₦airaland Forum

Ama80:
disinfecting corruption?prosecuting Dokpesi for exposing d rot Tinubu n co perpetrated in Lagos state while d criminals dine n eat wt d govt dat b,pontificatin in every matter as saints.dis is hypocritical of u midolian.Oh God!Pls use ur divinity n incorruptibility to cleanse ds country of all past n present leaders irrespective of party affiliation dat hav brought rot n suffering to ds country.

As the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), continue to quiz more prominent Nigerians involved in the $2.1bn arms purchase deal, THE PUNCH is reporting that some of the suspects have been reaching out to ex-President Olusegun Obsanjo to intervene on their behalf.

Although, the report did not mention names of the suspects, it said a trusted aide of the former President confirmed the development.
The report added that those reaching out to the ex-president wanted soft-landing.

“I can confirm that,” the newspaper quoted one of the former president’s trusted aides in a telephone chat on Saturday night.

Obasanjo, who played a major role in galvanizing local and international support for Candidate Muhammadu Buhari prior to the 2015 election, is believed to have the ears of the current president.

However, the source said Obasanjo was not likely to accede to the requests of the highly influential Nigerians involved in the scandal.

Some staff of the office of the National Security Adviser, who made useful statements to investigators of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, had named several prominent Nigerians in politics, business, governance and the media as beneficiaries of several “suspicious payments”.

But the Obasanjo aide said those who hoped the former president would help them to pervert the course of justice were in for a shocker.

He said, “Of course, some of the people involved in the scandal are reaching out to Baba (Obasanjo). They want soft-landing. People would always reach out to him. But we all know Obasanjo’s disposition to some people and what he thinks of them.

“Moreover, the revelations are serious. Even if only 10 per cent is true, it is still serious. Also it is important to stress that what have been revealed are the things that we know. How about other deals that we do not know? We are talking about the office of the National Security Adviser, how about what happened in other places: Education, Finance, Aviation etc?”

Lalasticlala

sunnyb0b0:
Keep on egging the gullible ones on. When it happens now, you'll either escape to the UK or Ghana.

OZAOEKPE:
GUY, AS LONG AS WE DEPEND ON OIL TO SUSTAIN THIS ZOO, MY BRO NOTHING CAN HAPPEN TO TOMPOLO.....

OZAOEKPE:
I AM NOT SUPPORTING TOMPOLO, AND I WILL NEVER SUPPORT HIM. Buhari SHOULD USE HIS WISDOM, HE WANTS TO PEG OUR BUDGET TO THE PRODUCTION OF OIL, AND NOW HE WANTS TO ARREST THE LEADER OF THE MILITANT GROUP, DOES THAT MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL?


NO, THE MAN SHOULD LEARN TO BEHAVE LIKE A MONKEY, ONE BOMB FIRED AT SHELL, CHEVRON ETC, WILL SCATTER THE ECONOMY TO PIECES. I KNOW SOME THUGS WONT SUPPORT MY VIEWS, BUT HE NEEDS THE OIL(REGION, MILITANTS) MORE THAN THEY NEED HIM.



SALAAM MY BRO(MIDOLIAN)

Former Niger Delta militant leader, Chief Government Ekpemukpolo a.k.a Tompolo, has gone into hiding in the creeks of Bayelsa State for fear of arrest after being summoned by the Economic and Financial crimes Commission (EFCC), a report said.
“There, he is being attended to by his coterie of militant boys, shielding him away from any eventual attack, which may possibly lead to his arrest,” reports Nigeria Standard.

It would be recalled that the EFCC had earlier this week given Tompolo one week to report at its head office annex on Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, or risk being declared wanted.

A letter from EFCC said the commission is investigating Tompolo for unclear dealings involving the sale of parcels of land worth about 13 billion naira to the Federal Government under the last administration.

