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.
If You Don’t Want Us, You Cannot Have Our Gold by Lawson Akhigbe
When Tactical Brilliance Meets Strategic Confusion: Washington’s Iran Problem by Lawson Akhigbe
But wars are not graded like Olympic gymnastics. There are no medals for technical execution if the end result leaves your opponent intact, emboldened, or—worse—adapted.
Crocodile Tears and Caliphate Dreams: The Selective Christianity of Washington’s Nigeria Policy By Lawson Akhigbe
Let it be said plainly: Christians are dying in Nigeria's Middle Belt and northeast, in numbers that shame a government which has spent a quarter-century treating internal security as a procurement racket rather than a constitutional duty. That much is not in serious dispute, whatever Abuja's spokesmen protest on television. But sincerity and self-interest are not mutually exclusive states, and it takes a special sort of credulity to receive Donald Trump's sudden solicitude for Black Christians in the Sahel as anything other than what it plainly is a foreign policy improvised from a domestic culture war, deployed by an administration whose relationship with racial minorities at home has rarely troubled itself with tenderness. One does not have to admire
The Trump World by Lawson Akhigbe
There is a particular cruelty in a medical report. Unlike a political speech, a budget forecast, or an election manifesto all genres of creative literature to which democratic publics have made a resigned peace a medical report carries with it the residual authority of science. When a doctor speaks, we are conditioned, in some prelinguistic way, to believe them. Which is precisely why what has happened to American presidential medicine under Donald Trump is so arresting. The clinic has been converted into a theatre, the stethoscope swapped for a megaphone, and the diagnosis subordinated entirely to the demands of the narrative.
Schrödinger’s Immigrant: The Convenient Villain for Every Failure by Lawson Akhigbe
The immigrant today exists simultaneously as two incompatible creatures. On one hand, he is portrayed as a lazy welfare dependent draining public resources, crowding hospitals, filling council housing lists and surviving on benefits paid by hardworking natives. On the other hand, that same immigrant is somehow an unstoppable economic superhuman taking all the jobs, dominating industries, suppressing wages and outcompeting local workers in both skilled and unskilled sectors.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 