Some policies seem so altruistic that it is almost impossible to imagine any objection to them. For example, lending small amounts of money or writing off debts to help the extreme poor are intended to help the most vulnerable, and both approaches seem entirely sensible. However, scrutiny reveals these well-intentioned policies to be misguided. Around a decade ago, NGOs, international organizations, and philanthropists trumpeted microcredit as a silver bullet that would end extreme poverty. The United Nations designated 2005 as the International Year of Microcredit, and when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank the…

Since the Macpherson Constitution of 1951 granted self-rule to all the three regions that made up Nigeria, the year 2007 was actually the very first time that virtually all the Nigerian states experienced a successful succession of leadership. Except perhaps in 1958 when Chief Obafemi Awolowo transmitted the power of the office of the Premier of Western Region to Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, neither the regions nor the states had the experience of a seamless transmission of power from one political office holder to the other. You will recall that the military was in power for the greater part of…

Although participation in “bourgeois politics” – as we used to call electoral politics – has never been absent from the Nigerian Left’s general programme, it has also not been made a “categorical imperative”. I am, however, now persuaded that it has become generally accepted in the ranks of contemporary Nigerian Leftists that intervention and participation in the country’s electoral struggle - for office or for power, as an organized political force and in alliance or acting separately - have become both categorical and urgent. The following notes are offered as a searchlight in support of this anticipated revised programme of…

There has been nothing in recent memory like the build up to Nigeria’s first match at the on-going 2018 FIFA World Cup tournament in Russia. Football is Nigeria’s greatest unifier: when it is football, our compatriots drop all ethnic, religious and ideological differences and profess the missing faith and ideology of one Nigeria. They have expressed similar solidarity over whose jollof is sweeter in the competition between Ghanaian jollof, Senegalese jollof and Nigerian jollof - the way Nigerians defend our national cuisine, you would think we are a nation of gourmets, but nothing compares to the magic of football and…