If you had to switch lives with a fictional character for a week, who would you choose? When things fall apart, the centre can not hold.
Okonkwo of Umuofia
When Presidents Hire the Critics and the Opposition Suddenly Discovers the Joys of Silence by Lawson Akhigbe
There is a peculiar genius to Nigerian politics that deserves its own chapter in the handbook of advanced statecraft. It is the art of shrinking the political space not by banning dissent, not by jailing the loud ones, but by simply offering them a seat at the table and watching the principles evaporate faster than …
Tinubu’s 3rd anniversary, Ogun deity and voodoo vote numbers by Festus Adedayo
Africa and indeed, the Third World in general, suffers the affliction of leaders and tautologos. It is an epidemic of leaders who act like the sexually infirm. For this species of infirm male, when queried on why they cannot insert into the right hole, they boast of possessing the capability to make multiple insertion of threads into the barely visible hole of the needle, even in the dark. Were Tinubu to be tautologous in delivery of democratic dividends, it would have been more desirable than repetition of needless words.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there is the eternal Home Office press release – updated for the age of Blue Labour, Tory one-upmanship and Reform UK’s five-year fantasy. By Lawson Akhigbe
Yet the political theatre continues as if the data never arrived. Immigration remains the ultimate litmus test, the issue on which every faction must prove its manhood by sounding harsher than the last.
The Case of the Interchangeable Greers by Lawson Akhigbe
For years I laboured under a delightful cognitive shortcut, the kind the brain builds when it decides two people are essentially doing the same job and therefore need only one filing cabinet between them. In my mind there lived a composite figure: formidable, telegenic, fond of a well placed intellectual demolition on live television, and, crucially, British by adoption rather than birth. I called her, in the privacy of my own head, "the Greer." It never once occurred to this internal editor that there were, in fact, two of her: one African American, one Australian, one from Chicago's West Side, one from Melbourne, sharing a surname, a sharp tongue and, apparently, my short term memory.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 