₦airaland Forum

iflywithbuhari:
Perhaps you didn't see the part where he claims there are some errors he wants edited. Be waiting for happiness from heaven. You better go and find a real job, because if you are banking on this government, then you're dead on arrival.

TonyeBarcanista:
Typical of Said Buharists... very intolerant

greatiyk4u:
I think the media are the people cooking up parts of the story.

Beremx:
you will know a lady when she comments in politics section. I am 100percent sure that moniker belongs to Ngwakwe.

My baby is fine. Do you know of any ointment or soap i can use to treat heat rash for my son?

thesicilian:
True, bro, true. We have to manage it like that for now.
Your reference to the begged reminds me of a story that broke out few months ago about a particular better that was making over N300,000 per month begging for alms for treatment at Luth. It made my eyes pop out in shock, as in, you mean you made over 300k in a single month, and you found it necessary to go back to the streets to beg the next month? Talk about the poverty mentality!

thesicilian:
I believe this is where a majority of our economic problems as a nation lies - just following advice, instead of brainstorming on our own and what is best for us in our own peculiar situation. While my current position is let's even wait and see whether they'll even give the money in the first place, I'm actually of the opinion that it is much better to provide free (or heavily subsidized) healthcare, education, agricultural incentives, etc to these particular poor communities that they have targeted with the help of the World Bank.
We're not arguing that they don't need the money but putting aside the impracticality of the project itself, why start something that is most likely to be kicked out should another government come in in about 3yrs time?

Firefire:
[b]It will be recalled that the World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, had said at last year’s IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings that Nigeria is one of the top five countries that has the largest number of poor. Nigeria, he said ranked third in the world while India ranked number one with 33 per cent of the world poor. China is ranked second with 13 per cent of the world’s poor, followed by Nigeria where seven per cent of the world poor live in.

He said that Bangladesh has six per cent share of the world’s poor while the Democratic Republic of Congo has five per cent of the world’s poor population. Jim Yong Kim said these five countries are home to 760 million of the world’s poor, adding that another five countries, Indonesia, Pakistan, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya would encompass almost 80 per cent of the extreme poor.

World Bank had said that a sharp focus on these will be central to ending poverty, the “while economic growth remains vital for reducing poverty, growth has its limits, according to a new World Bank paper. Countries need to complement efforts to enhance growth with policies that allocate more resources to the extreme poor. These resources can be distributed through the growth process itself, by promoting more inclusive growth, or through government programs, such as conditional and direct cash transfers. Direct cash transfers “It is imperative not just to lift people out of extreme poverty; it is also important to make sure that, in the long run, they do not get stuck just above the extreme poverty line due to a lack of opportunities that might impede progress toward better livelihoods.

Economic growth has been vital for reducing extreme poverty and improving the lives of many poor people. Yet, even if all countries grow at the same rates as over the past 20 years, and if the income distribution remains unchanged, world poverty will only fall by 10 percent by 2030, from 17.7 percent in 2010. This is simply not enough, and we need a laser like focus on making growth more inclusive and targeting more programmes to assist the poor directly if we’re going to end extreme poverty.” Kim added: “To end extreme poverty, the vast numbers of the poorest – those earning less than $1.25 a day – will have to decrease by 50 million people each year until 2030. This means that one million people each week will have to lift themselves out of poverty for the next 16 years. This will be extraordinarily difficult, but I believe we can do it. This can be the generation that ends extreme poverty. “Growth alone is unlikely to end extreme poverty by 2030 because as extreme poverty declines, growth on its own tends to lift fewer people out of poverty.

This is because, by this stage, many of the people still in extreme poverty live in situations where improving their lives is extremely difficult. Even if there is no change in inequality, the “poverty-reducing power” of economic growth is less in countries that are initially more unequal.” The transfer will go directly to the beneficiary.[/b]

Re: Con Coughlin’s April 12 Telegraph report on Nigeria’s war on terror

Our attention has been drawn to a piece published in your paper, by one Con Coughlin, identified as your Defence Editor, and titled, ‘Nigeria using UK aid to persecute president’s political foes rather to fight Boko Haram.’

