When Francis Fukuyama published his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History?,” he captured the mood in many Western capitals at the time. Not everybody agreed with him that “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” had been reached, but few could deny the resonance of his message. In anticipating “an unabashed victory” for “economic and political liberalism,” he was channeling both the emerging policymaking consensus and what had already become the standard approach in much of academia. This late twentieth-century consensus rested on two distinct but synergistic pillars: political liberalism and economic liberalism. In the political domain, democratic institutions had…

If Nyesom Wike had read the character portrait of the Ijaw man as sketched by Percy Amoury Talbot, an early 20th century British historian and colonial administrator, he would most probably have thought twice before settling for Simnalaya Fubara as his third term placeholder. Wike was a two-term governor of Rivers State and today, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. In his highly authoritative 1926 book, Peoples of Southern Nigeria: a Sketch of their History, Ethnology, and Languages, with an Abstract of the 1921 Census, Talbot reserved an unflattering description for the no-nonsense Ijaw race. Hear him at page 333,…