Tag: government

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Nigerian Lawyers in Political Careers: A Historical, Structural, and Contemporary Analysis

The intersection of law and politics in Nigeria is profound and longstanding. Lawyers have disproportionately shaped the country’s political landscape, from pre-independence nationalism to post-1999 democratic governance. Legal training emphasizing advocacy, constitutional interpretation, negotiation, evidence-based reasoning, and oratory equips practitioners exceptionally well for political roles. This pattern reflects both the profession’s prestige and Nigeria’s constitutional emphasis on legal expertise in governance.

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WHEN THE FINE OUTLASTS THE SENTENCE: NIGERIA’S DIPLOMACY OF THE UNCOMPELLED By Lawson Akhigbe

Ambassador Yakubu Gambo did Nigeria the rare courtesy of telling the truth in public, which in the diplomatic trade counts as a small scandal in itself. Standing before Abike Dabiri-Erewa at NiDCOM’s Abuja headquarters, he confirmed what families of the detained have known for years without an official ever saying it plainly: Nigerians who have finished serving their Saudi jail terms remain locked up anyway, held hostage to fines they cannot pay and a government that has not worked out how to pay them either. He framed it as a welfare concern, a matter for coordination and consolidation of diaspora associations under one umbrella. It is, more accurately, a description of a state that has run out of leverage and is calling the shortfall a strategy.

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BOOK REVIEW: Inside Yakubu Gowon’s “My Life of Duty and Allegiance”, By Mathew Hassan Kukah

The reader will be right to expect that this book will be the biography to end all biographies and accounts of Nigeria’s chequered history through three coups and a civil war. If you are expecting any revelations from declassified documents, private papers and notes, the reader might be disappointed. The reasons is that, from the beginning, the author confesses that: I want to emphasise that I am telling my story without access to my crucial personal records since many important documents taken from my desk after my removal in July 1975 were discarded by those who succeeded me. Other documents that survived were destroyed by two fire incidents in Bakori and Kaduna(xxi). Yet, none of this diminishes the book which obviously was written straight from whatever he could remember.

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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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Amupitan’s Yanga Wakes Trouble by Azu Ishiekwene

Six months after his appointment as the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Joash Amupitan appears determined to beat the record of Professor Maurice Iwu as the most mistrusted electoral administrator yet.

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