It may sound like a fairy tale but some decades ago, stories were told about school children being slammed with all manner of punishment for speaking Igbo language in the classroom!

HOw sweet the sound of victory is! It is even sweeter when the victory is won “home and away” like the Brazilian team of USA ’94 would do to any team that crosses their path. Such was the mood from Uyo to Calabar, Port Harcourt to Lagos and Abuja to other parts Nigeria when, on Friday, September 15, the Court of Appeal sitting in Calabar upheld the election of Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State. And the victory sound was blared from all corners of the world, blowing the good news across the lands and waters of Africa.

The meeting or conference might grant the Moslem states the right to demolish Christian churches and to prevent the erection of new ones. But there, it must also grant the Christian states similar rights, to uproot existing mosques and abolish the construction of new ones in their own areas.

I am not quite sold to the idea making the rounds that majority of Nigeria’s Northern Moslems or their leaders do not subscribe to the Boko Haram ideology of Sharia rule in Nigeria’s Muslim states in the North and the concomitant rejection of Western education for which the group is known.

It was short and brutish: that text message I received that Wednesday evening from a friend, stating, “Ambassador Saidu Pindar is dead”. Initially I thought somebody was toying with death or playing a trick on me, thinking that because our political affiliations differed with the Ambassador, the news of any harm coming to him might not bother me.