PRECISELY 24 hours from today, eligible voters in Enugu State will return to the booths, this time, to elect the Local Government chairmen and councilors who will pilot affairs in the seventeen Councils.

I READ Mr. Femi Kusa’s brilliant expose in the Nation newspaper, on his days in The Guardian and his encounter with the late Chief Alex Ibru, our late publisher and it occurred to me that one of the reasons why Africans counselled that we should not speak ill of the dead is that we deny them the right to reply.

NIGERIANS criticise the government because they love Nigeria. Patriotism is not love for one’s government; it is love for one’s country. Theodore Roosevelt said in 1908 that “patriotism …does not mean to stand by the country or any public official save to the degree in which he himself stands by the country.

UNEMPLOYMENT is not new to Nigerians. They have grown used to reading about the general failure of the state called Nigeria and by extension, have come to understand the futility of trying to redirect the tragic trajectory of their own existence. We have heard gory stories of “700,000 applicants jostle for 5,000 positions in the Customs”, let alone the Nigeria Police Force.

GODSWILL Obot Akpabio, the Governor of Akwa Ibom State is fast becoming a proverbial golden fish that has no hiding place.