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Dateline – Balaclava, Mauritius. I spent
a working weekend at the Intercontinental Hotel beach resort in the
beautiful Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius. I was invited to
witness the launching on Friday, 15 October of Global Board of Trade
(GBOT) Ltd, a pan-African futures trading platform that will be based
on the island.

For the
non-initiates, derivatives are financial instruments designed in the
form of an agreement or contract between two counterparties, and having
a value determined by the future price movements of a share or
currency. Derivatives are financial engineering instruments that
facilitate the trading of risk, allowing corporations and investors to
ring-fence the value of their assets against the changing vagaries of
the market.

GBOT Ltd aims to
become an Africa-wide trading platform, leveraging on the enviable
position of Mauritius as a growing financial centre. With a population
of 1.3 million people, the economy has been successfully diversified
from commodity exporting to textiles and manufacturing. With a GDP of
US$16 billion and a per capita income of US$12,500 (compared to
Nigeria’s US$1,142), Mauritius has first-level infrastructures, aided
by policies that are prudent and highly investment friendly. Mauritius
stands at the crossroads of civilisations, linking Africa with Asia and
Europe.

Nigeria was
mentioned in passing, if at all. I kept wondering what’s happening to
our Financial Sector Strategy (FSS2020) which aims to make us the
financial hub of the continent by the next decade.

At the seminar on
Saturday yours sincerely was invited to speak on the theme of
developing a well-regulated pan-African platform for derivatives
trading. The main thrust of my own discourse is that significant
progress has been made in recent years,

although we are
still a baby in global terms, contributing a mere 4.0 and 4.5 percent
to world trade and GDP respectively. If, in the unlikely event that our
continent were sunk by a giant meteorite from outer space, the world
economy would register no more than a few ripples.

But the future is
bright. While the West persist in their backward mindset locked in the
space-time cocoon of incurable ‘Afro-pessimism’, the Chinese and the
Indians see Africa not as a problem but as an opportunity. To fully
realise our incalculable potential I stressed the role of leadership,
the importance of investing in our people and deepening macroeconomic
and institutional reforms, all of which are essential to creating world-class financial centres.

During the evening
we were treated to a gala night of entertainment by a musical dance
troupe from the Mauritian Creole community. Under a canopy overlooking
the stunning Indian Ocean, lullabied by exotic birds and the echoes of
the shimmering waves, our conversation drifted in a totally
serendipitous direction. A white young man imposes himself on our table
with the words, “Niels from Cape Town”. I said, “Oh, is that Niels as
in Niels Bohr?” He laughed and said “yes”. I added that I liked Niels
Bohr very much, having passed his statue everyday at Copenhagen
University, where I once did a summer course in applied econometrics.

One of my passions
is epistemology and the philosophy of science. I said I wished I were
there when Bohr and Albert Einstein first met at Copenhagen train
station. It was said that they got to their homes only late at night,
having spent the whole afternoon absorbed in their eternal debate about
quantum physics and about whether God plays dice with His universe.
William from Uganda gruffly told us that he believes Einstein was the
better of the two, although he would give the ultimate prize to
Feynman. “I met Richard Feynman at Caltech, he said rather
nonchalantly”.

Anil, a Mauritian
commodities trader, found our conversation irresistible. He softly
interjected that Feynman was at heart an artist rather than a
physicist. He went on and on about space, about negative time, black
holes and parallel universes. Having studied Astrophysics at Berkeley,
he told us he found money-making far easier than the abstruse world of
the astronomers. He believes Stephen Hawking, recently retired from the
Savillian Chair of Astronomy once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton at
Cambridge, to be the greatest of them all. He said he once listened to
the old chap at a public lecture. “If you were a non-physicist, you
understood everything he said; but if you were, you would totally be at
sea.” Incomprehensibility, it seems, is the ultimate mark of genius.
The names of Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer also came up.

