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The flight from London had arrived. I was waiting for the Chief Judge of Kwara state. An elderly man wheezed past me imperiously like he owned Ottawa Airport. Like he personally appointed the Mayor of Ottawa. The unmistakable trade mark of the Nigerian. I was going to hail him and ask if he was my guest.
The performance requires a villain. Africa has been performing that role for free, and at some cost to itself for considerably longer than it should have.
The prosecution says he cannot be trusted because he once faced disciplinary proceedings in another jurisdiction decades ago. Yet even if every fact of that matter is accepted, the question before this court remains simple: what relevance does an event from more than twenty years ago have to allegations made today?
This intersection of libido and governance is deeply rooted in history. In When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958, Professor Saheed Aderinto documented moral degeneration among the ruling elite, showing how men of power have long been implicated in what he called the “commoditization of sex.”
Whether you are in your living room, a classroom, a place of worship, or just trying to navigate a highway without praying for divine intervention, lives are being lost to blood-thirsty bandits. Thomas Hobbes once described life in the state of nature as "short and brutish." If he were alive today, he’d probably look at Nigeria and say, "See? I told you so."
