From the BBC: A team of observers from Commonwealth countries has arrived in the UK to watch how the election is conducted and suggest how it could be improved. It will be the first time a Commonwealth team has observed elections in a developed country. They will observe candidates’ campaigns, polling stations and the count,… Read More »
Keith Hart writes: The contrast between Zuma and Mbeki could hardly be greater, a tribal chieftain in the mould of Bolingbroke or Henry Tudor against Mbeki’s Othello, a man happy to be photographed dancing in Zulu warrior gear versus the austere western intellectual with his stiff suits and goatee beard. The number of Zuma’s wives,… Read More »
I just read this on the Nigerian Village Square: The literary world is abuzz with the news that Achebe in 2010, on the fiftieth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, and the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Biafran war; is working on a major opus – Reflections on the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970. It will… Read More »
The scheduling has done this documentary series no favours. Welcome to Lagos has coincided each Thursday night with an event, the TV debate between the three party leaders, which has not only turned this election on its head, but which may have changed politics in this country forever. If you can ignore history being made… Read More »
From a BusinessDay Nigeria column: [O]ur trade policy has remained very inconsistent many years after independence. Recent reforms – particularly the NEEDS – have however tried to considerably minimize the unpredictability of the trade policy regime by establishing a schedule to fully adopt the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) common external tariff (CET)… Read More »
Deborah Brautigam thinks so. And she should know, since she recently wrote a book on China in Africa, titled The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. She said this in an interview with the Aid Watch blog: As a donor, China’s way has several advantages. Take the way they operate. They rarely “poach”… Read More »
You probably know her. She is the award-winning author of An Elergy for Easterly, a beautiful collection of short stories. I didn’t drop the book until I finished it. Get it if you can. She writes in Guardian of April 14: Thirty years ago on Sunday the renegade British colony that had been Rhodesia was born… Read More »
1. How Mathematics might have caused the financial crisis 2. To which Gillian Tett says, Bad practice, not the discipline itself, is to blame for the financial crisis 3. Sex and the single black (American) woman 4. On Goodluck Jonathan’s Amanpour interview 5. Joe Stiglitz: An Agenda for Reforming Economic Theory 6. Zimbabwe hangman position… Read More »
Extracts: Collier’s work is not informed by any explicit, overarching theory of development or any historical perspective that might inform one; nor does he offer any social analysis. There is an implicit theory of human behaviour, which is radically reductionist—individual economic self-interest rules. In this view, history appears to be a continuum of ‘14th-century reality:… Read More »
Apparently, nobody knows. Check this out: The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has described the records of the country’s crude production and export as unclear, saying that after 58 years of oil production, the country does not know exactly the quantity it produces. Speaking at the presentation of a research report on the Nigeria… Read More »