Tag: Argument

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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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Twenty Years Late and Several Republics Short: On EJ, Atiku and Nigeria’s Habit of Reheating Cold Corruption by Lawson Akhigbe

In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar rode into Aso Rock together, a presidential double act that Nigerians assumed would age like most political marriages: quietly, then not at all. They survived one term. They won a second in 2003. Then, somewhere in that second term, Obasanjo discovered a constitutional itch that the 1999 Constitution's two term, eight year ceiling on the presidency simply would not scratch. He wanted a third term. Atiku, nursing a presidential ambition of his own and possessed of the inconvenient habit of reading the Constitution literally, said so publicly. The friendship ended there.

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The Union Jack Won’t Fix Britain: Farage, Braverman and the Politics of National Nostalgia by Lawson Akhigbe

When a political movement cannot quite explain where Britain should go, it apparently finds comfort in explaining where Britain used to be.

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The Cane, the Conference, and the Curious Case of Self-Sabotage by Lawson Akhigbe

Behold the main character of British politics in 2026: a white, elderly gentleman, clearly leaning on a sturdy wooden cane for support, accredited badge swinging proudly from his neck at the Reform UK conference. Mouth open in mid-roar, eyes locked in righteous fury, he has somehow decided that the greatest threat to civilisation in that moment is a young woman holding a handbag. The crowd of fellow pensioners and patriots looks on with varying degrees of encouragement. Somewhere in the background, the usual sea of white hair and earnest lanyards nods along

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