The Lede

Examining Nigeria’s Elections — with Obiageli Ezekwesili and Kwangu Liwewe

Tomorrow, Nigerians will head to the polls to elect a new president and vice president, as well as members of the Senate and House of Representatives. This election is Africa's first in 2023 and has been described as the most consequential election this year — not only for Africa but for the rest of the continent. Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation and has its largest economy. So when Nigeria sneezes, the rest of the continent catches a cold.
“Citizens are tired of simply repeating and rinsing electoral cycles. So they want elections that lead to governance, not just governance, but good governance, and the benefits of having democratic processes,” Oby Ezekwesili tells New Lines magazine’s Kwangu Liwewe. 
“People actually boasted that they didn't waste their time to go and vote, because they're all the same. That was the basic premise on which people didn't waste their time with our democracy. And it's not just in Africa, it's actually across the continent.”
But elections have consequences, especially in a country like Nigeria. In an effort to curtail attempts at corruption related to the elections, the Central Bank of Nigeria, working with the Independent National Electoral Commission, announced that the country will move to a cashless economy and that the current naira notes will no longer be valid in the days close to the elections. But this creates its own set of systemic issues for low-income groups who rely on cash transactions. Ezekwesili, who is the senior economic adviser of the Africa Economic Development Policy Initiative and the former vice president of the World Bank (Africa region), predicts that this will affect Nigeria’s productivity in the months ahead. 
For now, she is among those who remain hopeful that this election has the potential to deliver what Nigerians ultimately want: accountability, economic growth, human capital development, infrastructure to support their needs as citizens as well as businesses and a better environment for doing business. And though Ezekwesili says that the presidential candidates put forth by the incumbent All Progressives’ Congress (APC) and long-dominant People’s Democratic Party (PDP) simply don’t resonate with the culture of good governance that citizens want to see, it is ultimately up to those citizens to make the decision that will move their country, and indeed the continent, forward.
“The less attention that citizens pay to democracy, the more that they should be ready to take any consequences of their absence from a process that is actually defined by the level of participation,” Ezekwesili says. “But it is vital, it is critical for us to have a peaceful election —  Nigeria is too big to fail.”
And so when polls open Saturday morning, the elections will be watched closely — even by those not participating in them, whether in Nigeria or abroad.
Produced by Faisal Al Yafai, Sabrine Baiou and Christin El-kholy

Ukraine’s Long War — with Olesya Khromeychuk and Amie Ferris-Rotman

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began on the 24th February, 2022.
“I'll never forget that night,” Olesya Khromeychuk tells New Lines magazine’s Amie Ferris-Rotman, as she looks back on it almost a year later. A historian and the director of the Ukraine Institute London, Khromeychuk says that her shock soon turned to defiance and determination. “We were all prepared for an escalation. We expected it to happen.”
The invasion, she points out, was not the beginning. It was the culmination of centuries of repression and eight years of war — a war which started when Russia began arming separatist paramilitaries in the Donbas region, in response to the overthrow of the Kremlin-backed Yanukovich regime during the 2014 Maidan revolution. 
“My brother was the first one who warned me of it when he returned to the frontline after his first deployment,” she says. “He was absolutely certain that it was going to escalate. All of my veteran friends said the same thing. It was just a matter of time.” Yet Khromeychuk’s brother never lived to see it. He was killed in action in 2017, five years before his prediction came tragically true. 
She wrote a book about him, called The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister. “I wrote it in order to try and raise awareness about this forgotten war,” she recalls. At the time of his death, the Donbas war had faded from view in the eyes of the rest of the world. 
“It took a full-scale war for the world to actually discover Ukraine.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Many Worlds of Indian Cinema — with Anupama Chopra and Surbhi Gupta

“It is a movie-crazy culture,” says journalist and film critic Anupama Chopra. “Cinema is the number one choice of entertainment. The Indian movie star is somewhere between human beings and god.”
 
