A law that punishes the messenger protects the officials who most need scrutiny.
10 hours ago
A country reveals what it thinks a woman is worth by what it is willing to spend, build and enforce before she is killed, not after. Right now, across much of Africa, that answer lies in the gap between the laws and measures that exist and the ones enforced.
2 months ago
Social media has made this particularly easy because it rewards confidence far more consistently than it rewards accuracy. Complicated issues are difficult to make viral because nuance does not always survive the algorithm. A careful explanation of the historical, political, and economic causes of insecurity is considerably less exciting than a confident declaration by VDM that someone is secretly responsible for it. The algorithm does not care which one is correct. It cares which one keeps the people watching. This has created an environment in which being interesting can become more valuable than being informed.
2 months ago
Nigerian male skit makers have built an entire subgenre out of female alter egos, and it has earned a reputation, deserved in many cases, for being lazy. It is rarely observational or funny in a way that reveals anything true about the women it claims to depict. It is simply loud and obnoxious men wearing wigs and women’s clothes.
2 months ago
The Gambia has been gripped by violent protests since Monday night over chronic electricity blackouts.
2 months ago
According to an exclusive report from The New Humanitarian, Nigeria has maintained a ceasefire with Boko Haram for roughly three months, tied to negotiations that freed 360 civilians abducted from Ngoshe village in Borno State earlier this year. The truce, in place since June, is likely to be extended for another 40 days. The arrangement reportedly involved a ransom payment of 3.7 million Dollars, which the government denies making.
2 months ago
Announcing a crackdown on foreign hawkers is a low cost way to appear responsive to ordinary traders without addressing the deeper structural problems of debt servicing, taxation, and stagnant real incomes.
2 months ago
A New York Times report on August 27, 2026, announced that the United States would withdraw roughly 200 of its military personnel from Nigeria, months after deploying them to support counterterrorism operations in the country’s northeast. The move is expected to be completed by late September, while a small team of trainers and intelligence analysts will remain behind.
2 months ago
What makes the outbreak striking is that diphtheria is almost entirely preventable. A cheap, effective vaccine, usually given as part of the routine DPT (diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus) immunisation series, has existed for decades and has all but eliminated the disease from most of the world. Nigeria’s neighbors and peer economies with strong routine immunisation systems rarely see outbreaks like this one; when cases do appear elsewhere, they are typically isolated and quickly contained.
2 months ago
