My mind wandered to Nigeria and I pictured what our friends in Abuja would have done to our people were they the ones hosting the couple having lunch just one floor above me! That’s when sadness and anger engulfed me. I thought about how many streets in Abuja they would have cleared and closed; I thought about their koboko and AK-47-wielding soldiers and mobile police men, high on paraga, flogging and jack booting our people out of the way; I thought about the atrocious psychology of mediocre rulers who treat their people like dung that must be hidden from the sophisticated vision of every visitor in a convoy. 

We live in a society where trust is at a discount, and deceit is rife. The National Assembly is a house of deceit and those in Aso Rock, live in denial of the truth. Each man is out for himself. No one here stops to think of the implication of his or her action on the next person, on the neighbour, nay, on the community at large: the driver on the road that drives crazily hooting non-stop, blocking crossroads, or speeding maniacally; the man that fells the neighbourhood tree just to give himself a clearer view from his patio; the “big men” that divide up, as private plots, public parks amongst themselves; the governor that converts state treasury into his personal account; the policeman that sets free an armed robber in exchange for bribe; and so on. 

Obama has come and gone, the speech is classic and the rhetoric is exceptional. But the best way to test whether he would be different from other American presidents is to explore the question of African strategic interests, or, alternatively, American strategic interests in Africa, and examine the ways in which and the degree to which Obama's pursuit of American policy is consistent with or diverges from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush

We have had bad governments in Nigeria by default, by allowing the past and present rulers to operate on the margin of despair and apathy. They won power not because they were geniuses but because we were asleep and the coalition of progressives was fractured.  But today I am convinced that the many masses, the impoverished, the committed within and the educated out there, across the globe, your time has come!