Sola Tayo. There have been long-standing tensions between nomadic pastoralist Fulanis, one of the dominant ethnic groups in Nigeria and the ruling class of much of the north, and their settled counterparts, centred on the use of land for grazing livestock. But recently, the frequency and intensity of the violence has increased, causing alarm and potentially spurring a dangerous securitized approach to the clashes that could wreak havoc on Nigeria’s fragile economy and have devastating consequences for the majority of peaceful Fulanis. Violence has certainly claimed hundreds of pastoralist and settler lives this year alone, but precise information is scarce.…
Author: CASADE
Tom Moss. After several starts and stops, the Nigerian government has finally removed fuel subsidies, resulting in an overnight price hike of 67 percent. The economic logic of subsidy reform is clear. Fuel subsidies were costing the government about $5 billion per year while the benefits accrued mostly to the non-poor. Nigeria’s particular scheme was also riven with corruption; a 2012 parliamentary inquiry found that the government was paying daily subsides on 59 million liters even when consumption was only 35 million liters. In recent weeks, the country was further hit by debilitating fuel shortages. Politically, however, the subsidy was…
The history of religion is a history of schisms. You can make a case that every great religion is a heresy of some previous one: exactly as Christianity is a heresy of Judaism, which itself is a reworking of Ancient Babylonian myths. In the sibling rivalry that exists between Jews, Christians and Muslims, we are all descendants of Abraham one way or another, like three children competing for a father’s attention. What we need to learn is how to get on with each other without resorting to violence – a massively tall order, as these books reveal. Faith is a…
Christoper L. Daniels. Reviewed By John Hoist. Christopher L. Daniels’s timely book on piracy and terrorism in the Horn of Africa provides detailed, valuable information on a poorly understood and under-studied region that is attracting growing international attention. Analysts and policy makers will undoubtedly find this to be a very useful book. Unlike many authors, who are reluctant to make explicit policy recommendations, Daniels is overt in his support for U.S. and international anti-terrorist and anti-piracy operations in Somalia, and ends the book with a clear prescription for greater international aid for the sake of “truly eradicating the terrorist threat…
Edited by Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Roland Bénabou and Dilip Mookherjee. Understanding poverty and what to do about it, is perhaps the central concern of all of economics. Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first essay is about how poverty gets measured.…
Ray Cummings. Just as its physical landscape, the political environment of sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 varied greatly from country to country. On a positive note, elections in politically polarized countries such as Nigeria, Tanzania, Guinea, and Cote d’Ivoire concluded relatively peacefully, despite the shadow of political violence looming large. Burkina Faso, which entered the year in political limbo following the ousting of long-serving president Blaise Compaoré, also elected its first, democratic government thwarting a coup attempt by the deposed leader’s presidential guard in the process. In another encouraging development, 2015 also marked the nadir of the West African Ebola outbreak, which killed more…
Dustin Henry. The Islamic State, also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS, is renowned for their recruiting. Al-Qa’ida was known for recruiting people from around the Muslim world, but ISIS has successfully reached out into the West and pulled people in. But where did ISIS originate? In a twisted way the United States and Coalition members who operated in Iraq can be blamed for ISIS. It was discovered that at least 12 of ISIS’ core leadership were prisoners in Camp Bucca [i]. Thus, the 2010 boom of ISIS can be directly attributed to a Western held POW camp in Iraq, where ISIS leadership,…
Economists are usually, in the main, a reasonable sort. But their persistent inability to speak uniformly on critical matters of global interest or the inability to approximate the final value of an economic variable is beginning to wear thin on policy makers who depend so heavily on their expertise. Take the current rage of negative interest rate; economists had emphatically said it could not (or at least should not) happen. Yet rich-world central banks are starting to impose negative interest rates. In June 2014 the European Central Bank (ECB) began paying -0.1% on deposits held in its vault, before lowering…
Kashik Basin. It is time for the annual Spring Meetings. Many of the world’s finance and development ministers, along with business and civil society leaders, are here is Washington and have been meeting with us at the World Bank this week to discuss what we can do to rise up to these challenging times. Most conversations have come to land on two important questions, namely: What is happening around the world in different regions? And: what can we do to stem the slowdown and disunity around the right policy way ahead? The global economy has hit a difficult patch. We…
September 11, 2001, stands as a critical pivot point in history, one that put the threat of terrorism in the national spotlight and demanded immediate expertise in national security. Yet, as new as the issue may have seemed to many observers, this demand for legal, political, and technical attention to national security reflected a longer-term set of profound changes. The fall of Communism and the end of the Cold War ushered in a new era of geopolitics, ending a past marked largely by alliances between—and rivalries across—nations and beginning an era of global risks from actors not easily defined by,…