Niels adds jokingly that perhaps Schrödinger would have understood
Hawking, but only because his real career was his string of mistresses
while mathematics was merely pursued as a hobby! Jane from Kenya
reveals that she is suffering from a profound existential crisis: “How
can they say that Pluto is no longer a planet?” You would think Pluto
was the land of her ancestors. A toast to the African Renaissance!

I don’t know if irony is the right word, but it
does give me pause when I reflect on the fact that the male equivalent
of the pill that freed women from the fear of conception is a little
blue diamond shaped pill that prolongs men’s ability to seek
satisfaction in the act of conception. But just the other day, one half
of the duo that made it possible for couples to meet in the middle and
achieve that ultimate joy of union for most- the birth of a child – was
awarded the Nobel prize in medicine.

Robert G. Edwards, an Englishman with his compatriot, the late Patrick Steptoe, developed the procedure for helping infertile couples to
fulfill their hopes. Edwards is a physiologist now aged 85, who spent
years working on getting eggs and sperm to grow and unite outside the
body. The late Steptoe, who died in 1988, ten years after the first
successful test tube baby, was a gynaecologist who pioneered the
concept of laparoscopic surgery, the method by which eggs are extracted
from a womb.

The duo were a dogged and determined pair who
withstood ostracism, hostility, and denial of funds from the medical,
scientific, and religious establishment.

According to the UK Guardian, they were spurred
on, Edwards said in 2008, by their patients. “Nothing is more special
than a child. Steptoe and I were deeply affected by the desperation
felt by couples who so wanted to have children. We had a lot of
critics, but we fought like hell for our patients.”

Louise Brown, the daughter of Lesley and John
Brown, that lucky first couple was understandably excited and happy at
the news of the prize, but many of Edwards and Steptoe’s supporters
felt the Nobel Committee had been very tardy indeed in recognising this
achievement.

Steptoe is no more, and Edwards is too old to
grasp what has just happened to him. To date, 4 million people around
the world have been born through IVF and the procedure has led to the
development of new ways to treat forms of male infertility, a condition
that, to some Nigerians, does not exist.

Which brings us to the strongly held beliefs that
can make the pursuit of happiness so hard for some. The idea that a
person is incomplete without this or that can create a real blight on a
life that could, left alone, find other paths to fulfillment. You must
marry, you must have children, then you must have sons, because
daughters don’t mean as much…It is unending and sometimes it is
nonsensical.

Happily, even in Nigeria, some of that is giving
way to the recognition that there are alternatives, one of which is
providing a loving home to children in need through adoption, an act
that is a two fold gift of giving and receiving that keeps on growing.

Looking back though, there were days when almost every aspect of the act of conception was fraught with fear. Lack of the kind of medical
knowledge and the tools we have today meant that giving birth was a
risky process that could take you to the brink and beyond. If something
went wrong, there was little to choose from between the act of trying
to extract the child with the crude and rudimentary tools available and
saving the mother. Both usually died so that when child was
successfully delivered and the mother lived to share the joy, it was a
triumph of grace and providence.

“I have been and back’ is the chorus of one of the traditional songs announcing the birth of a child.

There was surviving childbirth and there was the
fear of conception, the strain of a child each year, the pressure of
more mouths to feed, the drudgery of a life of constant physical work
farming, childbirth, housework or in between some petty trading, just
to keep something coming.

For schoolgirls, it was a rocky terrain. Teenage
pregnancy meant the end of a chance at education and a career. And
then, with a working life, babies meant no career or one where
advancement was limited, especially if the babies kept coming. Those
were dark days of back street abortions of lives wasted in hidden fear
and misery.

The advent of the contraceptive pill changed all
that. One tiny little tablet freed women up to make choices and plan
their lives, to pursue pleasure without fear, to plan for the
responsibilities young men did not spare a thought about as they went
about sowing the wild oats society entitled them to.

Two inventions have made the pursuit of happiness possible in such fundamental ways

and yet, we still continue to perpetuate the same
problems. Teenage pregnancy is till an issue in many countries, despite
the availability of sex education, and free contraception. Ordinarily
it should be an anathema that HIV AIDS should still continue to spread
when the message of how it can be prevented is so basic and simple:
protect yourself always or abstain and you can live free of the virus.

