₦airaland Forum

This is not true.

Here are the prices in some stations as at this afternoon:

Total on Ndidem Usang Iso Road N140.5
Oando Opposite Stadium N141
Tonimas on Murtala Muhammed highway N150

Rhino.5dm:
Tell me this is a joke.!

UYCO, whats the meaning of this your latest U-turn? Hmm. Wonders shall never cease.

Its now official that Deltans are one and thesame. All you need to put them to default(arz licking) is a cup of garri. Wow! I was thinking it was only Beaf? Thank God i didn't send any money to this UYCO guy.

Its a Nigerian thing.

The rate at which Nigeria churns out sychophants is amazing.

Wetin be "Believer's Council"?

,

And now,

CHOGM delegate sidelined over sex harassment complaint

A NIGERIAN delegate has had his CHOGM accreditation revoked after a complaint that he allegedly sexually harassed a Perth hotel worker.
The man is accused of approaching a female worker at the Hyatt Hotel, in Adelaide Terrace, and requesting she perform a sexual act on him.

Offended, the woman reported the incident to senior staff at the hotel.

PerthNow understands that the man was spoken to about the allegations and subsequently sidelined for the week from official duties.

But police have not been called in to investigate and no charges have been laid.

A CHOGM 2011 Taskforce spokesman said organisers were aware of the allegations.

``We are aware that a complaint was made by a staff member at Hyatt Regency Perth,'' he said.

``We understand that the matter has been resolved.''

A WA Police spokeswoman said the force had not received a complaint to investigate any criminal activity in relation to the incident.

``Allegations about harassment in the work place are an issue related to equal opportunity and are not a police matter,'' she said.

``No complaint about a criminal matter has been received by WA Police.''

Source: http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/chogm-delegate-sidelined-over-sex-harassment-complaint/story-e6frg13u-1226179789868

I thought CHOGM meant Commonwealth Heads of Governments Meeting

"Coons holidaying on government money" , Carol Thatcher (PM Thatcher's daughter)
Compulsory Handouts to Greedy Mendicants

Inspiring!!!

anishe:
Why are people castigating Aregbesola for his actions. I think it is higj time we started standing up to our useless leaders. Was GEJ right to order the police to stop ACN supporters from entering Abuja? Shame on Useless and coward GEJ that parade himself as Nigerian president. RUBBISH

If you missed an appointment cos LASTMA stopped you on the road, you'll assume Fashola sent them and that'll make him a useless coward. Right?

Please lets allow the police do their job. They do not need a Presidential order to do anything they think will help maintain peace and order.

You definitely do not know why the so-called supporters were prevented from entering Abuja so stop putting the blame on the presidency.

Objectivity should be the watchword.

ekt_bear:
When did Sambo or GEJ become Aregbesola's father?

The analogy fails. This is a federation, not an autocracy or centralized government.

Aregbe is not Sambo or GEJ's sidekick.

Sambo is not Aregbe's oga, had nothing to do with him gaining office. Aregbe's "oga" is the people of Osun State.

Mr ekt_bear,

Forget the arguments,
It is inappropriate to disrespect the office of the president.

ekt_bear:
Respect is a two way street.

If you don't give it, then don't expect it back.

Will you publicly disrepect your father under any circumstance?

Its disheartening that a democratically elected governor who swore to protect the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria can stoop so low to disrespect the office of the President as a way of showing grievance.

In the Yoruba culture, are you allowed to snub your father in public simply because you are angry with him?

The divisive form of politics being played by the ACN leadership will only lead to rancour and disorder in the society.

If an elected local government chairman in Osun state does this same thing to the governor, I wonder what will happen to him.

@KnowAll,

If Mbadinuju was excluded (according to him) in 2003, what stops PDP from excluding Sylva in 2011.

Any way we look at it, Sylva's likely loss will not make history.

KnowAll:
If Silvia dosen't get the ticket in the primaries, he would have broken a new record in Nigeria as the first incumbent not to be selected by his party in a primary election. I don't see that happening. Silvia would get the ticket, others are only posturing for 2016 or there about.

Wrong!! Chinwoke Mbadinuju, a sitting governor, lost the PDP ticket in 2003, decamped to AD (I think) and lost woefully at the polls.

