A FORTNIGHT ago President Buhari submitted a request to the Senate to approve an external loan of US$29.96 billion (N10.7 trillion). It’s the second time such a request would be presented, the first being in 2016, when the Senate rejected it. As a career banker, it would be rather rich of me to sit here and be sanctimonious about borrowing. I am experienced enough to know one of the axioms of finance, which says it is smart to use other people’s money to get rich. But you must know what you are doing.

A FEW weeks ago a dear American friend and former colleague sent me an email. Permit me to quote him verbatim: “Hello brother Obed. I trust that you are fruitfully engaged these days. I read an article earlier today that immediately brought you to mind. I want to share its contents with you, as attached. 

THE French President Emmanuel Macron was recently quoted as saying that the problem with Africa is “civilizational”. In his words: “With a family that has seven or eight children in Africa, even if you invest billions, nothing will change, because the challenge of Africa is civilizational.” A decade ago, his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, in a well-packed hall at the venerable Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar opined that Africa is stagnating because its collective mindset is rooted in “circles and circles” of thinking. Nothing moves, everything is in “endless circles”, hence no progress is possible. The audience in that sweltering summer in Dakar felt both stupefied and humiliated.

WE live in strange times. Blatant travesties are being repackaged as wisdom and virtue while right is being made an object of derision and scorn. The new hate-speech law being proposed by the APC-dominated National Assembly is an obnoxious piece of legislation. It proposes to slam the death penalty by hanging for hate-speech especially through the social media. To all intents and purposes, they are elevating that crime to the same level as murder and high treason.

LAST April the international charity, Oxfam, revealed that the number of extreme poor in Nigeria had skyrocketed to 94.4 million people, with three million having been added to that unhappy lot in a mere span of six months. As some of my gentle readers would recall, in 2017 Nigeria overtook India for the dubious prize of being the world’s poverty capital. India’s destitute poor number some 70 million out of a total population of 1.36 billion. This amounts to 5.124 percent of India’s total population of 1.36 billion. Nigeria’s 94.5 million poor constitute 47.2 percent of our current estimated population of 200 million. Nearly a half of our population is virtually condemned to the nightmare of the Middle Ages.