Tag: Africa

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The NGO Trap: How a $1 Trillion Industry Learned to Love African Poverty by Lawson Akhigbe

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.

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Exploring ICC African Bias Critiques

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.

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Dissolution Of Customary Marriages

When a customary marriage is dissolved in Nigeria, the distribution of property and assets does not follow the same rules as a statutory (court) marriage. While statutory marriages are governed by Section 72 of the “Matrimonial Causes Act (MCA)” which grants judges wide discretion to divide matrimonial properties equitably, customary marriages are governed strictly by “Native Law and Custom”, subject to constitutional tests of fairness.

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THE FOUR THEATRES: A GUIDE TO AFRICA’S ATROCITY CIRCUIT By Lawson Akhigbe

There is a peculiar comfort in cartography. Draw a line around a catastrophe, label it, and it becomes something one can point to on a map rather than something one must answer for. Africa, in the twenty-first century, has been organised into four such catastrophes with the tidiness of a continental league table the Great Lakes, the Horn, the Sudans, and the Sahel  each running its own fixture list of massacre, displacement and denial, each independently promoted from "concern" to "crisis" to "protracted emergency" without ever being relegated back down to "peace."

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