Senator patrick Osakwe lost the PDP senatorial ticket for Delta North in 2007, decamped to Accord Party and won convincingly at the Polls.

My point, Sylva will lose the ticket if he really insulted President Jonathan. And if he moves to another party, he is doomed.

You can't insult Tinubu and get an ACN ticket,  How much more insulting the president,

It is crystal clear PDP intends to kick out Timi Sylva.

Mr Bruce's biggest challenge will be overcoming the Alaibe effect. His closeness to President Jonathan may count during the primaries.

Rhythm FM has confirmed the rumours.

Ben Murray-Bruce has picked up a PDP governorship form.

The political battle in Bayelsa is getting really interesting.

I like Beaf and his zeal.

I know he is not in support of Uduaghan or his cronies. However, I think he has lost it.

His attempt at defending the indefensible all in a bid to chide the holier-than-thou ACN worshippers has led him to show how brainless educated folks can become.

Eko Ile and Beaf are the official contenders for arsse-lickers of the year.

One thing we need to change as a people, is our satisfaction with mediocrity. Another thing is comparing apples with oranges.
Anyone making excuses for the inadequacies of another person is definitely not helping matters.

People accuse Odili of squandering the resources of Rivers State. What was Amaechi's role in Odili's government? Why do we have the three arms of goverment if all we can do is lay the blame of our developmental setbacks at the doorsteps of the executive arm.

Amaechi, as Speaker of RVHA for 8years, was part and parcel of Odili's government, and thus should share in the blame for the "stagnation" Rivers state experienced from 1999 to 2007.

That aside, Nigerians see development from a myopic viewpoint. Fashola is being praised today simply because of his achievements in road construction.
Amaechi is being villified because of his 'failure' in constructing quality roads.

Some people want to see three or four lane dual carriage roads everywhere in River State. Is it really possible? Comparing the level of Urban planning in Rivers State with that in Lagos State would be like comparing Abuja with Kano.
It would be difficult for any state to be like Lagos or Abuja. The Federal Government spent a huge amount of money constructing the Lagos roads we all praise today. Fashola is simply maintaining what was already there.
Amaechi is building some roads from the scratch and expanding existing roads would mean massive demolitions as PHC is largely unplanned. We all  will accuse him of being ‘elitist’ when he starts demolishing buildings yet we want three or four lane roads. Haba!

For me, the main area where Amaechi has failed is in road construction. And this is largely because of the ‘share the money’ style of politics we play in Nigeria.

That said, Amaechi is neither a super-performer nor a laggard.

An article in the latest edition of the Economists magazine paints a gloomy picture of my fatherland. Is the Nigerian state tending towards failure?

Can the promise of "fresh air" change our fortune?



[size=15pt]Wealth, poverty and fragile states
MIFFed by misrule: A new category of countries mixes modest affluence with miserable governance[/size]

MOST people think they know what a failed state looks like. An obvious one is Somalia, where an outbreak of famine in the south was formally acknowledged by the United Nations this week. Help has started to trickle in after the Shabab, an Islamist militia, lifted its ban on aid agencies that it once termed anti-Muslim. In most ways the afflicted region epitomises the collapse of authority: extremists control roads and markets; the government is powerless outside the capital; outsiders provide what little assistance exists.

But not all failed or fragile states look like Somalia. This month the World Bank issued its annual list of countries by income category: rich, middle, poor. Several African countries are faring rather better than Somalia; they have graduated from poor to middle-income status. Yet strikingly, some 15 of the 56 countries on the bank’s lower-middle income list (ie, over a quarter) also appear on the list of fragile and failed states maintained by the OECD, a rich-country club. They range from Côte d’Ivoire to Yemen; the most important of them are Pakistan and Nigeria. State failure, it appears, does not necessarily go hand in hand with other human woes, such as poverty.

Why should it matter that a group of countries has crossed some arbitrary line separating poor from middle-income status? Perhaps, some may say, it shows that state failure is an extremely elastic term, embracing both countries in total collapse (Somalia, Chad) and those which merely contain large ungoverned spaces. In fact, the emergence of a group of middle-income but failed or fragile states is more than a curiosity. The group—call them MIFFs—includes countries crucial to the future of west Africa and South Asia. The new state of South Sudan (see picture), which combines oil wealth with instability and underdevelopment, will surely join its ranks.

