KNOWLEDGE DISPATCHES
Hi,
I am Samuel Ajayi, the community manager for Ideas Untrapped and here’s my first post to the community.
I’d like to start with a bit of a recommendation, IU spoke to Professor Kingsley Moghalu earlier this week and the conversation was an illuminating one. He touched on several key subjects, but perhaps one of the interesting points was his insistence that the outsized role that the Nigerian CBN has been playing is mostly because of a paucity of proper talent in other key public service sector. Remember that Professor Pat Utomi also made a similar point about the lack of proper intellectuals in the political arena, a dearth of state capacity both in personnel and ability. We wrote a thread on State Capacity outlining some key compositions of this.
As the world continues to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, many have pondered the failure of experts in the handling of the crisis, which made this particular article about Christian Happi a welcome one. The epidemiologist explained a lot about Africa's readiness for the COVID pandemic and his actions to set up an early detection system in Africa. The creation of this laboratory backed by the biggest names in the world is a necessary step and I think Africa can leverage this in building hard technology capacity as Anton Howes makes in this interesting article about technological fairs.
The security situation of the country has gotten increasingly dire. The state has shown an aloofness that is allowing non-state actors to step into the fray as mediators. This report highlights the amount of weapons circulating around the country in the hands of non-state actors. The statistics are chilling, but not entirely unexpected. The report draws on some points that may be useful in framing some current challenges facing the Nigerian state regarding the regular uprisings and unrest.
Nigeria has gotten poorer 6 years consecutively and this Business Day article takes the scorecard even deeper, it explores the core of the issues and the current President of Nigeria doesn't come out looking pretty at all. This thread by Cheta Nwaze attempts a breakdown of the key points.
It's not all gloom and doom, the Nigerian government has finally decided to let private sector build some needed road infrastructure across some federal roads in the south, it seems that necessity due to low funding is forcing the government to do this. I am cautiously optimistic about this because without a respect for laws, the next government may reverse this and damage long-term investor confidence.
Ideas are important. This article by Alexey Guzey explores how good intermediate ideas matter for the execution of ideas, which leads me to a Matt Clancy article about how to generate new ideas and how adjacent thinking is the best mode of it. Tobi Lawson also has an adjacent take on the subject of ideas. You can read some of his thoughts here.
Tell us what you think in the comments we'd love to hear from you.
Cheers.
P.S
We had a long conversation with Timi Soleye that we will release soon, Take a look at the sneak peek here.