Once upon a time, proving you existed required little more than a vicar with decent handwriting and a congregation that hadn’t yet discovered the joy of Nonconformity. In 1538 Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief enforcer and occasional destroyer of monasteries, ordered every parish priest to start writing down baptisms, marriages and burials. The stated aim …
What is one thing you can’t live without? I don’t live by bread alone
The roadside collector may be the visible face of the system, but the real question is who controls the pyramid, who receives the proceeds and what political interests protect it.
ITV’s Lucy Watson helpfully translated the subtext for the rest of us: “This is not a developing, third-world nation; this is Europe!” The unthinkable, you see, is only unthinkable when it happens to the right people. When it happens elsewhere, it is merely Tuesday.
A nation’s mind dies when it can no longer recognise irony even when the irony is wearing agbada, boarding a presidential jet, and lecturing the rest of us about sacrifice. No previous assemblage of Nigerian power-brokers has democratised this particular form of intellectual blindness quite as thoroughly as the APC under first Buhari and now Tinubu.
