One of the most pleasant ways to end a season as a football fan is for your team to do so with silverware.  It is usually just reward for a year of faithful devotion, often at some cost physically and financially.  This year, Arsenal fans experienced emotions which last occurred in 2005.  Doubtless, this will wet the appetite of players and fans alike and will impact on the preparations for the new season even as the previous one has barely ended.

The season ended on a real high with the 9-year trophy drought broken by one of the most nervy, nail-biting FA Cup final in years.  Starting catastrophically by conceding 2 goals in the first ten minutes of the game, Arsenal rallied.  A Santi Carzola free kick after 17 minutes brought measured recovery confidence before the end of the first half.  At 72 minutes, it was beginning to look like one of those days when Koscielny bundled home a much-deserved equalizer to wipe out Hull’s earlier lead.  From then on, it was, effectively, a matter of when the winner would come and in extra time, indeed 19 minutes of the regulation 30 minutes, Aaron Ramsey, undoubtedly the stand out player in Arsenal this season, despite prolonged absence through injury, conjured a winner that sent the Arsenal faithful into the kind of improvised delirium by a following who had forgotten how to win titles.  It was a pulsating way to end a long period of emptiness in tournament success and one that Arsenal fans will savour for a very long time.   But, truth be told, it could have been so much better if, but only if, certain factors, both unfortunate and sometimes self-inflicted, did not conspire to deny Arsenal a far more successful season.  In Post-Mortem mood, here are some of those “if” factors and probably what needs to be done differently to address these.

Festus Iyayi was, by every account, a truly exceptional Nigerian.  University lecturer and activist, he was, between 1986 to 1988, the leader of the labour union entity known as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), the umbrella organization responsible for the activities of academic staff unions across universities in Nigeria.  In 1987, as its president, ASUU confronted the military leadership at the time, advocating critical improvements of working and education conditions for the staff and students population alike.  As its influence grew and with typical military fastidiousness,  ASUU was banned by the government at the time.  Its leadership, starting with Iyayi, were arrested, detained and tortured.

Nigeria's electricity deficits have been well rehearsed in the last few years. With approximate installed power generation capacity of just over 9GW and peak generation capacity fluctuating around 4GW, power generation remains grossly inadequate to meet demand many times in excess of availability.

On 8 March 2013, Obafaiye Shem, the Lagos State Commandant of the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corp (NSCDC) appeared on Channel Television's breakfast programme, "Sunrise Daily".