Tag: Nigerian legal matters

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Twenty Years Late and Several Republics Short: On EJ, Atiku and Nigeria’s Habit of Reheating Cold Corruption by Lawson Akhigbe

In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar rode into Aso Rock together, a presidential double act that Nigerians assumed would age like most political marriages: quietly, then not at all. They survived one term. They won a second in 2003. Then, somewhere in that second term, Obasanjo discovered a constitutional itch that the 1999 Constitution's two term, eight year ceiling on the presidency simply would not scratch. He wanted a third term. Atiku, nursing a presidential ambition of his own and possessed of the inconvenient habit of reading the Constitution literally, said so publicly. The friendship ended there.

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When the Family Becomes the Coroner: Has Nigeria Turned Cause of Death into a Matter of Opinion By Lawson Akhigbe

On 23 August, I wrote on this platform about the danger of treating the law as an optional accessory in suspicious deaths. I asked a simple question: when a Nigerian dies suddenly and in circumstances requiring investigation, who decides how that death occurred? The family, or the law?

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The Art of the Unsolicited Ass-Kiss: Understanding Nigeria’s “Eye Service” Economy by Lawson Akhigbe

In the United States, corporate culture has a colorful vocabulary for the hyper-sycophant: the brown-noser, the bootlicker, the corporate shill. But in Nigeria, this behavior isn't just a personality trait of that one annoying guy in middle management. It is a highly sophisticated, deeply institutionalized standard operating procedure known colloquially as "Eye Service."

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The Bulletproof SUV That Disappeared: What The Saraki / Customs Case Tells Ordinary Nigerians About Due Process by Lawson Akhigbe

What should have been a routine anti-smuggling enforcement - fake chassis number, alleged unpaid duty of N74 million on a vehicle valued at N298 million - turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

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The Samson Strategy: How the Tinubu Government Pulled the Temple Down on Itself Over PFIPC by Lawson Akhigbe

The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration appears to have forgotten that rule in its handling of the Presidential Foreign Investment Promotion Council (PFIPC) controversy. In its determination to destroy the credibility of one man, Prince Adeniyi Matthew Adeyemi, it may have inflicted collateral damage on something far more valuable: the credibility of official government documentation itself.

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