The man on the roof called out to his colleague and the two of them came to the door and were hitting the door, asking us to come out. In our midst were two elderly women who asked them to stop hitting the door, that they will open the door for them. They opened the door and the two insurgents asked us to come outside; we went out and they asked which among us refused to answer their call earlier. I stepped forward and said I was the one and he asked why I refused to obey him and I said I didn’t know who he was, besides, he was wielding a gun and that was why I refused to obey him.

After three years on the saddle, Governor Ibikunle Amosun recently went on a circuit of the 20 local government areas of the state. It was couched as an assessment tour, but given the resonance of politics in the polity it was not surprising that many stakeholders took the tour to be a political venture aimed at shoring support for the governor’s re-election bid.

THERE is understandable concern in the country about the drop in crude oil prices over the last several weeks. From a figure of $104 per barrel on August 1, 2014, the OPEC basket of prices collapsed to about $82 per barrel on October 28, 2014. The basket of prices used by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is the average price of all the varieties of crude sold in the international market.

Activities of operators of illegal refineries have been blamed for the drastic drop in crude oil production. Illegal refining and crude theft have grown beyond the Niger Delta. To stop the trend, several billions of Naira has been expended to secure pipelines and fight oil bunkerers.

Suffering, indeed, is an equalizer in the human experience. It knows neither rich nor poor, religion nor ethnicity.