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General Sani Abacha When Donald J. Trump “won” the 2025 elections—won in the special, metaphysical sense that only Trump can win—America finally met the man it had been dating casually for years: its inner Abacha. This was no ordinary victory. This was not a triumph of ballots but of destiny. Trump did not merely return …
Continue reading "The Day America Met Its Inner Abacha By Lawson Akhigbe"
Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you. My dad's shoes, a size too large. These shoes have taken me to the sky and I touched the heavens
Rev J Jackson What links Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama? Not inheritance. Not patronage. Not the comfortable cushion of establishment approval. It was the voice. Not merely sound waves projected from disciplined diaphragms, but rhetoric as architecture — words arranged with moral symmetry, cadence deployed like a drumline, pauses used as …
Continue reading "Oratory: When a Voice Becomes a Bridge to the Sky by Lawson Akhigbe"
From time immemorial, societies have wrestled with power. Kings once ruled by divine right, their word indistinguishable from law. The only real constraint was conscience—if they possessed one. As even Donald Trump recently suggested in a moment of candour about executive power, a ruler’s restraint may lie chiefly in the mind of the ruler himself. …
Continue reading "The Return of the Crown: Billionaires and the New Absolutism by Lawson Akhigbe"
As a journalist and researcher attempting to document the activities of the Nigerian government, I have come to a disturbing conclusion: we are not being governed by the Constitution, but by witchcraft. Not the theatrical kind. The administrative kind. The kind where rules exist—somewhere—but not where citizens can see them. If you have ever tried …
Continue reading "Governance in the Dark: When Witches Run the Arms of Government by Lawson Akhigbe"
Centre for Nigeria Progress 