France’s ongoing uprising is not simply a contest between demonstrators and police. It is a crisis of representation, revealing what happens when citizens believe that institutions hear their complaints only after streets become ungovernable.
When floods swallow roads in Lagos, food prices jump in Kano, classrooms overflow in Niger Delta communities, or young graduates queue for scarce jobs in Abuja, government is expected to respond.
Two weeks ago, this column began by arguing that Nigeria’s policy conversation – especially in the subnational – must move closer to lived reality.
Last week, this column began with a simple proposition: Nigeria’s public policy conversation is often conducted at the wrong altitude.
Nigeria’s policy conversation has long been conducted at the wrong altitude. We speak of federal programmes, presidential initiatives and national plans as though Abuja is the decisive theatre of development.
Nigeria has entered another season when politics acquires the grammar of salvation. Banners multiply, motorcades thicken, slogans become policy substitutes, and every candidate discovers that the country can be repaired overnight.
When Emperor Nero died in AD 68, Rome was not short of people who remembered him fondly. Those who benefited from his generosity, public entertainment, and personal favour mourned his passing.
A driver who insists on using a 1960 road map to navigate a twenty-first century city is not necessarily lost because the map is inaccurate.
A bridge is only useful when it connects two sides of a river. If engineers complete one end while the other remains untouched, what exists is not infrastructure but symbolism.
A nation’s tax system is like a long suspension bridge stretching across a turbulent river. The steel cables represent legislation, digital infrastructure, enforcement machinery and administrative reform.
Economic development theory has never been a neutral exercise in abstraction. It is an arena where ideas are shaped by institutional power, geopolitical interest, and the historical position of those issuing policy advice.
A tax system without data is like a pilot navigating through thick cloud cover without instruments.
Imagine a farmer who painstakingly installs the most sophisticated irrigation system, yet never plants a single seed.
A state’s tax system is like the circulatory system of a body; it is not the quantity of blood that ensures vitality, but the efficiency of the vessels, the strength of the heart, and the coordination of every pulse.
History has rarely been kind to societies that avert their gaze from difficult questions, especially when those questions involve the disappearance of the young and vulnerable.
Kaiama Local Government Area in Kwara State has once again become the epicentre of national grief.
On Friday, 30 January 2026, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director-General of the World Trade Organization, delivered the 45th Pre-Convocation Lecture at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
I started watching The Source of the River last month, seeking an evening of entertainment but finding an unexpected masterclass in human behavior, economics, and governance.
When Aliko Dangote recently declared that Ajaokuta Steel Complex will never work, his words provoked anger across the country, particularly in Kogi where the plant sits like an abandoned monument.
On June 26, 2025, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu assented to four landmark laws that signal the boldest reconfiguration of Nigeria’s fiscal architecture since the return to democracy.
Two years into the administration of Governor Uba Sani, Kaduna State presents a portrait both hopeful and troubling, one marked by flashes of progress and deep, systemic voids.
Lagos, a sprawling megacity of dreams and contradictions, lives and breathes through its housing market. This market is as vibrant as it is volatile, as complex as it is crucial to the city’s economic heartbeat.
Nigeria’s economy today feels like a bike with a good rider, a decent engine, but a cracked and muddy road. The rider – our entrepreneurs and businesses – is full of energy and resolve.
If you were to ask Roger Martin, one of the sharpest strategic minds of our time, about the Northwest Development Commission (NWDC), the first question that might come to mind would be: Where is the region’s intended place to win?
There is a growing murmur in Nigeria’s business corridors – an air of restrained optimism, captured in the April 2025 edition of the NESG-Stanbic IBTC Business Confidence Monitor (BCM).
It is often said that institutions reflect the values and visions of those who design and manage them.
In 1996, the World Bank issued a now-historic report titled “Nigeria – Poverty in the Midst of Plenty: The Challenge of Growth with Inclusion.” It was a stark paradox: a country blessed with vast oil wealth, fertile land, and youthful energy was…
The modern world prides itself on civilization, on the idea that we have transcended the barbarity of our ancestors, yet, every now and then, a brutal spectacle unfolds that reminds us just how thin the veil of civility truly is.
Nigeria’s economy is at a crossroads. The past year has been a whirlwind of policy adjustments, market turbulence, and shifting investor sentiment.
On December 31, 2024, Nnamdi Obasi, Senior Adviser on Nigeria at the International Crisis Group, shared an important report with me via email.
The Northern political class must confront a stark and unavoidable reality: the economic road ahead will demand proactive efforts, strategic vision, and collective action.
In Nigeria, public policies frequently miss the mark, leaving their intended beneficiaries wondering where the promised benefits went.
The International Forum on the Development of the Lake Chad Basin, held in N’Djamena, Chad, from November 5-7, 2024, was a critical juncture in the dialogue surrounding the region’s future.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, is undergoing a troubling economic narrative that has taken an unexpected turn.
In the aftermath of a well-attended power sector retreat organized by the Ministry of Power, the landscape of Nigeria’s electricity industry stands at a crucial crossroads.