Tag: politics

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Edo’s Chop-Chop Chief: Dan Orbih and the Politics of Convenient Grief by Lawson Akhigbe

Chief Daniel Osi Orbih is dead, and Edo State’s political class has responded the way it always does when one of its own departs: with a grief so generous it retroactively forgives everything the man ever did. Orbih passed away on Monday, 31 August 2026, at the age of 64, and within hours the condolences arrived in a queue, each one more magnanimous than the last, as though the deceased had spent his career building roads rather than blocking them.

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May You Live in Interesting Times: The Era of the Unshakeable Political Disruptor by Lawson Akhigbe

If you had told a political scientist thirty years ago that a lineup featuring Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, and Bola Ahmed Tinubu would simultaneously dictate the fortunes, policies, and discourse of major world democracies, they would have recommended you take a quiet walk and a cold shower. Yet here we are, sitting in the front row of a geopolitical comedy-drama where the plot is made up and the rules don't seem to matter.

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The Ultimate Resume Flex: “Hi, I Have Absolutely No Idea What I’m Doing” by Lawson Akhigbe

You would rip out your IV lines, jump off the table, and run out of the building still wearing that drafty hospital gown.
And yet, when it comes to the complex, high-stakes machinery of running a society, this has become the ultimate campaign calling card. Across the globe, prospective elected officials are handing out political resumes where the biggest, boldest, most capitalized bullet point is: Not a politician

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BOOK REVIEW: Inside Yakubu Gowon’s “My Life of Duty and Allegiance”, By Mathew Hassan Kukah

The reader will be right to expect that this book will be the biography to end all biographies and accounts of Nigeria’s chequered history through three coups and a civil war. If you are expecting any revelations from declassified documents, private papers and notes, the reader might be disappointed. The reasons is that, from the beginning, the author confesses that: I want to emphasise that I am telling my story without access to my crucial personal records since many important documents taken from my desk after my removal in July 1975 were discarded by those who succeeded me. Other documents that survived were destroyed by two fire incidents in Bakori and Kaduna(xxi). Yet, none of this diminishes the book which obviously was written straight from whatever he could remember.

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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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