Tag: citizenship

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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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ANDY BURNHAM MUST GIVE BRITAIN AN IDEOLOGY, NOT ANOTHER MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT’S POWERPOINT by Lawson Akhigbe

There was something important about Andy Burnham's intervention at Prime Minister's Questions. Not simply because of what he said, but because of what it appeared to recognise: Britain has not merely been badly governed. Britain has been travelling in the wrong ideological direction for decades.

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Back to Basics, Rebranded: Burnham’s High Streets and the Politics of Looking Busy by Lawson Akhigbe

John Major's government never intended "Back to Basics" to become a punchline. Launched in 1993 as a pitch for moral and civic renewal, family values, personal responsibility, respect for the old certainties, it was retail politics in the purest sense: cheap to announce, easy to photograph, and entirely disconnected from the actual machinery of governing a mid-sized post-imperial economy adjusting to the ERM's wreckage. Section 28 sat quietly in the background as inherited scaffolding for this mood music, and the Education Act 1993's sex-education clauses supplied a fresh, deniable coat of paint. None of it required legislative heavy lifting. All of it signalled seriousness to an audience that wanted reassurance more than reform. The scheme collapsed, memorably, when half the cabinet turned out to be failing the basics they were instructed to return to.

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