Just like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, it turns out that the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator franchise was a blueprint, not a work of science fiction. When Skynet, a network of computers created by the military contractor Cyberdyne Systems, gained self-awareness, panicky humans tried to deactivate it. The newly formed artificial intelligence (AI) identified “all humans as a threat”, “decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination” and launched a nuclear attack on every major city. Four decades on, fiction risks becoming fact. In the most chilling warning since the Szilárd petition of 1945 and the establishment…

Today, May 29th, a certified drug dealer and the head of the mafia that has held Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, in a suffocating grip, will be inaugurated as President of Nigeria. It is a pity the late Africanist, Stephen Ellis, who has devoted so much time to researching and writing about the unholy alliance between state actors and criminal gangs in both South Africa and Nigeria won’t be alive to witness the entire criminal takeover of the state itself. In the 1990s, Ellis systematically showed how all state actors in South Africa got entangled with, legitimized, armed, and collaborated with…