Tag: historical context

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Edo State Political History: A Theatre of Comrades, Godfathers, and Suspended Dreams by Lawson Akhigbe

Ah, Edo State, the ancient kingdom of Benin, where bronze casters once made art that still makes the British Museum sweat, and modern politicians make drama that makes Nollywood blush. If Nigerian politics is a never-ending telenovela, Edo is the season where everyone keeps switching wigs, parties, and loyalties faster than a market woman dodging rain. Let’s stroll through this glorious chaos, shall we?

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NATIONS, TRIBES, AND THE GRAMMAR OF EMPIRE: On why the Scots get a parliament and the Yoruba get an anthropologist By Lawson Akhigbe

Scotland has a parliament, a flag, a football team that loses with tremendous dignity, and roughly the population of Lagos’s Ikeja Local Government Area. The Yoruba nation and I use the word advisedly has an empire’s worth of history, a written and oral constitutional tradition running from Ile-Ife through the Oyo Mesi and the Alaafin’s checks and balances, a diaspora spanning three continents, and something in the region of forty million native speakers. One of these is routinely described in the Financial Times as a nation debating its constitutional future. The other is routinely described, by the same publication, as a tribe engaged in an ethnic dispute. I invite the reader to spot the empirical difference. I have been looking for thirty years and have found only prejudice wearing a monocle.

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The Monumental Ego: How Trump and Tinubu Turn Public Infrastructure Into Personal Billboards By Lawson Akhigbe

There was a time when nations had the decency to wait until a leader was safely six feet under or at the very least, out of office before plastering their name across state infrastructure. The unspoken rule of public memorials used to be simple: let history render its verdict first. If your legacy survived the passage of time without decaying into scandal, perhaps the state would name a secondary school or a modest bypass after you.

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A Tale of Two Locations and One Citizenship by Lawson Akhigbe

Passports are supposed to be the great equalizers of national identity. If two people carry the green-backed book stamped with the Nigerian coat of arms, the constitution insists they share the exact same claim to fundamental dignity and justice. But citizenship, like roaming data on a prepaid SIM, appears to depend entirely on which borders your passport happens to cross.

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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.

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