₦airaland Forum

aventura:
the toothpick analogy was to synonymise "preference" in the midst of availability.

I get it but that would not work based on the psychology of the people, who consider everything made elsewhere as quality.
All developed countries incl China allowed their local industry to develop before partially opening up. Yet, they put all all sorts of barriers to protect their markets.
Brazil for instance has a closed economy on things they have a competitive advantage despite the fact that they import stuffs.

Nice read and good article.
A break away from the emotions driven drivel/falsehood that are continously posted. The writer wrote about life from his point of view without getting involved in the APC /PDP inter ethnic crap.
He also proffered solution from the civic point of view.

But like that sapele pastor said, you will never get good results from low quality people.
The solution is the drastic reduction in their numbers, their reach/ spread and the isolation of their mess to their communities.
You can only achieve this in a restructured polity.
Most of my battles here are on low quality arguments.

Hail storm

I agree with most of what he said apart from the toothpick part.
It all depends on how serious you are.
Impose death penalty on the smuggling and selling of prohibited with strict enforcement by well paid units and you will get a reaction.
Since oil money is easy, Nigerian leaders cannot be bothered about enforcement.

SamuelAnyawu:
You guys are lucky you have enough cash and investments and having fun in London Millions of Nigerians can't eat a 3square meal per day.




Next!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Since 1982
Or you are only just waking up when it got to you.

santori:
I don't think you know there are so many dialects in yoruba. an egba man in ogun may find it difficult to understand an akoko man in ondo state, and this also goes for the other dialects in the language. Don't get it twisted, ijaws are not indigenous to lagos and ogun. except for the eastern flank of ondo state creeks

They are not indigenous to on do state .

Beautiful .
I hope the owners of this new build control the land in the surrounding areas .
I want one right now.

At the end of the day ,
The major oil coys will continue to divest
the FG will divest .

Some of these clowns are laughable.
Where and how do they make these folks
Not surprised.
I personally think that the SW need to send a troublemaker to the National Assembly to call out all the BS always coming out of the place.

1 Herdsmen men are not fulani
2 They are not there to spread poverty
3 transformation agenda
Many of the lawmakers there right now are sedentary low quality folks who ride into power on other people's coat tails.
Are we talking about the Jonathan who manufactured kerosine subsidy to steal $6 billion.

TippyTop:
Compare to the suffering now, Dr Jonathan and his team were geniuses. Buhari is not known to be a patient listener or a good economist, yet his ministers are in awe of him.
No one dare advice Bubu on the way forward, therein lies our problems. Bubu is Mr-know-it-all.

Yeah , he did a good job mortgaging your future.
More Jonathan to your elbow and hopefully one day, the Nigerian structure will change an Jonathan's will take charge in your state or region.

Dollarised over leveraged noneconomy.
Greece loading .
Iweala and Jonathan did a hit job on Nigeria.
Textbook shock therapy ( watch video below)
We all knew where we were heading during the subsidy protest.
I will take my time to gather some of the resources ( books , articles and videos ) for those who are interested.
If Nigeria cannot ride out the storm and fall into the hands of the IMF, expect almost everything owned by the federal government to be sold .
This includes NNPC and those oil blocks .


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxxOIfrtYYY

And you are at fault

One thing about conservatives is that they will keep doubling down on the past until they are either left behind, or their stance leads to crisis.

trillville:
What are the similarities between Venezuela and Nigeria
1. Major oil exporting countries.
2. Over-bloated civil services.
3. Lack of adequate tax regime.
4. High political instability which in turn leads to cronyism and patronage over merit.

These characteristics are all clear symptoms of the Dutch disease.

Although Venezuela has functional refineries, the country is still in a big mess. They probably have better electricity supply too. They provide more social services to their people so the percentage of the recurrent expenditure may be higher than ours.

You damn right.
Oil
Corrupt oil industry
thieving conspiring elites.
Poor masses
Dysfunctional politics
Street gang culture
Poor services relative to wealth( still better than Naija).

The greedy capitalists were replaced by greedy comrades. Influence from outside does not help as well.
Nigeria and Venezuela would have done better without oil.

CFCman:
Mehn!! I can't wait to see what Lagos would be like in 10-12 yrs time. It, alongside Abuja would become the financial/trade centers of Africa.

