It may sound like a fairy tale but some decades ago, stories were told about school children being slammed with all manner of punishment for speaking Igbo language in the classroom!

HOw sweet the sound of victory is! It is even sweeter when the victory is won “home and away” like the Brazilian team of USA ’94 would do to any team that crosses their path. Such was the mood from Uyo to Calabar, Port Harcourt to Lagos and Abuja to other parts Nigeria when, on Friday, September 15, the Court of Appeal sitting in Calabar upheld the election of Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State. And the victory sound was blared from all corners of the world, blowing the good news across the lands and waters of Africa.

The meeting or conference might grant the Moslem states the right to demolish Christian churches and to prevent the erection of new ones. But there, it must also grant the Christian states similar rights, to uproot existing mosques and abolish the construction of new ones in their own areas.

I am not quite sold to the idea making the rounds that majority of Nigeria’s Northern Moslems or their leaders do not subscribe to the Boko Haram ideology of Sharia rule in Nigeria’s Muslim states in the North and the concomitant rejection of Western education for which the group is known.

It was short and brutish: that text message I received that Wednesday evening from a friend, stating, “Ambassador Saidu Pindar is dead”. Initially I thought somebody was toying with death or playing a trick on me, thinking that because our political affiliations differed with the Ambassador, the news of any harm coming to him might not bother me.

IT has almost become a tradition that after 100 days in office of any elected leader, an evaluation of a sort is made. The Niger Delta Nationalities Forum, NDNF, Lagos views your first 100 days in office as a period of strategic planning for the actualisation of your “Transformation Agenda”. Therefore it is a period for consultation, engagement, selection and appointment.

True to predictions made early this year, our nation has experienced major flood disasters this year. Lagos and recently Ibadan have experienced very heavy flooding leaving in its trail, lots of avoidable deaths and massive destruction of property.

Let us even assume that Oshiomhole romanced PDP before berthing at the ACN. Is that in itself against any known law in the land? If Ihimekpen is sincere with himself, he should be bold enough to tell the people of the state that the real truth Oshiomhole abandoned the PDP is because of the fraudulent conditions they wanted to impose on him.

Are journalists in Ogun State not worthy of appointments in the government of their state? Why is it that successive occupants of Igbein Hill Government House since 1999 (that was when I began active journalism in the State) have not been looking their ways for engagement, especially as media and information managers?

Policy reserval is a disease common to our governments, military or civilian, since independence in 1960. It has been the bane of development in a way that rubbishes all the positives of perspective planning.

The telephone at my New Rochelle, New York residence rang one afternoon in late September 1990. The familiar voice at the other end simply said, “Joe, I dey your town, o!” “Gus”, I answered, a bit surprised as I had not had prior intimation of his visit. “Welcome,” I said. “How now?” “We dey!” He replied. “Shey you go come house?” I quickly followed. “How I go come New York and no come your house?,” He responded. “How long you dey town for?” “Only a few days,” he answered. “Okay. We go arrange. Where you dey stay?” “For Helmsley Palace”. “Welcome,” I repeated, “I go come see you.”

Characteristically, an average liar also suffers a combination of two things- great deal of verbal hemorrhage and loss of memory. For the first lapse, he talks so much that he often colours his points so much that he is never comfortable until every word he utters is well embellished beyond what it ordinarily should be.

The fever that is raging in Nigeria todayis “Wikileaks”. Yet as entertaining as these secret communications are the truth is that if you believe everything that you read in Julian Assange’s “leaks” then you will believe anything. I say this based on my own personal experiences.

IT is baffling, indeed worrisome how people often and unconstructively criticize government policies without providing alternatives or superior arguments, rather relying on emotions and sentiments to project their views.

THE May/June 2011 West African Senior Secondary School certificate Examination result released by WAEC shows the grave state of our secondary education. According to Dr. Iyi Uwaedia, head of WAEC National Office, only 30.9% of the 1,540,250 candidates made five credits and above, including English and Mathematics.