The emotions raised by the recent Presidential, National Assembly as well as the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections will take a while to settle – especially from those who were not favoured by their outcomes. Elections, across all democracies arouse emotions, deepen divisions and polarize the society along certain fissures and contending fault lines. However as Bernie Sanders, the 78 year old American politician, who recently raised $18 million in just 41 days after formally announcing another bid to be the Democratic Party nominee in the 2020 US presidential election, would say, “[e]lection days come and go. But…

The lessons of Nigeria’s Elections 2019 to which I refer here are not abstract lessons-in-general or lessons-for-all-time, but concrete lessons that emerged for the use of political forces on the Nigerian Left that see the urgent need of re-dedication to the great cause and arduous task of building people’s power, popular democracy, People’s national unity and socialism in Nigeria. For all tendencies and segments of the Nigerian Left, this four-point platform should be integral, that is, inseparable into its components. And for Marxists, this unbreakable non-linear chain should be a conscious ideological and political choice. I consider the exercise of…

After listening to the litany of eulogies at the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium, I began to meditate on the reasons why we, Nigerians in the Southwest, are the way we are. I have been struggling within my mind to understand how people easily persuade themselves to hopelessly tolerate those who drill into our collective existence just to be in their good books. Here, I speak only to minds that have been able to detach themselves from the aura of sycophancy and the very few whose conscience are still a bit above the mundane. To the best of my knowledge, and…

Artificial intelligence is transforming every aspect of our lives, not least the economy. As a general-purpose technology, AI’s applications are potentially endless. While it can be used to automate tasks previously performed by people, it can also make human labor more productive, thereby increasing labor demand. Unfortunately, the current trend in commercial AI development is toward more and more automation, with potentially disastrous consequences for society. To be sure, automation has been an engine of productivity growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when, starting in the late eighteenth century, weaving and spinning were mechanized. But the tide of…