₦airaland Forum

Acidosis:
Right, and they're not ready to pay tax to unaccountable kleptomaniancs. It's the right to reject the bill.

If you have no issues paying tax to thieves, then you're probably a thief too.

The very reason why those "kleptomaniacs" are unaccountable is because they haven't had to rely on taxpayers to hold them accountable. It's easy to overlook corruption when the funds being looted seem to appear out of nowhere, instead of coming from your own pocket. There is no country in the world where a government is accountable to a citizenry it does not tax.

TLDR: The "they will only steal the money" line is just a tired excuse for wanting something for nothing. Nigerians need to grow out of the entitlement mentality borne of the "oil boom" of the 1970s.

Seun:
I thought that's what you all wanted. :😔

Please don't mind that character - the incessant tribal slurs and personal insults only serve to drive away intelligent commentary and turn the site into a cesspool. For anyone who wants an anonymous free-for-all where an endless deluge of hateful drivel drowns out everything else, 4chan is still in operation ...

grandstar:
You made a strong point but my worry is whether these senators have the competence to oversee this issue.

Just like in the US when politicians claim to be hard on crime, it leaves a lot to be worried about such as, "Three strikes, you're out!" Why not better policing, why not more boots on the ground in the inner cities?

What is needed is implementation in Nigeria. What criminals fear most is apprehension and prosecution. Kidnappings and these marauder bands called Bandits thrive and act so brazenly is because they think or know the security forces are either ineffective or Incompetent.

Where I think the fire on senators butt will prove effective is that they would demand ACTION aside from just making laws.

In the past, a phone tracking system was introduced to tackle kidnappings and it was quite effective. However, politicians started using it to spy on rivals and other things. It had to be scrapped.

Security agencies must be well equipped and trained and made into strong institutions and not wait for orders from the president or others to do their job.

What security outfit has the job of ending Banditry? Which one had the job of preventing them in the first place?

New legislation isn't a bad idea but ACTION is what's needed the most.

The problem is that there's no action that can be taken under the current setup which will result in a lasting, significant improvement in security. The executive can pander to popular clamor for "action" by resorting to temporary, ad-hoc measures (as Tinubu is currently trying to do), but these will never have more than a temporary impact. "More boots under the ground" under the current system simply means more hungry "police" to set up arbitrary checkpoints where they can shake down citizens for bribes, and then conveniently disappear at the first indication of any real danger. How does that help anyone? In many cases, the very same "boots on the ground" simply take off their uniforms and use their rifles to participate in the very crimes for which they were recruited to begin with! Isn't it common knowledge by now that many of the weapons used by robbers are obtained directly from the police?

Lasting and meaningful change must start with the very structure of the NPF, which was set up in colonial times for the benefit of the British administrators, to keep the "natives" in line, not to ensure the safety and security of the populace. The incentives of the NPF have not changed since those days, only the faces of the unaccountable few for whose benefit it operates. A country of 250 million people cannot expect security with less than 500,000 underpaid "police" on call, most of whom have zero knowledge of local conditions, and all of whom have zero accountability to the communities to which they are posted.

For any of this to change, the NASS has to change the laws, and the fear of suffering what everyone else already suffers is the strongest incentive for the NASS members to make the needed changes.

grandstar:
Withdrawing police escorts was dumb.

Tinubu is only treating the symptom of a problem and not the problem itself.

The problem is the high crime rate and kidnapping. People are so afraid.

I

As I've already responded to a similar comment you made elsewhere, there's nothing dumb about this. These very senators are the ones who should be at the helm of drawing up legislation to solve Nigeria's security problems, but until now they've had the luxury of being able to rely on police escorts to shield them from the realities of life for the people they claim to serve.

