Imagine a situation in which you won big in the lottery. Tens of billions of dollars. The rich and the hoi polloi came to celebrate with you. But when the money was paid, it turned out to be fake. You were paid with counterfeit money. How would you feel? Or you got a big job in a high-flying company. You were convinced that you were finally set for life. But when you were paid at the end of the month, you were paid with counterfeit money. How would you react? Nobody likes counterfeit money. It might look like the original,…

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…

Elections in Nigeria this year might be nearly over but the war by other means could well receive fresh fire from three state elections this weekend. The year began with general elections in February and March, and is closing with off-cycle elections in Imo, Bayelsa and Kogi on November 11. Conducting elections for three governors after the major round of governorship elections in March that covered 28 states, including the legislatures in dozens of states, and the federal elections before that, might ordinarily look easy. But they are not. These three off-cycle elections are in fact products of either violent…

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…