₦airaland Forum

pickabeau1:
Welldone

Liaise with oluamid

The hash tag #SaveHammed has been chosen

OK thanks, I will.

Attention: Gboliwe, Chaircover, Jarus, TeHN.

Since you guys are busy with other aspects of the case. I suggest we setup a 4th team, to strictly handle both on and offline publicity for our cause. This team should be furnished with pictures and few supporting materials to help further publicise our cause. Am available to work on this type of task.

fr3do:
The dome is predominantly a feature of Islamic architecture, it baffles me why there is one on the National assembly of our secular country.
This is as good as a Cross on our Supreme court.
g]

Although domes are a feature of Islamic Architecture, they are not synonymous with mosques. In fact, it is a cardinal feature of Byzantine Architecture. Which is a form of early Roman Architecture. That is why, till this day, most orthodox cathedrals in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean regions have domes. I have no doubt all students of Architecture and design on this forum must have all studied this at one point or the other in the course of their History of Architecture classes.

fr3do:
The dome is predominantly a feature of Islamic architecture, it baffles me why there is one on the National assembly of our secular country.
This is as good as a Cross on our Supreme court.
g]

Although domes are a feature of Islamic Architecture, they are not a synonymous with mosques. In fact, it is a cardinal feature of Byzantine Architecture. Which is a form of early Roman Architecture. I have no doubt all students of Architecture and design on this forum must have all studied this at one point or the other in the course of their History of Architecture classes. Even till this day, most orthodox cathedrals in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean regions have domes.

When China expelled Nigerian Athletes from the Junior Athletics Games in China recently there was a huge outcry from Nigerians, because we thought it was unjust for them to have done that. Yet, here we are doing the same thing. We need to treat citizens of other countries, just the way we would want other countries to treat ours. I don't think this is the right way to handle an issue like this. Why should the students be punished for what they have no control over? The university should rather ask them to resume with a medical report certifying that they are Ebola-free. They can even be quarantined for a short period during which the university would conduct confirmation tests at its own facility to verify the Ebola-status of each of these students.

Xetima: Why do I have this uncanny belief that thus Australian may be playing games? It is either he is lieing or Sahara reporter is hiding something.
For example why can't he name the sponsors and those helping to transfer money to BH through CBN? Until he does that I will only believe this to be a figment of his imagination.

Albeit, I think the only face we know BH with is Shekau. This man may have been discussing with a group of hired faceless individuals. see the picture below and judge if this is a resemblance of the BH pictures you have seen in the past.

Guys this guy is a liar!

This should not be about Sahara Reporters or the Australian. I think it is in the interest of the accused persons that these allegations are investigated as soon as possible...I personally will not be able to sleep at night if someone made this type of weighty allegations against me especially if am innocent. Any of the accused, who believe he is innocent, should go and sue the man in Australia for defamation of character, and he will get justice without doubt...and even get paid for damages suffered.

It is unfortunate that when serious issues like these are raised it sadly becomes and APC vs PDP cat fight and no one ever hears anything coherent about the matter again. Majority of Nigerians are non-aligned and do not care whether it is PDP or APC in power, all they want is to be given an opportunity to earn a decent living.

My advice to the President is that he should bypass the traditional channels of Security intelligence and assemble his own personal team of security Advisers and Strategist from outside the system who will report directly to him. It is glaring that the current security network in the country is heavily compromised and everyone is more concerned about protecting their personal interests, thereby rendering ineffective the war against terrorism in Nigeria.

The amount of filth on Bank Automated Teller Machines (ATM) is simply frightening. Even with the naked eye, one could still spot all sorts of stains and grease on both the screens and the keypads. This has been a source of concern for most bank customers even long before the outbreak of Ebola in Nigeria, I imagine that concern has further heightened under the current circumstances. These machines could potentially become one of the fastest medium of spreading the disease if infected persons leave residues of their body fluids on it, considering the very high number of people that use each machine everyday. I think, if these banks spend so much resources on their advertising and PR, they should at least be able to deploy dedicated cleaners to clean and disinfect those machines at least twice a day.

sheis: Ajanlekoko, Jarus and all,
How do I ask for more responsibilities without sounding like a redundant employee?

