Category: Editorial

•The repossession of Benin bronzes is a good start and must be built upon

One of the more negative consequences of colonial conquest was the theft of the cultural artefacts of conquered people by those who had invaded them. The 1897 invasion, sacking and looting of the Benin Kingdom by British forces ranks among the most traumatic instances of this painful reality. It is all the more gratifying that a small, but significant step was taken to achieve healing and restitution.

The occasion was the formal return of two bronze artefacts by a great-grandson of one of the invading British soldiers, Dr. Adrian Mark Walker, to the Oba of Benin, Uku Akpolokpolo Erediauwa I. Dr. Walker’s explanation of his unusual action was as simple as it was right: he felt that the acquisition of the artefacts was an injustice which he had to correct.

It takes a great amount of courage to publicly admit that one’s ancestors were wrong; it takes even greater bravery to seek to make restitution for such errors. Walker’s gesture is a welcome manifestation of the culture of reconciliation that has become vital to the resolution of long-standing resentments and simmering hatreds that continue to make the lasting resolution of many conflicts so difficult. He made no excuses for the behaviour of his great-grandfather or the nation that sent him; he did not demand compensation for an ostensible “loss;” he did not question the right of the Benin Kingdom to its own artefacts. He just went ahead and did the right thing: he returned the artefacts to their rightful owners.

By his actions, Walker has unwittingly given the world a useful template with which to resolve the vexed issue of returning stolen cultural treasures to their places of origin. Over the years, the countries in which these treasures are held have persistently refused to hand them back, and have disingenuously relied on several untenable justifications.

They argue that the artefacts are legitimate spoils of war; that they alone can maintain and display them appropriately; that those from whom the artefacts were stolen are no longer around to demand their return. When Nigeria was put in the humiliating position of having to request that Britain loan it the magnificent Queen Idia mask for use in FESTAC ’77, it was turned down.  Walker has shown that none of these excuses is justifiable or reasonable. If the provenance of an artefact can be precisely determined, and if the descendants of the original owners can be located, then it is incumbent upon those who currently possess them to return them. It is as simple as that.

It is significant that Dr. Walker’s courage was matched by Benin magnanimity. The Oba of Benin, as well as the Governor of Edo State, Mr. Adams Oshiomhole, warmly congratulated Walker for what he had done, and encouraged others in similar situations to imitate his sterling behaviour. Such generosity of spirit on both sides of the issue is vital to ensuring that it does not degenerate into a blame-game that will do neither party any good.

Nigeria must do more to ensure that more of its treasures that have been spirited beyond its shores in dubious circumstances are brought back to the country. It must strengthen its capacity to accommodate and maintain artefacts, enhance its ability to monitor them locally and internationally, and improve co-operative relationships with foreign governments and institutions.

In this regard, it is truly distressing that artefacts continue to be stolen from palaces and museums, only to show up in museums and collections abroad. Nigeria’s claims to its illegally appropriated cultural heritage will be hollow if it does nothing to protect those that are still within its borders.

– Global action is needed to avoid an antibiotic apocalypse

David Cameron has added his voice to increasingly urgent warnings by the world’s public health leaders about the growth of antibiotic resistance. Besides talking about a return to “the dark ages of medicine” if we lose our power to kill microbes, the prime minister announced an internationally focused commission to come up with solutions to the crisis.

Although several medical and scientific bodies around the world have recently looked at ways to tackle drug-resistant infections, the Cameron initiative stands out because economists and policy experts will lead its deliberations with Jim O’Neill, formerly of Goldman Sachs, in the chair. This is the right priority: while there are formidable scientific obstacles to discovering safe new antibiotics, the necessary research will take place only if governments can provide sufficient incentives for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries to do the work.

The principal reason for the dearth of drugs – no new class of antibiotic has reached the market since 1987 – is the industry’s withdrawal from research in favour of more lucrative pharmaceutical fields. Like much of the medical world, companies were lulled into a false sense of security at the end of the 20th century, regarding antibiotics as yesterday’s challenge; they could not see much potential profit in new drugs to tackle bacterial infections.

Now that antibiotic resistance has emerged as an impending apocalypse for the 21st century, the industry must be drawn quickly back into the field. To some extent companies do respond to crises in a way that goes beyond their direct responsibility to maximise shareholders’ returns, as demonstrated by the huge sums spent on developing Aids treatments in the 1980s and 1990s, but we cannot rely solely on their sense of corporate social responsibility. More incentives are needed.