Moreover, a gentleman's agreement between Lagos and the other 5 SW states could be signed which would stipulate that the Lekki and MMA airports would be the only international passenger airports in the zone. This could maximize the economic viability of both airports.

Abuja is poo.
An artificial welfare capital. A total waste of money
Ibadan,port harcourt,Kano,onitsha have more claims to trade or finance than Abuja.

While some are bombing and killing

All are signs of a failed state of the people , by the people and for the people.
I laugh .
They buy gas guzzlers and then turn around and complain about high oil prices.italian investment banker dey ride him scooter , British professor dey ride him 1.2L Vauxhall , Dutch go jejelly dey ride him bicycle Nigerian man go carry used hummer dey form big man.

4Play:
You guys can't see that you are tying yourself in knots. If you tell people that OBJ "saved" $64bn when oil $30 p/b (which is false anyway) and saved $29bn when oil was $16 p/b, they are inevitably going to start asking why Buhari can't do same when oil is $45 p/b.

All those so called foreign investors . All those foreign airlines , all the dollar debit cards given to Nigerian ,all the road contracts being given to Syrians ,Lebanese and Jordanian carpenters, all the expensive champagnes and bubbly , Gucci bag and Armani taste , private jet hires , the trillions of Naija printed for election sharing , all the embassy fees being repatriated, the crap Nigerians import , tuition fees etc
Do you think that these people keep the money earned in Nigeria?
Do you thinks these habits are cheap for a country that does not export much?
Tuition fees alone cost the country over $2 billion?
Then you have to adjust everything for the inflation.

Everything written here is backed with facts .

wordychap:
Oil is now 47 dollars a barrel, buhari has no excuse to fail as much as he is failing now
He's just bungled d peace in d Niger delta
He doesn't have a viable economic team to run the economy

Take this to your friends to explain to you.
The income from $47 s barrel is how much exactly?

(47- 30) * 0.6 = $10/ barrel
Out of this , Nigeria has to pay JV capital share.
The country will be left with maybe $7/ barrel
Even at full production for 365 days and ready buyers,
This is approximately $5 billion.
Nigeria needs forex of $60 billion per annum based on the dollarised , import everything economy .
The diaspora chips in $25 billion. Trade with neighbouring countries probably chips in another $1 billion.cocoa , timber , rubber , gum Arabic probably chip in another billion
How are you going to cover the balance of payment deficit of approximately $28 billion .

This is a rough calculation and it is very optimistic. Nigeria's been begging countries to buy her oil for the past 4 years or sell even cheaper than the market rate

odikimi:
The federal allocation for Bayelsa has been less than 2b in the past months. how can you develope and pay workers with that amount? Their major problem is their people and not the government. The people don't invest so as to attract employment. everyone there depends on the state government for survival. The highest business there is keke and hotel.
Do you know they import bread and sachet water from Delta State?

This is because our "Oyel" and gas will earn Nigeria less than $9 billion this year and with the electric cars that I saw were becoming more common on the streets of American and Europeans cities, Oyel is done.
Bayelsa has a civil service the size of Lagos civil service.
Anyone who wants to see through Jonathan's soul should look at bayelsa.
Ghost fishes must be on the payroll.

wordychap:
Jonathan left close to 30 b dollars in foreign reserve for this government
A viable agric sector
What's become of all that in 11 months?

Big deal .
Obasanjo left $64 billion at an average of less than $30\ barrel and in spite of ND criminal bombings.
22 billion of that reserve was revenues in the ECA.
Jonathan not only spent , stole or wasted $34 billion of what OBJ left , he also squandered the $500 billion earned during the boom. Include the debt mess he left behind in spite of the revenues.
Algeria saved forex of over $150 billion .
Jonathan dollarised the economy in such a way that the $29 billion he left in CBN will last for less 6 months.
By the way , a country needs foreign reserves to pay for imports .
The way Obj managed the economy, Nigerian should have had nothing less than $120 billion at the end of Jonathan tenure ,give or take $30 billion.
This is how much should have been left behind.
You are talking about $29 billion which took OBJ less than 3 years to save at $16 a barrel .
By the end of 2010 , Jonathan had already lost control of the economy. This was masked by high oil prices.

wordychap:
Let's keep politics aside, this buhari's govt has lost grip of things. A revolution is called for which should go concorrently with the planned protest for fuel price hike.

