Tag: high crime

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When Shell Companies, Bribes and Billion-Dollar Fantasies Meet Nigerian Bureaucracy: Lessons from P&ID (and a Cheer for Mambilla) by Lawson Akhigbe

In the grand theatre of Nigerian public life, where contracts are signed with the solemnity of wedding vows and then abandoned with the enthusiasm of a jilted lover, few dramas have rivalled the Federal Republic of Nigeria v Process & Industrial Developments Ltd saga. The 2020 English High Court decision ([2020] EWHC 2379 (Comm)) was merely the intermission. The full production, complete with bribes, perjury and a near-$11 billion bill, only reached its denouement years later. Yet that September 2020 judgment by Sir Ross Cranston remains the pivotal moment when Nigeria was allowed, against all the usual arbitration orthodoxy of finality and speed, to drag the whole rotten affair into the light.

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The King’s Square Circus: When Justice Becomes a Stage Play by Lawson Akhigbe

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.

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Same Shit, Different Hat: A Timeless Fashion Statement in Political Extremism by Lawson Akhigbe

Ah, the internet has done it again. While the rest of us are busy arguing over pineapple on pizza or whether socks with sandals constitute a war crime, some genius has distilled centuries of ideological garbage into one glorious, four-panel roast. Behold the meme that slaps you harder than your uncle at Thanksgiving: "Same Shit, Different Hat."

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State Police in Nigeria: Between Constitutional Necessity and Historical Fear by Lawson Akhigbe

Nigeria is once again standing at a constitutional crossroads. The growing insecurity across the federation, from banditry in the North-West, secessionist violence in the South-East, kidnapping in the South-South, farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt, and urban criminality in Lagos and Abuja, has pushed the debate over state police from intellectual seminars into the centre of national survival.

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