₦airaland Forum

For university, it there not Atiku's school in Yola? 15 million+ naira/year just for tuition:

http://www.americanuniversitynigeria.org/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=41&Itemid=46

Hehe

The silly thing about this law is that in Nigeria, there are very expensive schools you can send your children too, if you like.

AIS in Lagos is what, $10k+/term?

So what difference does it make if a man loots and sends his kid to AIS versus a boarding school abroad?

Hehe

Just really a very silly law.

oyb:
are you sure u didn't consult for our transgendered minister when she schooled in howard? 

hehe

what can I say, whenever I see a law/rule, I look for loopholes/flaws in it

And to pre-empt the stupid argument someone will no doubt make about, "Well, even if the public officer is not corrupt, he should suffer along with us who must also go to bad schools". . .

Is it the fault of the minister of defense that the school system is bad? Or the guy who is an accountant for some local government?

Very silly to prevent someone from improving the lot of their family just because they work for the gov't.

Now if it turns out that the guy is corrupt, by all means punish him heavily. And if the guy is incompetent, by all means sack him.

But there is no reason to mix up someone's private life with their own career, even if they work for the gov't.

What is next, no public officials should buy foreign-made computers? Instead they must patronize Zenox?

Sagamite:
Stop chatting utter shyt!

No 1, there is nothing wrong with having a combination of laws to fight corruption.

Fighting corruption with a law like this is using a sledgehammer to kill an ant. Laws should be targeted and precise. This law is not.

No 2, this law is far easier to monitor than the other existing laws because it is harder to launder children.

It is dead easy to launder children. I can just transfer custody of them if necessary, for example. Or have him change his name before he enters the school abroad. Or lie about having 'em. Or substitute a look-alike. Etc, etc

No 3, cut this crap about rights. You have a right not to take a public position. A law to protect the good of the country is legal and constitutional. Please stop chatting such crap. Is it illegal and unconstitutional for the US government to ban US businesses from engaging in business with Cuba? That is abusing rights? Stop chatting tosh!

False. Not every law that protects the "good of the country" (whatever the hell that means, as if there is some uniform, universal standard on what the "good of the country" is) is legal.

Wth does a US feud with Cuba since Castro have to do with this? Please don't bring up irrelevant examples like that.

How on earth can you ban a public officer from educating his child overseas? The premise is that he is earning the money from corruption, right?

Assume temporarily that a given public officer was rich even before he entered office. Why should a guy like that not be able to educate his child overseas?

(Implicitly, I am asking for legitimate reasons related to the quality of him doing his job, not flimsy, arbitrary ones)

Cure the illness (corruption) rather than treating its symptoms (a man stealing public funds and using them to send his kid abroad).

This reminds me of a comment Shekarau made in a debate a few months ago about the EFCC.

If the existing laws and organizations were strong and functional, would there be a need for the EFCC? If naija courts and police worked, then there would be no need for this redundant organization.

We'll pass 1000 laws dancing around the problem rather than facing it head on.

Sagamite: Only now returning to this thread and seeing your comments on the first page.

In a nutshell, this is a dumb policy. If the idea to prevent people from looting. . . how about you just enforce existing laws?

You cannot restrict a man's rights in this way. Let alone those of his children. It doesn't sound legal or constitutional to me.

Regarding @nuzo's comment, my pops has no connection to the Nigerian FG.

Err, nm. My question answered in the post.

Is he printing naira again to inject this $4.5 billion?

By Vincent Nwanma - Aug 8, 2011
Nigeria will inject 679 billion naira ($4.5 billion) into three banks nationalized by the government two days ago in a further step to restore stability in the banking system of Africa’s biggest oil producer.

The funds will be raised through bond sales today and paid to the banks, Mustafa Chike-Obi, managing director of Asset Management Corp. of Nigeria, said in a phone interview from Lagos today.

Amcon, as the state-owned company is known, took over Afribank Plc, Bank PHB Plc (PLATINUM) and Spring Bank Plc (SPRINGBK) on Aug. 6 after the central bank revoked their licenses a day before because they were unlikely to meet a Sept. 30 deadline to recapitalize. This action is the latest by the Central Bank of Nigeria, led by Governor Lamido Sanusi, to clean up the banking industry after the global financial crisis led to about $10 billion of toxic debts on lenders’ books.

