I have been blogging on this platform since 2009. Yes, it has really been that long. As in life everything has to change at some point and I am migrating to a new platform at nonso2.substack.com. If you were subscribed to this blog via email then you will be automatically migrating too. But if you subscribed through some other means then you will have to move over yourself. I wont delete any posts and all the previous posts will still be here, but I won’t post anything new here after today. Thanks for reading and see you on the other side ..read more

We haven’t had a census since 2006, and many argue that census was … not great. The last census before that was in 1991 and many argue that census was …. also not great. And before that we had a census in 1973 but that was so bad it was cancelled. And before then we had a census in 1963 and that was so bad academics have agreed that you just can’t use it for any serious research. So, how many people are there in Kano? And more generally, how many people are there in Nigeria? Short answer: we don’t know. Why am I pointing out Kano in particular? Last month the NBS released State GDP for a ..read more

Nigeria, and Africa in general, has slowly become a net importer of food. Not that domestic production has not grown but consumption has grown faster than production. There are probably many factors behind this but one that I’ve been thinking about is the impact of urbanization and the competition between Nigerian historical food options, and global food value chains. Let me explain.  If you could split the world into two in terms of broad historical categories of staple foods, you would have a world of cereals (maize, rice, wheat, etc) and a world of tubers (yams, potatoes, and cassav ..read more

My column last Monday was on CBN bills. You can read it here. An interesting thing I didn’t mention was how the use of CBN bills has evolved over time. First thing you notice is the explosion sometime in 2016. NIFEX window anyone? Second thing is the continued growth to unprecedented levels. I know, there is an inflation and exchange rate story there but even you look at the inflation adjusted levels the story is the same. Where does it all end ..read more

My article in Business Day yesterday was about the recently released state-level unemployment data. The article was driven by the maps below and shows the change in the percent of people in each state who stopped being fully employed. Technically this is the change in unemployment plus the change in underemployment. You can think of this as a measure of full time job creation. Purple means that state managed to reduce unemployment and underemployment. Green means unemployment and underemployment got worse. Looks like a nationwide bloodbath (or green bath?). Only Lagos, and to a lesser ex ..read more