The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Endless

  • Board appointments: An endless waiting game

    The perpetual shift of goalposts on the fulfillment of the electoral promises by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration is fast becoming its character rather than a stigma it should fight against. Apparently, the government and its handlers think more proactively to defend their anticipated failure and inactions than doubling efforts at meeting the expectations of Nigerians.

    The one-meal per day promise made to parents of junior school students has been procrastinated about more than thrice already, with the government offering sundry excuses. Yet, it is nowhere near fulfillment. Trust Nigerians, they now trivialize this promise as being effectively fulfilled! How? I was told because most Nigerian families these days have one meal per day! Even reports say internally-displaced persons (IDP) camps in the North East now feed only once daily. Then, how else can an electoral promise be fulfilled?

    In like manner, the 200,000 jobs promised to young graduates, said to have been implemented December 1, 2016, is also believed to be hanging in the balance. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo had announced, after a couple of postponements, that by October last year, the programme would take effect; later, it was shifted to December. Yet, the waiting game continues!

    The board appointments into federal government-owned agencies and parastatals that ought to have been fully effected within three months after this administration came to power are being made piecemeal in a fashion that is inconsistent with the norms of governance elsewhere. As usual, the presidency had last December 2016 announced that President Muhammadu Buhari would make appointments into all boards by January 2017. This was confirmed by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu. Although a similar promise was made on December 28, 2015, one year after, most federal government agencies are still without boards. Shehu explained that the delay was because of an issue of interest to members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), adding, “The process will be fully back on track at the beginning of the New Year.” Here we are in the second month of the year, February, yet, it’s another mirage.

    Recently, the chairman of Stanbic Bank Plc., Atedo Peterside (MON), in his presentation at the 14th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja, lamented the absence of boards in place to regulate the affairs of federal agencies and financial institutions, which in turn is expected to stimulate fiscal policies and revive the ailing economy. “The Federal Government should immediately appoint directors to the boards of every regulatory agency. Keeping a Lone Wolf at the head of a regulatory agency is dangerous and therefore detrimental to business confidence. The important lesson from the recent Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria imbroglio is that a single rogue regulator can hold the entire system to ransom, help destroy business confidence and hamper economic growth. This only became possible because the checks and balances which our laws envisaged, through the appointment of Boards, Council members or Commissioners, were not in place.”

    Unlike the usual practice, Rotimi Amaechi, Transport minister, was said to have got the nod of Mr. President to fill up the board of agencies under his ministry. Information revealed the minister had an altercation with the Chief of Staff to the President, Abbah Kyari, for substituting his (Amaechi’s) candidate with the sitting chairman of the Nigerian Railway Corporation, NRC. As at today, many of the juicy board appointments are being filled in a manner shrouded in secrecy; no thanks to the nepotistic and despotic tendencies of the President, which his close aides, associates and hangers-on are latching on to for selfish advantage.

    In response to the bickering silently ravaging the ruling party, the First Lady, Aisha Buhari, had frontally attacked her husband for abandoning party chieftains that toiled for his victory. “More than half of those people are not appointed into the government. Some people that are not politicians, not professionals were brought into the government. They don’t even know what we said we want and what we don’t during the campaign. They even come out and say to people ‘we are not politicians,’ but they are occupying the offices meant for politicians. Some have parted with their wives, some lost their children, some women too have parted with their husbands because of politics, a lot happened during the time,” she fumed. Not many board appointments had been made after the First Lady’s outburst in a British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC’s interview conducted in Hausa about three months ago.

    Competing interests from geo-political zones are said to be slowing down the President’s assent to the list prepared for the various boards. Initially, President Buhari last year October had instituted the Babachir Lawal-led committee to collate names from all the states of the federation, look at the credentials of the nominees and then advise the President on where they should be placed. The committee however identified the current economic recession, security clearance and federal character balancing as some of the reasons for the delay in constituting the boards. A number of recommendations were said to have been turned down by the Presidency, which is still considering complaints from top APC chieftains, traditional rulers and groups across the country. Also, Presidency officials are said to be attending to tons of petitions in respect of the pending board appointments.

    How long it will take to finally release the remaining list of appointments and how fairly the few juicy ones will be evenly distributed remain to be known. On why President Buhari has not been so decisive on the remaining appointments, a presidency official said the conflict of interests had to be resolved to avoid embarrassment and further division within the APC family. The delay has led to grumblings within the ruling party across the country. Supporters and chieftains of the APC, who worked for the success of the party during the 2015 general elections, lamented they had laboured in vain, having successfully wrestled power from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

    The party stakeholders deserve to be compensated after working so hard to install this government but it appears they are left not only in the cold but have also been left to suffer the excruciating economic downturn as many of them claimed they invested their resources in the campaign activities that eventually ousted PDP from power. APC members have accused their party leaders at all levels of not doing enough to compensate them. “They are weak. It seems they don’t have the guts to tell the President of the dangers of leaving the APC faithful redundant,” Yunusa Aliyu from Kano was quoted to have said.

