In 2015, United Nations member states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which include an imperative to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.” Yet, in the last four years, matters have deteriorated significantly. The dangers of environmental pollution receive a lot of attention nowadays, particularly in the developing world, and with good reason. Air quality indices are dismal and worsening in many places, with India, in particular, facing an acute public-health emergency. But as serious as the pollution problem is, it must not be allowed to obscure another incipient environmental catastrophe, and potential source of future…

Just like the prodding of a respected younger professional colleague moved me to take a look at the Ibadan house of horror last week, so also has the intervention of a senior professional colleague that I owe a lot of respect moved me to re-visit the issue. The younger colleague’s experience of how he, a passer-by, was swooped upon and dragged into the Olore compound was his own personal encounter in 1984/85 as a secondary school student; not a story he heard from another person. Today, this person is a highly-placed official of a Federal Government agency in Abuja. According…

Higher nominal wages for low-paid workers can boost real earnings, increase consumer spending, and help make housing more affordable. And insofar as raising the minimum would increase companies’ wage bill, it would create a stronger incentive to replace labor with capital, which could lay the foundation for renewed productivity growth. At 3.6%, unemployment in the United States remains near its lowest level since the late 1960s. There are even signs that people who had previously dropped out of the labor force are being attracted back into it as employers scour a tight labor market for the marginal employee. Consistent with…

This is confession time: My pessimism about Nigeria is as huge as its expansive landscape. Like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I believed that the beautiful Nigerian was either not yet born, born and died prematurely or will never be born at all. My experiential encounters with the Nigerian did not help matters. You meet countrymen who give you the impression that you could not find a good man in Nigeria. In virtually all sectors of the economy, distressing news is the order of the day. The politician is a mess, the journalist is a…