DESCENDANTS of the Herero and Nama people of Namibia on Thursday May 16, 2017 stepped into an American District Court in Manhattan. It was the first time in 109 years that the world would, through their descendants, hear the voices of over 100,000 Africans massacred in their ancestral home by German colonialists who operated on the basis that the Africans they annihilated were animals and not human beings.

BROS, the Bill has just been passed!” With those immortal words, Omawumi informed me that the Delta State House of Assembly, DSHA, had passed the Delta State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission, that is DESOPADEC, Bill into law. I think it was on 1st August, 2006 and she had called on phone from the House.

Permit me to begin this contribution with an aside. The barbarians that launched a terror attack in Westminster, London yesterday in which four people were killed and many more injured are the same type of people that attacked and beheaded the sons and daughters of Ile Ife in their own homes and on their own land earlier this month.

WE are today taking a short excursion into Criminology. Confidence Game (con-game for short) depicts a crime situation where the person who should have reported the crime is part of it. For example, if you were to patronise a prostitute in a jurisdiction where prostitution was outlawed; and in the course of an argument, she stabbed you with a kitchen knife; you were on your own for, if you reported to the police, you would first have to explain what you were doing in a whore house. That is the exact nature of many aspects of life, particularly gambling.

THAT the country’s economy is currently experiencing a downturn, a situation largely precipitated by a reversal of oil fortunes, is no longer news. No thanks to decades of over-reliance on a monolithic economy and the utter relegation of agriculture, once the country’s cash cow.