In civilised countries, representatives and senators have no need for noisy police escorts to go about their business. The question all members of the NASS should be asking isn't why their police escorts have been withdrawn, but why Nigeria's system of policing is so broken that powerful politicians should need police escorts to begin with. In the end, they are the legislative branch, and they are the only ones with the authority to pass the root-and-branch reforms Nigerian policing sorely needs. Tinubu can certainly try to lobby them, but in the end his authority is limited to simply signing or vetoing whatever reforms the NASS members propose. The prospect of being kidnapped themselves should concentrate their minds on this task wonderfully.

grandstar:
And the federal government wants to deny VIP's the use of police security?

The government is treating thw symptom of a problem, and not the problem itself.

High rates of crime, especially kidnapping, is the problem, and it seems to be getting worse.

I think this is actually a very good step. It means these "VIP" types will no longer be insulated from the security problems which plague everyone else. This should provide them with the needed incentive to actually pay attention to the fundamental issue: Nigeria's over-centralized and woefully under-funded policing system is simply not fit for purpose.

Tinubu can try to patch things up by simply throwing more bodies at the problem, but this isn't likely to make any real difference. Any meaningful improvements to Nigeria's security problems will require new legislation to authorize localised policing that is independent from control by governors yet accountable at the local level. This means the NASS is where attention should be focused, and its members will now have to think seriously about solving the problem instead of living carefree in their high-security cocoons.

anonimi:
You understand what the A-looter Propaganda Congress, APC has been doing in Lagos and Borno states since 1999 and in the entire country since 2015- propaganda stories and fake promises sustained by fabricated statistics.

Are you accusing Standard and Poors of "fabricating" statistics? Why would they do that for a dirt-poor country like Nigeria, just a month after downgrading France?

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/sourceId/101651950

What power does Tinubu have over S&P, that the US government didn't have when the same company downgraded the USA's long-term rating in 2011?

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/sourceId/6802837

I suggest you read something about Standard and Poors before spamming the thread with more nonsensical AI-generated slop.

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anonimi:
You understand what the A-looter Propaganda Congress, APC has been doing in Lagos and Borno states since 1999 and in the entire country since 2015- propaganda stories and fake promises sustained by fabricated statistics.

Are you accusing Standard and Poors of "fabricating" statistics? Why would they do that for a dirt-poor country like Nigeria, just a month after downgrading France?

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/sourceId/101651950

What power does Tinubu have over S&P, that the US government didn't have when the same company downgraded the USA's long-term rating in 2011?

https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/view/sourceId/6802837

I suggest you read something about Standard and Poors before spamming the thread with more nonsensical AI-generated slop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_Global_Ratings

In your eagerness to dismiss anything positive done under Tinubu as "fake" and "fabricated", you only destroy your own credibility.

grandstar:
Hello Omohayek,
What is the average interest rate for concessionary debt? How low and high can it get?
Thanks

I don't think there's any single such number, as the big feature of concessional debt is that it's made on terms the borrower could never get on the market, and different borrowers can have very different market expectations (e.g. compare Argentina and Switzerland). Terms that are "concessional" for a lender which has been shut out of the credit markets could therefore be considered "extortionate" for another.

In Nigeria's case, the best we can do is go by the country's credit rating, which is currently B-(S&P)/B3(Moody's)/B(Fitch). This is in the "highly speculative" range, but both Moody's and Fitch have given the country a ratings upgrade just this year. Nigeria's 30-year bonds are currently yielding %15.57, so that can be taken as an for any new concessional lending, which by definition will be more generous than what the market is offering. The other thing to keep in mind is that this yield is for Nigerian bonds in Naira, so it's actually slightly negative after adjusting for inflation.

Instead of all you usual suspects drawing the obvious lesson here - that it's the height of stupidity to expect coup plotters to "rescue" you from a government you don't like - you bend over backwards to pretend that an elected Nigerian leader who is only halfway into his 4 year term is just as bad as men who have monopolised top office for longer than their subjects have been alive. If more of you had working brains, you'd realize that such obvious hyperbole only destroys your credibility as critics of Tinubu's government.

