reindeer:

True.
But i dont see what America will linger on in Afghanistan for any longer. If they successfuly extricate themselves from Afghanistan then i guess those sentiments may not be as strong as they would have been otherwise.

reindeer:

You are wrong.The Pakistani gathered the intelligence and passed it onwards and they were informed(albeit at the last minute) of the operation and they went along.

"We are very glad that our American partners did," he said. "They had superior intelligence, they had superior technology, and we are grateful to them and to God for having given us this opportunity to bring this chapter to an end."

Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner to the United Kingdom, told CNN Pakistan knew the operation was going to happen but he was unclear when it was informed about it.

He said both Pakistan and the United States shared intelligence, and Pakistan was "in the know of certain things" and "what happened happened with our consent."

"Americans got to know him -- where he was first -- and that's why they struck it and struck it precisely," he said

culled from CNN.

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Nigeria’s debut international bond issue saw strong demand from investors in spite of worries over its depleted oil savings.

The country, which has been at the centre of controversy over its fund to gather windfall oil revenues, sold $500m to investors.

Olusegun Aganga, Nigeria’s finance minister, said the issue was more than twice oversubscribed. “It is a debut bond, it shows we have met with international standards getting the deal to market. It means our corporates can access longer-term funds and it reinforces our position as an economic and political leader in Africa,” he said.

Mr Aganga said some of the world’s biggest investment funds from 18 different countries subscribed to the bond issue. However, some of the world’s biggest fund managers told the Financial Times earlier they would not buy the bonds because of Nigeria’s deteriorating public finances.

Concerns over a huge outflow of money from Nigeria’s “rainy day” oil fund, known as the excess crude account (ECA), forced the government to pay investors higher yields than would otherwise have been expected, investors said.

The 10-year bond priced with yields of 7 per cent, higher than other similar bonds from other sub-Saharan nations. Gabon and Ghana 10-year bonds trade at 5.8 per cent and 6.2 per cent respectively.

One investor said: “Ordinarily we would have bought this bond as Africa is a coming market in our view, with potential for strong returns. But we were not impressed by the Nigerians.”

Mr Aganga said the pricing was a good result and that if Ghana launched a bond in today’s market it could expect to pay more than 7 per cent.

Nigerian officials and bankers managing the 10-year bond deal insisted that there was considerable appetite for the bonds. Bankers said order books or demand rose to about $1bn.

But worries about how President Goodluck Jonathan’s government has run the excess crude account – into which surpluses from crude exports above the budgeted price of oil are supposed to accumulate – marred what has been an eagerly awaited bond issue.

Many investors had expected Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, to issue bonds as long ago as 2008. The financial crisis and drop in oil prices delayed the deal, the fourth international sovereign bond from a sub-Saharan nation, excluding South Africa.

In spite of the problems, Nigeria remains an attractive investment because of its large oil reserves, growing private sector and banking reforms. It is also only the fourth sub-Saharan country, excluding South Africa, to issue debt. This scarcity helps attract demand.

Investors also stressed that yields of 7 per cent were an attractive return for a country that was likely to remain on a stable financial footing, given that oil prices were rising.

They point out that Nigerian bonds are not a safe investment like German bonds, which is why the yield premium is much higher than in these developed economies.

Nigeria’s ECA has dwindled by more than $30bn in the past four years – about $7bn last year alone – according to officials and analysts. It now stands at less than $1bn, they say.

Foreign reserves, of which the ECA is a part, inched up month by month to $33.5bn by mid-January but are still down more than a quarter on year-ago levels.

Nigeria has shrugged off the concerns, saying the spending was needed to defend the currency against increased dollar demand, fund projects in the power sector, and provide seed funding for a planned sovereign wealth fund, which should have a firmer legal basis than the ECA for safeguarding oil savings.

The special account has stirred political tensions because under the federal constitution the revenues should be split between the federal, state and local governments.

appletango:

but he's got his hands firmly caught in the cookie jar this time. rule number one in politics is: DONT GET CAUGHT. if you dont believe me, just ask nixon.

as a sitting president who's cornerstone campaign strategy of late has been 'free and fair elections, free and fair elections, free and fair elections' to now have such a damming document released in a hammer blow to his ambition.

this is the stick that will be used to beat him over and over again.

i think he's done.

oweniwe:

The only way to end this recurrent problem in jos and other parts of the country is to ban nomadism to be replaced with cattle ranches. Then nomads will no longer slaughter other people in the name of grazing land/farms/territory 

KAMPALA, Uganda (Dow Jones)--The Ugandan army evicted hundreds of immigrant families from communally owned land in the oil-rich Bulisa district over the weekend in a bid to diffuse tensions with locals, officials told Dow Jones Newswires Monday.