Lost grips or fighting the fire that was already set?
If he had not acted the way he intervened, most of you would have been queuing for UN charity grains by now. The same way Somalian used to queue for grains.
The day Jonathan left, Nigeria had only 3-6 months of foreign exchange left.
Most people are clueless about the fiscal train wreck Jonathan left behind .when I join the fuel subsidy protest, it was in the knowledge that this was going to happen .

yemmit90:
That is the problem of many Nigerians, they're quick to compare anything to make unrealistic points.

If every worker are to receive 56,000 or more as a minimum wage, where on earth do you expect FG to get money for other sectors of economy. Have we even considered the Inflation that this increament will brings along.

Instead of us to demand for subsidization of Agriculture and Health service, we are fighting over fuel subsidy that only benefit the few.

Most Nigerians are innumerate, ignorant and if you asked me, should not be given the vote.
They use their votes to hurt themselves and interest.
You will be shocked by the statements coming out of the mouths of PhD holders and professors.
Already,public servants consume all ( 100% )the federal incomes in Nigeria . They eat all and then provide shoddy services and bad outcomes.
That alone is enough to tell you that not a penny more should be put into the civil service.
What about the 97% who are not civil servants?
They also think that government only exist to pay salaries and provide services for free.
On another note , Algeria came out of the oil boom with a foreign reserve of over $140 billion.

Pedrop:
meanwhile, conspiracy in Nigeria had Northerners taking up all oil wells while there partner in crime from west occupy all administrative positions in oil companies at the detriment of the owners, while at the same time using Ibadan Lagos propaganda houses to tell minorities in South that Igbos( whom have their own oil and other resources in their lands ) are after their oil. Thank God for social media and recent events in NigerDelta. God is alive and always there for Igbos.

Nothing more than beer palor / market Square news

989900:
Where is Pat Utomi, Oby, Sanusi, and all of them now?

Whet the country with imported fuel they said . . .

At what cost?

The Naira is on a free fall as it is.

And by the time salaries are increased and budget monies released, and oil prices . . . it's just going to be anarchy!

So much for cosmetic fixes.

There are somethings you can't just 'short cut'.

One of my lecturers once said that most of Nigeria's intelligentsia are quacks who passed through school cramming the whole textbooks.
The first shock you get when you study overseas is the emphasis on research rather than testing.
Utomi, Ekwesili and Co put on the toga of being economist .I have never seen them build mathematical or economic models to back up most of the jargons they spit on radio and TV.
To put thing in perspective,

Ajaokuta steel was been 97% complete in 1982.
It is like a caterer having all the tools to make soup but yet cannot cook because it is not 100%.
If you can smelt iron and steel, you can make anything made of iron and steel.
At 90% complete, ajaokuta was capable of producing the components of power plants and 1000 ajaokutas.
The useless and unpatriotic Nigerian politicians economists and lawyers used economic arguments to answer what was an engineering and industrialisation question.
Abacha used ajaokuta to steal over $2 billion

Buhari fall my hand on this devaluation thing.

I was hoping that he would maintain his stance.
They accused him of running a command and control policy. Command and control was and is still exactly what Nigeria needs.
You can only do this with patriotic, competent and incorruptible Men whose job is to change the course Nigeria has been travelling for 60 years.
A lot of useless and socially unproductive / destructive activities happen in that country on a regular basis.
A lot of misplaced spending also takes place.
Nigeria has an economy similar to that of a dying super power or civilisation( service economy) . While the super still remembers how to make some stuffs, Nigeria makes absolutely nothing.
WE CANNOT EVEN BUILD OUR OWN ROADS.
if all the so called elites, after 60 years of independence,have not been able to build the capacity to construct our roads, then they are useless elites.
A new set of elites, preferably younger,patriotic, intelligent and competent, are urgently needed.
In order countries, when the elites start spending on art works $50,000 champagnes, $5 million parties, you know that it is time to increase the higher rate of tax.
It means that they are making easy money and are not paying optimum taxes.
Same thing goes for the materialistic masses.
Money hearted through serious hardwork is never wasted. It is more often than not, reinvested.
A lot of products we import in Nigeria can be made at home. Even with poor power supply.
I hope to hear from the textbook economist like
Pat Utomi, Ekwesili and the political rats who are constituting a nuisance online.
Nigeria cannot borrow, import, financialize or legalise herself into development. ( Banking,importation, union thuggery, and law seems to be the only profitable activities after churches and oil theft, politics ).
The state is broken. Nigeria failed to do anything with the oil money when it was worth something.
The real exchange value of the naira to the dollars lies between 450 and 1500. This is because Nigeria does not make most of what she consumes and hardly export anything.

