From the BusinessDay of October 6, 2009 To become a member of the German parliament, the Bundestag, one either has to be directly elected to represent a constituency, or one has to be on a party list. Let me explain.On Election Day, Germans cast two votes, one for a particular candidate, and the other for a party. The first vote [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 29, 2009 Ms Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid is about the problems of foreign aid. She not only claims that aid does not work, she also claims that aid is what is retarding the development of poor countries. The book brings together a combination of an indictment of foreign aid and a complex [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 21, 2009 Part I Regular readers of this column would probably realise by now that I have a thing for stereotypes. Well, the current interest was raised by the recent debate that surrounded two issues: the Sony Playstation advert, in which there was a mention of a Nigerian 419er, and the South [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 15, 2009 Permit me to introduce you to Dawit Shanko. He was born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, in 1968, and spent his early teenage years working as a shoe-shiner. It was through this that he supported his education. He was awarded a scholarship to go to East Germany to study surveying [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 8, 2009 I was walking down the main street in Neukölln, an area of Berlin, when a middle-aged man stopped me to ask for direction to Hermannplatz, a square in the area. I was rather surprised that someone asked me for directions; I had noticed that in Berlin these kinds of things [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 1, 2009 Act One A couple of days ago I joined one of my friends to pick up his daughter at the kindergarten. This was the first time I was seeing her in close to two years; the last time I saw and carried her she was just about 4 months old. [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of August 25, 2009 Sometime last year Chris Carrol, a National Geographic writer, wrote a report about what he saw while researching what happens to e-waste from the developed world. It goes roughly like this: A random recycler in the United States of America sells used computers to brokers who have connections in developing [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of August 18, 2009 Anthropologist Nancy Sheper-Hughes is well-known around the world for her research into the illegal trafficking of human organs. You probably know of cases of wealthy Americans who travel to India and China for medical procedures, as part of what is now referred to as medical tourism; update that knowledge to [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of August 11, 2009 Hernando de Soto’s major contribution to development studies and practice is the idea that there is so much capital locked away in the backyard of developing countries, and that only a few things need to be done to unlock the capital and make it work. His book, The Mystery of [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of August 4, 2009 In Lagos sometime last year, I was introduced to someone as an anthropologist, and he said – I suppose as a compliment – that he was happy that there are people willing to help preserve our culture. To his credit, he knew about anthropology – in the most general sense, [...]