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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.
To truly understand Edo State today, one must trace its lineage back to the colonial provinces that formed its core: Benin Province and Afemai Province.
These tactics blended fiscal innovation, technocratic recruitment, institutional reform, political networking, and strategic confrontation with the federal government. They created the so-called “Lagos Model”, a proof-of-concept for sub-national self-sufficiency that influenced his successors (Fashola, Ambode, Sanwo-Olu) and later his national approach.
In Nigeria, the legal framework explicitly criminalizes the payment of ransoms to kidnappers or terrorists.
In most functional societies, those quaint places where governments occasionally remember they exist to serve rather than to frustrate, when a citizen submits an application requiring official action, a few basic courtesies are observed. An acknowledgment. A request for missing documents if needed. Perhaps even a timeline, however optimistic. The machinery of state, however rusty, at least coughs to confirm it has received your papers.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 