Loomnie

A news story on crossing from Benin to Nigeria, through the Seme border:

“At every half kilometre, you encounter checkpoints manned by all sorts of agencies. This is a real problem to the sub-region,” he said. “On a bad day, from the Seme border down to Lagos, you meet over 70 checkpoints and they all ask the same thing, ‘what do you have for us’. They are all unlawful.

Although the report mentions the list of prohibited items, it does not say that the real reason that the border is that policed is because of that list itself. I have written somewhere else that the Nigerian state should consider other measures apart from outright prohibition. As long as the list of prohibited items is long, that border, as well as the road that runs from the border to Lagos, is going to remain as policed – either legally or illegally – as it is at the current moment.

I spent most of last year travelling the road.

BBC’s Mark Doyle is going around Africa asking the question for a documentary series. The first installment is here. One or two instances of bad interviewing, but generally worth listening to.

1. Remember the list of debtors that was published a last week by the Central Bank of Nigeria? Well, some of the money is now recovered

2. It seems that the Nigerian stock market is getting over the initial shock of the banking reform

3. More on the effects of the rescue of Nigerian banks by the Central Bank

4. Now to the US, 1,000 Banks to Fail In Next Two Years: Bank CEO

5. How does one modernise the Middle East’s Economies?

While Africa is blessed with much natural wealth — gold, diamonds, ores from tin to uranium, oil and ivory — it has also long been a target for plunder. Listen to Ian Fisher recount how some, mostly outsiders, built great fortunes off of Africa’s material riches — and for centuries its people as well — while it remained the poorest continent in the world.

Check out the graphics and audio of the plunder here.

H/T Kiwanja

From Foreign Policy:

Imagine a tiny country flush with oil money, where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy. Now picture a place quite the opposite, where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Impossible as it sounds, these two sentences describe the same place: Equatorial Guinea, a West African country home to roughly a half-million people. Earlier this month, the country’s president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, marked the 30th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

Continue reading.

Q & A on Free Trade Zones in Africa.

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

Read the whole article here.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that borrowed a bit from Hernando de Soto. Today, I read this from Peter Schaefer at the Foreign Policy website. The concluding paragraph:

Yunus and de Soto offer us real insights into how the poor can, finally, work themselves out of poverty: Yunus shows they need credit and de Soto shows they need to join the formal economy. But we must build on their ideas and combine them in order to develop a more viable way to realize their inherent promise. If the world’s poor can gain access to private capital via their formal titles, then we will have a real solution to a $9 trillion problem.

HT to William Easterly

Yesterday afternoon I ran into part of the Nigerian team to the IAAF World Championship in Athletics in Berlin. It was at a Nigerian restaurant. From the way they interacted with the staff, and from references to previous days, it seemed that they had been going there everyday since they got to Berlin. This got me wondering how adventourous we are with regards to food. These are Nigerians who’ve travelled to Europe (they probably don’t travel to Europe very often) and who have sought out one of the very few places where one can get Nigerian food in Berlin. Actually, it is the only decent one I know.

While we are on foods, I might raise the point that has bugged me for quite a while. Why is it that African food has not become popular in Europe? Why is it that African restaurants only cater to a very small clientele, namely Africans living in Europe, and Africans who visit Europe (like the Nigerian team above)? I have not fully thought it through, which is why I was excited to see this blog post. It answers it to a certain extent but I think the topic could do with a lot more exploration, at least as it concerns Europe. Also see this article about good-looking food.

1. First of all, congratulations to NEXT on going daily. They fed as the banking issues unfolded last Friday. See their editorial of today.

2. Following the relationship between China and Latin America? Check out Aleksandra Gadzala’s post on it on her very informative blog.

3. WHO warns against homeopathy use

4. If sex at the wheel is legal, why isn’t telephoning?

5. What’s left of the Berlin Wall

6. A review of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds