How can a man who has been president on two occasions, two decades apart, not fully understand the underlying political issues that are the root causes of the current instability in the Niger Delta? How could he ever so carelessly transpose the criminality of a handful of opportunistic kidnappings and bunkering onto an entirely legitimate political agitation?

Perhaps if he had directed more of the revenues from oil to the development of the areas from whence those revenues derived, while he was President and Federal Minister of Petroleum, the Niger Delta unrest might have dissipated by now!

Effectively, one’s position on social and economic issues were constrained into this left-right continuum, such that if one favored a highly-controlled economy one was on the extreme left, and if one supported a highly unregulated economy, one was on the extreme right. Similarly, on the social dimension, if one was collectivist, one was to the left and if one tended towards individualism, one mapped to the right.