Direct public support for research and development is one route. Public-private partnerships are already beginning to stimulate antibiotic R&D, with the EU Innovative Medicines Initiative leading the way. These should be extended.

Another contribution should come from measures to ease the path to regulatory approval for new antibiotics, with better collaboration between authorities around the world, so that companies have to carry out no more animal testing and clinical trials than the minimum needed to demonstrate safety and efficacy. Carefully targeted patent extensions for innovative drugs might provide an incentive, too.

But the most difficult task of the O’Neill commission will be to design a market incentive to reward companies for developing medicines that would be used as little as possible, so as to prevent their microbial targets developing resistance. They would be held back for short-term administration in patients whose infections resist all existing antibiotics. Unlike other drug categories, where companies try to sell as much as possible, antibiotics need a system that decouples payment from prescriptions. An advance purchase scheme or market commitment, in which governments and health providers undertake to buy and distribute new antibiotics that meet agreed criteria, could provide the necessary financial incentive.

Some see a role for prizes. Britain’s £10m Longitude prize is on offer for the development of a cheap, simple and accurate diagnostic test for bacterial infections, which could be an invaluable tool for better targeting of antibiotics. But any prize for drug development would have to be huge to provide a serious incentive.

Whatever the O’Neill commission recommends, action is urgent. Next year should mark the start of a concerted global campaign to prevent medicine returning to the dark ages.

– Financial Times

• It is alarming that about 80 percent of motorists are culprits

We are startled by the revelation that out of the more than 12.5 million registered vehicles in Nigeria, a paltry 2.5 million of them have genuine insurance cover. The information on the record of insured vehicles is reportedly sourced from the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database’s (NIID) data bank, and released to the public by Remi Olowude, Chairman, Nigerian Insurers Association (NIA) during its annual general meeting in Lagos. The NIID, an arm of NIA, is saddled with the duty of providing information on the details of vehicles available on Nigerian roads, as well as helping to identify fake insurance certificates.

Olowude over-simplified the issue at stake when he held the trend responsible for why the reportedly registered 60 insurance companies operating in the country could not attain their collective target of N1trillion premium income since 2012.

We consider the revelation as scandalous as it portrays Nigerian motorists as lawless in view of the explicit provision of the Insurance Act 2003. The Act, in section 68, unambiguously provides: “No person shall use or cause or permit any other person to use a motor vehicle on the road unless a liability, which he may thereby incur in respect of damage to the property of third parties, is insured with an insurer registered under this Act.”

We ask: Why would 80 percent of vehicles driven on the nation’s roads not be insured in flagrant violation of the above provision of extant insurance law? Could the NIA revelation be a clear case of inaccurate data capturing of total vehicle insurance holders by NIID?  Does it mean that most vehicle owners in the country are lawless and are contemptuous of the law? Or, more importantly, could this unacceptably doubtful trend be a reflection of the passing of a vote-of-no-confidence in insurance companies generally by vehicle owners?

We seem to attune to this last point as we have always known that there is widespread popular cynicism/scepticism about insurance companies’ sincerity when it comes to payment of compensation in the event of any accident. There have been several reported and mostly unreported cases of procedural hiccups used by most insurance companies as a ploy to escape payment of compensations to the insured. Because of this general public perception  of the insurance companies over time, most Nigerians, not only car owners, have lost confidence in seeking insurance policy. Sadly, most motorists plying the nation’s roads have criminally embraced fake and cheap vehicle insurance policy that is antithetical to the whole essence of having such global motor insurance policy in place.

We call on motorists to henceforth ensure that they endeavour to get at least the minimum mandatory genuine third party motor insurance certificates before ever venturing to put their vehicles on the road, as the habit of procuring fake insurance policy is a detrimental practice. More importantly, there is the need for the police, as a law enforcement institution, to intensify efforts capable of boosting compliance with genuine vehicle insurance policy. This should be complemented by a vigorous enlightenment campaign geared towards sensitising vehicle owners to their insurance rights, the available cause of legal action in case of insurance abridgments, and the compelling need to always obtain genuine insurance policy before putting vehicles on the road.

We also call on insurance companies in the country to do more than their current efforts to try and win public confidence in the discharge of their responsibilities. The waning confidence of the public in their services might be injurious to their growth revenue wise, but it has more hurtful impact on safety of commuters and motorists. To the insurance firms, we say, in unequivocal terms: do everything possible to restore the people’s trust.

