Reporting News and opinions
It issues pronouncements, launches programmes, commissions projects, publishes budgets, announces reforms and produces an endless supply of political speeches. Ministers hold press conferences. Governors commission flyovers. Presidents announce ambitious economic transformations. Political parties publish manifestos promising a better Nigeria.
There is an old legal maxim that justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done. Somewhere between Osadebe Avenue and King’s Square, however, that venerable principle was evidently fed into a shredder, doused in kerosene, and traded for prime-time television ratings.
Gather round, petrol-pump poets and economic visionaries, because Governor Monday Okpebholo has unlocked a geopolitical cheat code that will leave Nobel Prize-winning economists weeping into their calculators.
Experienced business executive and political leader from Ogbona, Etsako Central Local Government Area, Edo State. Combined private-sector leadership with extended public and party service at state and national levels. Held traditional titles including Oduma of Uzairue and others recognising community contributions.
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.
