Tag: political-influence

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The Ancient Art of Buying Silence: How Rulers Have Always Turned Critics into Courtiers by Lawson Akhigbe

Political co-optation is not a Nigerian invention. It is one of the oldest and most elegant tools in the authoritarian toolkit far more refined than the crude business of jailing poets or shooting journalists. Why break a man’s spirit when you can simply rent it? Offer him a title, a salary, a motorcade, and watch the moral thunder turn into polite applause. History is littered with the wreckage of principles that met a well-timed appointment.

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When the Living Governor’s Pen Meets the Dead Monarch’s Signature: Nigeria’s Land Use Act Versus Britain’s 1925 Registration Revolution by Lawson Akhigbe

In 1925, while Britain was still recovering from one war and quietly preparing for the next, its legislators decided that land law had become an expensive medieval farce. The result was a cluster of statutes, most notably the Land Registration Act 1925, working in tandem with the Law of Property Act 1925, that performed a quiet but decisive act of administrative hygiene. They did not nationalise the soil. They did not turn every landowner into a tenant of the state. They simply made the register the master of the title, and the process of dealing with land a matter of bureaucracy rather than political favour or ancestral archaeology.

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Wike: Je Suis La Loi (French) I am the law by Lawson Akhigbe

Emperor Wike In the grand theatre of Nigerian politics, Nyesom Wike never misses his cue. His latest press conference, staged with all the theatrical pomp of a Roman emperor granting audience to trembling subjects, was no exception. Perched loftily above the journalists—who gazed up as if awaiting crumbs of imperial wisdom—Wike radiated Abuja-Emperor energy. If …

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