Since 1993, Chopra has been covering India’s cinema industry — or industries — and is the founder and editor-in-chief of the digital platform Film Companion. In the past, she tells New Lines magazine’s Surbhi Gupta, the Indian movie culture was dominated by the goliath that is Bollywood, the Hindi-language industry. Yet Indian film is larger than Bollywood alone. “Every other state has its own thriving, regional cinema, with its own local stars,” she explains. 
 
With the rise of streaming, a trend accelerated by the Covid pandemic, those regional cinema industries have burst through the boundaries of state borders. “We all discovered the brilliance of Malayalam cinema and how Telugu cinema does the sort of over-the-top commercial film in such a brilliant way, or all the kinds of really exciting stuff happening in Tamil cinema or Kannada cinema,” says Chopra. “We are no longer fixating on what region of India a film comes from. We are all watching everything.”
And it isn’t only domestic audiences who are watching, either. The Telugu language movie “RRR” was a surprise hit with international audiences, including in the United States, where it won several awards. “Honestly, I've never seen anything like it for any other Indian film,” Chopra says. “It's not just playing in the U.S.; it's running to packed houses in Japan.”
But back in India, not everyone has been celebrating. At a time of rising nationalistic fervor, the movie is one of several to draw criticism from those who believe such films are fanning the flames. Chopra is skeptical. “Films are not removed from society,” she says. “That is the current mood, and that is what films will reflect.”
For better or for worse, film and society are inextricably linked. “You have to understand that films in India are not just entertainment, right? It's a way of life.”
Produced by Joshua Martin

The Fight for the Right — with David French and Faisal Al Yafai

In 2019, the writer Sohrab Ahmari launched a blistering attack against David French, a former lawyer and political commentator who now works as a columnist for The New York Times. Both men were known as committed conservatives and prominent figures on the religious right. Yet their dispute became emblematic of the deepening division within conservative intellectual circles since Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 — the ripples of which have been felt throughout the entire American political landscape. 
“It's weird that we're both considered conservative,” French remarks to New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai. “Someone can say that they're a Republican, and it won't necessarily tell you their view of individual liberty or their view of the power and role of government and economic affairs or their view of foreign policy. That's how divided the right is right now.”
 
The author of the book “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” French has spent the past few years increasingly worried by the intensity of partisanship that now characterizes U.S. politics. “I think it's a public service to humanize each other,” he says. But that was precisely Ahmari’s objection.
“The right is, I would say, by and large on Ahmari’s side,” explains French. “In other words, this idea that we're not going to play by gentlemen's rules here. We're going to roll up our sleeves and we're gonna have at it.” From the point of view of Ahmari and his fellow travelers, that partisanship is a feature, not a bug. Feeling increasingly out of step with the direction of American society, French argues that they have embraced an uncompromising, ends-justify-the-means approach to politics embodied by politicians like Trump or his potential rival Ron DeSantis — even to the point where some are questioning their commitment to democracy itself. "Many folks are not necessarily after majority rule at all.”
It’s a line of thinking that extends beyond the realm of the strategic and into the intellectual.“This is sort of where you're going to see the classical liberal versus authoritarian approach,” he explains. “The more authoritarian approach takes a very negative view of individual liberty, because they argue it breeds individualism, which fractures, community bonds and ultimately harms all of us. What Ahmari and others are saying is, ‘Well, when people fail in their responsibility to exercise liberty virtuously, then the government has to step in and eradicate that liberty.’ And I firmly disagree with that.”
So that may be what the division comes down to — power vs. persuasion. “And it's so weird that in our politics, we've become so polarized that a lot of people just scorn persuasion entirely,” French says. 
Produced by Joshua Martin

Behind the Hamline University Incident — with Erika Lopez Prater, Christiane Gruber and Rasha Elass

“I said, ‘I'm showing these images to you for a reason,’” recalls Erika López Prater, a former adjunct professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. “I wanted to demonstrate the rich variety of art-making within Islamic traditions.”
 
The images in question were medieval paintings of the Prophet Muhammad. At the time it was produced, the art was intended to be celebratory. However, due to shifting religious practices, many Muslims have come to consider such depictions of the prophet to be forbidden or offensive. López Prater says that she tried to be mindful of these sensitivities and warned students before displaying them. But after a complaint was lodged with the administration, university officials turned on her and her contract was subsequently canceled.
 
