₦airaland Forum

Each candidate tried to impress the North as per what they will do. Typical areas included security, agriculture through the use of vast Northern farmlands, textile industry revival and addressing the out of school children.

All the above are very good but I was surprised that not a lot of focus was put on Northern industrialisation. The Buhari govt kickstarted this through the ongoing construction of the AKK gas pipeline to take gas to the core North which will boost power generation in Abuja, Maiduguri and Kano, fastrack a massive boom in gas based industries along the entire length of that pipeline by teeing off from it and the other industries that will spring up. It would have been sufficient to just say they will tag on to the existing govt initiatives and expand, complete them.

Tinubu mentioned completion of the 700MW Zungeru hydro power project and the 3000MW Mambilla hydro power project in Taraba state which has hardly kicked off and faces funding challenges and decades long legal battles. Though good he mentioned it, hardly went far enough to harnessing the huge potential that the North offers. Peter Obi did ok but could have said a lot more beyond just his agricultural plan. Atiku as son of the soil disappointed me the most as his plans were the lightest of the major contenders that addressed Northerners at the Arewa House.

Cmanforall:
Kaduna refinery o
I read the Banner again

Oil is in South South, what happens to fixing the nearest refinery in South first

Buhari have shown the worst tribal and regional discord in Nigerian history



It is to fix the refinery in the North, his region

PortHarcourt refinery is being fixed as we speak at a cost of about $2.5bln. It is expected to come on stream by middle of next year.

Warri refinery is next in line to be fixed, to come on stream in 2024 or thereabouts.

Kaduna refinery is the last to be fixed hence the signing of the Letter of Intent now. They will need to find the funds, sign the contract and start rehabilitation works. That may still take some time to sort out.

This is all part of the plan to rehabilitate our moribund refineries and the plan is on track. If you add this to the Dangote refinery and the other modular refineries coming on, Nigeria will be self sufficient in refining its own crude and even have a lot to export primarily to the West African Market.

Not surprised that PHC International Airport did not get any bidder. Only 2 or 3 foreign airlines operate out of that place. More needs to be done to attract back the International traffic that Airport once enjoyed. How will an airport concessionaire make money with very little traffic activity?

Struggling to see the need for this at this time. I didnt listen to Emefiele's press conference but I imagine he is doing this to tighten amount of money in circulation. It will force people to turn in their cash to the banks and I suspect a requirement will be to open an account for those without one. That will enable a lot more people to be banked thereby reducing the size of the informal economy. This is apart from the possibility of reining in some corrupt folks.

Powersurge:
I thought this project was 3,000 MW b4?

It is Mambilla Hydro Power in Taraba state that will generate about 3000MW. This Zungeru project has always been 700MW generating capacity.

PMB should have done this a long time ago but frankly what difference would it have made?

Corruption was the worst under constituted boards in the past right from OBJ's time. Trillions and trillions of NDDC money unaccounted for. The forensic audit report if it will ever be released will reveal a lot.

Governors and powerful interest groups in NDDC states influence board nominations who then do the bidding of their benefactors. If these powerful folks are ignored, they will make life unbearable for such a board. The issue is NOT appointment of a board but fighting the cabals that hold that agency down.

Who is going to immortalise those killed in the ensuing riots and who still remembers those whose businesses were burnt down and livelihoods destroyed in the mayhem that played out subsequently?

Strange that Oyebanji will start by observing a minute silence for his late mum. RIP to his mum but bringing his personal matter into the beginning of his tenure is unwise if you ask me. He could have said let us observe a minute silence for all victims of insecurity including the Owo massacre victims, then add his mum at the very end if he must.

This must be an old draft version of the 2023 budget, not the one presented by PMB. Total budget was more than N20trn and debt servicing was about N6trn

Kasssandra:
1.We are building airports, powerplants and road construction is ongoing. Both before Buhari and after Buhari (We even have more airports than we did in 1987 self).

2.As for power, when government is setting the prices below what the sector needs for a profit, at the end, the sector is not going to grow as it should.

There is a reason why GSM is growing. MTN and Airtel were allowed to set their prices...and thus could afford to build all those antennae, and towers, and suchlike.

3.Our tax to gdp ratio is 8.1% . It is even lower than Niger Republic. Taxes are what build a lot of things. You have poor tax uptake, what do you expect. Plus 20 years ago, we removed tollgates, and by extension a vital source of income for......roads.

