₦airaland Forum

bloggernaija: It should be. In proper functioning countries, there is always healthy competition. This is how people judge/measure their leader.now a tailor in akwaibom should be wondering how a governor in osun can contract directly to local tailors thereby keeping the locl economy active. why is my governor building things that are of no use to the common man while most people are going hungry.why do i have to ride okada in the midst of plenty to make up for lack of patronage?What do you think the premier league rivalry was all about.? It is about "my town is better than your" ," my street is better than your" .there can be no development if human capital is not developed.have you seen the tacky capital of Kazakhstan . Abuja pales in comparison.but it does not have a tenth of the human capital of Poland or even Hungary .those two countries are not exactly rich countries.poland exports ships and other heavy machinery. Hungary builds underground and overground trains.

Gbawe: Guy, you can point out Aregbesola's achievements without putting down Akpabio. It is not a competition. Frankly, approaches to development can be different. I don't see what brings Akpabio into this at all.

omiobo: When i watched him in a programme'an hour with Angela' i know the guy is very humble and intelligent.

chukwudi44: Amechi's told us he won by 19 votes to 16.The onus is now on him to prove it by convening a forum for the 19 governors in his camp.Any thing short of that would only vitiate his claim of victory.

alj harem: The standard yoruba has always been Oyo. Lagos dialect we hear everyday is a corrupt form of Oyo dialect. The actual Lagos dialect is totally different

In Lagos today we say Bawo ni which is Oyo but actual Isale eko ancient dialect is Bawa n

automaticcarzz: He changed the name on his birth certificate to Azikwe. He now wears red Igbo cap. Etc.

malc619: I'm sure it's Aregbe who recorded the election!!

Nice one...

seunny4lif: Ikale & ilaje yoruba,sweet die....

Tolexander: thanks jare John.

And he shouldn't have said it isn't correct. He should have asked for the meaning

Tolexander: must i follow conventional rule?

Tolexander: sure! I know.
Gat No candidate for now!

bloggernaija: Am not derailing .i am just pointing out the facts.you can see that I also pushed out a few alternative ideas.i like people who think and dream big.
Mimiko is a grassroots politician alright knowing fully well that is where the votes lie.however , this type of leadership Is not going to get the state anywhere .look at the typical well planned house built by the citizens in 1950's ,60's .compare them to the shacks being built now in unplanned streets .
Those houses/churches/ business/water works were built by farmers on the strength of a thriving cocoa industry.government activities were funded on taxes so derived.
I repeat,ondo state is still too sleepy when compared to her professional human resources.i say it as an omo odua.
i could not care less if it were Lagos ,oyo ,ekiti. , osun .the governors of the SW must up their game by strategically detaching the southwest from the dysfunctional importation dependent national economy .
Only Lagos and osun seem to be making such investment .
For this ,aregbesola gets my vote

Tolexander: Bola IGE owns his house and he should be the occupier!

solomon111: Kudos to the FG for its investments attracting policies.
A good number of states are benefiting massively now.

kingingkinging: Pls put this on the front page now. It should not be about accidents, B.H., corruption, etc alone. Let good news surface now.

...It said Lagos State’s economy would be equivalent to the Ghanaian economy post-GDP rebasing, adding that the heart of Nigeria’s $284 billion GDP economy is clearly in Lagos.

PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma will pay a one-day official visit to Nigeria on Tuesday as Africa’s two very dissimilar giants see if they can put squabbles aside and start pushing in the same direction.

The economic growth happening in parts of the continent could be in jeopardy if an unexpected resurgence of conflicts in other parts — Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic (CAR), for instance — is not quickly contained. In order to make the "Africa Rising" trend a long-term one, analysts say Nigeria and SA are condemned to be partners, if not bosom buddies.

"It’s a complicated relationship, marked by both co-operation and competition," said Adekeye Adebajo, executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town.

Mr Zuma will meet President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja and then host him next month during a full-blown state visit to South Africa, the Department of International Relations said.

The superficial focus of competition is about size — the relative size of the two economies. Nigeria is due to rebase its gross domestic product (GDP) figures next year, boosting the total to about $350bn and in sight of South Africa.

If Nigeria’s growth rate remains at nearly 7% — twice that of South Africa’s — the title of Africa’s heavyweight economy will go westwards within a few years.

