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.
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.
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.
You arrive at a government office because you need a service. You have your documents. You have paid the required fees. You have probably taken three days off work and spent half your morning fighting traffic.
How do you write what people actually want to read? I am the litmus test for what others want to read.
