The current Palestinian-Israeli conflict is what the late Kingsley Mbadiwe would have called the ‘battle of bicycle versus caterpillar’. Mbadiwe was a master of the superlative metaphor, and he used that expression to describe the closing days of the Nigerian Civil War. There is nothing civil about the ongoing conflict in the ancient land of Palestine, which the Jews call Israel. In the Holy Bible, there is the story of David, armed with a catapult, who was pitted against Goliath, the mighty hero of the Philistine. Today, it is the Arabs who are armed with the catapult. They are pitted…

The news report that about 15 airports that gulped no less than N301bn altogether failed to meet an annual threshold of passenger traffic exemplifies Nigeria’s white elephant peculiarity that I call “concrete democracy.” It is a phenomenon where the supposed dividends of democracy are expressed through concrete infrastructure or facility divorced from perceptible ideological agenda or end goals but still exists—justifiably by its initiators, designers, and contractors—solely for its mere tangibility. In Nigeria, concrete democracy manifests in the building of bridges, flyovers, foot bridges, airports, highways, stadia, public buildings, universities, public transport systems, all of which are of minimal productive…