I handle most of the accounting functions of a branch in my organisation. The branch became autonomous recently and my job responsibilities have reduced. I have not gotten more responsibilities and I feel my capabilities are being
underutilized even with my professional qualification.

NB: The said branch is outside Lagos.

very impressive...I wish most young people thought like like this. We all keep talking about the obligations employers have towards employees, but very few people ever think of the responsibilities employees should have towards their employers.

Though I am neither a fan nor supporter of the President (and will probably never be), I do sympathize with him. Even though he personally brought all these upon himself. He has surrendered the reins of power to his aides who are all having a ball at his expense. The norm all over the world is for Presidential aides to take punches on behalf of their Principal, but here in Nigeria, Jonathan is taking all the punches on behalf of his aides. Very few people have direct quarrels with Jonathan, but have quarrels with the fact that he is tenaciously holding on to and defending some of these corrupt aides who have no economic or political value to him. If I were in his shoes, I will simply sacrifice them to further my political cause.

On a personal note, the grudge I have against his government and all the governments before his (Yar Adua & Obasanjo), is their resolute refusal to honestly prosecute all the established cases of corruption in the country.

I think people still do not appreciate the significance of social media, they think it is just another casual endeavor, when they follow you and you don't follow them, they take it personal. why must I follow everybody that follows me, even if we probably are not interested in the same issues? I only follow issues and not people, so when a person is constantly discussing an issue that might not interest me, I don't think I should follow him just to make him feel good. Besides when you follow too many people it is difficult to keep abreast of everyone's posts.

Reading all of the posts above, I must say I have been really lucky, the worst I ever got was a Facebook 'de-friending'.

The budget proposal is not a secret document, the 2014 budget proposal is already available and can be downloaded here at the budget office website below.

http://www.budgetoffice.gov.ng/2014_proposal.html

taharqa: He is already doing just that right now, for Goodness sake. And, am talking about the #360bn FG share of SURE-P it has so far received...

I think it's about time we looked at that SURE-P fund carefully at all tiers of government, because today whereas the FGN might be able to account for its own share of the monies, the state governments and local governments in some cases can barely say what they use it for. I think the monies should be tied to specific projects in the states and local governments instead of just handing it to them like a Christmas hamper to do with it whatever they want.

Secondly, there are a handful of duplication of expenditures i.e some expenditures captured in the mainstream budget are sometimes also re-captured in the SURE-P budget. For instance, SURE-P has no business buying safety vests for VIO officials. I think the SURE-P fund should be restricted to projects in very few sectors, because, the further we spread it thin the less effective it becomes and also the more difficult it becomes is to manage.

Pukkah: For example, Sanusi Lamido once made the following statements:


“At the moment 70 per cent of Federal Government’s revenue goes for payment of salaries and entitlement of civil servants, leaving 30 per cent for development of 167 million Nigerians. That means that for every naira government earns, 70 kobo   is consumed by civil servants."

Is this not scary? What's government's plan to address this bad case?
?

I think our problem typically begins at the budget office (isn't that why it is considered a lucrative posting by civil servants?), that is where civil servants start padding the budget from. What we should be asking now is, how much of the 70 kobo is spent on actual salaries; how much of it is spent on imprest and cost of running the various offices, and finally, what constitutes each imprest for each office? The truth is, if you budget an imprest of say 2 million naira for a small office every month, the head of that department, will ensure all of that money is spent in a month. He won't come back to you to say the money is too much. Haven't we had cases where government officials fuel a salon car five times in one single day, and claim from the government the full amount for same. Just imagine the number of people pulling this stunt across the various government agencies and how many times they do so in a month, then multiply it by twelve months.

The Finance Minister only needs to take a look at the past Auditor General's report to know what goes on in these ministries. Secondly, I also think our wage bill is over-inflated. We need to carry out a personnel audit across all the MDAs and am sure we will be surprised by how much we can bring down these figures.

At this stage, I think it is totally unacceptable that we are currently doing less than 35 percent for capital expenditure.While I acknowledge that it will be a little discomforting to cut our recurrent expenditure all in one go, I think the minister should have developed a 3-4 year plan to achieve this, with a very rigid milestone for each year. In my opinion, it is the 'Father Christmas' disposition of the Federal Government that is responsible for our very high recurrent expenditure. Even government agencies that are capable of funding part of their own expenditures will fold their hands and wait for Ministry of Finance to fund them. Take the case of Nigerian Embassies for instance, how much do they remit back to the Federation account from the Visas fees and other levies that are being collected.

