Nigerians Dream

Your Excellency President Joyce Banda, Professor M.S. Swaminathan, the Borlaug family, John and Janet Ruan, the World Food Prize Laureates, Excellencies, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, and the future leaders in agriculture. I am delighted to be here with you all today. It is such a great honour for Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, President of the World Food Prize Foundation, to have invited me to be keynote speaker today. Thank you very much, Ambassador Quinn, my dear friend; Professor Swaminathan; the Board members and staff of the World Food Prize Foundation, for all the great work you do. And congratulations as you celebrate the 30 th  Anniversary of the World Food Prize. I applaud and congratulate the World Food Prize Winners of 2016, for their transformative work on developing bio-fortified crops. My most recent interaction with this team was two years ago, when Howarth Bouis and his team at Harvest Plus organised the Second Global Forum on Biofortification in Kig...

There is an ongoing discussion on the effectiveness of foreign aid in helping the economic development of Africa. One thing is obvious: the results are not exactly what Africa’s development partners have expected, and the reasons are not far-fetched. Dambisa Moyo, global economist, and author contends in her book  Dead Aid  that while foreign aid that addresses humanitarian needs caused by drought and conflict is helpful, most of the aid given to African countries is rather harmful. The OECD provides  comprehensive statistics  on the kinds and volume of aid received by the continent up until 2015. Moyo lists the problems enhanced by aid to include corruption, civil conflict, shrinking of the middle class, and the instilling of a culture of dependency. All of these combine to make Africa unattractive to global investors. It has become obvious that it is politics that drives the economies of nations. Acemoglu and Robinson assert in their seminal book ...