₦airaland Forum

So it will cost 140 trillion naira to build enough power stations meet up with our country's current demand for electricity.

I think you mean 140 billion naira.

But look at it another way... we have (conservatively) about 20 million working persons in Nigeria. Let's say that each person pays (conservatively) 10,000 naira per year for their electricity, then this means that in a year, the electricity companies will get 200 billion naira. Assuming that they use 20% (or 40 billion naira) of that for building power stations, then in over three years, the money spent on power stations will have been recouped.

So what does this tell us? If the distribution companies are able to sort out their revenue collection problems, there shouldn't be a problem with money to build the electricity infrastructure. And as I'm never tired of saying, privately run companies are more likely to do a better job of collecting revenue that publicly owned ones. So bring on privatisation!

I refuse to entertain any more of your stories on this forum until you do just that and report your findings. Please, we are not interested in bogus stories on this forum.

Haba! Why the threat to stop Cletuskpelle's posts? I don't think there was anything that he said in his previous posts that indicdated that he was making bogus posts.

Kodewrita,

I'd advise you to look at details of the Electric Power Sector Reform Bill (EPSRB) instead of the act that set up NEPA, since the EPSRB is now going to be governing how electricity generators, transmitters and distributors operate in Naija.

To view the act, go here:

http://www.bpeng.org/10/adddoctool.asp?DocID=109&MenuID=108#

Then click on the link that says:

Electric Power Sector Reform Bill 2004

(that's the third link under the 'Legal and Regulatory Framework' section.

An authentication dialog will come up - just press cancel to dismiss it (shoddy website design), then you can view the details of the bill. You will need to have Word installed on your machine, though.

Hope this helps.

Allenpowered:
The reality of the whole thing as I'm always quick to point out is that things that work well in other countries don't seem to work in Naija.

I hear what you're saying Allenpowered, and I agree that this is true in some cases, but I don't think this is true for all cases. What I would love would be for people to stop concluding that something that works abroad "will never work in Naija" and try to find out [I]specifically[/I] why it won't work. But I digress.

What is the gua[are]antee that when there is an increase in tariff there wo't be more corrupt managers to embezzle the money

There's no guarantee - they might and they might not, although measures can be taken to prevent this. But I can guarantee you that if the company doesn't get any extra money, services will remain as bad as they are.

Of course no one would go to the market to bu[why] unreliable product for himself,its the constraint on resources that make people do that.

True, but when I her Nigerians' comments, I wonder whether they understand the saying that [I]'the soup wey sweet, na money cook am'[/I].

Also, fundamental questions should be asked from the NEPA management: what has been done to this great amount of money spent on power generation,no results...then why should an average Nigerian expect anything better when they pay more...

Well, there appears to be quite a bit of work in building new generating plants and refurbishing transmission infrastructure, and we won't see the effect of this for a while yet.

But as I have said already, without any extra revenue, nothing good will happen. The government certainly isn't interested in pouring extra money into a company that should be generating its own money, so that money will have to come from Nigerian customers.

Anyway, Nigerians aren't forced to use NEPA/PHCN/whatever it calls itself tomorrow - if you wish, you can buy a generator and disconnect yourself from the grid.

seun:
Ka, appreciation is not the issue here.  This case is worse than what you think.

Tayotina mentioned that "he doesn't even want to know whether she is busy or not."  It has reached a stage where he's demanding to be fed, even when it's not convenient for her.

Perhaps what I really should say instead is that 'being taken for granted' (an extreme case of lack of appreciation) is the issue here.

I do not want to use the word 'irresponsible', but this boyfriend is costing her time and money.  He is  simply [I]taking advantage[/I] of her.

I'm not so quick to judge... people don't do things unless there is a payoff, either by avoiding something unpleasant, or gaining something pleasant. If she's still sticking with him despite the complaints, she must have her reasons.

seun:

Branson can only hav at most 49% share in Vmobile

I'm relieved to hear that.  Which means he won't necessarily be controlling the company.  This means he's going to have enough Nigerians on board to frustrate his decisions and oppose his bold business moves.

And this is supposed to be a good thing?

