If you could pick any fictional animal to be your lifelong companion (like a Pokémon or fantasy pet), what would it be? My childhood television fantasy pet
Rin-tin-tin
Burnham’s Strategy: Manchesterism Meets the Politics of Looking Busy
Andy Burnham did not inherit a government so much as a stage set. After years of mayoral apprenticeship in Greater Manchester, he arrived in Downing Street with a ready-made philosophy called “Manchesterism” and a clear preference for the photographable over the structural. The high-street crackdown is not an aberration. It is the strategy in miniature.
The Poverty We Do Not Count: Notes on a Nigerian Spirit in Recession by Lawson Akhigbe
Ghana, our garrulous neighbour and perennial older-sibling-by-comparison, is not a rich country. Its currency has had its own well-documented indignities. Its unemployment figures would not shame anyone into silence at a dinner party in Lagos. And yet Ghana has not produced, at scale, the particular species of moral vacancy that Nigeria now exports more reliably than crude oil. The difference is not GDP. It is something closer to what economists, in their limited vocabulary, have no line item for: a poverty of the spirit, and it is this poverty, not the one in the spreadsheets, that is bankrupting the country in ways no IMF facility can restructure.
Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Laboratory: How Governors Cripple Local Government and Representative Democracy by Lawson Akhigbe
The greatest casualty of this failure has been grassroots democracy.
Okonkwo of Umuofia
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.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 