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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!