DURING the tenure of one of our past presidents, I was given a publication to distil some of its content for use in another publication. The publication, a “Mid-term Report” of the president’s administration, featured inputs from various ministries, departments and agencies. It was meant to project the goals and achievements of the government of the day. And, not surprisingly, its foreword was signed by the then incumbent president, an indication that his government endorsed it at the highest level.

How we respond to an issue is in many cases more important than the issue itself. And one such issue is the current economic travails Nigeria is currently grappling with.

A Federation of the existing Region, Lagos continuing as Federal Territory or becoming a Region. N.B. The Memorandum considered a redrawing of the constituent units desirable and set out the following criteria: ethnic, linguistic, and cultural affinity or homogeneity, historical association (e.g. Hausa/Fulani, Efik/Ibibio), viability of states both absolutely and relatively, geographical contiguity, comparability in size, reciprocal self-determination (i.e. not only should each minority group be given the opportunity to determine its future but also a majority group must be given the opportunity to determine whether it is willing to associate with a minority seeking such association.

TWO! I had carefully read the farcical online report that Governor Obiano had, in two years, blown the fabulous N75 billion “abandoned” in Anambra’s vaults by his predecessor. It was a disgraceful washout; it contained not a single word, let alone a single sentence, to support the wild claim of its title. It merely listed what the author termed 29 Anambra State Government accounts in various banks, and posted the sum of N37.3 billion as the total funds in them on the morning of Chief Obiano’s inauguration.

MR. Lee Kuan Yew (1923-2015) was the first Prime Minister of Singapore and he governed Singapore from 1959-1990. In January 1966, he visited Nigeria as part of the Commonwealth delegation to discuss Rhodesia unilateral declarations of independence. Rhodesia is now called Zimbabwe. He stayed in Lagos like all the Commonwealth leaders for three days. It was after their departure that Nigeria’s Prime Minister Alhaji Tafawa Balewa was assassinated.