115 years ago, in 1909, Walter Egerton, the barrister-turned-colonial administrator, and then governor, introduced the Sedition Ordinance into the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. This drew a sharp response from Christopher Sapara Williams, Nigeria’s first lawyer, the son of an Egba mother and an Ijesha father, who challenged the Ordinance, describing it with considerable prescience as “a thing incompatible with the character of the Yoruba people, and (which) has no place in their constitution…. Hyper-sensitive officials may come tomorrow who will see sedition in every criticism and crime in every mass meeting.” Sapara Williams was Nigeria’s first articulate defender…

It is always interesting to read the reactions of Nigerian to various national and international issues. You get a full mix of brilliant arguments, morally compelling admonitions, sensationalist illogic, and watery defense of the establishment often couched in flowery language. More often than not, when individuals realise their interventions are morally vacuous and intellectually wanting, they take a recourse to ad hominems and veiled- and not so veiled- threats. In this short piece, I’d like to invite you join me in examining some of the specious arguments being put forward by apologists of the Nigerian state, in the wake of…

The nationwide #EndBadGovernance protests that are convulsing the neoliberal fundament of the Bola Tinubu administration are redefining and redrawing the contours of protests in Nigeria in many significant ways. Although I’ve been on the road since Thursday, here are lessons I’ve learned from the protests. One, there is now a profoundly consequential decentering of the locus of protest culture in Nigeria. In the past, protests against unpopular government policies used to be conceived, constructed, and carried out by a self-selected class of professional protesters based mostly in Lagos who earned activist bona fides from their anti-military, pro-democracy, human rights advocacy…

There is this anecdote in Igboland of M̀gbekē and her cutlass. By the way, M̀gbekē is a synonym for an unrefined and unsophisticated girl. Each time M̀gbekē’s farmer colleagues visited her in the farm, they saw haphazardly tilled land and a female farmer lazily fondling her farm implement. Whenever Mgbeke was asked the reason for her snailish work, she complained of an old and ineffectual cutlass. Knowing M̀gbekē as the female version of Nnoka, Okonkwo’s lazy father in Things Fall Apart, it was difficult to believe the implement was the culprit. The villagers thereafter concluded that it was either M̀gbekē’s…