Loomnie

1. FT has a special report on Nigeria at 50. It is worth your time.

2. The BBC also has a special reports page on Nigeria at 50

3. Still with the BBC, some Nigerians are interviewed on how they will be celebrating the 50th independence anniversary

4. Have you seen the official Nigeria at 50 website? See what Akin has to say about it here

5. The series of articles to celebrate the anniversary on NigeriansTalk runs till tomorrow

Image via Wikipedia

Nigeria’s 50th independence anniversary is on October 1, 2010. To celebrate it, we are running a series titled Nigeria@50 at the groupblog NigeriansTalk. The first in the series, titled One Nigeria: Nigerian Unity 50 years Post-independence, was written by Kola of KTravula. The second is titled Nigeria at 50: Academic Medicine, and was written by Seye of Square One. There will be at least an article a day till October 1.

Follow and join the discussion at NigeriansTalk.org.

I just got this in the mail.

Four interrelated crises are mutually reinforcing each other: climate change, the energy crisis, the food crisis and the financial and economic crisis. But of these, the consequence of the global financial meltdown presents significant challenges for African countries, reversing the gains in economic performance and management made since the beginning of the new millennium. Although the crisis, progeny of the US mortgage industry came up gradually since Summer 2007, it went through a new phase of acceleration and development in early Fall 2008. This crisis has since spread beyond the US and the developed countries to Africa, a continent pervasive with weak institutions of governance and uncoordinated policy responses to the crisis.

The call for concept papers for an edited Book Project hopes to address the implication of globalisation of the financial crisis to Africa. It also seeks to identify divergent policy responses from African countries, regional organisations and international institutions in ensuring that the crisis does not develop into a humanitarian crisis. Although African countries have reactive identities regarding impact and policy responses to the crisis, the continent is far from being monolithic.

Sub- Themes

Proposals are welcomed from the following sub-themes:

i. The globalisation of economic and financial crisis in Africa
ii. The synergy between climate change, food crisis, energy crisis and the financial and economic crisis
iii. The role of institutions in stemming the tide of the financial and economic crisis in Africa
iv. Financial and economic crisis and peace and security challenges in Africa v. Income re-distribution and pro-poor policies during financial and economic crisis
vi. Diasporas, remittances, brain drain or brain gain during the financial and economic crisis
vii. Images, media presentation and representation of the economic and financial crisis viii. Gender and the economic and financial crisis
ix. The role of Asian drivers in mitigating the financial and economic crisis in Africa
x. Impact and responses from rentier states, enclave economies, mono-crop economies and diversified economies
xi. Financial and economic crisis and African borders
xii. Country case studies on the global and economic financial meltdown

Proposals should include the contributor’s name, affiliation, and contact details (including email address) as well as book sub-theme, abstract and paper title (maximum 500 words). Proposals should be sent to: taconceptpapers2@gmail.com

Deadlines and timetable
28th September 2010 – Deadline for submitting the book proposal
31st October 2010 – Notification about acceptance/decline of the proposal
31st November 2010 – Deadline for submitting the papers
15th January 2010 – Deadline for submitting revised papers
4th March 2011 – Publishing of selected papers in an edited volume

For further information, email:

Terhemba Ambe-Uva
Lecturer/Coordinator, Department of International Studies, National Open University of Nigeria PMB 80067 Victoria Island, Lagos.
mneuter@gmail.com

Delivered at Gresham College, London. The summary:

Professor Niall Ferguson offers an evolutionary approach to financial history. He questions the impeding of ‘natural selection’ by keeping the financial dinosaurs alive through the life support of monetary injections: “without creative destruction, our economic system cannot be a healthy one.”

The view that financial history could be ‘evolutionary’ in fact pre-dates Darwin, born 200 years ago this year, but the view has been pushed into the hinterlands of contemporary thinking about the worlds of finance and economics. Through the publication of his book, The Ascent of Money, Professor Niall Ferguson brought about a timely re-emergence of the evolutionary approach.

By looking at finance along evolutionary lines, we can relate the long run of financial history to recent events and so illuminate them in a way which will perhaps offer us a clearer sight of how we should pull ourselves out of the current economic crisis.

Click the watch full progamme button on the video to watch the full lecture.

Check this out:

“Here’s something you always like to see,” Stewart says, scanning the front page of the Washington Post.“ ‘U.S. Trade Deficit Startles Markets.’ Now, we’ve understood the U.S. trade deficit for a while. Are the markets small children that are easily startled? The next day, they’ll get an unemployment number and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know why we were startled and lost 200 points yesterday; today, we realized the shirt on the chair wasn’t a monster, so we’re going to put 300 points back on the Dow because we’re fucking 5 years old.’ ”

Read it all here. H/T @Dollabrand.

Each month, The New Yorker invites a writer to read something from the archives of the magazine. This month, Ms Adichie reads Jamaica Kincaid’s Figures in the Distance, first published  in the May 9, 1983 issue of The New Yorker. It is a great choice. Check out the podcast here.

While you are at it, check out Ms Adichie’s new story, Birdsong, on The New Yorker website.

A lot, argues journalist Patchen Barss, who has just published a book titled The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google. From the publishers’ website:

From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube.

You probably already know about the Freshlyground music video.

Well, in what is probably the least surprising news of the day, the Zimbabwean government has pulled their work visas. Upcoming concerts in Zimbabwe are cancelled.

Listen to band members Zo and Simon talk on the PRI’s Global Hits programme here [mp3].

Off to Basel tomorrow for an African Borderlands Research Network conference. As part of a panel on a comparative study of cross-border trade networks in Africa, I will be presenting a paper titled “Benin-Nigeria secondhand clothing cross-border trade in historical perspective”. The abstract:

Today, Benin Republic is the main supplier of secondhand clothing to Nigeria, a country in which the importation of secondhand clothing is banned. Igbo traders, who form a transnational trade network that spans the eastern part of the West African coast and that extends to Europe and North America, dominate the import and retail trade in the commodity in Benin Republic. This is a network that could be described – depending on the side from which one chooses to look at it – either as an agent of development or as a predator on the state’s resources. The exercise here is to move beyond those arguments and to show the current configurations of the trade network as it has responded to a changing global political and economic landscape, and as it has been modified by the changes in the political economy of the West African countries that it spans.

For more on the conference [pdf].