How the Africa Keeps Refusing to Fit Neatly into Western PowerPoint Slides by Lawson Akhigbe

In his memoir The Lion Awakes, Ashish Thakkar recounts how, as a young entrepreneur flogging computer parts across Africa in the 1990s, he noticed that flights within the continent took suspiciously longer than the maps suggested. Were the planes slower? No. The Mercator projection had been quietly shrinking Africa for centuries, the cartographic equivalent of …

Britain Wants the World to Visit, But First It Wants to Know Why You Have ยฃ500 in Your Bank Account by Lawson Akhigbe

The UK says it welcomes tourists, artists, writers and performers. Its visitor visa system sometimes seems determined to prove otherwise. There is something wonderfully British about telling the world that Britain is open for business, culture and tourism, while simultaneously asking an African musician why somebody deposited ยฃ500 into his bank account three weeks before …

Where Was James Bond While the Fifth Column Was Busy Selling the Family Silver? By Lawson Akhigbe

From the moment Sean Connery first uttered โ€œBond, James Bondโ€ in *Dr. No*, right through Daniel Craigโ€™s final, rather damp exit in *No Time to Die*, I, like millions of other loyal subjects, laboured under a charming delusion. I believed the United Kingdom possessed impregnable security. MI5, MI6, the whole alphabet soup of spooks with licences to kill, gadgets that could turn a fountain pen into a nuclear deterrent, and a national instinct for spotting a wrong โ€™un at fifty paces. We had the Queen, the navy, and 007.

When Cartels Outpace Courts: What the Ozubulu Massacre Reveals About Nigeriaโ€™s Creaking Justice System by Lawson Akhigbe

On the morning of August 6, 2017, gunmen stormed St. Philipโ€™s Catholic Church in Ozubulu, Anambra State. When the gunfire ceased, at least a dozen worshippers lay dead on the pews, including the elderly father of the intended target.