August 2011

This week Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is back. Who, you might say? She is the person, in the early 2000s, who as finance minister under Nigeria’s democratically elected president, Olusegun Obasanjo, turned the Nigerian economy around 180 degrees. Before that, under the military dictatorship which had ruled Nigeria, Africa’s most populated country, for 18 years, economic growth, despite the huge oil wealth, had not risen above 3% a year. The economy was badly sick and billions of dollars were skimmed off by the dictator, Sani Abacha, and those around him. Inflation and bank indiscipline brought havoc and instability to the economy. The poor got poorer. With success under her belt she departed Nigeria to be a vice president of the World Bank. Now the new president, an Obasanjo protégé, Goodluck Jonathan, has brought her back, presumably to engineer another surge. On her last watch she killed inflation, paid off Nigeria’s huge...

There are questions that even today the historians don’t seem moved to investigate. Two important ones come to mind. Why was it that Pharonic Egypt never went to war for hundreds of years until Ramesses 11 became pharaoh in 1303 AD? Isn’t it a fact that Jews in Europe were unmolested for most of the first millennium after the death of Jesus? The Egyptian question is a bit of an idle curiosity since an answer probably won’t affect our behaviour today, although it should. Still, it is nice to know that we human beings aren’t constituted to make war and that we don’t have to live like we did over hundreds of years in Europe – going to war at the seeming drop of a hat and making the continent the most war-like place on earth. To learn more about the persecution of the Jews is highly relevant to today’s...