4.Oil is our main source of income. Oil prices jump up and down. We need oil to be like 133-40 dollars per barrel before we can even balance the budget...meanwhile the price has been all over the place...meaning loans have to be taken

5.Corurption. If I talk and say GEJ government was corrupt, Obi govt was corrupt, Atiku was corrupt., Obasanjo and tinubu was corrupt, all of you will jump on my matter. You all talk about corruption, and yet when your favorite master is indicted, you suddenly cry prosecution.

My main message is simple....let us get off oil, diversify, industrialise, remove subsides on power and petrol so that they can earn the profit needed to pay for improvements, and new refineries and power plants, extend tax collection to the 70% of economically active people who don't pay a thing....and we will get somewhere.

But you see the high prices, and then label me fulani herdsman supporter. Okay o.

4.

I completely agree with your points. These are the issues we should be paying attention to

Rufai, I get what you are trying to say. However, the figures you quoted showed that the pound was stronger than the Naira at the time. More Naira exchanged for the Pound Sterling and not the other way round. N793 exchanged for £650, so £1 was N1.22, 22% weaker than the £.

Yes, the British Govt defended the Pound Sterling last week to the tune of £65bln in a single day, yet the Pound crashed to its lowest level against the Dollar in decades (more than 30% loss) if my numbers are correct. Economies are volatile around the world and many currencies have tanked against the Dollar. Our situation may be self inflicted atimes but not immune from the global economic crisis.

The important thing is exchange stability so that businesses can plan. The Japanese Yen exchanges at more than 120 to the Dollar, no issues. As long as we depend on oil revenues for most of our forex needs, our currency is doomed. We have to diversify our forex earnings by exporting more goods and services apart from oil. Any manifesto that doesn't prioritise this and the quadrupling of revenues in the medium term is dead on arrival.

I don't believe raising interest rates by CBN will curb inflation. Emefiele should deal with multiple forex exchange rate regimes and curb massive roundtripping. That is the main problem. On the fiscal side, solve crude theft and significantly raise oil revenue then watch the Naira stabilise and cost of living start to reduce.

Prof Pat Utomi is 66yrs old and if not that he stepped down for PO in the Labour Party Presidential primaries, would have been contesting for Presidency. How is he much different from Tinubu as per age etc? Why did he step down, afterall he is more cerebral and competent than PO in my opinion. I observed that he parried Seun's questions on competency as basis for seeking presidency, rather he stuck to Afenifere's position of geopolitical balancing and 'my turn' ideology.

OBJ set up Nigeria to succeed through his bold reforms which we are enjoying today. However he completely derailed by attempting the dead-on-arrival third term bid. His disdain for free and fair elections disabled our march towards selecting good leaders. This led to the emergence of unprepared leaders such as Yaradua and GEJ. Yaradua meant well but apart from amnesty for ND militants, what else stood out? He reversed the sale of refineries, halted the electricity reforms after the humongous amounts spent by previous administration and generally slowed down most of OBJ's reforms before his untimely death.

OBJ therefore has no right to pontificate about the process of emergence of good leaders, far from it. In fact we should hold him responsible for the string of failures since he left office.

NOI came close to identifying our major economic problem. Our inability to diversify away from oil, our mono product economy sustainer. She was finance minister twice and knows what she is saying. You can see how she sidestepped the blame game because that will quickly put her years of service to Nigeria in the spotlight.

We need to diversify our economy, increase revenue five, ten folds and put our largely idle people and assets to productive work. That will solve most of the other problems bedevilling us. I look forward to hearing candidates' proposals in this direction

Truth is, there is oil theft. There has been oil theft for years, more than 15 years now. Theft from pipelines, from terminals and from well heads. It has gotten worse in the past year or so.

Crude theft is not the difference btw our OPEC quota of 1.8mln bbls per day and current production of about 1.1mln bbls per day. The Naval Chief was right when he said that level of theft being quoted by NNPC and others including what Peter Obi is quoting is wrong. Truth is we have not invested in growing our oil production over the years and we have been steadily facing declining production. The other thing is that many oil export terminals have been closed in the past 6 months by the IOCs because of all sort of issues including vandalism and equipment integrity. Shell and Agip have declared force majeure on their exports as they shut in their export terminals for months now. When they reopen, our production will increase. However, there is still the menace of crude oil theft that needs to be attacked frontally. I dont think we are losing more than 250,000 bbls per day to crude theft. That is still huge so reason why I support the pipelines protection contract recently given to Tompolo and the effort by our security agencies to destroy crude theft operations. We should start seeing our production going up in say 2-3 months from now.