"Nigeria will soon become the largest economy on the continent thanks both to its rapid growth rates and the current exercise of reweighting and rebasing its national accounts for the first time in two decades," said London-based Gregory Kronsten of Nigerian bank FBN Capital.

"The flavour of the year for the offshore portfolio investor is frontier markets, and Nigeria in particular. The all-share index for the Lagos bourse has risen by 19.9% year-to-date while its counterpart in Johannesburg has shed 0.5%," Mr Kronsten said.

The raw numbers disguise some key realities and not only the fact that Nigeria’s population of 162-million is three times South Africa’s. Nigerian revenue is still excessively reliant on its oil and gas exports. Its overall economy is nowhere near the depth and sophistication of South Africa’s. Per capita annual income in South Africa is $7,000, more than five times Nigeria’s, and as a percentage of the population, twice as many Nigerians are below the national poverty line as South Africans.

South African corporates and their expatriates, spearheaded by MTN, SABMiller and Shoprite, have led the investment charge into Nigeria. The traffic in the other direction is more about individual Nigerians, rich and poor, seeking better opportunities. Dr Adebajo, a Nigerian, reports a degree of resentment in his homeland towards South African companies, which are perceived as making huge amounts of money while Pretoria restricts access to the local market.

The issue blew up last year when South Africa’s immigration department refused entry to Nigerians who lacked yellow fever certificates. The South African authorities backed down, certainly mindful of the financial cost of a drawn-out fight on the matter.

Commercial and economic links are not really the problem area. Politics and diplomacy are.

Nigerians have felt since the end of apartheid that South Africa’s African National Congress leaders have never really acknowledged or repaid the debt to their best and richest African friends while they were in exile.

Mr Jonathan did not support Mr Zuma’s successful but divisive campaign last year to get his former wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, elected as chairwoman of the African Union Commission.

Bilateral relations were sometimes closer during the presidencies of Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo. The two were instrumental in pushing the African agenda in the early 2000s and getting seats at the high international table for key nations and the African Union.

But Mr Zuma and Mr Jonathan are less effective in international arenas than their predecessors.

South Africa’s halo has been damaged by corruption and bad governance, both chronic weaknesses of Nigeria’s, which are now compounded there by the startling rise of domestic Islamic terrorism in its northern states.

"There is a sad decline of Nigerian foreign policy," Dr Adebajo said. "Goodluck Jonathan doesn’t have a good grasp of foreign policy and the most dramatic example has been Mali, where France has intervened and Nigeria has been quietly applauding in the background".

Previous Nigerian leaders, many of them military, regarded their country as being in competition in Africa with France. They would have wanted a central place in attempts to counter Islamic terrorists in Mali in their Sahelian backyard.

Similar suspicions about France’s involvement in the CAR appear to have been one motive for Mr Zuma’s hugely criticised military foray into one of Africa’s least strategic countries. Thirteen South African soldiers were killed in the CAR last month and on Saturday the politician against whom Southh Africa’s intervention was apparently directed, Michel Dodotjia, was formally invested as president.

"I think Mr Zuma and his team are unnerved a bit by CAR. I think they’ll be chastened by the experience," Dr Adebajo said.

But South Africa did the Nigerian government a good turn this year when the South Gauteng High Court sentenced Nigerian national and South African resident Henry Okah to 24 years in prison for ordering bombings in his homeland in 2010 in which nine people were killed.

It was the first outcome of a trial under the Protection of Constitutional Democracy Against Terrorist and Related Activities Act, which gives courts in South Africa jurisdiction to hear crimes of terrorism committed abroad.

musiwa11: ijaws do not own does places..

Tolexander: Then we don't need saying Osun a dara again but Osun ti dara!

shymexx: Anyway, welfarism is quintessentially part of Yoruba culture, tradition, and spirituality... and if UPN can bring that back to Yorubaland, they should go for it... We need leaders with astute Yoruba-ness and those who actually understand what it means to be Yoruba and the Yoruba consciousness of being your brother's keeper... Only the state of Oshun OSUN is doing that, at the moment - we need more people like that... However, a party with a manifesto based on the virtues of Yoruba people and welfarism won't be a bad idea...

ACN and the way they're running the darn place collectively isn't just it!

UPN it's for now...

Jah bless!!!