name of “honourable” people.

Could it be that Christianity is the most permissive religion in the world, or of the object of worship of what other faith could a professed adherent have casually remarked what was reported of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo about the conduct of elections in Nigeria?