“The nationalizations bring to an intermediate end a sorry chapter in Nigeria’s recent banking history,” Sebastian Spio- Garbrah, managing director of New York-based DaMina Advisors LLP, a frontier-market risk adviser, said in an e-mail to clients today. “Nigeria’s banks today are safer than many” in developed countries, he said.

Amcon

Nigeria’s banking stocks fell for a 10th consecutive day. The Bloomberg NSE Banking (NGSEB10) Index, which tracks the performance of the 10 biggest banks by market capitalization, dropped 4.4 percent to 314.51 by 11:18 a.m. in Lagos.

Amcon, which was set up by the government to buy the bad debt of banks, assured depositors on Aug. 6 they won’t lose their money. New boards of directors were appointed for the lenders, which were renamed Mainstreet Bank Ltd., Keystone Bank Ltd. and Enterprise Bank Ltd. respectively.

In 2009, Sanusi fired the chief executives of eight of the country’s 24 lenders after a debt crisis threatened the industry with a collapse, and injected 620 billion naira to rescue lenders. The crisis was triggered after the oil prices tumbled and the benchmark stock index slumped 34 percent in 2009.

“Amcon’s remit just got much larger,” Olubunmi Asaolu, head of equity research at FBN Capital Ltd., said in a note to clients today. “In addition to trying to recover bad loans, it also has to manage three rescued banks for three years after which it hopes to sell them.”

New Boards

Amcon yesterday appointed Jacob Ajekigbe, a former managing director of First Bank of Nigeria Plc, as chairman of Keystone Bank and Oti Ikomi as managing director, it said in an e-mailed statement. Falalu Bello was named chairman of Mainstreet Bank, with Faith Tuedor-Matthews the managing director. Emeka Onwuka, a former managing director of Diamond Bank Plc, was appointed chairman and Ahmed Kuru managing director of Enterprise Bank.

The injection into the new banks will raise their capital adequacy ratio to the required 15 percent and enable them to repay the capital provided by the central bank in 2009, Chike- Obi said on Aug. 6.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended the shares of Afribank, Bank PHB and Spring, it said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.

The steps taken these past two days mark an end to Nigeria’s financial crisis, central bank Deputy Governor Kingsley Moghalu said on Aug. 6. All banks in the country will be adequately capitalized by Oct. 1, and “all the major systemic” challenges would have been resolved by the end of the year, he told reporters in Lagos.

“Although we welcome the fact that the curtains are finally coming down on this saga which has been ongoing for the best part of two years, the fact that two of the largest rescued banks ended up being nationalized is disappointing,” Asaolu said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2011-08-08/nigeria-to-inject-4-5-billion-into-three-banks-nationalized-on-saturday.html

As wonderful as this idea is, does the law actually allow for this?

See the relevant section of the law:

http://www.nigeria-law.org/Taxes%20and%20Levies%20(Approved%20list%20for%20collection)%20Decree%20No%2021%20of%201998.htm

3.
Right of Occupancy fees on lands owned by the State Government in urban areas of the State.

So could the state government charge an annual "right of occupancy fee"?

manny4life:
Actually everyone should pay taxes; individual or commercial or rental property. Property taxes should be taxed based upon the valuation of the bldg involved. If an individual has a home (for personal and family use), and the house is worth $30,000, then a 3% tax for instance will apply but if your house is worth $300,000, that will push you into a higher bracket say 5% because you're more likely to earn more than the other brackets. Same rules will apply to rental and commercial properties.

Why do you suggest a progressive tax rate here? Just general pro-middle class/distributionist sentiment?

I have no opposition to the tax being progressive btw, just curious.

Also, what happens if me and my buddy go 50/50 on a $300k property? Will we still be in a higher tax bracket?

Ultimately, I wish policy like this were not set on a national level, but a zonal one. If @alethieia's zone wants to subsidize education for all, more power to 'em.

If my zone decides to focus on its top 20 or 30% of JAMB takers, then we should be able to do so.

One-size-fits all, cookie-cutter approaches like rarely work out well.

And if each zone gets to set its own educational policy, within a short period of time we'd see what works well and what doesn't. So bad policy will get discarded more rapidly.

aletheia:
^Shall we agree to disagree then?

Looks like it, hehe

@aletheia: It doesn't make sense to compare the US to Nigeria. One is a very wealthy country, the other is very poor. Even if we accept this argument of yours that pouring resources into education in the 60s was what made America great (a questionable argument), doesn't mean the same will be true for Nigeria. Is the US likely to be the best point of reference for Nigeria, a country that has been amongst the wealthiest in the world since at least 1900AD? Probably not.

