Oluyomi Ola-David Insights

Inclusive growth is one of the recent concepts in development parlance. A drive for inclusive growth focuses on creating productive opportunities while ensuring there is equal access by all to those opportunities. Therefore, if growth is to be inclusive, it must consider the participation of every segment of society particularly the marginalized and vulnerable. Nigeria’s real estate sector has continued to grow at an impressive rate within the past decade. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the value of Nigeria’s real estate market has grown from N 1.4 trillion in 2011 to N 6.5 trillion in 2015. Notably, the residential real estate sub-sector’s contribution to GDP increased from 7.7 per cent in 2012 to 11.1 per cent in 2014. With over 80 per cent of Nigeria’s adult population living in rented accommodations, the sub-sector hold tremendous potential for growth. The Managing Director of The Infrastructure Bank (TIB) alludes to this in a report that projects the

Often times when development experts propose solutions to the problems of underdevelopment and poverty, the solutions are tilted towards addressing the effects of underdevelopment such as high unemployment, hunger, low literacy rate, prevalence of communicable diseases, and other low quality of life parameters. There are fewer empirical investigations into the causes of underdevelopment and poverty across developing countries. For instance, there is a need to intricately decipher the role that traditions, cultural values, norms, beliefs, and religious inclinations play in development. This is because non-economic factors could be either great contributors to or deterrents of development. Within the Weberian framework of economic development, religious affiliations to  Protestantism  and Protestant ethics were observed to be stimulants of the entrepreneurial spirit. In turn, the entrepreneurial spirit significantly contributed to industrial development. Notably, most r

In popular parlance, it is common to term esusu as ajo. In a forthcoming Encyclopaedia entry we distinguish between Esusu and Ajo. Esusu Ajo The discussion continues...

Without doubt Nigerian National Youth Service Corps ( NYSC ) deployments have been useful in filling manpower gaps across the country, especially disparities in the availability and quality of subject teachers.  For instance, during my National Youth Service year, I was deployed to teach Mathematics at a government junior secondary school in Goepaal , Shendam Local Government Area of Plateau State. There I taught the entire arm of junior secondary school One (JSS 1) students. Some other Youth Corps members within the Local Government Area were the pioneer teachers of some science subjects in the schools to which they were deployed. By and large, when given primary teaching assignments,Youth Corps members are assigned to teach at educational institutions, based on the assumption that they know enough (about classroom management, lesson plan preparation, student learning styles, teaching effectiveness etc)  to function effectively at those assignments. As they say, assumption i

Today, I launch a change initiative, C ampaign A gainst L ittering i n Nigeria (CALi Nigeria). I have a dream to see a litter-free Nigeria where everyone young and old, male and female sees littering as an unacceptable and evil behaviour.  The objective of the Campaign is to create awareness on the environmental hazards associated with littering behaviour in Nigerians and the Nigerian environment. Very important is changing the perspective that littering is an acceptable behaviour.  Simply defined, littering is making places messy by strewing garbage around; it is making places or areas untidy with rubbish or objects left lying about.  I am just tired of getting angry every time I see littered environments and people walking past litters without a thought to pick them up to dispose them off properly. So I thought to do something about it.  I had even begun to conduct a research investigation into the phenomenon. However, since littering is first a thought

The experience of countries around the world indicates the relationship that subsists between industrial development and economic growth on one hand and with environmental degradation on the other hand.  Given the myriad challenges of environmental degradation and climate change, current policy advocacy centre on strengthening legal, regulatory and political institutions that guide domestic and international investment activities. i Further, discussions on a Post-2015 development agenda brought to fore issues of economic, social and environmental sustainability.  For instance, with respect to international capital movements, in as much as foreign direct investment (FDI) holds the promise of positive externalities, there is also the tendency that FDI may induce negative externalities (pollution, natural resource degradation, inadequate protection of worker health and safety, and complicity in the violation of human rights all of which confound the tenets of sustainable development

A frica’s demographics, emergent middle class and rich natural resource endowments has made it a toast of trade and investment, with traditional partners in Europe and emerging partners from global south. Notably, the structure of Africa post-colonization has been toward resource extraction and being feeders for developed countries’ industries.  However, as south-south cooperation deepens, new models of development assistance, trade and investment are emerging. In the past, development assistance held most African countries bound to the whims and caprices of their respective western donors, mostly OECD countries.  Also, most of the bilateral and multilateral development assistance to developing countries came with stringent conditionalities, such as the structural adjustment programme (SAP), which produced a long term backwash effect. Consequently, for many low-income as well as post-conflict and fragile African states, aid-dependency is still a present reality. 

At different points in time, while exercising my pedestrian rights walking through zebra crossings on a serene campus, I have almost been knocked down by moving vehicles!  Sometimes other ‘ignorant and unlearned’ motorists yell out at your effrontery to walk through a zebra crossing when you can see them approaching!    At other times I have also noted the plight of several pedestrians who ‘love their lives’ having to wait at zebra crossings while impatient motorists drive by.  Interestingly, I recently read incidences of disregard for the road culture of giving pedestrians the right of way at zebra crossings in Egypt, as documented by an Egyptian blogger.  Thinking on these recurrent phenomena, I question the effectiveness of training offered at driving schools in instilling civil road behaviour. Whereas in some developed societies, the process of obtaining a driver’s license is one of the ‘biggest deals’ ever, for some African countries, especially Nigeria, the giant