The piece is not only full of factual inaccuracies, it also betrays a shocking level of ignorance of Nigeria and the country’s ongoing war against terrorism.

Mr Coughlin’s editorial tactic is to quote unnamed “senior officials” and “Western diplomats” and “Western officials” and “political opponents” making fact-free and unfounded statements. It also appears that he sought out only those opinions which suited and reinforced his disgracefully false headline. Nowhere in the piece is there anything that suggests he attempted to contact the Nigerian government for its own side of the story.

Coughlin writes that “American officials are also angry that $2.1 billion of aid given to the Nigerian military to tackle Boko Haram has not been properly accounted for.”

It does not occur to him that the $2.1 billion he refers to was budgeted for and wholly spent by the government that President Buhari and his party defeated in the March 2015 presidential elections, and that one of President Buhari’s priorities has been investigating the misuse of those funds.

It also does not appear to occur to Mr. Coughlin that the “political opponents” he is falsely accusing President Buhari of “targeting” and “persecuting” are actually on trial on account of how they spent the $2.1 billion in question. Mr. Coughlin is equally unaware of the fact that the investigating panel set up by Mr. Buhari to probe the $2.1 billion recently published a preliminary report that confirmed that much of that money was indeed looted or mis-spent by the accused persons, and that the government has started to recover the funds.

Coughlin accuses President Buhari’s government of attempting to cover-up the abductions of 400 women and children “abducted last year by militants from the Nigerian town of Damasak.”

This is absolutely untrue. The Damasak abductions he’s referring to, which were recently widely reported, took place, not “last year” as he says, but in late 2014, well before Mr. Buhari was elected President of Nigeria. (And, by the way, Mr Buhari came to power on May 29, 2015, not July, as Coughlin reports).

A simple search by Mr. Coughlin of his paper’s archives would have revealed these facts. A simple fact-check by his copy-editors would have spared the Telegraph the embarrassment of publishing this drivel.

There are several other inaccuracies and baseless statements in the piece, but Mr. Coughlin is too enamoured of his anonymous sources to realise they might be misleading him, or be as ignorant about the situation as he is. The suggestion that Boko Haram is going “from strength to strength” is an eminently laughable one; not even Nigeria’s opposition party would make such an absurd claim.

Since President Buhari took office, schools in Borno State, shut for more than one year under the previous government, have reopened. The same applies to the airport in Maiduguri, shut down in December 2013 after a devastating Boko Haram attack on the nearby military airbase.

Thousands of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) have now started returning home. Last Sunday, El-Kanemi Warriors Football Club played its first game in its home base of Maiduguri in more than two seasons. Until now they had been forced to play home games outside the region, on account of security concerns. There are several more examples of how the people of the region are finally getting a chance to rebuild their lives, as the Nigerian Armed Forces and a Multinational Joint Task Force continue their work of routing the terrorists.

Mr. Coughlin not only sounds like a spokesperson for the very people whose corruption and mismanagement allowed Boko Haram to bring Nigeria to its knees – and whose disastrous legacy President Buhari has spent the last one year redeeming Nigeria from – he is also guilty of failing to observe the most basic rules of responsible journalism.

Mr Coughlin needs a refresher course on responsible journalism as much as he needs a crash course on Nigeria. Until he submits himself to these, we’re afraid he will continue to embarrass not only himself, but also the revered British media institution that is the Telegraph.

Garba Shehu
Senior Special Assistant to the President
(Media & Publicity)
April 13, 2016

“Good morning. This week, we address the fuel subsidy. It’s not by happenstance that you see me with my sleeves all rolled up. And I hope you’re visiting filling stations and helping us work this difficulty.

This is probably the most challenging issue since I took over as GMD and Minister of Petroleum, and the reality is that a lot of us even within the Company (NNPC) do not know why this is so and so for those who don’t know, I’ll first go through why you have this situation.

