I cannot now remember exactly how I first encountered this phrase: “In defence of history”. But I think it was during my days on the Editorial Board of The Guardian newspaper, between mid-1980s and mid-1990s. The specific source must have been Odia Ofeimun, a friend and colleague that I had met and engaged about seven years before I landed in that newspaper house. In the first encounter with the phrase, it was used as title for a contribution to the debate on a widely-known account of a “cross-carpeting” (today’s “defection”) episode in a Nigerian regional House of Assembly in the…

No policy is as self-defeating during recessionary times as the pursuit of a budget surplus for the purpose of containing public debt – austerity, for short. So, as the world approaches the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it is appropriate to ask why austerity proved so popular with Western political elites following the financial sector’s implosion in 2008. The economic case against austerity is cut and dried: An economic downturn, by definition, implies shrinking private-sector expenditure. A government that cuts public spending in response to falling tax revenues inadvertently depresses national income (which is the sum of…