… MoreThere is no doubt, of course, that the knowledge which has been acquired at schools and higher educational institutions can be used almost exclusively for personal gain, with benefit to the society being a mere by-product. Indeed, it sometimes seems that we have organized our societies on this basis, as the temptation of the highest wages is so often connected with the least socially useful occupations.
The business of national economic development is always multi-faceted with blurry lines, with politics, economics, technology and ecology interacting all the time. There is even a peculiar additional complexity when we deal with strategic national resources such as water. This complexity amplifies when there are other stakeholders to the same resource but outside the national borders. Such, it seems, is the story of the recent Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.… More
For a long time, we heard much about John Garang de Mabior the politician and the armed rebellion leader. Little have we heard, however, in the conventional Sudanese media sources, about Garang the scholar of Economic Development and the national visionary, or Garang the pan-Africanist. This article attempts to give some glances of the pan-Africanist side of the man (as last week’s article highlighted his vision of economic development and national building).… More