THIS month, the Federal Government came up with a new policy on foreign travels. According to press reports, it is designed “to curb leakages and instill financial prudence in the management of government resources”. Government also “warned that all public funded travels, local and foreign, must be strictly for official purposes and highly essential statutory engagements that are of benefit to the interests of the country”.

BARELY two days after returning to  Nigeria from Russia, President Muhammadu Buhari is again on another trip to Saudi Arabia to attend the Economic Forum of the Future Investment Initiative. As if that is not enough, Mr. Femi Adesina, the President’s Special Adviser on Media and Publicity said “at the end of the summit, President Buhari will on Saturday, November 2, 2019 proceed to the United Kingdom on a private visit. He is expected to return to Nigeria on November 17, 2019.” In effect, the President will be on a “private visit” to UK for good two weeks.

There is also the American Revolution (1787), the Meiji Revolution (1860) in Japan and the communist revolutions in Russia (1917) and later in China (1947). The incomplete revolution in Korea led to the division of the Korean peninsula to North and South Korea with two political and economic systems. As we can surmise not all revolutions ended in inclusive political and economic systems. As it has been observed, the rich countries of today are those that undertook the journey of industrialisation and technological change and the poor ones are those that did not. As Acemoglu and Robinson have stated: “World inequality exists today because during the 19th and 20th centuries, some countries were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and methods of organisation that it brought while others were unable to do so. Technological change is not only one of the engines of prosperity, it is the most critical one”.

AFTER being forced to dismount from his high horse over a grass-cutting business that went awry at the noon of his stint in unelected public office, Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to Nigeria’s Federal Government, has turned to another venture. He has sauntered into the edgyenterprise of looking into the crystal ball. First, he took a deep dip into the past to lay hold on the Time Machine developed in 1895 by English science fiction writer, H. G. Wells. Then, he used the contraption to glide from today into the misty tomorrow. Cocooned in the cockpit of the craft, Lawal time-travelled to a nearby age: 2023. It’s not a distant future, less than four years. So he’s back, brimming with news for his anxious countrymen. What did he see about the close era that we who have been gloomily glued to the present 2019 aren’t permitted to behold?

Forget the grinding traffic jam, the ever-bustling bus stops, the noisy markets and all those discourteous motorcyclists, who are a big pain in the neck. And the street urchins. Forget them all for a while. Let’s sing our own sweet song instead.