Islamic finance in Nigeria – BusinessDay Why mobile money arrived in Africa before the UK – BBC What DSK’s fall says about transatlantic differences in attitudes to sex, power and the law – The Economist A new freight train route connects Antwerp in Belgium to the western Chinese city of Chongqing, 11,000 kilometers away –… Read More »
Sometime last week I attended a podium discussion at the Berlin Humboldt University. The topic was Africa as the laboratory of globalisation. The idea was to discuss different ways in which Africa serves as a laboratory for ideas that then travel to other parts of the world. Some of those on the podium are STS… Read More »
I just got this in the mail: While walking down the street one day a corrupt Nigerian Senator was tragically hit by a car and died. His soul arrives in heaven and is met by St. Peter at the entrance. ”Welcome to heaven,” says St. Peter. “Before you settle in, it seems there is a… Read More »
In The New Yorker: The narrator of “Open City,” Julius, is in his final year of a psychiatry fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian, and the book covers roughly a year, between the fall of 2006 and the late summer of 2007. He is around thirty, and tells us that he came to America as a university… Read More »
Seye Abimbola, a research fellow at the National Primary Health Care Development Agency, Abuja, Nigeria, uses the case of a country without a proper health system (Nigeria) to reflect on how one might build a health system for the 21st century: The world is at a watershed, on the brink of monumental change in what… Read More »
A guest post from Benson Eluma, a NigeriansTalk contributor. WHAT ARE THE differences between Achebe and Hart? Achebe says we have to go back 500 years to understand the problem of Africa; Hart says no, the required span is ‘the last century’. I feel that by the time we get to the start of Hart’s… Read More »
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 »
Both on NigeriansTalk. First, in a post titled Jos and Maiduguri Attacks: If not ethno-religious, then what? Yomi Ogunsanya writes: The crises can also be understood in the context of Nigeria’s perverse inequality, high rate of unemployment, and worsening poverty rate, all of which are, of course, largely the upshot of institutional dysfunction, absence of… Read More »
1. Africa is now one of the world’s fastest-growing regions 2. Now more hopeful in Africa 3. Africa’s urban revolution in the 20th century 4. Romania declares witchcraft a legally-recognized (and taxable) profession 5. What happens to your digital footprints when you die? 6. “The fault lines that have divided us as a people extend… Read More »
Mallam Lamido Aminu Sanusi has been named as the Central Bank Governor of 2010 for both the African continent and the entire world, by the prestigious Banker Magazine. The editor of the magazine, Brian Caplen, says that few candidate names generate an overall consensus on judging panels, and yet, when it came to finding the… Read More »