Reporting News and opinions
Andy Burnham did not inherit a government so much as a stage set. After years of mayoral apprenticeship in Greater Manchester, he arrived in Downing Street with a ready-made philosophy called “Manchesterism” and a clear preference for the photographable over the structural. The high-street crackdown is not an aberration. It is the strategy in miniature.
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.
The greatest casualty of this failure has been grassroots democracy.
Political co-optation is not a Nigerian invention. It is one of the oldest and most elegant tools in the authoritarian toolkit far more refined than the crude business of jailing poets or shooting journalists. Why break a man’s spirit when you can simply rent it? Offer him a title, a salary, a motorcade, and watch the moral thunder turn into polite applause. History is littered with the wreckage of principles that met a well-timed appointment.
Every generation seems to produce its own undertakers, its own mourners and its own carefully worded obituary announcing that the republic is finally approaching the end.