It is a big puzzle how the human condition simply refuses to change.
Or maybe it is just that freedom without education, and that in its
truest sense, is as bad as no freedom at all.

The huge Nigerian,
and indeed African community in the United States engages in intense
and constant debate on a list serve run by Professor Toyin Falola –
SAAFRICADIALOGUE. In the run up to the 50th anniversary celebration of
Nigeria’s independence, the key issue of concern to the community was
fraud and the Emeagwali narratives. Anyone that has googled

Nigerian achievers
on the Internet would have come across the “great achievements” of one
Philip Emeagwali. The question posed was whether he is the greatest
Nigerian achiever in the contemporary world or a monumental fraudster?

In the numerous
citations about his so-called achievements, we read that he has a PhD
in scientific computing from the University of Michigan, that he is the
father of the Internet and the inventor of super computers.

He claims to have
invented 41 patented devices including a timing device, non-capsizable
container, sweepstake programmer, random unit generator amusement
device, and bidirectional monitoring and control system and so on. In
an interview by Susan Henderson for the book African-American
Inventors, Philip Emeagwali presented his achievements in the following
manner: “…Invented methods and procedures for making computers faster
and more powerful. These methods enabled me to perform the world’s
fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second in 1989 and
solve the largest weather forecasting equations with 128 million points
in 1990. Programmed a computer with 65,000 processors to outperform the
fastest supercomputer and thereby proving that it is best to use many
processors in designing supercomputers. Successfully implemented the
first petroleum reservoir model on a massively parallel computer in
1989. As a result, one in 10 parallel supercomputers is used to find
and recover additional oil and gas. Solved one of America’s 20 Grand
Challenges – accurately computing how oil flows underground and thereby
alerting the petroleum industry that massively parallel computers can
be used to recover more oil. Only 30 percent of the oil in a reservoir
can be recovered and this discovery will enable oil companies to
recover more oil. Invented a new approach of designing supercomputers
by observing and emulating patterns in nature. Formulated new
mathematical (partial differential) equations for slowly moving liquids
and gases such as the flow within the Earth’s interior.”

Under Olusegun
Obasanjo, the Nigerian Government invited and celebrated Philip
Emeagwali as one of our shining stars in the Diaspora. This was at a
time in which there were claims that the best Nigerian brains are
abroad and we should bring them back to develop our country. Those of
us in the country were considered failures that could not get positions
abroad.

The problem with
Philip is that the university has now revealed that he never completed
his doctorate degree and checks at the United States Patent and
Trademark office did not show up patents with the name Philip
Emeagwali. He has not published in any reputable peer reviewed journal.
The conclusion is that narratives about his achievements are a fraud.

The claims about
his achievements have however been cleverly spread in numerous web
sites, and today many curricula on African and Black achievements have
him as a star example. Black youth in Europe go around with his
photographs in their school bags determined to be as “great” as
Emeagwali when they grow up.

One of the most
poignant aspects of the saga is the manner in which Gloria Thomas
Emeagwali was dragged into the debate. Gloria is a top ranked professor
of history in the United States. She is a good friend of mine from our
days as junior lecturers in Ahmadu Bello University in the early 1980s.
At that time, she was recovering from a bitter divorce with a different
Emeagwali who had studied with her in Trinidad and Tobago, married her
and brought her to Nigeria where she suffered a lot of abuse. To her
shock, she found her photograph cut and pasted on Philip Emeagwali’s
web site with the fraudulent claim that she is his wife. She put a
disclaimer on her own web page and has sued him in court.

When she drew
attention to this in the on-going debate, many questioned her
sincerity. As one commentator put it “”Emeagwali” is not a common name,
like Okeke, Okafor or Ojo. We know not whether Gloria bears ANY past or
present relationship with Philip beyond a common last name.” The
suspicion was that she might be his estranged wife trying to get at
him, which is extremely unfair allegation for the Gloria I know. At
that point, the debate got dirty between so called Igbo bashers and
Igbo defenders derailing the core issue about fraudulent claims of this
man. The most painful issue of the debate is that Nigeria bashers in
the United States are now singing narratives about how most Nigerian
academics in the country are 419 scholars.

