Screenshot If you recently bought a phone charger, a box of paracetamol, or a loaf of bread, congratulations! You just paid six people whose names appear nowhere on your receipt. In Nigeria, nearly everything you eat, wear, or swallow arrives by sea. Over 70% of the nation's pharmaceuticals and almost all its daily essentials pass …
Continue reading "The 34 Fee Tollbooth: Who Really Owns Nigeria’s Maritime Gates? By Lawson Akhigbe"
Which celebrity would you love to meet, and what would you talk about? How he loved the world that he gave his life.
In 2015 the APC unseated the PDP and has governed Nigeria ever since. That is eleven years, which in political terms is not so much a tenure as a tenancy with squatter's rights. Mr Tinubu spent the first eight as the party's national leader, with Osinbajo, reportedly his nominee, installed as vice president. Since 2023 he has been president, with Kashim Shettima beside him. Whoever invented the phrase "continuity of government" clearly never imagined it applied this literally.
Look at the last thing you bought: the rice, the paracetamol, the charger in your pocket. Before it reached your hand, at least six different people were paid. Not one of their names was on your receipt. You paid every single one of them, and you never knew who they were.
“Frank exchange of views” is the single most useful phrase in the diplomatic lexicon, precisely because everyone involved knows it is a lie and nobody involved will admit it. A former UK diplomat once put it plainly in a Language Log discussion: a frank exchange of views is just shouting. If the participants throw things at each other, it upgrades to a full and frank exchange of views. That is not satire. That is a professional’s working definition.