The group matters for several reasons. Although its members may be semi-prosperous when measured by income per person, they contain a large and rising share of very poor people. Geoffrey Gertz and Laurence Chandy of the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC, think-tank, calculate* that MIFF countries account for roughly 180m of the world’s neediest people (those living on less than $1 a day). That is 17% of the total number of the world’s poorest—more than the 10% who live in poor but stable countries. Anybody concerned with alleviating world poverty must reckon with the MIFFs.

The category has also grown fast. Failed states were once poor almost by definition. The World Bank’s fund for helping fragile states is called the Low-Income Country Under Stress fund; once countries stop being low-income, they no longer qualify as “under stress”, even if they are. In 2005, MIFF countries contained fewer than 15m people living on less than $1 a day, not even 1% of the world’s poorest. Since then, the group has expanded mostly because once-poor states have grown richer, but no more functional. It is rarer to find a middle-income state in which law and order once existed but later failed.

And that points to one broad lesson from the emergence of this new group. Indigent places are often racked by chaos; but somewhat better-off ones are not necessarily more stable. This year’s World Development Report (WDR)** showed that violence plays a greater role than once thought in keeping countries poor. Yet countries do escape poverty, and do not always grow more peaceable in the process.

As a background paper to the WDR shows, almost 70% of wars and conflicts took place in the poorest quarter of countries in the 1960s; little more than 10% then took place in the next quarter up, the lower-middle income countries. In the 2000s, however, that changed. The share of conflicts in the poorest group fell below 40%; the share in the lower-middle group rose to over 40%. Strife is getting more common in lower-middle income countries, and weak government is at least as big a predictor of violence as poverty itself.

The MIFFs are a headache for aid donors. Middle-income states in general need little financial support or technical advice. Yet the MIFFs contain many poor people whom the local government cannot or will not help. As Andy Sumner of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University has argued, the West’s aid business has grown up in poor, stable places, such as Tanzania. The UN’s millennium development goals, like most other aid declarations, reflect the old way of doing aid. Donors admit that what works in poor, stable countries probably won’t in those which are not poor and not stable.

MIFFs also pose a big problem for Western governments which want to influence them. Being no longer poor, their elites rarely see the need for aid, military or developmental. Being fragile, their governments often consist of complex, fractious coalitions that are hard to deal with. The combination is deadly. Look at Pakistan. In a warning to the country, America’s Congress this month suspended $800m worth of aid. That drew barely a flicker from the government of President Asif Ali Zardari. The aid is worth less than 1% of GDP. Internal political calculations matter more than external ones.

The MIFF phenomenon is not entirely new. Papua New Guinea and Equatorial Guinea—both undeveloped places with big extractive industries—are longstanding examples. But until recently, there were few of them and they mattered less. Now countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria may pose bigger problems to the West than traditional failed states, such as Congo, whose disasters are mostly visited on their unfortunate citizens.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/18986470?story_id=18986470&fsrc=rss

isquar3d3:
kobojunkie, frm a perspective, u'r right bt i think wt d guy's trying 2 say is dt FOCUSING solely on it won't help Nigeria as a nation. There r oda areas dt need healing too.

Thanks.

Focusing ONLY on corruption would lead us no where.

I left out 'ONLY' in my earlier post. My bad!

I love Ribadu's classical statement: "When you fight corruption, corruption fights back".

Any government focused solely on corruption, will end up going in circles as real infrastructural development would be impeded.

I watched the interview yesterday and Prof Soyinka stated categorically that he supports Ribadu.

He expressed his disappointed with the PDP led government and feels PDP has nothing new to offer Nigeria.

He also pointed out that every nation in the world has corrupt people. The problem with the Nigerian case is that the elite places corruption over and above productivity.

My understanding of this statement is that no god or demi-god can absolutely fight corruption. What any sane government can do is to increase productivity while trying to reduce corruption.

Focusing on corruption would lead us no where.

Please send prices to lumidi@ymail.com

The topic of this thread is misleading.

@ Beaf,

Please go to bed.
You sound as though you sleep on the same bed with President Jonathan. Your attempt at providing explanations for every Jonathan statement or action is becoming extreme and deceitful.
No matter how intelligent you sound, folks tend to dismiss whatever you say cos of the way you spam threads with you excessive support for President Jonathan. In addition, you are becoming as insulting and uncouth as the people you argue with every now and then.

