Tag: black

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NATIONS, TRIBES, AND THE GRAMMAR OF EMPIRE: On why the Scots get a parliament and the Yoruba get an anthropologist By Lawson Akhigbe

Scotland has a parliament, a flag, a football team that loses with tremendous dignity, and roughly the population of Lagos’s Ikeja Local Government Area. The Yoruba nation and I use the word advisedly has an empire’s worth of history, a written and oral constitutional tradition running from Ile-Ife through the Oyo Mesi and the Alaafin’s checks and balances, a diaspora spanning three continents, and something in the region of forty million native speakers. One of these is routinely described in the Financial Times as a nation debating its constitutional future. The other is routinely described, by the same publication, as a tribe engaged in an ethnic dispute. I invite the reader to spot the empirical difference. I have been looking for thirty years and have found only prejudice wearing a monocle.

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Born Free, Housed First: Reform UK and the Return of the Birth Certificate as Political Document by Lawson Akhigbe

Reform UK has now taken that quiet administrative habit and turned it into an actual policy platform, delivered at a press conference rather than buried in a PDF. Deputy leader Richard Tice has confirmed the party will prioritise British-born workers under 35 for social housing, alongside military veterans and married couples with children, should Reform enter government. The pitch comes wrapped in an infrastructure promise, 50,000 affordable homes a year, financed, the party insists, without new taxes or borrowing, which is the political equivalent of promising a birthday cake that requires no oven, no flour and no birthday.

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Uncounted in Life, Unrecorded in Death: Nigeria’s Costly Dignity Deficit By Lawson Akhigbe

here is an old, bitter administrative joke in Nigeria that you are only formally counted twice: never when you arrive, and certainly not when you leave. In between, your existence is largely an unverified rumor negotiated between your creator, your luck, and whatever age declaration affidavit you paid a court clerk two thousand Naira to stamp.

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When Laws Become Optional: Suspicious Deaths, Colonial Legacies, and the Dignity Deficit in Nigeria by Lawson Akhigbe

The difference between the United Kingdom and Nigeria is not primarily in the letter of the law. It is in the general application and consistent enforcement of that law. This divergence reveals a deeper reality about how the Nigerian state relates to its citizens.

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The Champions Who Forgot to Play Football! By @Microinteracti1

NBC Sports put it plainly: Argentina were more concerned with fouling and fighting than playing football, and the way several players behaved was a disgrace that tarnished their legacy.

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