Tag: Edo state

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Edo State Moribund Local Governments — The Glorified Cashier by Lawson Akhigbe

The narrative above is replicated across the 774 local governments in Nigeria. The Supreme Court judgment on Local Government financial autonomy remains iced over in practice. State governors continue to treat local councils as administrative subsidiaries rather than an autonomous arm of government.

Posted on

The Tape-Measure Doctrine: When Governance Becomes Site Theatre by Lawson Akhigbe

The optical message broadcast to the public is one of relentless vigilance, a leader ensuring the masses are not shortchanged. The institutional reality, however, is that governance has vacated the cabinet room and wandered into the realm of amateur site supervision.

Posted on

The NGO Trap: How a $1 Trillion Industry Learned to Love African Poverty by Lawson Akhigbe

Somewhere in a glass-and-steel conference centre in Geneva, a distinguished panel is convening to discuss Africa's poverty crisis. The room costs £18,000 a day to hire. The keynote speaker flew business class from Washington. The catered lunch is exceptional. The conference proceedings will produce, in due course, a forty-seven page report recommending as the 1994 report did, as the 2003 report did, as the 2011 report did, more aid. Africa, meanwhile, remains poor.

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com