Even casual readers of the news know that the earth is probably going to look very different in 2100, and not in a good way. A recent Times opinion piece included this quotation from the paleoclimatologist Lee Kump: “The rate at which we’re injecting CO2 into the atmosphere today, according to our best estimates, is 10 times faster than it was during the End-Permian.” The End-Permian is a pre-dinosaurs era of mass extinction that killed 90 percent of the life in the ocean and 75 percent of it on land. It is also called the Great Dying. Although those who…

Since August, I have been the anchorperson of a programme on television called ThisDay Live where we discuss political matters - local and global. The programme is available on Arise News TV ‪at 6pm‬, ‪9pm‬ and sometimes ‪at midnight‬ every Sunday. Two days ago, we discussed the situation in Zimbabwe, the elections in Anambra, Nigeria’s decision to hire Malaysian experts at a cost of N485 million to figure out new pathways for Nigeria’s economic growth (with all the experts in Nigeria oh!), the proposed expansion of President Buhari’s cabinet, the burial of 26 teenage Nigerians by the Italian authorities without…

According to the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, it is impossible to have full national sovereignty, democracy, and globalization simultaneously. The concept of a “political trilemma of the world economy,” which Javier Solana also recently explored, is useful, but incomplete.Rodrik’s argument, elaborated in his new book, is that too much globalization erodes the sovereignty of democratic nation-states, by increasingly subjecting them to economic and financial forces that may not correspond with the wishes of the domestic majority. By this logic, an authoritarian state may function better in a globalized world, because it is unconstrained by, say, electoral concerns. With less globalization,…

Since the hoopla about tithing surfaced, many who know my teachings on the subject in the last one decade or so have requested my opinion on the matter. My usual response had been to direct them to the Bible and to the two mini books I have written on the subject. I feel there is no point engaging in any debate with anyone. God has warned us to beware of such arguments from scoffers who would abound in the last days. But in the last one week, a dear friend and brother has put so much pressure on me, literally…