Just over a decade ago, I predicted the arrival of water as an asset class. I foresaw “a massive expansion of investment in the water sector, including the production of fresh, clean water from other sources (desalination, purification), storage, shipping, and transportation of water.” This would result in “a globally integrated market for fresh water within 25 to 30 years. Once the spot markets for water are integrated, futures markets and other derivative water-based financial instruments – puts, calls, swaps – both exchange-traded and OTC [over-the-counter] will follow. There will be different grades and types of fresh water, just the…

Penultimate week I returned to my hometown, Owo; specifically for the 14th Foundation Day and 11th convocation ceremony of Achievers University, a private university founded and nurtured by Bode Ayorinde (Pro-chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council) and an erstwhile member of the House of Representatives. My first trip to Achievers was last April at its 10th convocation ceremony. At a time when many universities merge streams of graduating students into one convocation ceremony for paucity of funds, pulling through two such ceremonies in a year is a feat. This year’s Achievers University convocation lecture was delivered by former Vice-President…

At the end of the Cold War, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a celebrated essay called “The End of History?” Communism’s collapse, he argued, would clear the last obstacle separating the entire world from its destiny of liberal democracy and market economies. Many people agreed. Today, as we face a retreat from the rules-based, liberal global order, with autocratic rulers and demagogues leading countries that contain well over half the world’s population, Fukuyama’s idea seems quaint and naive. But it reinforced the neoliberal economic doctrine that has prevailed for the last 40 years. The credibility of neoliberalism’s faith in unfettered…

This is the second part of our treatise on the rule of law that started last week. The rule of law is about the creation of laws, their enforcement so that no one - including the most highly placed citizen - is above the law. When one looks at how organised countries have control over their affairs, one sees how the weakest as well as the strongest face the same law and get the same justice when they get caught with a misdemeanour. In an ideal country, those who are at the helm of affairs are ever mindful of doing…