Zulu Ganyana, the western Uganda police spokeswoman, said that evictions were carried out following a court ruling last week which nullified the claims of immigrant pastoralists on hundreds of hectares of the land in the oil-rich rift valley.

"The court ruled that the pastoralists were occupying the land illegally," she said, adding that at least 400 people were affected on Sunday.

However, Mukasa Lugalambi, the lawyer representing the evicted families told Dow Jones Newswires separately the army had acted unlawfully in enforcing the evictions because court orders are supposed to be enforced by bailiffs.

"The government's interest in this land is oil, they are not doing this for any tribe, and that's why they are involving the army," he said, adding that he was preparing to file a fresh suit in the Ugandan high court Monday challenging the eviction.

According to Lugalambi, Court threw out the earlier suit on technical grounds after a preliminary objection from the attorney general.

The Uganda police arrested Grace Baroroza, the leader of the affected families, Monday after a group of families attempted to resist eviction. Baroroza told Dow Jones Newswires from the Bulisa police station that she would mobilize her fellow ethnic Banyarwanda tribe not to vote for incumbent President Yoweri Museveni in the forthcoming polls.

"We bought this land but government continues to harass us, they should know that we have the numbers to frustrate government in next year's election," she said.

Tensions between the pastoralists and local Bagungu tribes have been mounting and in 2008, there were several clashes between opposing tribes over the hitherto communally owned land. The pastoralists started migrating into the area around 2006 and acquired title deeds over 1,000 hectares of communally owned land after allegedly buying the said land from local communities.

According to Lugalambi, the entire land in dispute including that without title deeds measures around 8 square miles around block 2, where U.K.-based Tullow Oil PLC (TLW.LN), the operator of the block, is preparing to develop the Kasemene oil field in the fourth quarter of 2011.

Activists say the pastoralists had been aided by some government officials in acquiring the land, the value of which has been rising since the discovery of commercial oil reserves in 2006.

General David Tinyefuza, the Uganda coordinator of the intelligence services, who headed the operation to evict the pastoralists, told reporters Sunday that the army was enforcing a legal court order.

"The evictions are legal and there is nothing wrong with the army getting involved," he said.

Activists have in the past criticized the involvement of the army in the land conflicts in the oil region.

Last month, U.K.-based anti-corruption watchdog, Global Witness, criticized the involvement of the army and Uganda's first family in the oil sector, saying that there is conflict of interest and personalization of oil exploration activities in the country.

Lieutenant Colonel Muhoozi Keinerugaba, the son of the Ugandan president, is the overall commander of the elite Special Forces unit, which is in charge of the security of the oil wells, while General Salim Saleh, the president's brother, owns Saracen security group, which provides private security services to oil exploration companies operating in the country.

Uganda has been discovered at least 15 oil fields in three blocks in the oil region and the country is expected to produce at least 200,000 barrels of oil a day by 2016, according to Tullow.

Discovered reserves so far are estimated at 2.5 billion barrels, according to Tullow.

The alleged leader of several notorious kidnapping gangs in Nigeria's Abia state has been killed, its army says.

Army spokesman Sagir Musa said a joint military task force had shot dead Obioma Nwankwo, also known as Osisikankwu, in a forest gun battle.

Nwankwo had been wanted for some months after an increase of kidnapping and robberies in the area.

Correspondents say people began celebrating in the main town of Aba when they heard news of his death.

Hostage-taking has become so bad in the south-eastern state that many middle-class Nigerians travel with armed escorts.

Hostages tend to be released unharmed after a ransom is paid.

A joint military task force was deployed to the state in September to restore order at the height of the violence when many businesses were forced to close and some children were abducted from their school bus.

The children were later released after a military operation.

According to Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper, Nwankwo had said in an interview last month that he had turned to militancy to protest against police abuses and extortion.

"We became militants because of the failure of government to live up to its responsibilities towards us. Many of us are graduates. Some are university drop-outs, who could not continue for want of fund or sponsors. There are secondary school leavers without a future in school or jobs," he told the paper.

Abia state is on the fringes of the Niger Delta, where gunmen target oil workers for a ransom.