Anyway, it will only take an extra 2% for him to get his way... shouldn't be too difficult for him to get.

legry:
...He loves your food and he eats it all the time plus he wants it all the time

I don't get the impression from reading Tayotina's first post that the guy loves his girlfriend's food because his girlfriend prepared it. The impression I get is that if the girlfriend had got someone else to prepare it, he could have cared less.

I think the key word here is appreciation. I often find it very strange how people pay so little attention to this very important aspect in a relationship, and yet when things go belly up they wonder what happened.

I bet that the girlfriend wouldn't feel so hassled if after eating the meal, the man had said "Darling, that was a truly fantastic meal. I feel like my taste buds have gone to heaven and back. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for putting so much love and care in preparing this culinary wonder just for me".

Na mi o:
You no serious oh! Why wld a prefer an artificially cheap but scarce product?

Because it's cheap?

Because its cheapness matters more to you than the hassle of getting it?

I don't know.

'Cheap and unreliable' vs. 'Expensive and reliable'

I saw this article yesterday. Just in case Vanguard yank the article, here it is in its entirety:

FG hikes electricity tariff July

[I]By Hector Igbikiowubo[/I]

LAGOS—THE Federal Government is to increase electricity tariff significantly from July 1 this year when the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) transforms into the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, the current state of poor power supply in the country notwithstanding. Government is also to receive a $200 million (N26.8 billion) World Bank loan for investment in the power sector.

Mr. Joseph Makoju, Managing Director of NEPA, at a luncheon organised by the Nigeria-German Business Association in Lagos, yesterday, said the increase in tariff would come under the implementation of the Multi-Year Tariff Order (MYTO), a new tariff regime.
Mr. Makoju explained that following the implementation of the MYTO, tariff increases would be graduated in line with economic indices such as inflation rate, exchange rate and all other factors contributing to electricity generation in the country.

When the Power Holding Company becomes operational, it is expected that all the companies created out of NEPA will become more independent and operate on commercial basis, Mr. Makoju explained.

He said the current poor state of power supply in the country was caused by poor power generation from the Authority’s power plants, adding that the situation had been accentuated by limited gas supply to the Egbin Thermal Power Station. The NEPA helmsman said power generation currently stood at 3000MW while the nationwide load demand was put at 6000MW.
On the expected loan from the World Bank, he said the money would be utilised by the Authority to reinforce the distribution system.
The World Bank had, three years ago, extended a $100 million loan to the Authority in support of its efforts to strengthen the transmission lines and rehabilitate some of the power generation plants.

Speaking with Vanguard on limited gas supply, Mr. Makoju debunked perceived rancour in the Authority’s relationship with the Nigeria Gas Company, saying it was not true gas supplies had been cut because of lack of agreement over pricing. “Everybody keeps saying that. They keep saying it, it has nothing to do with paying more at all. I don’t know why people keep saying it. Does it make sense that because of payment the gas is being deliberately withheld?

“You journalists keep hammering that point. I don’t know why you keep saying it. Does it make sense? Is it possible? It has nothing to do with that at all, it is just operational problem. When it is fixed, we will get the capacity back,” he said.
When told that the state of power supply had been worsened by the activities of some of the authority’s managers insisting on people contributing money before their bad transformers could be replaced, he said such managers should be reported.

“When there are malpractices, they should be reported. When we get a verified story, where there is need we immediately weed them out. But many of these cases don’t get reported. When you have such a case just scribble something and fax it to me.
“We have a unit now which investigates such cases. This is Nigeria and we have to do it together. We have some bad eggs, we know and we are weeding them out,” he said.

Now I support the electricity company's move to hike prices, because the current regime is simply not sustainable - there's no way that the company will have enough money to maintain their equipment and guarantee their customers reliable electricity supply if they are charging less than it costs them to generate the electricity in the first place.

But I get the impression that the average Nigerian will look at this as yet another conspiracy to make life more difficult for the common man, because Nigerians seem to be in love with buying artificially cheap goods. When I say 'artificially cheap', I mean it is cheap because the organisation offering the good is not selling it at what it would really cost to make the good, and it is doing this either because the organisation is a government company with nothing to lose, or because it has been forced by government to sell the good at that price, or something else.

