ECONOMIC growth is the foundation of all material prosperity. In our age, quantitative growth is not enough – it has to be sustainable. By sustainable growth we mean a rate of output that meets the needs of the present society without compromising the ability of future generations to their own needs.

JOHN Bala Takaya, President of the Middle Belt Forum, MBF, went to be with his Maker at dawn of Sunday 25 May. He died on Trinity Sunday, an important date in the Christian Calendar.

TODAY concludes the piece I wrote in this Column last week in response to one Abdullah Musa Abdullah who accused me of being a hate-monger.  His confused and unlettered attacks, he declared that I had no right to talk of genocide in contemporary because such crimes appertain only to states.

ON Friday 11 May, I wrote an article titled, “Genocide, Hegemony and Power in Nigeria”, featuring on the back page of the financial newspaper BusinessDay.

A FEW weeks ago, a BBC documentary by Ruona Meyer, titled, “Secrets of Nigeria’s illicit codeine trade revealed”, brought the Nigerian epidemic of drug addiction to the forefront of world attention. It is a national tragedy of grave proportions.

IT was the great nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who described the youth as “the trustees of prosperity”. I would also add that they are also the trustees of posterity – nay, of civilisation itself.

TODAY, our ship of state seems to be careening from side-to-side under a tumultuous, overcast sky. My brief remarks this morning centre on transformational leadership in a democracy and why it matters for our future.

FORGIVE me — forgive us. We have failed you. We have failed you miserably. Literally every single day of my life I receive a text or email from one of you pleading for help — in desperate search for a job – any job. About a million of you leave the school system every year.

THE recent unrest in the English-speaking region of Western Cameroon caught the attention of the world media as well as that of the UN, EU and other international agencies. It is threatening to become part of what Wole Soyinka famously termed “the open wound of a continent”.

WEDNESDAY 4th April this year marks 50 years down to the very day, when African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee.

THE whole world now knows about her. Leah Sharibu, the freckled teenage schoolgirl from Dapchi who refuses to renounce her faith — even on pain of death.

WE Nigerians can be a prickly lot — particularly our men in power — who tend to be oversensitive to anything that smacks of criticism. If we lived in a perfect world ruled by infallible philosopher-kings, the question of dissent in opinion might not arise.

Financial inclusion thrives best, in my opinion, in an environment of macroeconomic stability; in a robust financial ecosystem within a well-governed country that is at peace with itself

WE begin by noting the crucial role played by the Bank of Ghana (BoG) in steering the financial inclusion agenda. The BoG has provided policies that support the development of branchless banking in the country.

I WAS  in Ghana recently to undertake a study on financial inclusion commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I did extensive field work, interviewing key stakeholders such as officials of the Bank of Ghana, leading commercial bankers, TELCOs and microfinance operators.