About The Public Interest
The Public Interest is a publication of the Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity. We bring together informed voices, evidence, and diverse perspectives to illuminate the issues shaping public life.
Mission
The Public Interest brings together informed voices, evidence, professional expertise, and diverse perspectives to illuminate the issues shaping public life. We publish so that citizens, practitioners, and policymakers can understand important developments, examine competing arguments, scrutinize the institutions that hold public money and public power, and consider practical responses to public problems. Our writing is rigorous enough for professionals and academics and clear enough for an informed general reader.
Vision
A public square in Nigeria and across Africa where decisions about public money, public power, and public safety are settled on the strength of evidence and argument, and where the institutions that hold that money and power answer to the people they serve.
What we stand for
- Accuracy and evidence: we publish what we have reason to believe is true, and we show our sources.
- Intellectual independence: no funder, partner, government body, political organization, or commercial interest determines what we publish.
- Fairness and reasoned disagreement: we present the strongest version of the arguments we examine, including those we reject.
- Public accountability: public money belongs to the public, and so does the record of how it was raised and spent.
- Integrity and transparency: we disclose our interests and correct our errors in the open.
- Original thinking, constructive criticism, clarity, and depth.
What we cover
Governance, democracy, and public administration. Fiscal transparency, public finance, taxation, and economic policy. Public integrity, anti-corruption, and institutional accountability. National security, international relations, and geopolitics. Law, constitutionalism, human rights, and criminal justice. Development, education, health, and social policy. Leadership, ethics, and institutional reform. Technology and its implications for public life. African affairs and global developments.
The publication has an international outlook with strong engagement with Nigeria and Africa, and is confined to neither.
Our relationship with the Center
The Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity is a Nigerian non-governmental, non-partisan organization incorporated as an Incorporated Trustee. Its work concerns public finance transparency, anti-corruption, and institutional reform. The Public Interest is the Center's editorial publication. It is not a separate legal entity; it is published under the Center's responsibility, and the Center is its publisher of record.
Editorial decisions about what the publication commissions, accepts, edits, and publishes are made by its editors on editorial grounds, in accordance with the editorial policy. Where the Center holds an institutional position on a matter under discussion, that position is published as an editorial and identified as the Center's. It is never attributed to contributors, and contributors are never required to share it.
What we publish
Original opinion, analysis, and research-based commentary from academics, practitioners, professionals, researchers, and informed writers, and curated notes on significant documents and developments from other publishers, written in our own words with attribution and a link to the source. Each piece is labeled so that readers can tell an individual's opinion from analysis, research, an institutional editorial, or curated material.
Masthead
Publisher: Center for Fiscal Transparency and Public Integrity, Abuja. Executive Director of the Center: Umar Yakubu, Ph.D. The names of the publication's editors will be published here on their appointment.
Contributors are welcome. See Write for Us for the subjects of interest and the submission process, and Contact for editorial enquiries and corrections.