Tompolo is expected to appear at the EFCC training room on Thursday, December 17.
A similar invitation was extended to Tompolo in November by the Head of Operations at the EFCC, Iliasu Kwabai, but he failed to appear and no correspondence was received from him.

Lalasticlala

SouthernBreeze:
Welcome back Bro

OZAOEKPE:
MIDOLIAN WAS ONCE LIKE THIS,,,,,,, AMINAT508

OZAOEKPE:
midolian..................

The Senate President Dr.Bukola Saraki yesterday said there was no anti-social media bill before the senate. Speaking on the sideline of Lagos Business School Dinner in which he was a guest, Saraki said “We have only debated the Principle of the bill, we have not gone into the details of the bill, so if there is any part of the bill that does not conform to human right, be rest assured that the senate will do the proper thing. So there was no bill that was brought forward called social media bill.

“I think there is need for clarity on that and to let you know that those that led the protest, we have received their letters, we have told them to be rest assured that by the time it goes to committee work, and go to public hearing some of these things will come up. But you must understand that when those bill come to the floor of the senate they come as argument on the principle of the bill, and the principle of that bill was Frivolous Petition, nothing to do with social media but later on we did find out that there was a section in it about social media.
“That will go away when it comes to third reading when you start the third reading, where you consider section by section.

Delivering a speech titled “Macroeconomic outlook for 2016 and legislative perspective at Lagos Business School breakfast club end of the year Dr. Bukola Saraki said “The 8th Senate is today at an advanced stage of carrying out one of the most far-reaching legislative reviews ever embarked upon by the legislature in Nigeria with the Doing Business Development Project which is aimed at eliminating obsolete business regulatory laws that have outlived their usefulness and in their place provide adequate legal, institutional and regulatory mechanisms to drive a new modern economy.

“Prior to this we have strategically utilized formal and informal meetings with key stakeholders including the NBA, the SEC, RMFAC, the ICPC, FIRS, and many other relevant agencies of government and critical industry leaders with a view to using gathered information as a critical tool to fashioning out what will make Nigeria a favourable investment destination.

More details soon

Lalasticlala

The Global Financial Integrity (GFI) ranked Nigeria after South Africa as the 10 biggest exporter of Illicit Financial Flows (IFF) between 2004 and 2013.

In a statement on Wednesday in Lagos issued by the Media Contact for GFI, Ms Christine Clough, GFI said the record was obtained from 20 emerging and developed economies worldwide.

It said that China came first with 139.2 billion dollars ouflow, followed by Russia (about 105 billion billion), Mexico came third with 52.8 billion dollars, while Poland came last with nine billion dollars outflow.

GFI said cumulatively emerging economies exported 1.1 trillion dollars (about N217 trillion) within the period.

It said that Nigeria alone exported 17.8 billion dollars about (N3.5 trillion), while South Africa exported 20.9 billion dollars during the period.
Dec. 9 is marked globally as International Anti-Corruption Day.

GFI is a Washington DC-based research and advisory organisation working to curtail illicit financial flows worldwide.

The UN scribe, Ban Ki-Moon, on Wednesday also called on world leaders to redouble efforts at fighting all forms of corruption in their countries.
The statement noted that the report entitled: “Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2004-2013,″ revealed that the 2013 IFF was higher than one trillion dollars obtained in 2011 by 100 billion dollars.

It added that the figure marked a dramatic increase from 2004, when illicit outflows totaled just 465.3 billion dollars (N9.2 trillion).

“This study clearly demonstrates that illicit financial flows are the most damaging economic problems faced by the world’s developing and emerging economies.

“This year at the UN, the mantra of ‘trillions not billions’ was continuously used to indicate the amount of funds needed to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Significantly, curtailing illicit flows is central to that effort,’’ Mr Raymond Baker, GFI President, said.

Lalasticlala

hinwazaka:
Check the link and you will find out

Some Nigerian football fans were on Saturday expelled from a football stadium in Senegal for displaying Biafran flags.

