Category: This, that and the other

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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.

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When Presidents Hire the Critics and the Opposition Suddenly Discovers the Joys of Silence by Lawson Akhigbe

There is a peculiar genius to Nigerian politics that deserves its own chapter in the handbook of advanced statecraft. It is the art of shrinking the political space not by banning dissent, not by jailing the loud ones, but by simply offering them a seat at the table and watching the principles evaporate faster than …

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Tinubu’s 3rd anniversary, Ogun deity and voodoo vote numbers by Festus Adedayo

Africa and indeed, the Third World in general, suffers the affliction of leaders and tautologos. It is an epidemic of leaders who act like the sexually infirm. For this species of infirm male, when queried on why they cannot insert into the right hole, they boast of possessing the capability to make multiple insertion of threads into the barely visible hole of the needle, even in the dark. Were Tinubu to be tautologous in delivery of democratic dividends, it would have been more desirable than repetition of needless words.

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