Author: Centre for Nigeria Progress

Nigeriancentric: Examining current & political affairs through law, history & accountability. Challenging official narratives, records institutional failures, & uses sharp humour to expose political hypocrisy No party loyalty, just facts, memory & critique
Posted on

THE TALE OF ONE HALF: ROCHAS OKOROCHA AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF PERFORMANCE By Lawson Akhigbe

There is a particular Nigerian genius for building things that mean nothing, and calling it a legacy. Rochas Okorocha, who governed Imo State from 2011 to 2019 as though the office were a stage and the electorate a captive audience, remains the finest living exhibit of this genius. Eight years after he last held power, and years after the last echo of "Rochas the Liberator" faded from campaign jingles, his name now surfaces mostly in courtrooms, in denial statements issued by aides nobody asked for comment, and in the occasional bronze figure still standing in Owerri, weathering slowly in the rain like the promises that built it.

Posted on

What goes around comes around

Do you believe in karma? It’s not a set of beliefs but an empirical fact, that what you do to others, others will do to you. Swings and roundabouts. All of these sayings are evidence that the world turns so shall your doings and sayings. What you sow, so shall you reap. Karma is just …

Continue reading "What goes around comes around"

Posted on

Profile and Political Legacy of Daniel Osikheme Orbih

Experienced business executive and political leader from Ogbona, Etsako Central Local Government Area, Edo State. Combined private-sector leadership with extended public and party service at state and national levels. Held traditional titles including Oduma of Uzairue and others recognising community contributions.

Posted on

Shares for the Many, Not the Few: What Dangote’s IPO Owes to Margaret Thatcher, and What It Might Teach Her Country by Lawson Akhigbe

The theory behind all of it, gas, telecoms, water, rail, was called popular capitalism, and it rested on a wager: that if enough ordinary Britons held shares directly, they would develop a stake, literal and psychological, in the fiscal health of the nation. Capitalism would stop being something done to people and start being something done by them.

Posted on

NATIONS, TRIBES, AND THE GRAMMAR OF EMPIRE: On why the Scots get a parliament and the Yoruba get an anthropologist By Lawson Akhigbe

Scotland has a parliament, a flag, a football team that loses with tremendous dignity, and roughly the population of Lagos’s Ikeja Local Government Area. The Yoruba nation and I use the word advisedly has an empire’s worth of history, a written and oral constitutional tradition running from Ile-Ife through the Oyo Mesi and the Alaafin’s checks and balances, a diaspora spanning three continents, and something in the region of forty million native speakers. One of these is routinely described in the Financial Times as a nation debating its constitutional future. The other is routinely described, by the same publication, as a tribe engaged in an ethnic dispute. I invite the reader to spot the empirical difference. I have been looking for thirty years and have found only prejudice wearing a monocle.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com