It's clear that what's really troubling most of you is that the man at the top is not your "person" or "kinsman", and you'd happily throw all legal and democratic norms aside if that meant getting one of your own into Aso Rock. It's also clear, given how so many of you have previously voiced support for coup plotters and American invasion of Nigeria, that you'd be perfectly content to have a Nigerian version of Obiang or Biya clinging to power for life, as long as that sit-tight leader was of your own ethnicity. Tinubu's true "crime" is that he doesn't come from your region or share your particular religion.

bablon20:
All of them should be tracked down and deported to Ghana and Congo. If it were to be in Nigeria we will be shouting tribalism, what should we call this afterwards Charlie Kirk was a white.

On what basis should Americans making use of their guaranteed 1st amendment rights to freedom of speech be "deported to Ghana and Congo"?

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/

I know semi-literate, wannabe fascists like you have probably never heard of the 1st amendment before, let alone that it was the same amendment which gave Charlie Kirk the freedom to make racist rants about "prowling blacks" lacking "the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously", but it's the height of absurdity for ignorant Nairalanders to be spouting venomous nonsense in defense of a bigoted lout who would have seen them as little more than upright monkeys if he were still alive.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs

You black Trump/MAGA supporters can fool yourselves all you like - you'll never be seen by Trump and his acolytes as anything more than untermenschen from "shithole countries" fit only for lives of indentured servitude or outright slavery.

grandstar:
Obama did not remove Jonathan.

Jonathan destroyed himself by being weak and undecisive, and having some incompetent people working for him..

Exactly. Many Jonathan diehards seem incapable of grasping the reality that leaders are not "owed" a certain number of terms in power on the basis of some imaginary "turn by turn" agreement, and that the ultimate arbiter of who rules is the Nigerian electorate as a whole. Nobody but GEJ is to blame for his own failure to convince a majority of Nigerian voters to give him another term, and the only role Obama played in Jonathan's loss was to warn him to respect the will of the electorate.

Anyone expecting the same fair-handedness from a power-hungry crook like Trump, who incited a mob to attack Congress in a failed bid to overturn his electoral loss, is in the grip of delusion. But then again, perhaps that very lack of respect for democratic norms is what the Jonathan holdouts are banking on - for forcible American intervention to get them through what they weren't able to achieve through legitimate democratic means back in 2014.

Kukutente23:
https://www.ft.com/content/e05d7c87-b2ae-494f-9c97-48771cc51c0a

Thanks for providing a direct link to the FT article (instead of some shady website putting its own spin on the FT's reporting). Nothing in the FT article indicts Tinubu in particular: it blames the entire Nigerian political elite for the breakdown in security.

To the extent that anyone reads this as an indictment of Tinubu in particular, logic demands that they allocate even more blame to the whole of the lower and upper houses of the National Assembly, the two bodies which actually have the power to make and unmake laws about how policing ought to be handled (the Executive's job being solely to execute legislation the NASS has passed). Blame must also be allocated to all of the state governors who happily pocket security votes while leaving their populations at the mercy of armed robbers and kidnappers. For some strange reason, though, I'm certain that the OP would never point fingers at either the NASS or the governors, if that means admitting that his own kinsmen in high places shoulder a great deal of the blame for Nigeria's current state of insecurity.

Nairalanders eager to bash Tinubu out of petty ethnocentric motives need to understand that a President is not a king able to pass laws at will (or at least should not be, in a fully functioning democracy).

Nwaikpe:


No matter how fast you run, you cannot run from your history.
Lagos belonged to no one. It was a barren riverine area without people. The Portuguese landed there, and people who came to trade with them developed a community. After the Britons arrived, the community that remained was what was referred to as the Lagos protectorate.
The capital of the colonials was in Calabar, but the Portuguese had already built a viable business area there, which is why it was protected (therefore called a protectorate) by the Brits for their business, which was no more the trade of h u m a n s but other commodities through companies like the UAC.

Seems like una no like una history.

Argument by bald assertion. Where is your evidence for such claims, that we should believe you over all the history books that are freely available?

