By Obadiah Mailafia Obafemi Awolowo: CHIEF, you are looking resplendent in your heavenly regalia. The aura around you is radiant and glorious. I am overwhelmed Sir! Smiling triumphantly, the avatar replies: “Well, thank you much for your kind compliments. But my appearance should not surprise you. Jesus told the Apostles that in His Father’s house […]

By Obadiah Mailafia In response to a piece I did on the war drums that seem to be engulfing our collective psyche today, one of my gentle readers, Nnaemeka Nnolim, businessman and media executive, sent me the manuscript of a book he is writing on recollections of childhood in Biafra. With his full permission, I […]

THE Nigerian economy is a series of paradoxes. In the first place, we are a very wealthy nation in terms of natural resource endowment. We in fact have an embarrassment of riches. And yet, we are the poverty capital of the world. In 2017, Nigeria overtook India as the world capital of poverty. The poor of Nigeria, as internationally defined in terms of having access to less than $1.50, number some 97 million today. They thus constitute something of the order of 48 percent of the Nigerian population.

LET me place my cards on the table: I have always been partial towards Britain. Apart from my country Nigeria, it is the only other place I can call “home”. Sadly, we would never forget that the British colonialists wilfully left behind a lopsided federal contraption that was inevitably to lead to a civil war that consumed more than two million Nigerians. To forgive, they say, is divine.

ACCORDING to my own calculations, the six core Yoruba states of Lagos, Ogun, Ekiti, Ondo, Osun and Oyo have a total GDP of US$80 billion, which, out of a total national GDP of US$446 billion, constitutes about 20 percent of our national wealth. The bulk of VAT revenues come from those states and most are spent elsewhere. The menace of insecurity in that region is consequently a threat to our long-term economic future, if not nationhood. This is why I welcome the creation of Amotekun (meaning leopard) as a regional outfit to tackle the worsening crisis of insecurity in the Western region.

WEDNESDAY, January 15, marks 50 years to the day when our tragic civil war was formally ended. That was the day that Colonel Philip Effiong and his men brought the articles of surrender to Yakubu Gowon at Dodan Barracks, Lagos.

WEDNESDAY, January 15, marks 50 years to the day when our tragic civil war was formally ended. That was the day that Colonel Philip Effiong and his men brought the articles of surrender to Yakubu Gowon at Dodan Barracks, Lagos. Gowon famously declared that there were”no victor, no vanquished”. January 15, 1966 was also the date the first military putsch led by Major Chukwuma Nzeogwu took place, setting a chain of events that culminated in a civil war that lasted from 1967 to 1970.

ON Saturday, December 21, French President Emmanuel Macron and his Ivoirian counterpart, Alassane Ouattara, announced a package of “historic reforms” of the 70-year CFA monetary zone. Macron explained that the reforms were part of an effort to reposition the partnership between France and Africa that is too often perceived “in terms of domination and the trappings of colonialism that did exist”, but which he admitted to be “a profound error”.

BRITISH wartime Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, famously noted that, “you do not negotiate borders – you defend them”. Borders are the hallmarks of a sovereign state. Any country that cannot control hers is not worthy of its own statehood. The current global system of territorial states that we operate began in continental Europe, with the Treaty of Westphalia 1648 that ended the devastating Thirty Years’ religious wars.

I HAVE always lamented the fact that Africans are the last people to ever plan for their collective future. In a manner of speaking, the future is already with us through the phenomenon that futurologists term “global megatrends”. These are long-term ubiquitous, structural and often irreversible transformations that shape economies and societies. By their very nature, they have the present and future capacity to “disrupt and reshape the world in which we live in surprising and unexpected ways”. This also means that public policies that normally operate within short-term horizons need to be designed in terms of more long-term, systems-based approaches to cope with structural societal changes. In this sense, long-term perspective planning, including scenario analytics, are often better suited to managing these large-scale transformations than traditional linear-based public policy systems.