Tag: feedback

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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.

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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 Laws Become Optional: Suspicious Deaths, Colonial Legacies, and the Dignity Deficit in Nigeria by Lawson Akhigbe

The difference between the United Kingdom and Nigeria is not primarily in the letter of the law. It is in the general application and consistent enforcement of that law. This divergence reveals a deeper reality about how the Nigerian state relates to its citizens.

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On the Sartorial Decline of the Nigerian Political Class: Monday Okpebholo, Yekini Idiaye, and the Wardrobe of Impunity By Lawson Akhigbe

Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State is a man who, on the evidence of a recent photograph shaking hands with new Speaker of the Edo State House of Assembly Yekini Idiaye, appears to have mistaken the office of Chief Executive for a weekend errand run. A branded baseball cap. Clothing better suited to a beer parlour than a state formal meeting. Khaki trousers that suggest safari rather than sovereignty. This is not a man dressing down to meet the people. This is a man dressing as though the people are an inconvenience he is squeezing in between other appointments.

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The Art of the Unsolicited Ass-Kiss: Understanding Nigeria’s “Eye Service” Economy by Lawson Akhigbe

In the United States, corporate culture has a colorful vocabulary for the hyper-sycophant: the brown-noser, the bootlicker, the corporate shill. But in Nigeria, this behavior isn't just a personality trait of that one annoying guy in middle management. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply institutionalized standard operating procedure known colloquially as "Eye Service."

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