Tag: economic dealings

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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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When the Living Governor’s Pen Meets the Dead Monarch’s Signature: Nigeria’s Land Use Act Versus Britain’s 1925 Registration Revolution by Lawson Akhigbe

In 1925, while Britain was still recovering from one war and quietly preparing for the next, its legislators decided that land law had become an expensive medieval farce. The result was a cluster of statutes, most notably the Land Registration Act 1925, working in tandem with the Law of Property Act 1925, that performed a quiet but decisive act of administrative hygiene. They did not nationalise the soil. They did not turn every landowner into a tenant of the state. They simply made the register the master of the title, and the process of dealing with land a matter of bureaucracy rather than political favour or ancestral archaeology.

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Silence is Golden (Especially When It’s About Your Land) by Lawson Akhigbe

In most functional societies, those quaint places where governments occasionally remember they exist to serve rather than to frustrate, when a citizen submits an application requiring official action, a few basic courtesies are observed. An acknowledgment. A request for missing documents if needed. Perhaps even a timeline, however optimistic. The machinery of state, however rusty, at least coughs to confirm it has received your papers.

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Overview of the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) by Lawson Akhigbe

The Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON) represents one of Nigeria’s most significant financial interventions in response to systemic banking distress. Its debt enforcement history reflects a blend of aggressive statutory powers, evolving legislative enhancements, notable operational successes, persistent challenges, and occasional perceptions of uneven application influenced by political or economic factors. Below is a thorough, chronological exploration of AMCON’s enforcement journey, including context, key mechanisms, statistics, notable cases (with nuances around the Ben Murray-Bruce/Silverbird matter), challenges, and broader implications.

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Navigating the Void: Why Nigeria Needs a Corporate Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) Framework

In a standard DPA regime, a company that self-reports and cooperates can avoid the "corporate death penalty" of a criminal conviction. In Nigeria, we are currently forced to rely on the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015.
While the ACJA provides for Plea Bargaining, it is a fundamentally different animal from a DPA:

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