Chinua Achebe, one of the greatest writers Nigeria has ever known, recently wrote an op-ed article titled Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope for the New York Times. The piece starts out with the injustices of colonisation and how Africans had no idea about what to do with independence after having gained it. The following two excellent… Read More »
FT’s Gideon Rachman thinks that the answer to that question might be Yes: The backlash against immigration is particularly visible in Europe. In Britain, the new coalition government has promised to reduce the number of immigrants from hundreds of thousands a year to tens of thousands. International banks and multinational companies are already complaining that their businesses are… Read More »
Ronald Coase, the economist who theorised the reason for the existence of firms, turns 100 today. The Economist’s Schumpeter column has this really nice piece about him: His central insight was that firms exist because going to the market all the time can impose heavy transaction costs. You need to hire workers, negotiate prices and… Read More »
Chris Blattman draws attention to the myth of information technology in development. What interests me is why this particular myth (of ICT in development) still survives. Which leads me to wonder how many ideas in development research and practice are really myths that have simply refused to die; and why they have refused to die.… Read More »
The Economist has a nice article on immigration in Germany. If you can recall, Angela Merkel recently said that multiculturalism has utterly failed in Germany. This was following the furore that was raised by the publication of a book that claimed that immigrants and muslims were causing the downfall of Germany. The book was written… Read More »
Adewale Ajadi writes in NEXT: Is it not possible that in a heated polity Mrs. Yar’Adua sees herself as isolated and her husband as threatened; viewing each delegation that approached Saudi Arabia with the same cynicism that is abroad across the land and drinking from the same sectional cesspool from which the national psyche is… Read More »
My saxophone instructor, a Muslim, asked me today about the ‘religious violence’ in northern Nigeria. I tried to explain to him that most of the violence that is reported from northern Nigeria is about a weird definition of who an indigene is and who a settler is, and that most often, the immediate cause of… Read More »
Nneoma of Pyoowata writes in a review of Nigerian bloggers’ response to ‘District 9’ for NigeriansTalk.org: In an interview with the Huffington Post, Neill Blomkamp states that the small population of Nigerians in South Africa is indeed responsible for the majority of crime in his country. In keeping with his bias against Nigerians, District 9… Read More »
was published a couple of weeks ago. It is here, but I have pasted the full text below. Thinking through kids Olumide Abimbola Act One A couple of days ago I joined one of my friends to pick up his daughter at the kindergarten. This was the first time I was seeing her in close… Read More »
Yesterday afternoon I ran into part of the Nigerian team to the IAAF World Championship in Athletics in Berlin. It was at a Nigerian restaurant. From the way they interacted with the staff, and from references to previous days, it seemed that they had been going there everyday since they got to Berlin. This got… Read More »