The figures from the first SBM Intelligence's Jollof Rice Index for 2018 are in. But there is not much to cheer. No, the food crisis bedevilling some parts of Nigeria’s northeast has not spread its wings to other parts of the country. The ghost of the inflation-fuelled 2016 still looms in the dark of markets…

In the days of yore, the Nigerian Super Eagles were a national treasure: the players were our go to persons when an aching nation needed to smile and find a common ground to bump fists in bars and, perhaps, forget our off-putting ethnic-based mutual suspicions.