When the stormy petrel governor of Rivers state, Nyesom Wike, threw his 13 percent derivation windfall bombshell last week, his fellow Niger Delta governors must have been gutted even as ordinary Nigerians within and beyond the oil-producing areas were alarmed. It was a shock to me that some governors can receive such a humongous amount of money in these austere times when salaries and pensions are not being paid, when infrastructure is decrepit, and when development as a whole is arrested all over the place - and yet keep quiet about it! While Wike said he has been building flyovers…

On Wednesday, Nigeria’s President, Muhammadu Buhari, along with the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, and some other high-ranking public officials formally unveiled the re-designed N1,000, N500, and N200 notes. Such a gathering is, of course, expectedly full of festivity, bluster, and the regurgitation of the same vapid and soulless speeches that typify these public gatherings. At the end of it all, one can conclude that no other official action typifies the many bitter disappointments, artificiality, and even the abject lack of self-reflexivity that has characterised this administration better than redesigning naira notes that increasingly buy you…

In 1845, Karl Marx jotted down some notes for The German Ideology, a book that he wrote with his close friend Friedrich Engels. Engels found these notes in 1888, five years after Marx’s death, and published them under the title Theses on Feuerbach. The eleventh thesis is the most famous: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’. The most widely accepted interpretation of this thesis is that, in it, Marx urges people not only to interpret the world, but also to try and change it. However, we do not believe that…

We thought we had heard it all when a ‘419’ kingpin sold a nonexistent airport for $242m. Then, a ship was mysteriously pickpocketed and disappeared from Lagos Marina. Little did we know that a Lagos Governor could obtain by 419 deception and renamed a whole railway line as Sanwo Olu's government is doing by falsely claiming the Ijora-Agbado section of the Lagos-Kano federal standard guage railway line that has been in operation for 10yrs from Ijora-Agbado, initially with four return trains daily but has dropped to two return trips. The Sanwo Olu phanthom claim of the Red Line is to…