We have great Nigerian scholars at home and abroad. We also have
great fraudsters at home and abroad. Not all that is abroad is good.

It’s not surprising
that Chilean President Sebastían Piñera made sure that he was on hand
to welcome the first of the 33 miners who had been trapped at the San
Jose mine since the 5th of August, back to the world, or that he stayed
at the mine in the remote town of Copiapo which is over 700 km from his
working base in the capital, Santiago, throughout the entire day and a
half that the rescue operation took. The entire episode has been
tremendously positive for the image of Chile and the Chilean people.

Comparisons, though
perhaps odious, are inevitable, nor is it only in Nigeria that the
results are unflattering to the home team.

In Mexico they are
cracking sour jokes along the ‘if-the-miners-had-been-Mexicans’ line
(the tunnel would have come out in the United States of America).

In the United
States of America Barack Obama, with his frequent visits to Louisiana
and tough talk during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill never played a
fraction as well as his Chilean counterpart. Obama’s government was
content to leave the matter for BP to sort out until public opinion
forced a more proactive response. By contrast, even though it sought
and received advice and assistance from all over the world, Piñera’s
government was clearly in charge of the rescue effort from the outset.

Disasters, whether
natural or man-made, are an inevitable fact of our human lives on
mother earth, but government reactions vary. In Hungary for example,
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is fully alive to the toxic effect of
environmental disaster on political careers, is threatening “the
toughest possible consequences” for those responsible for the tide of
toxic red sludge that burst out of the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant on the
7th of this month.

Here at home, the
disaster of the day has been floods from Sokoto in the north to Ogun
and Lagos in the south. President Goodluck Jonathan has made a point of
turning up in Sokoto along with relief materials for flood victims.
There has been none of that “I don’t need to be here” arrogance with
which former President Olusegun Obasanjo rebuffed displaced Lagosians
during his visit to the site of the Ikeja Cantonment explosions in
January 2002: Jonathan is running for election as President and needs
not only to counter the ‘Ijaw mafia’ tone that keeps leaking out from
those around him, but also to highlight the contrast between himself as
the father of the entire nation and the parochial and sectional
presentation of the ‘Gang of Four’ northern Peoples Democratic Party
candidates: Atiku Abubakar, Ibrahim Babangida, Aliyu Gusau and Bukola
Saraki.

But although it’s
not only in Chile that mining activity carries risks, or in Hungary
that industrial processes have deadly side effects, apparently it’s not
all disasters that a presidential candidate wants to be associated
with. That might explain why it has been left to the United Nations to
raise the alarm about the lead poisoning deaths of over 400 children in
Zamfara State, where alluvial gold mining is taking place in lead
contaminated areas. In that tragedy there is nothing to ‘fly in to’ –
just another mark of the failure of the Nigerian state at the basic,
boring, regulation of potentially dangerous industries.

When ‘rich alhajis’
are reaping while ‘poor mallams’ risk their health to mine the gold,
perhaps making too much noise would risk stepping on political toes in
an area where those running for office need local friends and
supporters. The thread of lax government oversight runs through many of
the recent man-made disasters: the oil industry in the US was obviously
getting away with the sort of grossly negligent attitude towards
compliance with safety standards for which it is famous (and
unsanctioned) in Nigeria, and the same might be said of Chilean mine
owners and Hungarian aluminium producers. But in those countries
governments have been loud in their promises of future stringent
regulation. Here, it may not be clear to informal miners in Zamfara
State that their governments even care that there is a problem!

