Read each passage carefully and answer the questions that follow it
Olumba removed a small black amulet from his neck and substituted a bigger one. The former was for general protection at home, the latter for protection and luck whilst travelling. Ready at last he picked up his matchet and headed for the chief’s with Ikechi behind him.
Olumba worked ahead looking up as usual. Just what he was searching for in the sky Ikechi couldn’t tell. Perhaps his shortness accounted for his habit since, he often had to look up in the faces of his taller companions. What he lacked in height he made up in solid muscles and he looked strong. His wrestling pseudonym was Agadaga, a name which meant nothing but which somehow conveyed an impression of strength.
Eze Diali, the chief, sat at one end f his reception hall ringed by the village elders who he had called to a meeting. The rest of the hall was filled with much younger men.
‘People of Chiolu, the chief began’, I have learnt that poachers from Aliakoro will be at the Great Pond tonight. There is no doubt that they will try to steal from the Pond of Wagaba which as you know is rich in fish. Our plan tonight is to bring one or more of these thieves home alive and ask for very large ransoms. This line of action will have two effects. Firstly, it will prove our charges of poaching against the people of Aliakoro, and secondly, the payment of very large ransom will be a deterrent. We need seven men for this venture. I call for volunteers’
Who will head this party?’ the chief asked, looking round. Chituru, one of the elders, said’ ‘Eze Diali, let us not waste time. Olumba is the man for the job. We all know that he had led many exploits like this one’. We still need six men’, Eze Diali said. Eager youths came surging forward. Their well-formed muscle rippled as they elbowed one another. It was difficult to choose.
‘I suggest Olumba should choose his men He knows the boys very well and his judgment should be reliable’. It was Wezume, another village elder, who spoke.

  In 1968 Nigeria was the world biggest producer of groundnuts (averaging 712,600 tonnes a year), the second producer of cocoa (203, 600 tonnes) after Ghana, the fourth producer of tin (13,264 tonnes) and the biggest producer of columbite. Oil palm, growing wild and in plantation in the south, supplied half the world’s export of palm kernels (407, 200 tonnes) and seventy per cent of the world’s export of palm oil (152, 700tonnes). Nigeria forests covered some 310, 800 square kilometres and produced about 1.132 million cubic metres of timber a year, for export as logs, sawn timber or plywood sheets. Rubber was grown by peasant farmers and, increasingly in plantation; and was partially processed in local factories. The ancient livestock industry of the north still supplies the whole country. About a million cattle are slaughtered annually, and the trade is now being modernized and expanded. As a by-product of the type of skin inaccurately called ‘Moroccan leather’ comes from Nigeria.

  I was on top of one of my palm trees yesterday, tapping the tree and collecting the wine for the morning when I saw two soldiers at the foot of the tree. They made signs at me, so I concluded that they wanted my palm wine. On descending from the tree I gave them the wine to sample, as is customary. Not only did they drain all the wine in the calabash, they said they had come to conscript me into the army. I ask them weather they wanted me or somebody else, and they said they had come for me. I asked them weather an enemy sent them or they came on their own. To cut it short, they said i was wasting their time s they had to catch twenty men that day. Only a foolish man willingly disobeys armed soldiers. I told them I had something very important to say.
‘Say it, then’ one of them cut in impatiently, looking at his watch. It was approaching midday, by which time it was considered unsafe to drive around in a car for fear of enemy planes which had learnt to strafe individual vehicles on the highway.
‘Yes, what I want to say is simple’ I said, ‘My first son, the boy who should have succeeded me when I died, joined the army voluntarily with my full backing. He was a brilliant boy, always first in his class. He was in his last year at school when the war began. He was killed. The two children who came after him are girls. The next boy is still in primary school. If he were old enough, I would have asked him to join the army not, minding that the fact that my first son’s head had already been sacrificed to the same war. For no person who breathes, will say that he has no part in this war.
‘But let me add this: - If this war has reached the stage when a man of my age is given a rifle by force and sent to the war fri9ont, then the time has come for you to blow the whistle and end the war. That is all I want to say!’.