First, on resumption in August, we had a very major problem on our hands. Because subsidies, 500 billion, close to 600 billion, hadn’t been paid over a one year period, and so the majors, everybody who was importing… had began to very quietly reduce the levels of importation that they had and although I struggled very hard and got the Assembly approval and the President’s approval to eventually pay a good portion of that subsidy somewhere in November, by then it was too late.

Too late because although they got the money, they didn’t have access to foreign exchange so the critical reason, main critical reason why you have this supply gap today is that although NNPC has its own 445,000 barrels allocation of crude and is meeting its own, who is meant to meet 50% of your delivery and is more than meeting but is indeed exceeding that, the individuals who should provide the balance of the 40% component are not bringing in any product.

And so, we’ve had to be very creative over the last 4, 5 months, until we basically ran out of options and the sort of creativity that we put in the space was forward buying, forward purchase, forward crude allocations, and also, just to bring in more product, because we saw NNPC transit from a 45% provider to suddenly 80%, and about this month really to 100% provider of petroleum products in Nigeria.

That was not sustainable, we didn’t have the capacity, we didn’t have the funding, we didn’t have access to the products, we didn’t have the foreign exchange. So in very many ways, it’s surprising that we’ve even been able to survive this long.

So the key element has been, how do we find foreign exchange for those who eagerly want to participate in the stream, who have been doing this traditionally, to get into the space, buy their products, come in, distribute. That’s something we’ve had to work on.

Of course, the second problem was incessant pipeline disruptions. Literally, if you look at the statistics of this year, versus last year, we’ve had almost two times the number of pipeline interventions and disruptions than we’ve had over the last two, three years, in this year and that for us is very disturbing.

Now, we’ve thrown a couple of ideas on this. The first thing that I have tried to do is, for the first time in this Country, I have been able to convince the upstream companies to provide some FX buffer over the next one year for those who are bringing in products.

And so I’ve tied, Total Upstream to Total Downstream, Mobil Upstream to Mobil Downstream, Agip ENI to Oando, Shell to Conoil and things like that. It’s been very innovative, putting 200 million dollars of FX availability out into the space. It’s taken a lot of goodwill, it’s taken a lot of work from me.

The second thing we’ve done is, we've had to box our way through the CBN to get a little of allocation, because we provide the bulk of this foreign exchange, we should have a bit of it to help stabilise the situation, because fuel queue, don’t make any mistake about it, it doesn’t matter what we achieve in our transformation agenda, is the single most difficult item, which if not solved can bring down the polity and can create a mayhem here, so it is something that we have focused on. So I have been able to get a bit of co-operation from CBN on that.

Now, I’ve also been able to convince Mr. President to give us access to some, other than the 445k barrels from national production. The difficulty with that of course, like you and I know is that it goes into the FAC entity, so once you touch any barrel there, you’re going to have Governors understandably, quarrel with you on this. But these are some of the innovative solutions we’ve done.

We’ve thrown our creative options on the pipelines, by pointing a set of trial, by contracting contractors to get into the pipelines, and show us that they can deliver if we give them the contract.

What that has done is that for the first time in over 8 years, we’ve been able to capture back system 2B all the way to Ilorin. For the first time in over 6 years, we were able to pump crude from Escravos into Warri and we were able to pump oil from Brass into Port Harcourt. And we were able to pump from Warri right into Kaduna, with a few skirmishes here and there. This is the first time in over 10 years we’ve been able to accomplish this. We accomplished this by not spending money, but owing obligations.

Now, we are going out to the stage of contracting, where we are going to advertise this and see how we can put this as permanent features into the system. So a huge amount of work’s been going on in this stream.

Our depots, we are at the stage right now of looking at policies geared towards advertising our depots and our pipelines for purposes of contracting joint ventures that will put in money, refurbish depots that have been abandoned for upwards of a decade, so that we can have the distributional network that we need to be able to solve this.

