Nigeria is about to enter into a new phase in its history. Scarcity will soon become the word most commonly used by us starting from 2024. We already have scarcity of cash in banks, foreign exchange scarcity, rice scarcity and job scarcity is about to kick in with several multinational companies voting with their feet. Procter & Gamble, P&G, being the latest to shut its gates and send Nigerian hopes of rapid industrialisation crashing at the dawn of Renewed Hope. Unilever, formerly Lever Brothers Nigeria Limited, was the first company to establish large-scale manufacturing in Nigeria on April 11, 1923.…

When Francis Fukuyama published his famous 1989 essay, “The End of History?,” he captured the mood in many Western capitals at the time. Not everybody agreed with him that “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution” had been reached, but few could deny the resonance of his message. In anticipating “an unabashed victory” for “economic and political liberalism,” he was channeling both the emerging policymaking consensus and what had already become the standard approach in much of academia. This late twentieth-century consensus rested on two distinct but synergistic pillars: political liberalism and economic liberalism. In the political domain, democratic institutions had…

From high-level policy debates and political manifestos to everyday news coverage, anxiety about economic growth is everywhere. In Germany, the government’s latest budget identifies stronger growth as a top priority. In India, national leaders are eager to reclaim their country’s place as the world’s fastest-growing economy. In China, where the prospect of deflation looms, the government is undoubtedly worried about hitting its 5% growth target for the year. In the United Kingdom, Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, has vowed to secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 if given power, and the ruling Conservatives express…

If Nyesom Wike had read the character portrait of the Ijaw man as sketched by Percy Amoury Talbot, an early 20th century British historian and colonial administrator, he would most probably have thought twice before settling for Simnalaya Fubara as his third term placeholder. Wike was a two-term governor of Rivers State and today, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. In his highly authoritative 1926 book, Peoples of Southern Nigeria: a Sketch of their History, Ethnology, and Languages, with an Abstract of the 1921 Census, Talbot reserved an unflattering description for the no-nonsense Ijaw race. Hear him at page 333,…