The alarm has gone off now. The Nigerian Meteorological Agency penultimate week sounded the warning that Nigerians should expect wet spells and floods especially in the Northern states of the country. The warning as contained in the 2012 Seasonal Rainfall Prediction also added that the deluge and the attendant flood will not limit only to the above states.

ONE of the notorious quirks bedeviling governance in Nigeria is the tendency for what started out as a firm, decisive and desirable government action to unceremoniously fizzle out into blatant back-tracking or abrupt disinterest and lingering inaction, often witnessing a pathetic return to business as usual.

A SYSTEM which community members prefer inferior values and products over others of superior quality; in which one’s own is looked down upon in preference to another’s, to artificiality and superficiality; in short, a practice which condemns the followers who are actually victims of their creation to self- depreciation is vanity and sure proof of emptiness: a substandard culture.

Its large population and market size bestow tremendous potential on the Nigeria economy -Africa’s second largest and among the most rapidly growing. The country’s ambitious Vision 2020 programme and the UN Millennial Development Goals together represent considerable challenges in terms of economic revival.

I visited Lagos lastyear from my base in Abuja, for the funeral ceremony of Mrs Florence Akinlemibola, the mother of my childhood friend. She lived to a ripe old age—so it was ‘owambe’ galore. We adorned our ‘aso ebis’ and boogied to juju live band music as we sent mama on her way to a glorious home-coming.