It’s not enough just to bring in the cargoes which we are beginning to do, but if you bring the cargoes and they arrive in Lagos, if you have to send 3,000 trucks round the whole Country, it takes an average of 4 to 7 days to do that, and the very next day, you’re back to the same place, so the sheer logistical nightmare is not what NNPC was set up to do, so we need to be able to get those pipelines back, get the depots functioning, push a lot of the responsibility to the major oil companies who are basically leaving us to do all the work and picking up the profit at the end of the tunnel.

So, it’s been a very difficult work, very challenging, we’re getting to the solutions, the first few cargoes are beginning to come in and I think by the second week of April like I said, we should be hopefully out of this queue situation. But that is not a long-term solution.

The long term solution is that we have to throw private initiatives to the downstream. We’ve got to have a situation where we create enough policy direction, such that people can get in there and actually do the business. We can take care of our own filling stations, NNPC stations and perhaps some of the affiliates that are going to be with us but that is a job we’ve done and done well but we can do it better. We can go into growing the affiliate stations even more so that we have a lot more affiliate stations that we use as response to security situations.

But ultimately, the business must go back to where it belongs, which is the private sector, not the public sector and until we do that deal with the issue of pricing, which our price modulation has helped us manage, but not quite completely, we’re not going to solve the problem.

Now, how do you come in? Get out into the filling station, BE a proud NNPC official, HELP regulate traffic, HELP push product, HELP report scams that are going on in depots, even by our own officials and HELP talk about the change, HELP talk about the problems and BE the spokespeople for your own company, HELP create ideas. HELP suggest ways in which we can find lasting solutions to this. And if we do that, collectively, every one of us a piece, at the end of the process, people will remember the difficulties, but will also remember an NNPC hwas united in the solution to this problem.

At the end of the day, it’s not all about ME, it’s actually about YOU. Have a nice week."

lastpage:
Stop selling this #bullshyt!
Jonathan had no choice than to hand-over..... He lost the election!
He was FORCED to make the Phone-Call; Even "pig-he@ded" Patience had to be removed to another room as she was pushing the "weak-man" not to agree!

But l give him Credit for being "Smart", unlike Laurent Gbagbo...... he chose not to spend the rest of his life in an ICC prison!

FREEDOM.........is PRICELESS

Lastpage!

Imports of Nigerian crude by the United States last week jumped to 559,000 barrels per day, a weekly record going back to mid-2013.

The rise comes as refining firms turned to imports of West African crude that had previously been displaced by domestic grades during the US shale boom.

Nigeria was the fourth largest supplier of foreign crude to the US last week, displacing Mexico and also competing with Iraq and Colombia, according to preliminary figures from the Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the US Department of Energy, Reuters reported.

Of the 11 cargos of Nigerian crude that arrived in the US this month, eight went to the East Coast, while the remainder were sent to the US Gulf Coast, according to Thomson Reuters Trade Flows data.

Along with typical cargos of Nigeria’s Qua Iboe, Bonga and Forcados, two 500,000-barrel cargos of Usan medium crude were delivered to Royal Dutch Shell at South Louisiana Port, marking the first time since May 2014 that this crude has entered the US.

From 2004 to 2007, Nigeria exported over one million bpd to the US, but a surge of US domestic production that is of similar quality, including shale oil, later forced African light sweet crude producers, especially Nigeria, to find new destinations for their exports.

seunmsg:
Your hero and role model, Ayo Fayose is owing workers 3 months salary in Ekiti state and all you guys do is talk about Osun state. When will Fayose pay Ekiti workers?

Sibrah:
A man who couldn't run NTA, host a party, have a Cinema for average Nigerian thinks he can tweet his way to political followership.

falseman:
Can you get me the question he was asked before he vomited those ish or he actually took that speech from Nigeria to International stage.

"Some Nigerians claim is that life is too difficult back home, but they have also made it difficult for Europeans and Americans to accept them because of the number of Nigerians in prisons all over the world accused of drug trafficking or human trafficking," he told The Telegraph.

"I don't think Nigerians have anybody to blame. They can remain at home, where their services are required to rebuild the country."