    Meanwhile, allegations of bribery had been openly leveled against the Secretary to Government of the Federation (SGF) Babachir Lawal. Financial inducements reportedly played a determinant factor about who gets what as many of the recommendations from the states and zones were said to have been flagrantly altered when they got to the SGF’s office. But the SGF had since denied the allegation, saying he did not receive kickbacks from candidates seeking board appointments. Tainted by controversies and lack of trust in the Lawal committee, a Bukola Saraki-led team is reviewing the list all over again for the President’s assent.

    I think the problem with this issue of board appointments lies squarely with the President. The excuses for delay are not tenable if, almost two years into this administration, an integral accomplishment like board appointments is yet to be fully put in place. The reason for this lackluster style of governance is because Mr. President does not know or trust people enough for such appointments. Buhari failed to build network of contacts across the Niger. He scarcely knows good people beyond his base in the north. All the while, whenever he ran for election and lost, he had quietly recoiled into his shell until another four years. He did not socialize. He distanced himself from the elites and was equally not seen amongst the masses he claims to represent either. So, it is difficult for him to easily identify people he can trust to help actualize his vision or dreams for the nation.

    Unfortunately, this was the same reason it took him seven months to come up with those he could have appointed as ministers in less than two weeks after taking the oath of office. He was said to have rejected the list earlier submitted by the SGF-led committee on the grounds that most of the nominees “have skeletons in their cupboards.” Ostensibly looking for saints as ministers, he ended up with some of those whose activities in public offices were known as gravely corrupt.

    Now that President Buhari is back to office with a renewed vigor after 49 days of medical retreat, he should put machinery in place to fast-track the process and do something about this long overdue appointments.  We hope the discrepancies witnessed so far in the unorthodox way of board appointments will eventually give way to usher in laudable offers for party leaders, stakeholders and loyalists. Enough of this endless game of waiting!

     

    • Michael West, a Media Consultant, writes via HYPERLINK “mailto:mikeawe@yahoo.co.uk” mikeawe@yahoo.co.uk
  • Onukaba: Nigeria’s endless season of ‘cheap’ death

    Onukaba: Nigeria’s endless season of ‘cheap’ death

    Our last set of text messages started on the noon of Friday, July 24, 2015 and ended on Sunday, August 16, 2015. They were short messages in which Dr. Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo sought the intervention of this paper in publishing an online interview he granted this reporter.

    In that interview, the erudite scholar, celebrated journalist, respected university lecturer, playwright and the intellectually savvy author of many books spoke on how and why he was aspiring to govern his beloved state, Kogi.

    Personally, I had taken the whole thing as a joke when he called to ask for my support. Something just told me that this man was too refined to play the kind of do-or-die politics on display in spite of his closeness to veterans of the game like former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. Besides, he didn’t have the war chest which is key to staying on top of the political chess board here. His firm grip of media communications notwithstanding, Onukaba just never came across as a politician in the hue of those he was going to face on the battlefield. Even at death, which came like a thief in the night and snatched him away from us last week, this gentle dove would be remembered for what he did outside politics than the feeble steps he made towards actualising his personal convictions that the people of his state deserved better. His, like the death of many others, was a painful exit of a blossoming dream. Highway robbery, road accidents, ritual killings, maternal mortality, infant mortality, grisly assassinations, death from collapsed buildings and all other manners of ‘cheap’ violent death have continued to consume many Nigerian souls without adequate or realistic response from our leaders.

    And so, the man· died. Just like that! He died on one of Nigeria’s famished roads. Onukaba was not the first victim of the many tragedies that take away our nation’s best. He would not be the last either. He left with the rhythm and rhymes of his poetry; his poetic candour and nuances; the mastery of the spoken word and a firm grip of the evocative cadence of the written word. He left with many things left unfinished. Our last one-on-one contact was at a quiet library in Zone 4, Abuja where he was marking some scripts. He was a lecturer at the University of Abuja. I had gone there to pick a cheque for an advert he had placed earlier. In his usual simplicity, he walked me to the car and we spent some time discussing politics, journalism and life generally. He never missed the opportunity to smile. He readily offered tips on how to survive the vagaries of the journalism profession in a mutually suspicious society like ours. He was just that jolly good fellow that was a father or brother to many. A good man who was genuinely concerned by the woes confronting a country that endlessly demonstrates seemingly irredeemable impotence.

    When you interrogate how he died, you cannot help but blame the system – the same systemic failures that Onukaba spent the better part of his life to rectify. It is ironic that a man that spoke eloquently about the tragic consequences of bad leadership and governance structure had become a celebrated victim of that societal malaise. Asked why his state suffered from a debilitating dearth of good governance, Onukaba said that Kogi had the “misfortune of being led by the wrong people, people without vision, people who were clearly ill-prepared for the office, people who believe that being governor gives them an opportunity to primitively accumulate wealth and promote nepotism. This is why we have to be careful this time. We must pick a candidate with the right credentials, including integrity, vision and capacity to deliver. Kogi needs good governance. Kogi needs development. I believe that Kogi needs me to pull it out of this sorry state.”