The fans were expelled minutes after they displayed Biafran flags alongside Nigerian flags at a football match between Nigeria and Algeria at the U-23 African Cup of Nations holding in Dakar, the Senegalese capital.

There have been protests in South-East Nigeria by Igbos who demand for a separate Biafran country. Biafra was also the name adopted by the Eastern Nigeria during the civil war between 1967 and 1970, after which a ‘no victor, no vanquish’ was declared by the federal government after Biafra was defeated.

On Saturday, the Senegalese football association officials considered the display of the Biafran flags at the Leopold Sedar Senghor stadium “a militant act”.

As a result, the Vice President of the Senegalese Football Federation, FSF, Amadou Kane, who was in charge of the organisation, ordered security officials to respond by tearing down the Biafran flags and posters and expelling the supporters involved.

Senegalese FA officials said the group took advantage of the presence of the media at the stadium to raise the Biafran flag.

Dressed in T-shirts with the Biafra logo, eye witnesses said the group “invaded” the left wing of the covered pavilion to flaunt the Biafran flag alongside that of Nigeria. They later displayed a large flag calling for Biafran autonomy.

The match eventually ended 0-0 with Nigeria coming second in Group B with five points, behind Algeria.

Nigeria will face Senegal in the semi-final next week while Algeria will battle South Africa.

Lalasticlala

PROVACATEUR:
You need to stick with what you can deduce easily instead of trying to speak parables when your teeth are not strong enough to churn it out

PROVACATEUR:
sorry your first comment is different from this shallow rebuttal. Nobody has monopoly for violence

PROVACATEUR:
Are you calling for reprisal attack indirectly or are you reminding us about the millions of death which your almajirii brothers have committed in which they went unpunished? Nobody has monopoly for violence

Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (June 2009-Feb 2014)

As soon as oil prices recovered, Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi (SLS) restored the Interbank and WDAS markets that Soludo had previously banned. But he then faced a somewhat strange problem later on. Oil prices were high but Nigeria was not building up its reserves for reasons that are perhaps now obvious. This meant that he did not have enough dollars to defend the naira and keep it stable as he wanted.

To solve this problem, he removed the one-year restriction on foreign investors who wanted to buy government bonds. (Previously, any foreign investor who wanted to buy Nigerian government bonds needed to hold the bonds for one year). The dollars came pouring in. But then this was what is known as ‘hot money’ i.e since you did not need to hold the investment for one year, the money poured in and out rapidly.

JP Morgan’s requirement to include Nigeria in its index was always that the market was kept liquid. As soon as this was done with the removal of the restriction, there was not much else standing in the way of Nigeria being included in the index. Nigeria’s Debt Management Office even took a 2-page advert in the newspapers congratulating President Jonathan on Nigeria’s inclusion in the JP Morgan Index.

Given that oil prices remained high throughout SLS time in office, some measure of stability was achieved. The naira was trading at 148 naira to the dollar when he took office in 2009 and was 164 naira by the time he was suspended from office in February 2014. The stability of the graveyard.

Godwin Emefiele and where we are today

It costs something like $30 to extract a barrel of crude oil in Nigeria. So when oil was trading at $110 Nigeria had a margin of around $80 to play with. But when oil drops to $45 as it has now, that $80 margin turns to $15 as the cost of getting the oil out of the ground still has to be incurred.

To put the above numbers another way — while oil prices have dropped by 60%, the revenues available to Nigeria have dropped by 81%. That is, revenues have dropped much more than oil prices have dropped. Nigeria is earning almost nothing these days and you can imagine how disastrous it will be if oil prices drop further to $40 or even less.
When things like these happen, one way to defend yourself is by unleashing your reserves. So for example, Algeria had something like $150 billion in reserves when the oil crisis hit. But as stated above, Nigeria did not save anything when the going was good so the country walked into this oil price crash practically naked. Reserves are allegedly $30 billion today but in reality they are much less (maybe around $20 billion when you account for all the money that is already ‘spoken for’)

Governor Emefiele has done the usual in response. He has banned the Interbank forex market and also banned 41 items from being eligible for forex, directly undoing what Soludo did. Forex is now essentially being rationed and the CBN is deciding who gets what and how much. Rumours of privileged people making a fortune from the confusion and arbitrage are circulating among bankers once again.