For the medium to long term, we need more investments in our oil industry. Unfortunately that is where we will struggle as international financiers are unwilling to fund oil and fossil fuel projects anymore and our local companies and banks cannot raise the sort of monies required. That is where the advocacy by Timipre Sylva and Vice President Osinbajo come in. They need to appeal to our international friends to keep funding oil and gas projects in the medium term at least. This is where I expect Peter Obi and other candidates to focus on providing solutions, not reeling out statistics that don't speak directly to the issues at least in the medium to long term.

The Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) was conceived in 2018, spearheaded by late Abba Kyari after a business meeting and agreement between PMB and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel with Siemens leading the effort.

We were generating well over 8000MW of electricity at the time but only about 4000MW was evacuated and distributed. So it made sense to tackle the immediate evacuation and distribution problem seen as a quick win hence the target of evacuating and transmitting already available 7000MW by 2021. Next was to expand transmission and distribution to 11000MW by 2023 while the last phase was to expand generation to 25000MW by 2025.

A few things happened since then;
1. Abba Kyari died such that program was a bit derailed

2. Covid happened such that lockdowns took at least a year away from the schedule

3. We couldn't fund our part of the deal as required. That meant a delay

It now appears that we are back on track with delivering this program though a couple of years late. It is a good step in the right direction for what was started in 2018. It didn't start today and projects like this take some time to accomplish.

I expect Peter Obi or any other candidate for that matter to pick up the well thought out program and find areas where there are still gaps or need prioritising so that we can recover lost time. There is absolutely no need to understudy another model or create something new. That will amount to a waste of energy and lack of continuity thinking. Whatever new thing conceived will take at least 3-4 yrs to be delivered. Now let us scrutinise the plans of our Presidential candidates accordingly.

ADC that can't solve a minor disagreement with its presidential candidate for such a small party wants to rule states where it doesn't control the police or security agencies. This political season comes with all sorts

Funny how people including Peter Obi and PMB keep multiplying volumes of oil in barrels by oil price and arriving at revenue accruing to govt. First of all, there is a cost of production which is roughly about 30% of oil price. Secondly, govt via NNPC owns 60% of what is left, the balance is owned by the IOCs or other JV Partners. They should adjust their numbers accordingly and show some basic knowledge of how it works

Fashola nailed it perfectly. Ideas and solutions beyond using our challenges to score cheap points.

However, I agree with those that now bash him of haven used the same tactics he is now disowning against the previous administration. Hopefully he has humbly learnt from that.

ElSudani:
I read what he said but I couldn't find the lie told by Tinubu.
Is it that the site was not a dump site previously?
Is it that the site is not within 100 meters away from the shoreline?
What exactly is the lie?

Good questions. In addition, I thought land rights not within 100m of a shoreline belonged to state govts. I am aware some inland waterways and their mgt are on the exclusive list but even that has been successfully challenged in court by Lagos State govt. So how did FG allocate that land to Kembe or whatever the company is called?

Who listens to this sort of people? My problem with Buhari is how he picked this guy to serve in his govt. The SDP candidate is not even the youngest amongst the candidates as he alluded to.

Grgton:
why is Abuja kaduna not tolled?

Below article provides FG's plans on tolling across the country. 12 highways across the country in the first instance.

https://www.vanguardngr.com/2021/02/fg-plans-tolling-on-12-highways/

Excerpts below:
“……Others are: Kano-Shuari, Potiskum-Damaturu, Lokoja-Benin, Enugu-Port Harcourt, Ilorin-Jebba, Lagos-Ota-Abeokuta and Lagos-Badagry-Seme Border.

The roads, according to the ministry, come under the pilot phase of the HDMI to be managed by selected private sector investors under its Value-Added Concession, VAC, arrangement.

The 12 highways according to the document reviewed by Vanguard represent merely 5.6 percent or 1,963 kilometres of the country’s 35,000 km federal highway network.

The document estimates that not less than N1.34 trillion of private sector investment would flow into the highways while no fewer than 50,000 direct jobs and 200,000 indirect jobs would be created by the concessioning of the highways to the private operators.”

GeneralDae:
Come on man, ever heard of the OB3 gas pipeline from Kwale? The AKK gas pipeline is built to enable us export gas through Niger then to Algeria to Europe. Is Abia close to Niger or Algeria?

You are right. Very many of our people need to be informed about ongoing projects. The OB3 line you mentioned is the SE/SS equivalent of the AKK gas line. The ELPS pipeline is the SS to West equivalent. These pipelines were part of the gas master plan formulated since the 90s and only being completed by this administration.