You can make your ludicrous and dishonest claims as often as you like, but you'll never be regarded as anything more than a ethnic champion seeking to nurse a fragile ego by disseminating blatant propaganda. Your drivel belongs in the same revisionist rubbish-bin as the nonsense from those who claim Palestine was empty before the 19th century, or that South Africa was unsettled before the Boers came in the 17th century.

The most amusing thing about the persistent mendacity of characters like you is that even as you spend all this effort spewing lies about Lagos to soothe your egos, others of your kinsmen are noisily stating how they "don't give a f***" about the same Lagos you put so much energy into lying about. Why all the lying, if Lagos means so little to you people?

Eboofa:
Rubbish.......how come for years......NPA charged higher in Onne than Lagos ports! Why is it that bulk cargo and pharmaceutical products cannot be brought in thru onne?

Someone provides 3rd-party evidence that there are no differences in charges between ports, and there are no restrictions on bringing pharmaceuticals through Onne, and your response is simply to repeat the same lies verbatim? Where is your evidence for your claims? Why should we believe you over the person you're arguing with?

Nwaikpe:
But it is clear that everyone there was from different places.
Meaning there is absolutely nothing like "Lagosian" but a confederation of people from different places.


Abi you decided to overlook the stats and just make a comment?

No, nothing of the sort is "clear". The reason so many of these groups were there is that the British-created Lagos protectorate was carved out of land was already occupied by these groups! That's why you have parts of Lagos with names ending in "Egba", "Ijebu" and so forth. The only part of Lagos state that was overwhelmingly Awori was Lagos Island.

In short, you'll have to look for another excuse to pretend Lagos has always been some sort of "no man's land" ...

All this "revenue rise" figure indicates is that the DISCOs have managed to keep their revenues in line with inflation. It certainly doesn't mean they are somehow "profiteering" or "exploiting the masses". Indeed, as the articles notes (at the very end)

Adegbemle noted that under the 2022 Multi-Year Tariff Order (MYTO), the cost-reflective tariff averaged N68.42/kWh, while the allowed tariff was N59.89/kWh, with the Federal Government covering N8.53/kWh as subsidy. Between January and March 2023 alone, subsidies totaling N52.7 billion were paid to the 11 DisCos.

In other words, the DISCOs are still not being allowed to charge what it actually costs them to run their businesses, so the FG has to step in with subsidies to make up for the losses being run by the DISCOs. Besides, it's almost certain that the supposed "cost-reflective tariff" for 2022 is wildly out-of-date, given the Naira's depreciation in the years since, so even the subsidy the FG is already struggling to pay the DISCOs is insufficient to cover their losses.

The above is why the article's inflammatory title focuses on revenues rather than what really matters, namely profits (and the lack thereof) - because a story noting that Nigeria's DISCOs are all running huge losses doesn't spur the necessary outrage to make good clickbait.

nairalanda1:
If you disagree with someone on this site , dem go call you agbado

Honestly, adhomien attacks on this site reflect more on the person lobbing then, than the person they are being lobbed at.

Lol

The quick resort to ad-hominems, utter indifference to facts, and manifest inability to apply basic logic exhibited by so many commenters on here are why I find myself visiting this site less and less as time goes by ...

No matter how often and at what length one states the obvious on here (e.g. that Nigeria is actually dirt-poor, that the corruption Nigerians claim to hate stems largely from the economic interventionism they demand, or that countries like Switzerland, South Korea and Taiwan show natural resources have little to do with prosperity), these facts never seem to permeate into the intellects of the half-baked, barely literate types who constitute the loudest and most vociferous commentators on the site.

The end result of all of this is that Nairaland is a showcase for the application of Gresham's Law to trolling.

https://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

grandstar:
This is a breath of fresh air.

Where have you been?

Sadly, real-life burdens have made it a lot harder for me to justify wasting time on Nairaland ...

