The greatest casualty of this failure has been grassroots democracy.
Nigeria’s Failed Democratic Laboratory: How Governors Cripple Local Government and Representative Democracy by Lawson Akhigbe
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.
There are lies, damn lies, and then there is the eternal Home Office press release – updated for the age of Blue Labour, Tory one-upmanship and Reform UK’s five-year fantasy. By Lawson Akhigbe
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.
The Ancient Art of Buying Silence: How Rulers Have Always Turned Critics into Courtiers by Lawson Akhigbe
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.
The Obituary of American Democracy Has Been Written So Many Times It Deserves Its Own Rest Home by Lawson Akhigbe
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.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 