There are many other ongoing gas power plants in Imo State that can deliver up to 5000MW of power plus small modular refineries in that same Imo State. The Bodo-Bonny road in Rivers State is transformational. East - West Road is ongoing, phc-maiduguri rail is ongoing. Enugu-phc and Onitsha-Enugu roads are all ongoing. The $10billion NLNG Train 7 plant is ongoing in Bonny. See, if a $10bln project is cited in your region, the whole area and communities will feel the benefits of spending that huge sum of money. If not for the Southern legislators that blocked funding for the $15bln Lagos-Calabar coastal rail, that also would have been ongoing. We Southerners just like to complain daily.

Peter Obi needs to back up his manifesto of 'From Consumption to Production' with track records. As I understand it, he was engaged mostly in trading and importation businesses most of his life. Apart from the brewery business, which other manufacturing concerns or initiatives has he championed? The list to look out for includes but not limited to Port development, Refineries, Car manufacturing/assembly plants, agro allied industries (local agric production, extension services, mechanised farming, storage, processing, bagging, export), petrochemical/fertilizer plants, airports and a host of other businesses that are Nigerian based, employ thousands and depend less on forex? These are the things that will convince me of the seriousness of that agenda beyond the rhetorics. If no prior experience, then his manifesto needs to detail out HOW he intends to conceive ideas, fund them and attract a crack team to help him deliver. Time to go beyond sloganeering.

By the way, the same goes for other candidates.

Some other sectors will suffer forex deprivation due to this. We simply have to earn more USD

nedekid:
Simple question, do you live in Nigeria?

Yes I live in Nigeria. We need to earn a lot more revenue through tax. You can argue that the govt need to show that it can handle what it currently earns before been trusted to handle more. That is a reasonable expectation but may take time. Let us raise more tax money and continue to hold our leaders accountable

daywatcher:
After reading comments, it is clear that many Nigerians want 21st century development as long as it is not them paying for it

Nigerians want to eat omelettes without breaking one single egg. Free education, free parking, subsidized fuel, subsidized power, free everything. It doesn't work that way. We need to raise taxes to fund our needs as it is done elsewhere in the world. I believe we have a revenue problem in Nigeria and if we can put our massive GDP to work and generate at least 15% of GDP per year in taxes, we would have solved half our problems. Plugging loopholes is a part of it but no where near enough. We must at least triple our revenues to stand any chance at economic recovery. I will support any candidate with an aggressive revenue generation manifesto, including removing subsidies and directing it to funding education and other social amenities that will benefit the poorer masses more.

The signing of the recent PSC extensions and lease renewals as part of PIA implementation is significant and the reason why these disputes can be amicably settled. Both FG/NNPC and oil majors have done the best thing in the circumstance and I commend both parties. Projects that were stalled for years can now go ahead and be funded and executed by the oil majors. We are looking at around $500bln revenue over the 20-yr lease period which is significant.

Listening to that Datti's interview, it didn't strike me as if they understand the enormity of what it takes to govern a country like Nigeria. Asked how they intend to turn around the agricultural sector, the response was so ordinary and underwhelming as if they have not thought about it. I notice this general lack of a clear direction and the 'how' in most of the speeches and interviews so far. They will have to do a lot better if they ever want to come close to the achievements of other contenders.

I think Dr Reuben Abati is more matured, knowledgeable, measured and balanced than the younger presenters. That said, I think Arise News carves out a special and unique form of news and media presentation unrivalled by their competitors. As long as they keep reviewing their performance and correct mistakes, it is all good.

I cannot wait until campaigns start in September. Each candidate should tell us what they have done in the past and what specifically they will do to handle the issues we face today. Sweet talking will not cut it.

Tinubu has some sort of headstart over others but we will see what each candidate has to offer.

Apart from the Lekki Deep Seaport and all other industrial concerns in that free trade zone, I'm also impressed by the liberal policies of Lagos State that attracted to that business corridor the gigantic Dangote investments in Fertiliser and petroleum refining that are among the biggest in the world with respect to capacity and volume of business. The reclamation of the encroaching sea on Ahmadu Bello Way that led to creation of Eko Atlantic City and other state govt driven initiatives on properties along the internal waterways are just a bit of what I consider the legacies of Tinubu's team through the democratic years.

I say let ideas rule the airwaves

Collinsaik:
if tinubu were to win in this electon, after doing 8 years power automaticaly goes to the north. that will mean, 24 years of uninterupted muslim reigh over nigeria. is nigeria an islamic country? ,tinubu must be stopped at any cost.

But when OBJ and GEJ together did almost 14yrs as Christian Presidents, it was ok right?