Bananapill:
It can only bounce back if government is sincere and brings back the original builders, Russia technology, to revitalize it. If not, it's efforts in futility

And how much steel is Russia exporting these days? Ajaokuta was already an obsolete Soviet project when it was first conceived in the 1970s, and even the Western companies that would have crushed it in the marketplace are now having trouble themselves with super-cheap Chinese steel.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/eu-plans-cut-steel-import-quotas-hike-tariffs-2025-10-01/

Ajaokuta is the very definition of a white elephant project, doomed even before work was started on it. There is absolutely no chance it will ever produce steel at market-competitive prices, even if corruption were miraculously eliminated from Nigeria and the best Russian experts were brought in to run it.

The worst thing about the Nigerian obsession with this black hole of a project is that steel isn't even that economically important anymore. How much steel do the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft or Nvidia produce? How much steel do Singapore, Switzerland or Hong Kong produce?

Fetishising steel in the name of "industrialization" is nothing more than cargo-cult thinking, based on the delusion that we have to repeat other countries' exact development history to succeed. By that "logic", we might as well start with setting up 19th-century steam-powered cotton mills, so we can work our way properly from the beginning through all of industrial history.

erad:
.

You people keep saying the north contributes nothing.

Do you even know the kind of famine that will happen without the harvests from the north?

That's why we keep tasking southern governors to prioritize agriculture to counter what the north contributes. Everytime there has been food scarcity was because something happened in the north.

They contribute a whole lot.

Oh please! As if the same food items couldn't easily be imported from elsewhere, at much lower cost and much higher quality! Nigeria's long-standing, wrong-headed obsession with protectionist measures is the only reason why northern states like Sokoto have any economic relevance whatseover, given their preference for wasting money on subsidising useless activities like Quran memorisation instead of giving their young people skills of use in the modern world.

If Morris Monye really believes the message he's trying to sell, why doesn't he spare us all the propaganda, and turn his energies instead to convincing Peter Obi to participate in an ADC primary? Why all the gra-gra attempting to force a coronation down our throats, if Peter Obi is really so popular?

Creamypie:
He's even smiling. He knows his oga at the top in also rock will rescue him

If Tinubu were really his "oga", he would have appointed a lapdog NDLEA boss who would never have arrested this guy in the first place.

sekeyso:
When the president of a nation is seen associating with dubious characters, it's a pointer that the nation would be overwhelmed by criminality. That position is meant to maintain law and order and encourage those to who do good and punish bad behaviors but what we see now is that bad behaviors are encourage to the point of being rewarded with the highest office in the land and you wonder why we're not making any progress.
No country succeeds with the kind of characters we have right now at the helm of affairs.

This is a call for the president to tender his resignation in order to preserve whatever good is still left of this country.

So the President gets all the blame when a private citizen is engaged in criminal activity, but none of the credit when one of the agencies he runs - the NDLEA - arrests said private citizen for breaking the law?

You can't have it both ways. If Tinubu really were as tolerant of criminality as you suggest, he wouldn't have appointed an NDLEA boss who goes vigorously after criminals. Politicians shake hands with huge numbers of people as part of campaigning, and it's not as if they can run background checks on each and every such person beforehand.

Ebeano49:
So OMOYELE Sowore is now an Ijaw man just to garner a sense of credibility while carrying water for Tinubu abi? Funny people continue deceiving yourself.

If that makes Sowore a Yoruba man, is Peter Obi now also an Englishman? It says something that you'd rather use flimsy reasoning to cling to an obviously false claim, instead of owning up to your error (or at least keeping quiet). All I see in your attempt to smear Sowore is projection of your own inclinations onto him.

Ebeano49:
This trick is too old. Sowore spent all of 2022 attacking Obi to pave way for his brother, Tinubu.
Now, 2027 is around the corner, Sowore is resorting to business as usual... Attack the only credible challenger your brother will be facing.
Sowore knows that come 2027, he will not get more than his usual 1500 votes.