The point is, selling a good at an artificially cheap price means that there usually isn't enough of it to go around. This is because the organisation producing the good is losing more than it makes, so in effect it is throwing away money. And of course, this means that there is only so much of a good that it can produce, so in the end a scarcity develops, and alongside this also develops a black market where the good is sold at many more times than the artificial price.

We've seen this in Nigeria in the past in the olden days of NITEL when it was difficult getting a phone and you had to bribe officials to get a line at many more times the price. More recently, we've seen this during fuel crises where the NNPC can't maintain the subsidy on fuel and a scarcity develops.

In fact, one of the reasons that there is acute scarcity of electricity in Nigeria these days is because the Nigerian Gas Company (which supplies NEPA gas to run its generating plant) is disagreeing with NEPA how much they should sell their gas to NEPA for. The NGC want to sell it at the same (higher) price they sell it on the general market; NEPA doesn't have the money to pay for this, because they have been 'throwing' their money away by charging Nigerians artificially cheap prices for electricity.

On the other hand, if an organisation sells its goods at a price that allows it to recover the amount it spent on making it, then it means that it will have even more money to continue to making the good. The price may be higher, but there won't be any sustained scarcity. You can see an example of this in the private phone sector where there usually is very little difficulty in getting a GSM or fixed wireless line.

So my questions are these:

Am I right or wrong to say that Nigerians would rather have a situation where a good was artificially cheap even though it was scarce than a situation where the good was more expensive and it was widely available?

Would you yourself rather have a situation where a good was artificially cheap even though it was scarce than a situation where the good was more expensive and it was widely available?

I'm with Seun on this one. Why spend so much on a device that only does one thing when you can by another device for much less that does more than one thing? Makes no sense to me - I suspect most people buy iPods because they are 'cool' (whatever that means) more than any other reason.

seun:
Ka, I was wrong.  There is an aspect of what you said I didn't grasp previously.  The seed that grows babies also grows hair, wow!

Well, in a way, it's true. The male hormone, testosterone is responsible for the distinctly masculine physical traits (like more muscular body and facial hair), and also has a role to play in male fertility. This hormone is produced in the testicles.

What if the child says he/she doesn't believe you?  What if he wants to [I]see[/I] the seeds you are talking about?  What if he demands for some seeds to show his friends?

OK, now that I have recovered from my bout of laughter, I will tell him that the seed is held inside a little bag beneath daddy's penis. And unfortunately, the seed only comes out of daddy's penis when daddy puts it into mummy to grow a baby inside her (ok, not strictly true but near enough), so I won't be able to give him a sample of the seed to show his friends.

What sort of events could lead to a collapse of Nigeria as we know it?

1. Some ethnic (or religious) leader decides that his group has had enough, and decides to start a war using his home territory as a base.

[I]Likelihood of this happening[/I]: Very low. For one thing, as bad as things are for various groups (I single out the Ndoni, Ogoni, Izon and other ethnic groups in the Delta area), I don't think they perceive their misfortune as a deliberate government attempt to victimise and marginalise them. I think it is more a case of general misgovernance that affects everyone rather than one particular group being singled out. Having said this, there are always demagogues who are happy to fan the flames of ethnic strife by claiming their group is being victimised.

Also, I suspect that most would-be ethnic leaders these days are so corrupt that as soon as the government announces some financially rewarding concession towards the leader, that will be the end of the 'rebellion'. See what happened with Dokubo Asari (or is it Asari Dokubo? You never can tell with the way Nigerians switch forename and surname).

2. Some ambitious military officer decides to launch a coup, and this causes divisions amongst the military as some part of it remains loyal to the government.

[I]Likelihood of this happening[/I]: Low. I think the government has a good handle on military intelligence, and I also think that it is keeping the officer cadre of the military relatively happy.

Also, I think that unlike the olden days when unreliable telecoms and near total government control of the electronic media made it easy to stage coups, it will be much more difficult to rely on simply seizing a single radio station and playing martial music for a coup to succeed.

