Tag: corruption institution

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When Shell Companies, Bribes and Billion-Dollar Fantasies Meet Nigerian Bureaucracy: Lessons from P&ID (and a Cheer for Mambilla) by Lawson Akhigbe

In the grand theatre of Nigerian public life, where contracts are signed with the solemnity of wedding vows and then abandoned with the enthusiasm of a jilted lover, few dramas have rivalled the Federal Republic of Nigeria v Process & Industrial Developments Ltd saga. The 2020 English High Court decision ([2020] EWHC 2379 (Comm)) was merely the intermission. The full production, complete with bribes, perjury and a near-$11 billion bill, only reached its denouement years later. Yet that September 2020 judgment by Sir Ross Cranston remains the pivotal moment when Nigeria was allowed, against all the usual arbitration orthodoxy of finality and speed, to drag the whole rotten affair into the light.

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The American Constitution Was Never Designed for a President Who Treats Congress as Optional By Lawson Akhigbe

The framers of the United States Constitution expected conflict. They expected ambition. They expected rivalry between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

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The Poverty We Do Not Count: Notes on a Nigerian Spirit in Recession by Lawson Akhigbe

Ghana, our garrulous neighbour and perennial older-sibling-by-comparison, is not a rich country. Its currency has had its own well-documented indignities. Its unemployment figures would not shame anyone into silence at a dinner party in Lagos. And yet Ghana has not produced, at scale, the particular species of moral vacancy that Nigeria now exports more reliably than crude oil. The difference is not GDP. It is something closer to what economists, in their limited vocabulary, have no line item for: a poverty of the spirit, and it is this poverty, not the one in the spreadsheets, that is bankrupting the country in ways no IMF facility can restructure.

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Tinubu’s 3rd anniversary, Ogun deity and voodoo vote numbers by Festus Adedayo

Africa and indeed, the Third World in general, suffers the affliction of leaders and tautologos. It is an epidemic of leaders who act like the sexually infirm. For this species of infirm male, when queried on why they cannot insert into the right hole, they boast of possessing the capability to make multiple insertion of threads into the barely visible hole of the needle, even in the dark. Were Tinubu to be tautologous in delivery of democratic dividends, it would have been more desirable than repetition of needless words.

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