Reporting News and opinions
Yet the political theatre continues as if the data never arrived. Immigration remains the ultimate litmus test, the issue on which every faction must prove its manhood by sounding harsher than the last.
For years I laboured under a delightful cognitive shortcut, the kind the brain builds when it decides two people are essentially doing the same job and therefore need only one filing cabinet between them. In my mind there lived a composite figure: formidable, telegenic, fond of a well placed intellectual demolition on live television, and, crucially, British by adoption rather than birth. I called her, in the privacy of my own head, "the Greer." It never once occurred to this internal editor that there were, in fact, two of her: one African American, one Australian, one from Chicago's West Side, one from Melbourne, sharing a surname, a sharp tongue and, apparently, my short term memory.
Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why? Not yet
Political co-optation is not a Nigerian invention. It is one of the oldest and most elegant tools in the authoritarian toolkit far more refined than the crude business of jailing poets or shooting journalists. Why break a man’s spirit when you can simply rent it? Offer him a title, a salary, a motorcade, and watch the moral thunder turn into polite applause. History is littered with the wreckage of principles that met a well-timed appointment.
Every generation seems to produce its own undertakers, its own mourners and its own carefully worded obituary announcing that the republic is finally approaching the end.
