For 24 years, Zina didn’t know her biological father. As a growing child, she had repeatedly been told by her mother that her father was in Jos, Plateau State, then in Lagos. Unable to withstand the resultant mockery from friends and classmates, Zina demanded to be taken to her father, sometimes refusing to eat for days.

When will the folly stop? No one can say. Even President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan who just some two years ago became a victim of this paradigm, mocked and made to feel incompetent and incompatible by the Yar’Adua cabal – because they didn’t believe in the constitution of Nigeria – is set on his path to another paradigm which would not lead to any shift.

I will like to disagree with our father and eminent personality in the person of Chief E.K. Clark when he spoke about soldiers on the streets of Lagos. There is a distinction between putting soldiers on the streets of the Niger Delta cities that are being burnt and places in the north where Boko Haram is striking and killing people and putting soldiers on the streets of Lagos where people are exercising their democratic rights.

Around 12 noon last Monday, rumours spread fast in Kaduna that a suicide bomber had forced his way into Kaduna State Government House (Sir Ibrahim Kashim House), Kawo, and that there had been an exchange of fire between him and security personnel guarding the place before he was captured. There was palpable anxiety in Kaduna that afternoon, after a daring suicide bomb attempt at a Military formation in the town was foiled just a week before.

But for the one week strike action of Nigerians against the removal of the subsidy on petrol, all indications were that they would have been taken for granted again by their government.