Pat Utomi narrated the thoughts, the people and the circumstances that persuaded him to run for the Delta State governorship election under the platform of All Peoples Congress, APC. Utomi was rightly warned by his friend, Dr. Asoluka, who prophetically described APC as a political party with “a flock of scoundrels.”

The old adage is that   “nothing is small or big otherwise by comparison.”

Indeed, time it was when: .Our Naira was stronger than the Dollar. At some point in the past it was 95k (less than N1) to $1, but now it is N365 to $1.

Introduction : In 2008, Mr. Klaus P. Wachsmuth, the German Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Nestle Nigeria Plc told me and Ikechukwu Eze, two BusinessDay Senior Correspondents then, in an exclusive interview that “nobody has the right to treat his country the way Nigerians treat their country.” Mr. Wachsmuth later sought to keep that statement out of what was going to be published, probably because he felt he shouldn’t have interfered in the internal affairs of his host country.  But Mr. Wachsmuth was absolutely right.

THE major difference between 1993 and 2018 is that we have a generation that has lost its sense of outrage. Whereas in 1993, I, as the top executive of a multinational, felt personally insulted by the annulment and wrote an op-ed piece in The Guardian titled We Must Say Never Again which forced middle-class professionals to rally and we founded the Concerned Professionals that mounted opposition to military rule; today’s people of my equivalence in 1993 are on Twitter and Facebook making jokes about happenings guaranteed to ensure that they and their children will have a more miserable experience of a future foretold.

Unemployment rate in Nigeria has grown from 17.5 per cent at the onset of democracy in 1999 to 23.1 per cent in 2018.