Like the people of
Nigeria, Chileans have had their time under the military jackboot,
ushered in on their own “9/11” when the democratically elected
government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in by Augusto Pinochet in
a 1973 coup supported by the USA’s Central Intelligence Agency. But
while for us, military dictatorship only set the country back and
hindered our progress in every way, Chile has at least emerged with
something to show for the years of human rights abuse and harsh
measures advocated by Pinochet’s “Chicago Boys”. Despite the resulting
slump in wages and high unemployment, Chile achieved such sustained
economic growth that today it is considered a ‘middle income’ country.
The miners and people of Chile deserve their accolades. It used to be a
standard joke in media circles that the dullest newspaper headline ever
written was: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

Times change. The 2010 version is: “Mine roof collapse in Chile.
None dead.” It’s a headline that brought the whole world to a halt with
tears of joy.

American officials
used to lecture other countries about their economic failings and tell
them that they needed to emulate the U.S. model. The Asian financial
crisis of the late 1990s, in particular, led to a lot of self-satisfied
moralizing. Thus, in 2000, Lawrence Summers, then the U.S. Treasury
secretary, declared that the keys to voiding financial crisis were
“well-capitalized and supervised banks, effective orporate governance
and bankruptcy codes, and credible means of ontract enforcement.” By
implication, these were things the Asians lacked but we had.

We didn’t. The
accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom dispelled the myth of
effective corporate governance. These days, the idea that our banks
were well capitalized and supervised sounds like a sick joke. And now
the mortgage mess is making nonsense of claims that we have effective
contract enforcement – in fact, the question is whether our economy is
governed by any kind of rule of law.

The story so far:
An epic housing bust and sustained high unemployment have led to an
epidemic of default, with millions of homeowners falling behind on
mortgage payments. So servicers – the companies that collect payments
on behalf of mortgage owners – have been foreclosing on many mortgages,
seizing many homes.

But do they actually have the right to seize these homes?

Horror stories
have been proliferating, like the case of the Florida man whose home
was taken even though he had no mortgage. More significantly, certain
players have been ignoring the law. Courts have been approving
foreclosures without requiring that mortgage servicers produce
appropriate documentation; instead, they have relied on affidavits
asserting that the papers are in order.

And these
affidavits were often produced by “robo-signers,” or low-level
employees who had no idea whether their assertions were true.

Now an awful truth
is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist.
In the frenzy of the bubble, much home lending was undertaken by
fly-by-night companies trying to generate as much volume as possible.
These loans were sold off to mortgage “trusts,” which, in turn, sliced
and diced them into mortgage-backed securities. The trusts were legally
required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the
borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were
frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now
taking place are, in fact, illegal.

This is very, very
bad. For one thing, it’s a near certainty that significant numbers of
borrowers are being defrauded – charged fees they don’t actually owe,
declared in default when, by the terms of their loan agreements, they
aren’t.

Beyond that, if
trusts can’t produce proof that they actually own the mortgages against
which they have been selling claims, the sponsors of these trusts will
face lawsuits from investors who bought these claims – claims that are
now, in many cases, worth only a small fraction of their face value.

And who are these
sponsors? Major financial institutions – the same institutions
supposedly rescued by government programs last year. So the mortgage
mess threatens to produce another financial crisis.

What can be done?
True to form, the Obama administration’s response has been to oppose
any action that might upset the banks, like a temporary moratorium on
foreclosures while some of the issues are resolved. Instead, it is
asking the banks, very nicely, to behave better and clean up their act.
That’s worked so well in the past, right?

The response from
the right is, however, even worse. Republicans in Congress are lying
low, but conservative commentators like those at the Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page have come out dismissing the lack of proper
documents as a triviality. In effect, they’re saying that if a bank
says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this
evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted,
knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I
suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.

What should be
happening? The excesses of the bubble years have created a legal
morass, in which property rights are ill defined because nobody has
proper documentation. And where no clear property rights exist, it’s
the government’s job to create them. That won’t be easy, but there are
good ideas out there. For example, the Center for American Progress has
proposed giving mortgage counsellors and other public entities the
power to modify troubled loans directly, with their judgment standing
unless appealed by the mortgage servicer. This would do a lot to
clarify matters and help extract us from the morass.

One thing is for sure: What we’re doing now isn’t working. And pretending that things are OK won’t convince anyone.

© 2010 New York Times News Service