Food for thought
I have always argue that payments due for previous bad behaviour is what Nigeria deserve. Crime and punishment. My stand remains as it was.
One good thing is the opportunity to make the desired corrections. I remember during the abacha regime, due to harsh realities.
Nigeria started making beverage, candles, nylon bags etc in their bedrooms. Civil servants were part time farmers
This is the attitude that will save Nigeria.
By the way.
WHO GAVE DOLLAR DEBIT CARDS TO NIGERIANS?
The persons whose idea it was to hand dollar debit cards to Nigerians ( a people who make nothing and only excel at shopping ) are same textbook quacks who were pressuring Buhari to devalue.
I am sure that in 99.9% of cases , the dollars were going in one direction only . Out of Nigeria.

What you see there are the tourism potentials of yorubaland that we can only start to enjoy when we leave this country.
Peace is wealth
security is wealth
civilisation is wealth.
Omoluabi is wealth.
As beautiful of those wonders of nature are, it has nothing on the creeks and lagoons of Ondo and ogun state.
Nice one naptu.

Adam Smith

Adam Smith wrote about the tonnage bounty ( subsidies) paid to the white herring fishery and how it has been too common for vessels to fit out for the sole purpose of catching, not the fish, but the bounty(Subsidies).

Today's worst news.
These same people are the main reasons why obj saved the Excess Crude and built up the foreign exchange.
A patriotic act. Obj called their bluffs time and time over again.
You are not independent country if you are a perpetual or chronic debtor.
The IMF is controlled by powerful American investment banks. Those banks are only interested in making money by any means possible. After lending you the money, they will look for ways to make you pay over and over again.
I am sure the IMF wants the exchange rate to float freely.

What Nigerian unpatriotic quacks say will happen
Everything will normalise after borrowing from the IMF and devaluing the naira


What will actually happen

The political thieves,foreigners,foreign firms and wealthy Nigerians with naira trapped in the Nigerian economy will convert their naira to dollars and shipped them out. (The same thing happened in Greece.)
The money borrowed ends up not providing any benefit to the country.
In the meantime The Nigerian debt has becomes larger.

Now I expect the parallel market to devalue further in order to maintain their margin. That is, if they've not done so already.
While I predicted the list directly below when Jonathan was squandering the country's resources, it is very important that Buhari rejigs is team, reorder his budget and rethink policy to deliver better services delivery as quickly as possible. (E.g step can be taken to reduce 25% of Nigerian fuel consumption in Lagos and the bloated and corrupt budget of the national assembly )
Emphasis on quickly.

Runaway Inflation
Civil servants strikes for more salaries
More inflation
More hardship for non civil servants.
Interest rates will go up.

The Nigerian economy is bedevilled by evil spirits( Nigerians).
The only places where the economy works are in poor autonomous or isolated villages where

1 prices are not set arbitrarily.
2 the laws of demand and supply actually works.
3 The value of the naira is governed by it's purchasing power and not the foreign exchange value.
4 inflation is low (local goods).

kropotkin11:
I just picked up a particular issue and we all know Nigeria has many many 'issues'.

Yes, I know. I am only emphasising the main problem.
THE CORRUPTION which breeds and amplifies every other affliction.

Can corruption be controlled by reform or is it so much the essential fuel sustaining political elites that it will only be ended – if it ends at all – by revolutionary change?

The answer varies according to which countries one is talking about, but in many - particularly those relying on the sale of natural resources like oil or minerals - it is surely too late to expect any incremental change for the better. Anti-corruption drives are a show to impress the outside world or to target political rivals.