If I were the President, I will insist that most of these MDAs finance at least 15 to 20 percent of their own budgets. The minister needs to assist some of these agencies to become profitable; an agency like the National Bureau for Statistic for instance has the capacity to raise a part of its budget by commercializing its data. The minister can attach financial experts from her office to agencies like this, to help develop a business plan for them, to see that they become profitable.

Of course, another culprit is corruption, there are lots of leakages in the system. Both from the area of budgeting to that of revenue generation. We need to take a closer look at what our revenue generating agencies are doing. There cases for instance where FIRS & Customs officials conspire with taxpayers to defraud the government. If we can plug all of these leakages and open up new streams of income, without doubt, we could be doing a 50-50 budget in the next three years.

I won't advice the President to risk visiting a public restaurant, because of the security implications (unless of course, everything has been well pre-arranged), least we end up having another Viktor Yuchenko scenario.

GEJ is also acting from the same script as OBJ; creating smokescreens to confuse Nigerians. Nobody should be deceived, this isn't about Nigerians, it is about two 'big men' and their over-bloated egos.

Obasanjo and his Ministers have huge corruption cases hanging around their necks with glaring evidences to back them up; infact CACOL once submitted a detailed petition to all the anti-corruption agencies on some of the corruption that took place during his government, yet Jonathan conveniently kept quiet; now that he has suffered a personal injury from Obasanjo, he is running all over the place looking for sympathy. Thank God GEJ also mentioned the Siemens & Halliburton scandals in his letter, which means he is fully aware of it, yet his government refused to act on the matter.

If Jonathan is so angry with OBJ's letter, he should start by prosecuting all the corruption cases before his government including the Siemens, Halliburton, Aviation Fund as well as the IPP Probes. And while he is at it, he should also take an honest and non-partisan look at the credibility questions that have been raised about some Ministers and officials in his own government.

Of course they are all too busy chanting 'PDP' and 'APC' to worry about how well the current 2013 budget performed.

[quote author=S@NNiE]The governors had at a meeting last Friday in Abuja unanimously agreed that Tukur should be shown the door, but given a soft landing to facilitate his exit from office. They are proposing, among other sweetners, an ambassadorial posting for him to quit as chairman.
http://www.thisdaylive.com/articles/first-lady-threatens-pdp-governors-over-tukur/166932/#.UrKCXJdh3gA.twitter[/quote]Which unfortunate country do they want to send him to? It baffles me how irrationally, politicians reason. You say somebody isn't fit to be your party chairman, yet you want to foist him on the rest of the country as an Ambassador to (mis)represent over 160 million of us abroad. If they are so keen on giving a soft landing, then might as well give him their wives or even their daughters to soft-land on.

The simple truth is, that none of these letters is saying anything we don't already know or haven't long suspected. It probably won't take more than two meetings in Ota to 'reconcile' OBJ & GEJ; so where does that leave the people he claims to be fighting for? The letters flying all around the place today is only a smokescreen by the political class to confuse us. It is glaringly evident, that every politician in Nigeria today, is a thief and they all are the collective cause of our problems and we must not loose sight of this fact.

Nigerians must simply refuse to take sides and with any of these people or their leprous political parties. Obasanjo has the capacity to do more than write letters if he is suddenly so concerned about the well-being of the citizens of this country (after eight years of indifference). Just as it is well within the means of the President to also demonstrate through his actions that he is concerned about our plight instead superintending over the current morbid circus that the entire political class is treating us all to.

Things are on the verge of getting really messy in this country and we must start looking beyond tribal sentiments. Democracy is not the only form of government available and if our political class aren't matured enough to play by its rules then we might as well start looking for more suitable alternatives. We can't go on like this ad infinitum. Even supposedly 'undemocratic' countries are not experiencing the kind of acute inequality that we currently experience in this country today. For the very first time in my life, I am tempted to say...am almost ashamed to be Nigerian.

AwodwaGyanOniwe: You will have to start from our colleges 1st our universities don't recognise Nigerian universities. Go to high school then we can see if ur fit to stduy here

Your degree from the BUSH UNIVERSITIES isn't recognised here.

