WHEN former President Olusegun Obasanjo wrote that there was a political watch-list, many thought the grand old man of Nigerian politics was hallucinating. But thanks to the former Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Malam Nasir el-Rufai, we now know that there is indeed a list.

LET us start by acknowledging, the fact that; good and credible elections can only take place, under an atmosphere of peace. The way the opposition, APC is going about wresting power from Jonathan’s PDP, will only alienate them from the people and win sympathisers to the side of Jonathan. Because they want power, they are intent on desecrating the institution of the presidency, the symbol of the country’s unity and sovereignty.

THE failure of our rulers cannot be measured only by the visible decay of infrastructure and the dwindling quality of our lives but also by the way they prefer to die. While ordinary citizens live their miserable lives which literarily expire unsung in the country, our leaders, or rather, rulers on whose shoulders rest the responsibility of taking us beyond the 47 years pegged as our life span live theirs in foreign lands and/or die there. Yet, they daily savour the splendour and all that the high public offices they occupied or occupy but fail to provide the rest of us facilities in the quality measure they enjoy them in the foreign lands they govern us from.

THE gale of defections from the Peoples Democratic Party,PDP, to the All Progressive Congress, APC has been received by many commentators with mixed feelings. While some brazenly wave the defectors aside with uncouth commentaries, others have seen it as the desired light at the end of the tunnel for Nigeria’s chequered history. The PDP has suffered very serious depletion lately and the gale has not ended. Many more are warming up to dump the party that has prided itself for too long as the largest political party in Africa. Some of its members had boasted to citizens that the party will rule Nigeria for sixty unbroken years.

WHEN in 1999 an apparently diabolical team swarmed into government in Delta State, little did we expected that their vicious and dreadful siege on our treasury would last for 16 years. Two to three years into their messing up the hard-earned democracy, creating and confronting us with instant Augean stable and completely rubbishing our sensibilities, some of us counted it obligatory then to stand out and fight. We knew we were out to confront a monstrous system, but that was not to matter to us.