Fela Kuti’s 1976 album, Ikoyi Blindness, featured a track documenting an encounter within Nigerian social context where violence is trite. The song, Gba mi leti ki n dolowo (slap me make I get money), is an encounter between an “Oga,” the quintessential big man who personifies the impunity of power, and an unnamed person who represents the disempowered masses. In the song, Oga reaches out to slap the Unnamed’s face. Rather than quake before Oga’s almighty power, Unnamed stands up to him. He taunts Oga to hit him saying the “systems of government in Africa” would arise on his behalf…

Spoiler alert: I am not going to talk about how ChatGPT responds when prompted about economic-development strategies. It basically regurgitates reasonable, but mediocre ideas that it has seen in its training set. But ChatGPT’s design, which has given it far greater capabilities than its creators anticipated, offers a valuable lesson for tackling the complexities of economic development. For more than a decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have outperformed all other artificial-intelligence technologies, driving significant advances in computer vision, speech recognition, and translation. The emergence of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT continue this trend. To learn, AI algorithms require training, which…

This writing was first published on 6 July 2020. With changes of leadership soon at the federal and state levels, I see it as relevant. The first part in particular. However, do we forget the lessons in the second part? The world is changed by your example not by your opinion – Paulo Coelho, Brazilian Lyricist and author of The Alchemist. Allah (SWT) said in the Qur’an that He does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in their hearts. It is a verse widely quoted out of context by people wanting to give their…

The ongoing fight-to-finish for principal officers’ positions in the 10th National Assembly by the All Progressives Congress (APC) has only one fitting corollary: It is the famous mythic, destructive squabble between the Shrew, Squirrel and a seemingly impartial arbiter, the Tortoise. Unless carefully resolved, what appears to be a fancy of conquest by the APC, leading to the party magisterially pronouncing who would be its legislative Man Fridays, seems to have boomeranged full throttle at its teething stage. Only last week, the party’s National Working Committee, (NWC) in a peremptory, you-may-go-jump-inside-the-lagoon manner, announced its choice of former Minister of Niger…