THE Joint Military Task Force, yesterday, averted what would have turned out as a bloody Easter in Kano, following a combat operation that left 14 insurgents dead, a primed car laden with explosives for suicide attack and assorted weapons of war recovered.

There is no doubt that Chinua Achebe, who died last week in the United States after a long residence there probably because it was better for him to live there than in Nigeria, was, by many accounts, an outstanding writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), received wide critical acclaim soon after its publication, which came in the wake of the great wave of decolonization. A year before the publication of the novel, Ghana became the first independent African country, in 1957. Things Fall Apart was published at a time when non-Western but Western educated intellectuals and cultural nationalists were looking around for indigenous cultural documents that could vindicate pre-colonial African cultures, in what the British-Indian writer, Salman Rushdie once called, in memorable phrase, “writing back to the Centre” (the West).

Fresh facts emerged, at the weekend, that former President Matthew Okikiolakan Aremu Olusegun Obasanjo is intensifying his opposition to the 2015 re-election aspiration of incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan.

Mrs. Tokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu, one of the surviving children of the matriarch of Awolowo family, Mrs. HID Awolowo, has asked those who might have been wishing their aged mother death to stop that, saying, no one could fast track her death.

Akolade Arowolo, who allegedly murdered his banker wife, Titilayo Arowolo, Thursday, told an Ikeja High Court that his late wife preferred her ex-boyfriend to him and their baby.