Fortunately for Nigerians, prestigious universities in Europe and US (including Harvard and other Ivy League universities) are still accepting degrees from these supposedly 'BUSH UNIVERSITIES' and even granting Postgraduate scholarships to Nigerians with these 'BUSH' degrees.

OP, when you go in search of junk news, you will most definitely find junk news. The quality of writing is not only appalling but also criminally inaccurate. The writer was lazily putting together pieces of hear-says to make up a news article to earn a paycheck, he/she even referred to something as "Nigerian 411 scam". At least that says something about the his/her intellectual depth. You can't get away with this quality of writing on a business-minded news site.

I would rather the minister had kept quiet. She is preaching to the wrong congregation. She should be lecturing her colleagues in government and not the private sector, who against all odds have literally made something out of nothing. In spite of all the obstacles and bribe-seeking government officials, Nigerian businessmen have weathered the storm. It is not enough for government to make good policies, it must also create the right environment to ensure that these policies work.

No businessman goes around looking for who to bribe, knowing fully well that this will eat deep into his profits. I think she was only grand-standing, because she already knows that the private sector has no choice. In all the countries where government officials insist on collecting bribes before anything is done, it has become a deliberate policy for corporations and private businesses to made provisions for those bribes as part of the cost of doing business. All foreign companies doing business in Nigeria and countries like Russia and even China, know that they will have to part with bribe money at one point or another.

The onus is now on the government to protect the private sector from corrupt public officials and civil servants, but if it cannot do that then, the private sector have no choice but to continue giving bribes to keep their businesses afloat.

As much as we all want to help, we still have to be very vigilant before someone presents us with a counterfeit widow.

Am impressed by how well you have answered all of these questions, your answers have been quite informative. I have just published a collection of Design Essays, that will be available on Amazon, Apple store and a handful of other eBook retail stores as from next month. And I will like to know What the indie publishing market in Russia is like. Do Russians buy eBooks?
Which Russian publishers will recommend that I send out query letters to?

Under the leadership of Medvedev, I saw a Russia that was more Pro-west and a lot more liberal, but under Putin, it seems Russia has become a tad more authoritarian like it used to. Would you say Russians prefer a Medvedev to a Putin Presidency?
What do the average Russian think about, cases like the arrest of Greenpeace activists of even the detention and trial of Alexei Navalny? Are they scared that their civil rights could be threatened under Putin?

There seem to be a lot of anti-Russian sentiments amongst the countries of the old Soviet Union. As can be seen from the on-going bitter debate in some of these countries over the propriety of Russian language as an official language or even as a language of instruction in schools. Do you think their reservations towards Russia are unfounded? What does the average Russian think about people from these countries?

Dannylux: How long would it take a non Russian (Nigerian, precisely ) to learn to speak Russian?

I think it depends on your level commitment and the intensity of the language program you are taking. I once took a 9-month intensive Russian language program in Kiev, and today, I do not only speak intermediate Russian but also read and write in Russian (even though, I was just an average student then). On the other hand, I casually took Italian classes while living in Italy for a couple of years, yet my Russian language skills is still twice better than my Italian skills.

stint: oga mi, no listen to the learner who said you should go and complain at the bank. people complain when they are not happy with bank services Abi your not happy with 800k alert.

For me o! if they mistakenly send me money, i will mistakenly withdraw it, and mistakenly spend it. daz all !

This guy is a lost case...I can't stop laughing...

O.P. As much as it is tempting to want to keep the money; it is obvious that you already know the right thing to do, or else you would have long withdrawn the money and kept quiet about it. The money isn't yours, you never worked for it, and it is even possible that someone might loose his/her job on account of that money. So just get in touch with the bank and sort this thing out right away.

Never knew this day would come; when we can have a Nairaland thread this long without tribalists hijacking it.

Can't help imagining carving a pair of nice white leather slippers out of one of these.

OP, don't you think you should be worried about more important things than about how much 'fun' you are missing by not going for service? Well, if it might interest you, I purposely refused to serve or stage manage an 'Exemption' from service even when everyone around me thought I was making a mistake, well 5 years later, I still haven't had any cause to regret my actions. My advice to you is to direct your energy towards realizing your dreams.