Facebook is an extraordinary tool, but its pitfalls have become increasingly apparent. Users’ personal information, interests and habits are all fair game for the company, which has little compunction about analyzing the data and selling them to advertisers. Now Facebook has gone beyond capitalism and into creepy. For a week in 2012, it seems, the company manipulated users’ news feeds as part of a psychology experiment to see whether happier or sadder content led users to write happier or sadder posts. The result? Facebook appears to have altered people’s emotional states without their awareness.

It was inappropriate and unethical for Facebook to conduct a psychological experiment without users’ informed consent.

This was wrong on multiple levels. It was unethical for Facebook to conduct a psychological experiment without users’ informed consent. And it was especially wrong to do so in a way that played with the emotions of its users. That’s dangerous territory.

Facebook, which employs a secret algorithm to determine what users see on their news feeds, conducted its research by altering the feeds of some 700,000 users, increasing or decreasing the number of “positive” and “negative” messages they saw to study the “emotional contagion” of social networking. The company, together with two academic researchers, published the results this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, Facebook asserted that users had given informed consent, which is standard protocol in psychological research, when they agreed to the company’s terms of service, which caution that users’ data can be mined for analysis and research. But that’s disingenuous. It’s hard to believe that users who took the time to read Facebook’s 13,000-word service agreements would have understood they were signing on to be lab rats.

In response to the outrage, the Facebook researcher who designed the study apologized for “any anxiety it caused.” He added that the company will seek to improve its internal review practices for future research. Certainly Facebook needs to revisit its policies to ensure that its users are not unwilling participants in psychological research. If this research is so valuable, the company should seek true informed consent.

But Facebook also needs to address its cavalier attitude toward its users. The company has come under fire repeatedly for pushing the boundaries of privacy expectations only to be surprised by ferocious blowback. This latest controversy sends a troubling message to users that their personal information, their online activities and now even their feelings are all data points to be analyzed and manipulated according to the whims of a giant corporate machine.

Los Angeles Times

•The new tariffs on used and new imported vehicles without fixing infrastructure will hurt the economy

Finally, the Federal Government has given effect to the new automotive policy announced last year, purportedly to encourage local production of motor vehicles of all types. By the policy, the import duties slammed on imported new vehicles have jumped to 35 per cent, with a matching punitive import levy of 35 per cent. Experts had warned that the move could hurt the local economy, while giving reasons why the fledgling automobile industry may derive a mere salutary benefit.

Yet, the government started its enforcement yesterday. Following trenchant criticism of the move last year, the government had put it on hold, apparently to attend to the recurring decimal in the criticisms- poor power supply. At the time, the Jonathan administration said the planned privatisation of the power sector would fix the problem within six months.

It is obvious that the problem persists. Power supply from the distribution companies is still epileptic and industries are complaining. The local automotive companies are almost non-existent as new and used vehicles dominate the market. The roads, too, remain in poor condition and would take more than lip service to fix.

In any case, it is a road we had travelled before when we had the likes of Volkswagen of Nigeria and Leyland locally assembling their products in Nigeria. Poor infrastructure frustrated the efforts. Although, there is no indication that another attempt could lead to the same result if all the loopholes had been plugged, the fact is that the gaping holes are even wider now.

The Nigeria Customs Service has continually cried out that it lacked the capacity to man all the entry points to the country. Even the ones manned still give enough room to smugglers to perpetrate their deeds, thus hurting the economy. It has been suggested by economists that Benin Republic is usually the beneficiary of such policies. Demand would always spur efforts by desperate importers to force in their goods. The jump in price by about 70 per cent would be far above the cost of smuggling.

As we argued in an earlier editorial when the idea was first mooted last year, Nigeria is not ripe for such a policy and it should be deferred until the infrastructure deficit had been fixed and the people mobilised behind the policy.

The Nigerian people deserve the best. The experience with the experiment with ban on importation of rice should serve as adequate warning as to the fate that would befall the new policy. The minister for agriculture, Mr. Akinwumi Adesina, had eloquently argued for the ban ostensibly to save the nation foreign exchange. He got the Federal Executive Council to approve it and it came into force. However, the local production lines had not been sufficiently activated and grown, in quantity and quality. The result is that there is enough imported rice to satisfy the demands and yearnings of Nigerians.

We call on the Federal Government to halt this move. Nigerians must be mobilised to approve the move and the needed support lines must be put in place before attempting to impose undue hardship on already sapped people in a country where poverty continues to ravage the land and unemployment rages like fire in the desert in the harmattan.

We see the take-off of the policy more as a way to earn revenue for the government than for its capacity to enhance the local vehicle assembly plants.