No man is perfect so stop making an angel out of President Jonathan.

Same advice goes to all Blind Buhari Followers (BBFs).

opalu:
GBAWE, U HAVE BRAINSSSSSSSSSSSSS I BEG. AS A CONSTRUCTION PROFESSIONAL, THE BUSH-CLEARING ASPECT MADE MORE SENSE TO ME.
BUHARI=BULDOZER TO CLEAR THIS ROT, RUST AND WRECK THAT PDP HAS INFLICTED ON US.
IN 2015, THAT WILL BE THE ELDORADO SINCE YOU WILL SEE PEOPLE LIKE FASHOLA CLIMBING HIGHER (if he doesnt dissappoint in 2nd tenure)

AFTERALL, DAVID FOUGHT THE BATTLE FOR SOLOMON TO BUILD UPON WITHOUT FIGHTING ANY BATTLE

Its heartwarming to see that Nigerians are beginning to think 'long-term'. Instant results do no last- instead, they attract enemies and extinguishers more quickly.
What we need in Nigeria is a systematic and thorough implementation of basic principles of good governance, exhibited first by the leadership. Giant developmental strides can then follow.
I'm happy to see an overt acknowledgement by a BB supporter that corruption cannot be fought in 12 short months.

9ijaMan:
That's not true bro. I went to Ife and witnessed everything Aisha 2 related. I have friends who finished from UNIBEN. UNIPORT, UNILAG, UNI-ILORIN etc confirming same too. If you passed through a federal Uni after 1999, you probably would want to deny it. All those institutions I mentioned still have PTF insignias to date. If you don't know, go and ask those who graduated before you.

PTF was definitely not a northern thing, it was a Nigerian thing.

At a time, all the student buses owned by tertiary institutions were donated by PTF.

@ Topic,
Seun can contribute greatly to helping the less privileged by creating a Humanitarian section for Nairaland and making aisha2 the moderator. That way, her job would better match her interests.

I know she has a good heart. Discussing politics on Nairaland may affect the way some folks see her.

^^^
lol

BTW, do u think it is right for presidential candidates to impose gubernatorial candidates at the state level?

^^^

What makes Pat Utomi a 'no-hoper' and Shekarau a 'hoper'?

Mr President needs to learn how to respond to questions.

ndu_chucks:
All I have to say is that, Nigeria can do better than the crop of people who want to become president in 2011. Our system is worse than rotten if out of all the talent we have in our great country, these debaters and GEJ are the only options we have.

Having said that, SAI BUHARI

I somehow agree with the above.

But not all the candidates were invited- Dele Momodu, Chris Okotie, Pat Utomi.

If debates are regarded as platforms for candidates to reel out their programmes, then every candidate should be given an opportunity.

Nigerians have experienced almost twelve years of continuous democratic rule but majority of the populace are not satisfied with the outcome of our democratic sojourn.

Is it time to call for military take over?
OR
Should we still go to the ballot to elect someone we think can lead us in the right direction?

If you think we should still continue with our democratic experiment, what would you do to someone that thinks otherwise?
Will you give him your support?

dayokanu:
- GEJ is too dull to rule. In a random gathering of 20 adults he would always be the dullest.

- October 1 bombing yet to be resolved

- Dokpesi suspected to be the bomber is now in GEJ campaign train.

- 80% of the corrupt politicians in Nigeria are supporting GEJ. Meaning he is a continuation of the rot.

- Jos killings have been going on forever and GEJ thinks its ok

- A president who believe prayers should be used to bring criminals to book

and five reasons you'll vote Buhari ?

tunene:
Honestly, I think this guy called Jonathan is just a bloody mumu.

If you think Jonathan is a 'mumu' for promising to build an airport in each state, why are you in support of Buhari who said the same thing?

Why not campaign for Pat Utomi who has concrete plans?

When Buhari made same promise in his campaign manifesto, most of us didn't think it was a good idea.

Now Mr President has copied same promise.

I really don't think any of the candidates have what it takes to lift Nigeria from underdevelopment.

The only sensible candidate, Pat Utomi, can never get near Aso Rock.