And lastly, even though things are bad, I still think that whoever seizes power needs a really compelling reason to overthrow the government if his government is to have any kind of credibility, especially because the trend these days (even in Africa) is for democratic governments, and most coups result either in a kind of reversal (Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau) or the coup leader makes some sort of plan to return to democratic rule soon after.

3. Some junior officers stage a mutiny over poor conditions, which escalates into a full blown rebellion that some middle ranking officer takes command of.

[I]Likelihood of this happening[/I]: Low-medium. For me, this is the most serious threat of all, especially it's happened in Cote D'Ivoire, and the conditions are present in Nigeria for it to happen here (I.e conditions of service of junior military personnel aren't that great). Perhaps the only thing that can prevent this is if the government continues to keep on meeting its existing commitments to junior soldiers' conditions, even if it can't improve them. Also, I don't know that there are sufficiently intense nationwide grievances against the current government that an opportunist soldier will want to risk leading a full scale mutiny, especially if he isn't doing too badly himself under the current dispensation.

So there's my analysis. But of course, I'm just one of many crystal ball gazers.

seun:
Am I the only one who doesn't think Ka's answer above is not much of an answer?

Yep... you're on your own, dude!

I mean, essentially all Ka is saying is "I don't want to talk about it because you don't have a beard".  Surely an intelligent kid would not be satisfied with that.

Yes, you're right that an intelligent child wouldn't be satisfied if his father said he didn't want to talk about it, but no, that's not what I'm saying.

You asked what I would say if the child asked: 1. where the the seed came from, and 2. whether he could have it. I answered 1. by indicating that the seed came from within daddy (how else could it make hair grow on his face?) and 2. by saying that he couldn't have the seed because he couldn't grow a beard yet.
 

An intelligent kid will reason, "ok, if daddy doesn't want to tell me where to get the seed I will ask my friends in school ..." and the entire purpose of the exercise is defeated.

An intelligent kid will seek clarification from daddy if he isn't satisfied with daddy's answer, and will only turn elsewhere if daddy has explicitly told him not to ask any further questions.

Please girls, could you please educate an ignorant but willing to learn man like me how this works?

You meet a man who is caring, sensitive to your feelings, intelligent, responsible, funny, well-off, generous, handsome, honest... but shorter than you. Are you honestly telling me that you will completely discount all these pluses in favour of the one minus - his shortness? If you start having feelings of affection for him, will you quash those feelings and say "Over my dead body! I cannot - I must not - allow myself to feel anything for this short man!"?

I decide that the time is right to launch a career in local politics... so I get myself a megaphone, go down to the nearest market and proclaim the formation of the "Miliki Unlimited Party" to all and sundry. I tell everyone that the policies of the party include...

Note: if you don't want the thread of this story to weave all over the place like someone who has overdosed on [/i]akpeteshi[i], I think it would be a good idea to limit the contribution of each person to say, 25 words.

Greatpeter:
Mamba,
Plz be realistic. I know it is uncommon in our land, Africa.
Anyway, that is what you are up to.Let's assume but I need someone to tailor this issue

Are you looking for a specific answer here, Greatpeter?

Anyway, I would just get up and walk out of the room, and I would keep to myself until my anger had cooled enough for me to say how terribly hurt and offended I felt that she had so little respect for me so little that she could slap me.

seun:
What if the asks you where daddy got the seed, and if he can get one too?

The seed that daddy used to make the baby grow in mummy is the same seed that caused hair to grow on daddy's face and chin. So if you can't grow a beard... forget it.

Greatpeter:
The only places in Nigeria I can't go are Zanfara and Kano because of the zero tolerance they have for Christianity.  I can't allow them to frame me with their [I]Sharia[/I] of a thing.

You're sure you're not letting the hype get to you?

I can't think about how a Christian would fall foul of Sharia law, anyhow.


Back to the topic, having spent my NYSC year in Jos, I can heartily recommend it for the pure beauty of the scenery that surrounds the town.

I think it's also important to remember that you don't have to tell the child everything at once, and you don't also have to go into the graphic detail that seems to terrify most parents - you can use natural sounding words that don't make sex look like some 'big deal'.

