When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.

Those who are talking sharia in Nigeria are really just politicians exploiting what they think is available. But if it should turn out that there are in fact whole sections of the country which believe that it is legitimate to chop off peoples hands because they stole a hen - if that should really turn out to be the genuine belief of responsible, educated people in the North than I would say there is no chance. But I do not believe that is the case. The sharia was always there but it was never force onto non-Muslims and it was not ever applied in the area of criminal law.

The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: `The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.

What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.