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What about the continued decades long clamor by Nigerians for the fuel subsidy to be maintained? This has meant that Nigeria has prioritized reducing the cost of fuel over spending on healthcare, education and infrastructure. There have been nationwide general strikes and public mass demonstrations (like Ojota Occupy Nigeria) but not once has this happened over healthcare or education spending. We signal to our leaders that maintaining a fixed low-cost fuel price is more important than the state of our hospitals, schools and roads. The country has the leadership it deserves. If we want good hospitals, we need to campaign for it the same way we have successfully campaigned over 40 years to maintain fuel subsidy. |
Paolo Dybala too it seems. In a worrying development for Juventus, another of their players has tested positive for coronavirus.https://www.caughtoffside.com/2020/03/12/second-juventus-star-player-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-in-worrying-new-development/ |
If this is sustained, it is likely to prove devastating for Nigeria. For one thing, the forex scarcity we experienced in 2015 to 2017 is about to reemerge with the CBN eventually going to devalue the Naira. Unlike in 2015, the FG has a much higher stock of foreign debt it needs to service with dollars. We need to brace ourselves for even more economic hardship. |
safarigirl:Saying Nigeria has poor health test facilities is a statement of fact. This pseudo-patriotism or ersatz national/racial pride you project is laughable. The country has a general problem of lack of access (free or otherwise) to good health facilities. Lots of people with symptoms will try to shake it off as they can't afford (no paid leave, free healthcare, etc) to take time off to pay for tests in the rare and reliable places such tests are available. By the way, this is a problem that even rich countries are bedevilled with, never mind Nigeria - https://time.com/5794672/health-insurance-deductibles-coronavirus/ So even with lassa fever, the problem is more widespread than the headline figures tell you. Ebola is different as the mortality rate is so high, transmissibility relatively low, and nature of symptoms so stark that victims can be more easily identified and contained. Coronavirus has the disadvantage of being insidious, almost all victims will recover relatively unscathed. Nigeria has a disproportionately young populace that can shake off the virus which claims most of its victims from the elderly and those with pre-existing health problems. So, yes, the virus can be running rampant to the obliviousness of Nigerians. To assert that it cannot be is the sort of delusional mindset of denial that hinders the country from tackling its myriad problems. |
The virus could be running rampant in Nigeria but we don't know due to poor testing facilities. |
Let's not overlook OBJ's government role in the initial settlement agreement with Bagudu. |
It seems to me that this is a non-solution to a non-problem. There is not going to be a sizeable security outfit under the guise of Amotekun as there is not enough financial resources at the state level to fund one. How will they pay for salaries, equipment and training? These are states that can barely pay teachers, doctors, etc. The proposed legal framework sounds like an exercise in vacuity. Saying you are going to have a legal framework in this case tells us nothing substantive. What's the scope of the framework as any federal legislation will be applicable nationwide; when is the legislation (if any) going to be drafted and what contents are being mooted? There is no detail other than empty soundbites designed to (laudably in my view) dampen tensions. I think in a year's time we would have forgotten about Amotekun and moved on to other issues. |
A small Nigerian oil company has revealed an alleged scam after handing over $600,000 to a consultancy which had promised to help to arrange a loan from the Qatari Investment Authority.https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/13/nigerian-oil-firms-shares-suspended-after-revealing-alleged-scam |
xpool:The examples you cite - murder, theft, pedophilia - involve cases where the perpetrator is acting without the consent of a victim (a child is unable to consent in the case of pedophilia). This is why it makes logical sense to condemn murder or theft. In the case of gay people, Africans are claiming that what consenting adults do with one another is wrong because its "abnormal." But within straight relationships, lots of couples engage in abnormal things. The question is what is the logic in being outraged about consented behavior that doesn't affect others? This thing about "promoting" homosexuality makes no sense to me since if you are straight, no one is going to convert you to a homosexual and the overwhelming majority of people will remain straight no matter the society (see western countries with a permissive outlook to homosexuals where heterosexuals remain the overwhelming majority). I suspect a lot of people who pursue this line of argument about westerners turning Africans gay harbour some homosexual inclinations themselves. |
Border closure is going to do a lot of heavy lifting in Nigeria - would it cure cancer too? In a year's time and the country as poor as before, they will find another ruse to focus on. |
You need to be naive to take NBS's statistics as credible. Bornu after many years of Boko Haram is not in the top ten of impoverished Nigerian states. Their poverty rates display remarkable differentiation even within geographical clusters. So Niger is the least poor state in Nigeria but it is also next door to Zamfara which is among the poorest - wouldn't that prompt the residents of Zamfara to move to Niger and that would reduce much of the difference. The same applies to Ebonyi which apparently is poor due to, among others, low literacy levels but are literacy levels there lower than in Niger? If you have low poverty/unemployment in a state and geographically proximate states have the reverse, migration will equalise things substantially so such differences won't persist. |
