In July 1968, a year into Nigeria's civil war, one of the divisional commanders fired a note, from the war front, to the Head of State: "What really are we fighting for: to enliven a new class of the domineering type or to integrate the country?" General Benjamin Adekunle who wrote that note to General Yakubu Gowon fought in our civil war and became a folk hero. He thought he was performing that duty for the sake of the children and grandchildren of a future Nigeria of justice. The celebrated General soon saw how Nigeria bred privileged vultures and preening…

Eighteenth-century British economist Adam Smith has long been revered as the founder of modern economics, a thinker who, in his great works The Wealth of Nationsand The Theory of Moral Sentiments, discerned critical aspects of how market economies function. But the insights that earned Smith his exalted reputation are not nearly as unassailable as they once seemed. Perhaps the best known of Smith’s insights is that, in the context of well-functioning and well-regulated markets, individuals acting according to their own self-interest produce a good overall result. “Good,” in this context, means what economists today call “Pareto-optimal” – a state of…

Bankole Folorunso Adedayo was my blood brother. Born in 1973, he was a soldier of the 1 Brigade, Nigerian Army, Sokoto. In 2000, a terse posted letter arrived the News Room of the ANN Plc., publishers of the Tribune newspaper, my erstwhile employer, from his own employer. That letter shattered the walls and world of my family. Bankole had been killed in the thick of fighting in the Sierra Leonean war, so said the letter to me, his next of kin. Till now, that terse 2-paragraph omnibus letter is all that has transpired between our family and the Nigerian Army,…

The goal of economics is to replace the particular languages that obstruct the discovery of general laws with the universal language of mathematics. This is the apotheosis of a Western conceit that can no longer be sustained by Western power. The historian Norman Stone, who died in June, always insisted that history students learn foreign languages. Language gives access to a people’s culture, and culture to its history. Its history tells us how it sees itself and others. Knowledge of languages should thus be an essential component of a historian’s technical equipment. It is the key to understanding the past…