Every New Year holds promise, as though it is any different from the turn of

The tent was still on the mountain. When searchers reached it on 26 February 1959,

I once spent an entire Saturday preparing to write a business plan. I did not

What the Dancing Plague of 1518 still has to teach a city like Lagos A

I once sat in a gathering of otherwise reasonable, educated Nigerians, the kind of room where everyone has an opinion and every opinion is delivered with total conviction, and listened to a full hour of righteous fury about the state of the country. The politicians were thieves. The system was broken. Nobody in government cared about the common man. Heads nodded. Glasses were raised. It was, by every measure, an excellent vilification session, and I nodded along with the rest of them, because every word of it was true.

I remember scrolling through one of those glossy “Forbes 30 Under 30” style lists one quiet night, the kind of night when you are not really looking for trouble but find it anyway. Photograph after photograph of confident young faces, each caption more impressive than the last. Founded a company at twenty two. Sold it at twenty six. Sat on a panel by twenty eight.

There is a statistic that should discourage any lion from ever hunting again. Three out of every four times a lion charges after prey, it fails. Twenty five percent success. Seventy five percent waste. If a man ran a business on those numbers, his accountant would resign quietly, his investors would call an emergency meeting, and his mother would move from praying for his success to praying for his sense.