What can we learn from all this? The most obvious lesson here is that Nigeria has never quite figured out how to spend oil money. When prices are high, you save as much as you can. When prices fall, you open the tap and increase your spending. The point of this is to keep things going steady and avoid wild shocks in the economy.

What Nigeria instead does is to increase spending once oil prices go up with things like increased minimum wages, bloating the civil service or even outright theft. Politics always manages to bully economics. With the exception of the one time under Soludo, this is how things have always been — Nigeria is never ready for when oil prices drop. And yet, oil prices dropping is as sure to happen as night following day.

Another lesson is that the politicisation of the exchange rate of the naira is an unhealthy obsession in Nigeria. It gives politicians an incentive to wage war against reality by doing things that are economically harmful in the name of maintaining a ‘strong’ currency. Economic nationalism comes into fashion — why do we need to import rice when we can grow it here?!

Yet, the rhetoric only lasts till oil prices go back up and then politicians can return to their old ways.
The very act of trying to fiddle with the currency whenever we run into trouble is what really needs to be looked at. The moment oil prices crash, businesses and transactions that were perfectly legal suddenly become ‘unpatriotic’. And then a pointless argument about what should be imported and what should not predictably take up valuable media space.

Nigeria wants to have high oil prices and spend without saving. It then wants to keep its exchange rate ‘stable’ even when revenues have collapsed dramatically.

It is not possible to have all these things at the same time. It’s time to depoliticise the naira exchange rate by allowing the market to determine its fair value.

There are no easy answers to this problem. Having an economy that is not tied to the price of one product that is bound to have wild price swings is an obvious solution. But wanting a diversified economy and actually having one are two completely different things. And if Nigeria is going to diversify its economy, it has not even started yet.

Over the last 20 years or so, Nigeria has slowly but steadily moved towards a market-determined foreign exchange system. This is the right thing to do as it takes the matter out of the hands of politicians. Given the severity of the current crisis, all those gains are now being undone with all kinds controls and erratic moves that slowly choke the life out of the economy.

If Nigeria won’t save when oil prices are high, then allowing the naira to float and be determined by the market is the only credible option left. Who knows, this might even teach some sense.

Lalasticlala

Since 1986, the Nigerian naira’s relationship with the US dollar (and other foreign currencies) has been erratic, (un)predictable, violent and full of heartbreak and tears. The built in dysfunction has also made a lot of people very rich.

This piece seeks to trace the history of how Nigeria’s foreign exchange management became what it is to the point where the exchange rate of the naira has become a deeply political matter.
The current debate continues to be around whether or not Nigeria should devalue the naira. But what if devaluation is the answer to a non-existent question?


President Ibrahim Babaginda’s Second-Tier Foreign Exchange Market (SFEM)

In September 1986, the SFEM was introduced as part of a package of IMF reforms that general Babangida was forced to accept given the mess that Nigeria had managed to find itself. Before this, the naira exchanged for something like 90 kobo to $1.

By the time IBB left office in 1993, the naira was exchanging for 17 naira to $1. It was during this time that Bureau de Change were introduced into the economy.

The rate at which the naira depreciated in those few years probably explains why Nigerians have never gotten over the idea of a strong currency as the mark of a ‘strong’ economy. People only remember that things got worse as the naira lost ground to the dollar. To make matters worse, the industrialisation that a weaker exchange was supposed to bring about never materialised.

