Reporting News and opinions
From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was not at all uncommon for West African children and babies to be fostered via newspapers and childcare journals. The above advert was placed by a Nigerian mother looking for someone to care for her three-month-old.
So far, so dazzling. We have been unchained from the desk, from the camera, from the petrol pump, and soon, apparently, from the steering wheel itself. Progress has been relentless, elegant, and profitable.
Nigeria turns 66 today, and the mood is not celebratory. Sixty-six years is long enough for a nation to have settled into itself. This one still feels suspended between promise and disappointment.
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.
When your elected officials subcontract their jobs to the celestial being, then you know you marked the wrong column