The anti-corruption summit in London this week may improve transparency and disclosure, but it can scarcely be very effective against politically well-connected racketeers, busily transmuting political power into great personal wealth.

This is peculiarly easy to do in those countries in the Middle East and Africa which suffer from what economists call “the resource curse”, where states draw their revenues directly from foreign buyers of their natural resources. The process is described in compelling detail by Tom Burgis in his book, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers and the Systematic Theft of Africa’s Wealth. He quotes the World Bank as saying that 68 per cent of people in Nigeria and 43 per cent in Angola, respectively the first and second largest oil and gas producers in Africa, live in extreme poverty, or on less than $1.25 a day. The politically powerful live parasitically off the state’s revenues and are not accountable to anybody.

Burgis explains the devastating outcome of a government acquiring such great wealth without doing more than license foreign companies to pump oil or excavate minerals. This “creates a pot of money at the disposal of those who control the state. At extreme levels the contract between rulers and the ruled breaks down because the ruling class does not need to tax the people – so it has no need for their consent.”

He writes primarily about Africa south of the Sahara, but his remarks apply equally to the oil states of the Middle East. He rightly concludes that “the resource industry is hardwired for corruption. Kleptocracy, or government by theft, thrives. Once in power, there is little incentive to depart.” Autocracy flourishes, often same ruler staying for decades.
Most, but not all, of this is true of the Middle East oil producers. A difference is that most of these have patronage and client systems through which oil wealth funds millions of jobs. This goes a certain way in distributing oil revenues among the general population, though the benefits are unfairly skewed towards political parties or dominant sectarian and ethnic groups.

In Iraq there are seven million state employees and pensioners out of a population of 33 million who are paid $4bn a month or a big chunk of total oil income. Often these employees don’t do much or, on occasion, anything at all, but it is an exaggeration to imagine that Iraq’s oil money is all syphoned off by the ruling elite.

I remember in one poor Shia province in south Iraq talking to local officials who said that they had just persuaded the central government to pay for another 50,000 jobs, though they admitted that they had no idea what these new employees would be doing.

Reformers frequently demand that patronage be cut back in the interests of efficiency, but a more likely outcome of such a change is that a smaller proportion of the population would benefit from the state income.

This could be the result of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s radical plans to transform the way Saudi Arabia is run and end its reliance on oil by 2030. He may well find that the way Saudi society works has long gelled and face strong resistance to changing a system in which ordinary Saudis feel entitled to some sort of job and salary.

The “resource curse” is not readily reversible, because it eliminates other forms of economic activity. The price of everything produced in an oil state is too expensive to compete with the same goods made elsewhere so oil becomes the only export. Migrants pour in as local citizens avoid manual labour or employment with poor pay and conditions.

A further consequence of the curse is that the rulers of resource rich states – like many an individual living on an unearned income – get an excessive and unrealistic idea of their own abilities. Saddam Hussein was the worst example of such megalomania, starting two disastrous wars against Iran and Kuwait. But the Shah of Iran was not far behind the Iraqi leader in grandiose ideas, blithely ordering nuclear power stations and Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft.

Muammur Gaddafi insisted that Libyans study the puerile nostrums of the Green Book, and those failing that part of the public examinations about the book, were failed generally and had to re-take all their exams again.

Can “the looting machine” in the Middle East, Africa and beyond be dismantled or made less predatory?

Its gargantuan size and centrality to the interest of ruling classes probably makes its elimination impossible, though competition, transparency and more effective bureaucratic procedures in the award of contracts might have some effect. The biggest impulse to resistance locally to official corruption has come because the fall in the price of oil and other commodities since 2014 means that the revenue cake has become too small to satisfy all the previous beneficiaries.

The mechanics and dire consequences of this system are easily explained though often masked by neo-liberal rhetoric about free competition.

In authoritarian states without accountability or a fair legal system, this approach becomes a license to loot. Corruption cannot be tamed because it is at the very heart of the system.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dismantling-the-looting-machine-of-global-corruption-is-near-impossible-and-ordinary-people-could-a7028011.html

Fuel scarcity is not so much about the lack of crude oil but theft and corruption

Poor power supply is not so much about lack of resource but theft and corruption.........

Water

Road...


You can pick anything and everything not working in Nigeria and apply the same statement