Tag: accountability

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Nigeria’s ‘heroes past’ and the inconvenient truth by David Hundeyin (Repost from 2022)

Call it childhood naivety, youthful idealism or a need to believe in something, but for a long time I believed that the line in Nigeria’s national anthem that goes “The labour of our heroes past shall never be in vain,” actually meant something. Not a lot, mind you, but something. It had to mean something because every society on earth had heroes – icons to look up to because they laid the foundation for tomorrow.

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Was there a ledger to square: Britain’s rule in Nigeria by Lawson Akhigbe

The late Sam Mbakwe, first civilian governor of Imo State and a man whose impatience with mediocrity remains legendary, once declared that he would gladly invite the British back to rule Nigeria for another fifty years. Other politicians have echoed the sentiment over the decades, usually after another round of epileptic power, collapsed roads, or the discovery that the latest “transformation agenda” had transformed mainly the bank balances of its authors. The quip is usually delivered with a sigh, half-joke, half-confession: better the colonial taskmaster who at least kept the trains roughly on time than the indigenous ones who treat the national timetable as optional reading.

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Rewritten from 2017: The Fine Art of the Birthday Bill-Board: Why the Governor Doesn’t Get the Joke by Lawson Akhigbe

Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State was turning 58, and he has a shocking, counter-cultural request for his inner circle: Please, stop spending millions to paste my face on the front page of the newspapers.
According to a poignant statement from his Chief Press Secretary, John Mayaki, the Governor was deeply worried about the plight of vulnerable street children. To fix this, he wanted his well-wishers to take the massive budgets usually reserved for full-page birthday spreads and donate them to the WeCare Trust orphanage.

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Thomas More’s Utopia

Utopia (full Latin title: Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia) is a seminal 1516 work by Sir Thomas More (1478–1535). It is one of the most influential books of the Renaissance and the founding text of the modern utopian literary genre. Understanding its historical context reveals it as a sophisticated product of its time—blending humanism, social criticism, travel literature, and political philosophy—while also serving as a subtle mirror to the anxieties and aspirations of early Tudor England and Europe.

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David Cameron: The Prime Minister Who Kept Proving Enoch Powell Right

Enoch Powell famously observed that “all political careers end in failure.” Whether one agrees with the man or not, the aphorism has endured because politics is an unforgiving profession. Few modern British politicians illustrate it more vividly than David Cameron.

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