Tribal politics is the only thing they can grasp easily. The knowledge you need to understand development issues is more varied and possibly more brain tasking. |
I am not sure why the comparison is being done with Lagos in particular as there is a general problem with government expenditure in Nigeria partly due to high recurrent expenditure ratio. Way too much spending is swallowed up by wages and debt repayments. Look at all those Niger-Delta state governments - Rivers, Delta, Bayelsa and Akwa Ibom. With the exception of Bayelsa, each intends to spend over $1bn in 2019 and will have barely anything to show for it re infrastructure. So Lagos is just a symptom of a general dysfunction in government fiscal policy. What may be unique about Lagos's situation is its much underestimated (in Nigeria) debt burden incurred to a great extent during the much praised Fashola years. Some of that debt was dollar denominated and the overall burden has increased with currency depreciation. With no credible plan to break the dysfunctional spending cycle, the coming years will test the propagandizing skills of our paid online propagandists. |
This story was run in 2016 with the usual comments: https://www.nairaland.com/3140285/pictures-ogoni-clean-up 3 years later, the same dishonest tactic of giving the impression that something tangible is commencing when image laundering is all that is happening. |
This criticism applies to all Nigerian states and the FG. There is less fiscal room available to spend on infrastructure due to increased debt burdens and public sector wages. When people say Fashola was effective, that can only be justified by reference to his first term when the minimum wage was N5,000.00. With the almost quadrupled wage costs and increased debt (some of it foreign-sourced when the Naira exchange rate was N155 to $1), there is barely anything left to fix roads. People refer to corruption but it is no worse now than 10 years ago. We need to stop focusing on personalities and focus instead on the policy environment. |
The lack of shame is troubling. He doesn't seem to recognize the waste all this spending represents. |
seunfly:You are probably adding to the risk of death though as this advice points out: "Bed-sharing 'raises cot death risk fivefold'," BBC News reports. The news has featured in much of the media, with headlines based on a large analysis of previous studies into the risk of cot death, or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), associated with bed-sharing.https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/sharing-a-bed-with-your-baby-ups-risk-of-cot-death/ |
I resent this facile notion that Nigeria's infrastructural deficits, ipso facto, justifies government borrowing. I wish it were that simple but borrowing has to be sustainable, otherwise, the cost of borrowing will offset any economic gains from infrastructure investment. You can't simply just spend your way to economic development at any cost when most of your tax revenue goes toward debt-servicing as this Bloomberg exceprt highlights: While Nigeria’s ratio of debt-to-gross-domestic product is low relative to other governments at about 25 percent, its small tax base means interest costs as a proportion of revenue are high. The federal government’s interest payments-to-revenue more than doubled to 60 percent last year from 27 percent in 2014, according to the International Monetary Fund. The figure is on course to rise to 82 percent by 2022, which the Washington-based lender says is “unsustainable.”https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-19/nigeria-seeks-concessional-loans-over-bonds-as-debt-costs-rise Think of the interest payments for a N10 trillion bond juxtaposed against the narrow fiscal space afforded by our current debt-service to revenues ratio. If financed from the local debt market, you are looking at an extra N1 trillion to N1.5 trillion per year in debt servicing (that's just being conservative) assuming 10 to 15 percent interest rate. The solution to our infrastructure problems needs to be a bit more radical encompassing privatization of a lot of present government enterprises (NNPC and the ports come to mind) to raise revenue, an embrace of the public-private partnerships to shift some of the financial burden of infrastructure investments to the private sector, abolition of the multiple exchange rates to encourage FDI, e.t.c. Proposing a significant of government debt at this point betrays a lack of serious reflection. |
Recruitmentedu: Bald men in Mozambique could be targets of ritual attacks, police have warned, after the recent killing of five men for their body parts.https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40185359 |
jayjola:South Africa has always had a high murder rate. It's even lower now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_South_Africa
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By CLIFFORD D. MAYhttp://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/19/world/cabinet-in-nigeria-installed-with-a-warning.html |
GutsOverFear:Standard Naija rape apologia: From emphatic claims about the woman enjoying to questions about why she didn't speak ab initio. Re the latter, it's as if Nigeria has a progressive culture and efficient law enforcement that will encourage a woman to speak up and get justice. |
It is this sort of misgovernance that drives people to the likes of Boko Haram. By the time people have tried different political parties with the same result, they lose faith in the entire system and the extremists suddenly seem alluring. |
robertshit:This is a theme I keep harping on. Governments at both state and Federal levels are running out of money to undertake major infrastructural investments without borrowing. Ambode seems worse than Fashola but if you factor in the cost of debt servicing and public sector wages (in Fashola's first term, minimum wage was N5k initially), this partly explains the relative inactivity of Ambode. As the debt and wage burdens increase quicker than the state's capacity to service them, infrastructure spending goes by the wayside. You can do some BOT type schemes for one or two eye catching projects (like the FG and China with rail and airports) but that's about it. Expect further disappointment from the new governor. |