For example, if I had a child and he asked me where babies came from, it wouldn't mean I would have to start giving him a biology 'O' level lecture - I could just tell him that they grow inside their mothers belly. That's all - no need to tell him more than that. If he went further and asked what made them grow inside there, I could just say that daddy lies with mummy and puts a seed in her which makes the baby grow.

Seems the answers here are just spawning more questions for me.

For example, most people are saying "marry when {emotionally or spiritually or mentally or physically or <insert your own category here} mature". What do you mean by "mature"?

Anyhow, I think it's silly for anyone to turn marriage (which should be undertaken with the greatest care in the world) into a do-or-die affair by imposing artificial time limits and decreeing a 'suitable' age for marriage.

It's when someone is told that they should get married before they are 30 that they jump into marriage with a totally unsuitable person because they are 29 years 364 days and desperate. And as someone who has seen a fair few desperately unhappy marriages, I'd rather remain single than enter into such living hells.

seun:
For an exam like WAEC's SSCE (WASSCE) which is taken by, say, a million students every year, this 10 minute session you're suggesting will take more than 6,900 man days.

To be completed in 30 days, such an exercise would require about 230 interviewers working round the clock with no breaks.

So scrap exams altogether, and move the people who would have doing the marking onto doing the interviewing. Exam markers spend more than 10 minutes marking each paper, as it is.

seun:
Ka, you remind me of George Lucas; what you are suggesting is nothing but Science Fiction, because even forward-thinking countries (like the US?) are not doing such things.

You know what Nigerian students will do if you give them the questions well in advance?  The dull ones will ask the smart ones to compose the answers for them, which they will proceed to write in their textbooks and transcribe during the course of the exam.

The students with the best [color=#000077]handwriting[/color] will end up with the highest scores!

Oh, did I forget to mention that each student will be a 10 minute session during which they will be required to defend what they have written before examiners?

If I had my way, exams as they are currently arranged would be scrapped.

Instead, I would give the students the questions well in advance, and even allow them to bring their textbooks into the exam hall so that they could give the best answer possible. After all, I'm not testing them on how well they can cram information but how well they can apply it.

seun:
What about the famous War Against Indiscipline (WAI) program?

I think you may be confusing General Muhammed with General Buhari, whose regime launched WAI and who came three regimes after General Muhammed.

My only disagreement is the domain name chosen. I would expect something along

www.army.mil.ng

Not too sure about this, but I believe that the process of getting an ng domain name is so tortuous and problematic that most people just use either .com, .net or .org.

I think there's currently some confusion over who should manage the registration of ng domain names - but even when this is sorted out, it will still take ages to register an ng domain name because of the stupid bureaucracy and incompetence that Nigerians like introducing into a simple task.

Allenpowered,

I have often heard this allegation that introducing higher denomination notes leads to inflation, but I have never heard any substantive proof of this. Let's look at what you've submitted:

the countries cited as examples are developed countries, what applies there does not apply in naija.

I accept that there are differences in the economic and political structure between Nigeria and the West which mean that there will be differences in how people respond to government policy. But are you saying that everything that applies in the West must not apply in Nigeria? For example, in developed countries, if the government starts printing money like no tomorrow, there will be general inflation. Are you saying that because this happens there that it will not happen here, i.e. the government of Nigeria can print as much money as it likes and nothing will happen?

The next thing that will happen will be the disappearance of the 5 and 10 naira denominations.  Everything will now be sold in graduation of 20 naira.

Why?

Coining the  5 and 10 naira denominations makes it even worse.  Most of will remember the phasing out of 10 kobo, 50 kobo and 1 naira coin.

Be careful that you are not confusing cause and effect. Instead of saying that the introduction of higher denomination notes caused inflation and led to the phasing out of coins, I believe it's more plausible that inflation which occurred at the same time as the introduction of higher denomination notes led to higher prices, and this meant that coins were redundant.

Let the necessary measures be implemented and we'll see if the ‘spirits’ find it in their powers to overflow the beach again.

Ra,

It's the spirits that are also preventing our leaders from implementing the necessary measures.