Nigerian officials like to tell a story about the telecoms revolution that began in Nigeria in 2001. It involves how Vodafone, the British telecoms giant, had been offered the chance to enter Nigeria’s nascent market on the cheap. The mobile phone company considered Nigeria a risk not worth taking and passed on the opportunity. In the end, MTN, a younger, smaller rival from South Africa, and a couple of other operators took a chance on the country in an auction where they each paid $285m for a license. To say that their bets paid off spectacularly will be a gross…

For most critics of globalization, trade is the villain, responsible for deepening inequality and rising economic insecurity among workers. This is the logic driving support for US President Donald Trump’s escalating tariffs. Why, then, does the message resonate far beyond the United States, and even the advanced economies, to include workers in many of the developing countries that are typically portrayed as globalization’s main beneficiaries? Free trade is hardly the only – or even primary – source of inequality and insecurity worldwide. Surprisingly, one enduring problem that provokes far less popular backlash is that finance continues to dominate the world…

There is this story that helped to tame the greed of pre and post-colonial Yoruba society, as well as any tendency within it to play God. Set in an African village, the story is that of a young wretched fisherman (ap’ejalodo) who was ravaged by failure. He was unable to catch enough fish over the years to rescue him from the pangs of lack. One day however, as he thrust his fishing hook into the river, it caught one of the largest fishes he had ever seen. Excited, Ap’ejalodo pulled his awesome catch up to the river bank and proceeded…

Let us begin by quickly recalling two bits of Nigeria’s recent history. First, at the close of 1983, a military junta overthrew and supplanted the elected civilian government of Shehu Shagari, the first and only president of Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979-1983). Then, early in 1985, in the second year of the new military regime, which was headed by Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, an animated debate, similar to the one the country is now witnessing, raged in Nigeria’s national newspapers. The debate then was the relationship between democracy and dictatorship, or – as Leftists would more elegantly describe it – the “dialectics…