Regarding increasing university education and also improving primary and secondary education, well, in a world with finite funds, we have to prioritize what we want to get done.

I don't have a problem with those who view university through this same "individualistic" lense you view it. There are lots of such things which are laudable like art, sports, etc. But it is one thing to like these things, another to ask someone else to pay for you to enjoy them. Especially when it is something expensive like a quality university education.

And no, I don't see how the projected growth in Nigeria over the next 5 years will be enough. My guess is that it is not. That sort of growth over 20 or 30 years maybe, but not over just 5.

Roflmao. This made the front page. Look at how Seun titled it:

"Self-styled Property Owner Wants To Pay More Tax"

@edo.girl: It appears that your caustic tongue has made you a foe

To be clear, I'm not trying to be some sort of elitist pig. But you don't want to end up like Iran:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_drain_in_Iran

Sinking a bunch of money into training college graduates that will then just be stolen from you by the US, Canada, Europe, etc.

Imo, sink money into providing quality education up to the secondary level. Does it make sense to be saying you want 800k students entering university when Nigerian secondary students will probably do very poorly in international assessments like PISA or TIMSS?

Let's get primary and secondary education in Nigeria right before worrying about increasing enrollment in university, imo.

As my old man always likes to say, we shouldn't major in minor.

Lol, ya'll gonna make me blush.

Anyway, I appreciate the sentiment.

Hehe

Correlation is not causation, as you probably already very well know 

If I had to guess, the direction of causality is the other way (economic development => increased access to education).

At any rate, perhaps by 2020 the Nigerian economy can support the # of graduates we are producing now. But to hope that by 2016 it will be able to support 800k to me seems nothing more than wishful thinking. I don't think anyone is predicting more than 8% GDP growth/year in Nigeria over that time period, are they? With population growth close to 3%/year, I don't see how a case can be made for increasing the amount of university admissions by 3X or 4X.

I'd always had the impression that oil refining is massively profitable. For most other businesses, most of the profit is made in being the guy who makes the finished product rather than the raw ingredient (you want to be the guy who sells chocolate rather than the cocoa farmer, for example.) Now while I didn't expect refining to be more profitable than extracting crude, I thought it'd be a good business because it is "finished producty" (to abuse the English language a bit.)

You learn something new every day, I guess.

olawalebab:
More questions than answers.

+1

Seun:
You're inviting thieves to come and steal from you, just because it's done abroad.
You can just calculate what the property tax should be and donate it to the FIRS.

Lol. Good that you edited your post. I guess you are still a bit peeved from your previous interactions, hehe

Interesting. We shall see.

Err. To my knowledge, Fashola didn't sell out Abiola (he wasn't even relevant then.)

So how is this going to break SW unity or whatever?

At best, some guys who won't aren't really that important in the grand scheme of things now, let alone in 2015 will be discredited.

Amala politics

@kalokalo: I agree entirely.

@aletheia: Unemployment is guess is a bit high in this country relative to the standard of the 90s and 2000s. But even in the boom times of the late 90s (http://www.miseryindex.us/urbymonth.asp), you'd still have this phenomenon.

Job prospects for your typical below-average philosophy, sociology, english, etc grad are pretty dismal. . . some sort of administrative assistant sort of gig that really doesn't use any skills beyond that a quality HS grad possesses.

I agree that 800k is small relative to Nigeria's population, but the economy doesn't really support even the current amount of people entering university, does it? Let alone 800k/year.

Does it even have the right under the constitution? Constitution leaves very little room for states to tax, I thought.

You are right though, $2 billion isn't enough.

^-- Hehe. Well, his claim of 800k students entering universities by 2016 is also an "idyllic" idea that fails to "take into cognizance the reality on the ground."

I doubt that it will happen

Hrm, looks like you are right:

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/cepmlp/car/html/CAR10_ARTICLE34.PDF

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/11/25/us-usa-refining-closures-analysis-idUSTRE5AN50V20091125

Interesting.

[quote author=edo.girl link=topic=729675.msg8874163#msg8874163 date=1312731302]The economics (profits) of refinning are not that great, so I assume there something other than profit in it for the Chinese.[/quote]Hold on now. Reference for this? I thought refining oil was crazy profitable.