After Christiane Gruber, a professor of Islamic art at the University of Michigan, wrote an essay in New Lines condemning the university’s actions, López Prater’s story became a national controversy. In this podcast with New Lines magazine’s Rasha Elass, they discuss the rich variety of artistic traditions within Islam and unpack the complicated web of factors behind the current controversy. 
 
“These anxieties around images of the Prophet Muhammad started to really emerge over the course of the 20th century,” Gruber says. Attitudes among Muslims have varied widely across time and place, and aniconic beliefs were far from universal historically. She traces modern concerns back to very recent origins — to controversies over disrespectful cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo in France and the Jyllands Post in Denmark. Such depictions should not be conflated with the depictions found in Islamic art, she argues: “The intent behind those cartoons was to shock. And of course it overlapped with xenophobia.”
 
But another big part of the problem, López Prater says, comes from the increased marketization of higher education in recent years. “Colleges and universities have adopted a customer-service model,” she explains. “They’ve slashed tenure track positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor. Meanwhile, that is accompanied by administrative bloat.” That trend, she suggests, has encouraged institutions to prioritize financial and reputational concerns over academic enquiry and enabled officials to treat academic staff as disposable. 
 
“There is this hugely tragic irony that the administration was trying to sweep this issue under the rug through the quick dismissal of an adjunct professor,” she adds. “And instead have been having to reckon with a long history of racist and Islamophobic events on their college campus and within the Twin Cities and within our country.”

A Tunisia Without Ennahda? — with Monica Marks and Erin Clare Brown

Two years after his 2021 power grab, Tunisian President Kais Saied is still struggling to consolidate his rule. His appeal to supporters was largely predicated on his promises to fix the country’s economic crisis — a promise he has failed catastrophically to deliver on. And yet despite rising inflation and shortages of basic goods, no coherent opposition has managed to emerge.
Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi, has been a keen observer of Tunisian politics for over a decade. “I think if we're going to really understand Saied’s ‘self-coup’ in 2021, what led to it and whether or not Tunisia can return to some sort of democratic path, we have to grapple with the so-called ‘Ennahda problem,’” she tells New Lines magazine’s Erin Clare Brown.
Ennahda is Tunisia’s Islamist party. After the Arab Spring swept away the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the party emerged as the new democracy’s foremost political force. But the optimism of the revolution soon gave way to disappointment. It was in the face of corruption and economic woes that many Tunisians turned to a demagogue like Saied. “They claimed that Ennahda was primarily or even single-handedly responsible for the country's failures to make good on its revolutionary promises of 2011,” says Marks. 
Likewise, many secular Tunisians fear that the party’s relatively moderate platform is a front for a more sinister agenda. They point to Erdogan in Turkey, whose stated commitment to secularism fell away the moment it became unnecessary. In Marks’ view, “When a lot of people remember that and say, well, listen, there's no reason to think Ennahda wouldn't do the same thing.”
But whatever reservations the opposition may have about working with Islamists, they may have to if they want to challenge Saied’s autocratic rule. “Do I think that there's a future for democratic politics in Tunisia without Ennahda? Absolutely not,” says Marks. “The fact remains that Ennahda is the only political party that can mobilize big numbers on the streets.” Without a broad united front, the dream of the 2011 revolution may well be dead for good.
“Exiting dictatorship relies on building cross-ideological opposition coalitions,” she adds. “There is strength in unity.”
Produced by Joshua Martin and Erin Clare Brown