As Sowore has made clear times without number, he is a member of the Ijaw minority in Ondo State, so how does that make him Tinubu's "brother"? Character assassination is the resort of those who have no rational counter to an argument.

nairalanda1:
True except for.population control. We need to utilize our large population to our advantage.

Population control will make your country end up like Japan and south Korea. Aging population, not enough young people to pay the tax needed for pensions. Growing debt.

Even so, I'm sure most Nigerians would switch places with South Koreans and Japanese in a heartbeat. Both countries are wealthy, extremely safe (even by first world standards), have very highly educated populations, and are on the cutting edge of science and technology. All Nigeria is good at is producing ever larger numbers of poorly educated, near-starving, unemployed youth with limited prospects beyond emigration or crime.

nairalanda1:
For individual houses solar may work

But for mega estates and cities? Probably not.

To generate one thousand megawatt of power you need a solar grid that would cover a large piece of land. You can build a gas station that would supply 5000 mw on a smaller area of land

But even leaving aside the question of how much land solar might take, changing the method of energy generation won't fix the underlying problem, which is that Nigerians aren't willing to pay enough to cover the cost of generating and distributing the energy they want (even though generators are far more expensive per unit of energy generated). Nigeria's problem has long ceased being generation as such - the existing generation capacity is more than 3x the amount actually consumed on a daily basis.

AerialMapper:
Opened post saw Kenyan pastor

Closed post

How are Nigerian "pastors" any different? 99% of African "pastors" are nothing but greedy conmen whose egos are inflated by the docility of their gullible followers.

DrFunmisticGlow:
unfortunately, standards to admit medical courses must remain high. If you lower standards, just anybody anyhow will become a just anyhow doctor, nurse, pharmacist , lab scientists, physiotherapist etc. Do you want to put your life or the lives of your I'll relatives and loved ones in the hands of these kind of people?

This "standards" talk is the same line of argument that is always used by any group looking to restrict competition in their line of business. Isn't that what bodies like medical boards are for?

Just graduating from a school with "medical" in its name doesn't grant anyone license to practice medicine, and for most Nigerians, at present the alternative to your favored few "high standards" doctors are roadside peddlers of "patent" medicine quackery, native "doctors", religious conmen masquerading as "prophets", etc. Even medical school dropouts would be preferable to all of these.

chinchum:
it is a double edged sword. Foreign remittances are not only made by Nigerian medical doctors or nurses diasporans.

Yes, I know that quite well from personal experience as someone outside those professions who was regularly sending USD back home.

A bond payment or about a minimum pegged amount of service period could be required. I suggest government making tuition almost free as well. their foreign counterparts in countries they are moving to will have high student loan debt.

Instead of directly subsiding the fees of medical students, a better system would be for the government to extend them student loans, which could be gradually forgiven after graduation based on a set term of public service (e.g. 7 years at teaching hospitals). That would

1. Deal with all the complaints about doctors taking advantage of FG generousity.
2. Provide incentives for at least a few to stick around after graduating.
3. Still leave the way clear for those who want to go abroad to do so.

The fact that medical students could now be charged for their education would also provide domestic universities with the funds to expand the number of students they can admit into their medical schools. With a big enough expansion, the pools of domestic and expatriate doctors could expand simultaneously.

TLDR: There are sensible ways to deal with Nigeria's medical professional issues without resorting to travel bans or endlessly criticising diasporean professionals.

chinchum:
The country needs to keep expanding that capacity. If it produces 5000 graduates and 4000 left, it may imply a net addition of 1,000 doctors.

unfortunately may also explore the international angle to combat the mass exodus with the enforcement of UNited Nations/WHO expectations of certain countries not recruiting medical doctors graduates from challenged countries like Nigeria

And how would such protectionist thinking help either the doctors themselves, their many dependents whose lives could be improved through foreign remittances, or the rest of the Nigerian economy which benefits when all of those dependents spend that foreign income domestically?

This attitude is just as wrong-headed as the one we're currently seeing in the USA with Trump. No country ever made its way to a high standard of living by raising barriers to the flow of capital (including human capital).