This topic reminds me of two recent personal incidents. I was in the office on the morning of Tuesday, July 13 when a colleague rushed in with his phone. He seemed quite animated, but there was also an edge of anxiety about him as he thrust his phone forward, stopping mid-speech, and asking me to speak with the caller. I didn’t know who it was. So, I motioned to my colleague to end the call first and sit down. He did, collected himself, and spoke. A federal minister, one of the very influential ones in this government, had just called…

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” – Aristotle. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters – Frederick Douglass. Today marks the first anniversary of #EndSARS! One prayer the Muhammadu Buhari administration must have prayed is that no one remembers the anniversary! But prayers having failed, the administration, employing a servile police force utterly lacking in professionalism, pulled the…

This week marked the first anniversary of the #EndSARS, the mass demonstrations against police brutality that shook Nigeria and culminated in a brutal crackdown on the protesters by soldiers drafted to the Lekki tollgate, Lagos State. As we all recall, the protests began as a social media campaign against the notorious Special Anti-Robbery Squad, an elite unit in the police reputed for its excessive use of force, cruelty, unlawful arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and flagrant abuse of the law. In response to the protests, the government disbanded SARS but almost immediately replaced it with another agency just like SARS. The…

In demonstrating how some of the world’s most powerful people hide their wealth, the Pandora Papers have exposed the details of a global system whose basic contours were already well known. Property laws have long been written by and for the wealthy, giving the public ample reason to suspect that the system is rigged. The “Pandora Papers,” a new investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, has fueled outrage around the world. Politicians, businesspeople, sports stars, and cultural icons have been caught in the act of hiding their wealth and lying about it. But how likely is a…