The Art of the Unsolicited Ass-Kiss: Understanding Nigeria’s “Eye Service” Economy by Lawson Akhigbe

In the United States, corporate culture has a colorful vocabulary for the hyper-sycophant: the brown-noser, the bootlicker, the corporate shill. But in Nigeria, this behavior isn't just a personality trait of that one annoying guy in middle management. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply institutionalized standard operating procedure known colloquially as "Eye Service."

The “Hero” of the Rubber Stamp: How Nigeria’s Separation of Powers Became a One-Man Show by Lawson Akhigbe

The Legislature does not check the Executive; it curtsies, takes notes, and asks the Executive what time it should pack its bags.

THE FOUR THEATRES: A GUIDE TO AFRICA’S ATROCITY CIRCUIT By Lawson Akhigbe

There is a peculiar comfort in cartography. Draw a line around a catastrophe, label it, and it becomes something one can point to on a map rather than something one must answer for. Africa, in the twenty-first century, has been organised into four such catastrophes with the tidiness of a continental league table the Great Lakes, the Horn, the Sudans, and the Sahel  each running its own fixture list of massacre, displacement and denial, each independently promoted from "concern" to "crisis" to "protracted emergency" without ever being relegated back down to "peace."