President Sani Abacha (1993-1998)

From the day that Abacha took power to the day he died on June 8 1998, a period of five years, the ‘official’ exchange rate of the naira to the dollar never changed from 22 naira to $1. The
Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market (AFEM) was introduced in 1995 as a way for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to sell forex to end users at ‘market’ rates.

But it is one thing to declare that the naira is worth 22 naira to $1. It is quite another thing to be able to satisfy all the people who will demand to buy dollars at that price. Given that oil prices were below $20 a barrel in this period, there was a very limited amount of dollars available (whatever was left after those in charge had helped themselves).

This rigid exchange rate gave birth to a phenomenon that is now a permanent fixture today — the mainstreaming of the forex black market. At one point, the naira was trading as high as 88 naira to $1 while the official rate remained at 22 naira. Bankers came up with they used to call the ‘blended’ rate. Say a client requested $1 million from their bank, the bank would inflate it to say $10 million and then take the request to AFEM knowing that CBN would never approve the full request anyway. Whatever was obtained from CBN was then ‘blended’ with the rest obtained from the black market.

It does not take a genius to know that if the black market rate was four times the official rate, people made an absolute fortune from the arbitrage. A lot of banking fortunes that remain to this day in Nigeria were made in this period. It was sweet business.

Joseph Sanusi (CBN governor 1999 to 2004)

The Interbank Foreign Exchange Market (IFEM) was introduced under Joseph Sanusi. Given how Nigeria’s reserves had been depleted severely in the two years before he took over, the naira was never going to survive the ‘military fiction’ rate of 22 naira for very long. Within a year, the naira was trading at 85 naira but this time, the gap with the black market had closed considerably at 105 naira to the $1—particularly if compared to what happened under president Abacha.

In addition to low oil prices, Nigeria was also struggling to service its $33 billion foreign debt which was eating up valuable foreign exchange.
All the things we see today were also experimented with under Sanusi. He suspended the IFEM for six months when the naira came under pressure and also introduced a limit to the margin (above CBN’s rate) that banks could sell their own forex for. Current governor Godwin Emefiele is doing the same thing today.

Again, the attempt to ‘control’ the exchange rate gave rise to all sorts of funny games. Since the rate at which banks could sell their forex was fixed, they simply complied with this rate at the IFEM but then collected an extra payment outside the system to make up the difference with the ‘real rate’ at which they were actually selling. Some bankers called this game ‘NIBSS and Drafts’ i.e. you pay the official rate via NIBSS (Nigeria Inter-bank Settlement System) but settle the difference with a bank draft.

Forex round tripping games flourished. Nigeria had all sorts of banks which totalled around 90 at one point. The licences were cheap and you could make the cost of the licence back in one year from round tripping. It was a win-win business. Banks also set up foreign entities which they used to help their clients move money abroad. One bank, now defunct, used to regularly reward employees with a Volkswagen Jetta for outstanding performance. In banking circles, the joke then was that the Jetta was always won by the bankers in the treasury department i.e. the best round trippers in the bank.

Chukwuma Soludo (2004-2009) and The Oil Boom


Starting in late 2003, oil prices began to rise steadily from around $30 per barrel till they peaked at $140 per barrel in the middle of 2008. It was also during this period of rising oil prices that Nigeria obtained its $18 billion debt relief from the Paris Club. It was like being in heaven.

First of all, rising oil prices allowed Nigeria’s foreign reserves to increase substantially. There were reserves and there was also the Excess Crude Account (ECA) which had more than $20 billion at one point in 2008.

What these happy events allowed governor Soludo do was to harmonise the four different exchange rates at the time — CBN, Interbank, Bureau de Change and wire rates. He did this by liberalising the foreign exchange manual and including all sorts of things that were previously not accepted as valid for foreign exchange requests. For example, previously you could only obtain foreign exchange to bring in ‘raw materials’. But in the world we now live in, manufacturing has changed to the point where you might need to import some finished products to add to your own process. His liberalisation recognised this.

