The 21st Century is a time of great converging challenges—we need to think, feel and act systemically like never before in our history. In reality the threats are all connected, yet we continue to deal with them separately in a piecemeal fashion. This simply will not be good enough.

It wasn’t long before I too learned to connect the dots. I learned to see that the austerity-induced Structural Adjustment Program of General Ibrahim Babangida in 1986, then lauded as an ingenious economic solution to Nigeria’s problems, was a creature of the IMF, the World Bank, and the Trojan sentiments...