ADAMUdaCOWBOY:You seem like an educated person, so it would be utterly preposterous if you reason that the government of an impoverished low income state ought to be complimented for ''achieving'' 2% GDP growth. A level of GDP growth that, as already has been pointed out, is lower than population growth. At our stage of development, we need double digit growth (10%+) to make significant dents in poverty levels. This is partly because the effects of growth often tend to follow the so called Kuznets curve, i.e., growth benefits the richer demographic primarily before spreading to the average person. One more thing on "achieving" growth - economic growth is the natural order of things. The Nigerian economy grew after all during the civil war. Recessions are aberrations - exceptions to the norm - so growth in itself is not an achievement, rather it is the rate of growth which is the real indicator of government competence. |
These Buhari propagandists exploit the naivety of Nigerians by comparing the stock total of forex reserves now with the stock total when GEJ was in power. This is an apples to oranges comparison as the exchange rates are different. Now that the naira exchanges for N305 for $1, N360 at market rate, the forex reserves should increase as Nigerians have less naira purchasing power for imports. A person who needed N1.6m income to buy $10k worth of imports now needs N3.6m income to buy $10k. Unless income is rising sufficiently to offset naira depreciation, this will cause people to buy fewer imports and enable the central bank to accumulate forex reserves. So the "achievement" of the Buhari government is that the collapse of naira has shrunk Nigerians purchasing power and, consequently, imports sufficiently to build up forex reserves. A similar "achievement" was accomplished by the Abacha government who grew reserves significantly as the naira collapse. The Federal Government also said Mr. Abacha oversaw an increase in the country’s foreign exchange reserves from $494 million in 1993 to $9.6 billion by the middle of 1997; and reduced the external debt of Nigeria from $36 billion in 1993 to $27 billion in 1997.https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/156004-why-we-honoured-abacha-nigerian-government.html The reason why Abacha built up such reserves is partly down to Naira collapse. Applauding increased reserves in these circumstances is like applauding a starving person for reducing their body fat; an epiphenomenom of starvation. |
omokiri5:This harebrained analysis Nigerians use baffles me. When one talks of the North benefiting, is the average North-Easterner any better off than the average South-Easterner? Effectively, all you are talking of is a handful of elites juxtaposed against millions of ordinary people who see no benefit either way. What is missed in the analysis is that the Nigerian government is so ineffectual that it can barely affect the distribution of income/wealth, or the general variables associated with well being, amongst the regular folks. So you can have decades of successive Northern leaders with no real impact on the lives of ordinary people. You need to think beyond the benighted ethnic-based analytical framework. If you are motivated by ethnic reasoning, the logical end point should be seeking independence for your ethnic group. One cannot logically insist on remaining yoked to other ethnic groups in a political state while seeking 'advantages ' which in any case only accrue to political elites. This is tantamount to seeking advantages for one organ of the human body at the expense of another organ of the same body. It is unvarnished idiocy. |
N18k is unaffordable given the precarious debt profile of the FG and most state governments, never mind N30k. For people who pontificate about the iniquities of our "low" minimum wage given the corruption/enrichment of the political class - the solution isn't to embark on the fiscally irresponsible act of adding to our already unsustainable recurrent expenditure. What we desperately need is more capital expenditure that will benefit all - bridges, rail, ports, e.t.c. Public sector pay rises benefit a miniscule proportion of the population and much of it will "leak" out anyway via increased consumption of imported goods. It was such pay rises under Yar'Adua and GEJ - from N5k to N18k - that depleted the forex reserves and left Nigeria unable to exploit the oil boom. Also, isn't funny how the minimum wage keeps increasing with no appreciable impact on the general populace - it was circa N800 in 1999? Perhaps, we ought to have learned that, like a dog chasing its tail, you won't reduce poverty in Nigeria by awarding public sector (a tiny segment of the populace) pay rises. Historical evidence is lost on Nigerians and the corruption narrative warps our judgement. |
The number of new voters registered in Nigeria since January 2018 has increased by almost exactly the same percentage in each of its states, according to documents seen and analysed by the Guardian, raising fears that the results of Saturday’s presidential election could be open to mass rigging.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/15/revealed-nigerian-voter-data-is-statistically-impossible |
kolaxed98:The North has been "gaining" from all the Northern leaders, appointments and infrastructure but where has that left the average Northerner? |
By CLIFFORD D. MAYhttp://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/19/world/cabinet-in-nigeria-installed-with-a-warning.html |
You would think that decades of seeing the poor outcomes from government run enterprises would teach people the lesson that no Nigerian government - state or Federal - has any business running a business. The country is doomed. |
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