The Nomad State — with Marie Favereau and Faisal Al Yafai

For most of human history, settled people have lived in fear of conquest by their powerful nomadic neighbors. Most powerful of all was the Mongol Empire, which brought most of Eurasia under their rule for almost 300 years. But in this second episode on nomads, Marie Favereau, a historian at Paris Nanterre University, says that the Mongols have been either neglected by history or unfairly represented as mindlessly destructive barbarians. Her book, “The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World,” was written to change all that.
The use of the word horde, she says, was quite intentional, given the negative connotations associated with the word today: “It's a very old word especially in Asian culture and Indo-Asian languages,” she tells New Lines magazine’s Faisal Al Yafai. “The word itself means an organized nomadic state. I think it's important to think about the words we use and, you know, how we can change the meaning.”
Historians have to put their bias aside and be fair in examining the record, she says, which can help us start to see the benefits and rationale behind the Mongols’ decisions. And there are lessons we can learn from the Mongols about how to strike a balance in our relationship to the natural environment and how to combat xenophobia: So long as they swore allegiance to the khan, the Mongols didn’t attempt to force their religion or way of life on their subjects.
But Favereau rejects any romanticized view of nomadic living.
“I know how difficult nomadic life can be. So the idea is not to say, ‘Oh, this is the ideal way of living.” Instead, when looking at past nomadic empires like the Mongols — and nomadic societies still in existence today — we can begin to envision different possibilities for living and doing today.
“It's important to know that it was not always like this,” she says.
Produced by Joshua Martin and Christin El-Kholy

How 2022 Changed the World (and What to Expect From 2023)

In this special episode, New Lines magazine’s Joshua Martin looks back at some of the key events of 2022 and how we tried to make sense of it all on The Lede. 
The Russian invasion of Ukraine was, for many, the defining story of 2022. A year on, it’s easy to forget how shocked the world was when Vladimir Putin’s forces pushed across the border and along the road to Kyiv. But even in those first weeks, many signs already hinted at the direction the war would take. As Ukraine pushed back, the extent of the rot in the Russian armed forces became increasingly clear, as did the evidence of atrocities against civilians. 
But while Ukraine dominated headlines, conflicts elsewhere went increasingly ignored. In Ethiopia, the central government’s wars in the regions of Tigray and Oromia were fought with no less brutality than the war in Ukraine. In the face of the international community’s apathy, peace seemed a distant prospect. And yet in November, government and Tigrayan forces did manage to reach a peace agreement. The war in Oromia, however, appears only to be intensifying. 
 
The year 2022 also marked a historic anniversary — a century since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. For better or for worse, its rise, 600-year reign and ultimate collapse left an undeniable mark on the vast swathe of territories it once ruled. The Empire might be gone, but its legacy remains, serving as a reminder that the past is never really past. Similarly, the death of Queen Elizabeth II in September was another perfect case in point, pulling 70 years’ worth of history into the public consciousness and provoking fierce debates across the Commonwealth about what that history meant. 
Such battles over history have become increasingly prominent in recent years, and 2022 continued that trend. For strongmen like Putin, Ethiopia’s Ahmed Abiy and others, these battles have proved to be a crucial part of their political strategy. In an age in which old certainties about history, identity and nation no longer hold firm, such autocrats and would-be autocrats offer a seductive promise: to turn back the clock to a simpler time. 
If the past year is anything to go by, 2023 will be anything but. 
 

When Reality Is a Lie — with Lea Ypi and Faisal Al Yafai [Rebroadcast]

[This episode originally aired August 5, 2022]What if you woke up one morning to discover everything you knew about the world was wrong? That all the truths you’d been taught to take for granted were actually lies? For author and political philosopher Lea Ypi, that’s not a hypothetical question. In her recent memoir “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History,” she tells the story of growing up in communist Albania only for the regime to collapse during her teenage years. 
“It really was like being taught a new language,” she tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. “Almost overnight, you’re told that all of these names that you had for things are now different—you have different names and different categories and different ways of making sense of the world.”
They talk about how to see the gap between ideology and reality, where people look for certainty in uncertain times and what it actually means to be free. 
Produced by Joshua Martin & Christin El Kholy

How Christmas Conquered the World

For this special Christmas episode of “The Lede,” New Lines magazine’s Ola Salem, Maysa Mustafa, Amie Ferris-Rotman and Surbhi Gupta gather ’round the mic with host and producer Joshua Martin to talk about the worldwide rise of Christmas and whether it’s outgrowing its Christian roots — before finishing off with our traditional holiday quiz.