He also made things like medical bills and even credit card bills allowable. And he achieved his aim. In a short while, the different rates converged to within one naira of each other given that there was no need to go to the black market or bureaux de change to get forex when you could get it officially from your bank. Nigeria was awash with dollars and bankers at the time spoke of not even needing to go to CBN for dollars for weeks. Indeed, they say CBN staff used to harass them as to why they had not come to buy dollars. This was the period when the naira gained about 20% against the dollar without anyone explicitly trying to ‘strengthen’ it.

And then the inevitable happened — oil prices started to fall from late 2008 to less than $50 by the end of the year. But this time around, Nigeria was in a pretty good position to weather the storm with reserves totalling around $62 billion. Nevertheless, Soludo engineered some kind of artificial scarcity of forex to allow a devaluation of the naira. He also banned the Interbank market for six months.

All told, when Soludo took office, the naira was trading at 127 naira to $1 and by the time he left in 2009, it was around the 147 naira mark. But this masks the fact that in 2008, it actually went as low as 115 naira to $1 at one point. Oil prices started to recover pretty quickly and so if Soludo had done nothing, it would have just cost Nigeria some of its reserves and normal service would have resumed after about eight months. But the temptation to ‘do something’ is always strong.

DickDastardly:

DickDastardly:
Is Buhari your father? NO
Did your father form APC? NO
Are you from Kogi? Probably NO
Are you more Nigerian than any other Nairalander? NO

Who are you? Just another online anonimous confused youth who thinks that by calling other Nigerians wailers makes his own deficiencies vanish.

Note: Yahaya's emergence is the next best thing to happen to our democracy after Jonathans peaceful handover.

Senator Dino Melaye representing Kogi West Senatorial District has since 2010 illegally operated bank accounts in the US, according to bank statements obtained by SaharaReporters.

Mr. Melaye, who once styled himself an anti-corruption activist, opened two accounts--one a current account, the other a savings account--in the name of “Daniel Din Melaye,” posing as a student.

SaharaReporters learnt that, by leaving the impression of himself as a student, Senator Melaye was able to open a “CampusEdge” current account with account number 4460 1649 8396 and a regular savings account with account number 4460 1647 5966 with Bank of America in the state of Maryland.

Senator Melaye obtained a bank debit card with account number ending with #8873. It is the senator's transactions with the debit card that gave away him away as the owner of the accounts.

One of Mr. Melaye's last transactions on the account took place on December 4th as he approved payment for a transaction relating to the purchase of cosmetics from a Kremlin-based MagnitKosmetik store. Also, on September 1, Mr. Melaye approved payment to a New York-based Schweiger Dermatology.

Mr. Melaye's operation of the foreign account while he is an elected public officer of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is a violation of Nigerian law. The breach could cost him his seat at the Nigerian Senate if he is successfully prosecuted by the Code of Conduct Tribunal which is currently trying Senate President Bukola Saraki, a close associate of Mr. Melaye's.

TopHand:
MY sister you are quite right when people are quiet and r not chestbeaters does not mean that they cannot not act the northerners were quiet the westerner were quiet and what did some igbo troublemakers do they made bread to celebrate but unfortunately opened the floodgates of death

24lolade:


Graduated in 1999 and went for Nysc in 2001,am I missing something?


24

Jarus:
I don't know anything about registration fees, but I guess 40k max for each diet.

If you at first attempt, you can finish it in one and half years.

As an accounting grad, you will get exemption for one or 2 subjects.

jamace:
5 SANs warn INEC against supplementary election in Kogi State : https://www.nairaland.com/2781443/kogi-guber-5-sans-engaged#40693026

HungerBAD:
Nigeria needs peace.

Just imagine, if there is retaliation in the North? in the calculation and game of who loses more, i think it will be the Easterners. There is a reason, people have been begging these guys to take it easy.

In the game called "WAR" everybody is a loser.

Let us not start something, we cannot be able to predict the ending.