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Nigeria is once again standing at a constitutional crossroads. The growing insecurity across the federation, from banditry in the North-West, secessionist violence in the South-East, kidnapping in the South-South, farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt, and urban criminality in Lagos and Abuja, has pushed the debate over state police from intellectual seminars into the centre of national survival.
Somewhere in a glass-and-steel conference centre in Geneva, a distinguished panel is convening to discuss Africa's poverty crisis. The room costs £18,000 a day to hire. The keynote speaker flew business class from Washington. The catered lunch is exceptional. The conference proceedings will produce, in due course, a forty-seven page report recommending as the 1994 report did, as the 2003 report did, as the 2011 report did, more aid. Africa, meanwhile, remains poor.
Rudy Giuliani has once again emerged from whatever landscaping parking lot or podcast dungeon he currently frequents to deliver a sermon on moral purity. In a television rant that felt like an archaeological dig through early-2000s cable news grievances, the former mayor declared that New York City’s mayor should skip the official September 11 memorial ceremonies. The mayor’s disqualifying offense? He happens to be Muslim.
The ICC established in 2002 under the Rome Statute to end impunity for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression, the ICC operates on complementarity, acting only when national courts are unwilling or genuinely unable to prosecute. Critics argue it disproportionately targets African leaders and situations, functioning as a neo-colonial instrument that polices the Global South while granting de facto immunity to powerful states.
Back in 2017, human rights lawyer Inibehe Effiong caused a stir when he accused former Akwa Ibom governor Godswill Akpabio of looting the state treasury on a scale that could fund neighbouring Ebonyi State for decades.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 