    Of course, the Kogi narrative is just a microcosm of a bigger picture· at the national level. Kogi, to my mind, shares the same misfortunes with many other states and the only difference is the scale at which some have glamourized the perversion. It is that sort of annoying ineffectualness that emboldens the armed robbers that took over the major road in broad daylight to pump bullets into travelers and rob· them of valuables. Onukaba must have thought his short flight from the robbery scene had saved him from a gory encounter with the dare-devil robbers, not knowing that another fleeing driver would crush him to death in the bush. How sad! Now, we wail and sing his praises. They said a good man who could not hurt a fly had gone to rest.

    If truckloads of eulogies could wake the dead, Onukaba would be cuddling his little children before the sun sets. But that would not happen. His mortal remains are down in the bosom of mother earth. He is deaf to all the good memories we recall about him. Yet a recollection of his excellence remains immortal and we paint him in glorious words and moving prose. The Senate President, Dr . Bukola Saraki, described Onukaba in flowery words. To him, the late dramatist was “a quintessential intellectual, consummate· administrator, complete gentleman and a detribalized Nigerian.” To his state Governor, Yahaya Bello, this illustrious son of the Confluence State was “a rare· gem, a sound mind and technocrat par excellence” who would be· missed not only for what he had written but also for his “kind-heartedness.” Former Senate President, David Mark, said he was ‘devastated by the death of the frontline journalist and playwright.” And Atiku, the man he worked with and was loyal to, even right through the bitter rift with Obasanjo, said the death was “shocking, painful and beyond words” especially because Onukaba was in his house the Friday before he left for Obasanjo’s 80th birthday and eventual death on Sunday. How cruel can fate be? The man who was privileged to write Obasanjo and Atiku’s biographies died while coming from the celebration of life of the latter having bade the former good bye 48 hours earlier. Even Onukaba couldn’t have crafted this scary plot of a fate so wicked. Oh, what a script!

    Yet, the reality is that he is gone. He has bowed to the finality of death for all mortals. But Onukaba’s death would not be in vain if those who mourn him in the corridors of power can make his dream of a just and egalitarian society a realisable project. Without this, this harvest of swan song of praises is nothing short of playing to the gallery (and don’t we do that to perfection here?) Adinoyi-Ojo left behind three· young children— two daughters and a son. He had plans for them. He spelt out his vision for Kogi. These ideas are explicitly expressed. Like an intellectual that he was, his blueprint for development titled “Re-inventing Kogi State” ,among other things, harped on the need to grow internally-generated revenue with innovative and creative methods that would not over-burden the people; block the loopholes and leakages in the revenue-collection process; be a governor to all Kogites and deploy the resources for the benefit of the entire people; maintain equity in appointments and resources allocation while reverting the faithful adherence to the tradition of marginalization by the previous democratically-elected governors of the state; reduce insecurity by aggressively pursuing youth employment; equip the security outfits, broaden intelligence-gathering and maintain a database of known criminals; change the state· of Kogi roads from that of a war-ravaged territory· to that in which the billions of naira spent would reflect on the quality of the infrastructural projects and stop the habit of using the re-awarding of contracts as conduit pipes.

    That was Onukaba in his own words. Good enough, the present leadership in his home state had confessed to holding in high regards. The change he craved is yet to happen. The situation in Kogi under a young· and dynamic governor Bello is anything but inspiring, going by reports one reads daily not only on the plight of workers and pensioners but also on the rate at which heinous crimes are being carried out in the state. For a man who recently got an award for maintaining security, one had expected a drastic drop in the rate of killings, kidnappings and armed robberies. Surely, the governor cannot rest on his oars. He needs to identify the lapses and fix them such that the state can get back on track.

    Yes, the man who crafted “Re-inventing Kogi State” is gone. Nothing stops a serious leadership from taking a cue from that document and return Kogi to the path of sanity. Interestingly, he was on the same page with Bello in the need for a workers’ audit in the state. According to him, there was something curious about the N 3 billion monthly wage bill that demands the scrutiny of an audit control. He said: “We will carry out a thorough audit of the workers in the state to ensure that the 28, 000 – 35, 000 workforce on the state payroll are real. We cannot be squandering state resources on ghost workers. I believe that after conducting personnel audit, we may be able to save· a big chunk for capital projects.

    No state government can develop spending 80 per cent of its revenue on recurrent expenditure. It is the era of small and efficient public service. We will right-size to put round pegs in round· holes. We will rid the state of ghost workers. I suspect that the N 3 billion monthly wage bill is fraudulently padded. Using modern ICT tools, such as biometrics, it won’t be difficult to know the true workers from ghosts. ”

    Now, the problem is no longer workers’ audit as that has been effectively tackled according to reports. What confounds is that Kogi’s finances still bleeds, with reports of frivolous spending and official graft flying in the air. Of course, the government has come out strongly to deny the reports while promising monetary rewards for whistleblowers who can expose the critics or ‘mischief makers’ as the government chose to call them. That is laughable and petty. Were Onukaba to be alive, he would have laughed it off as one of those comic reliefs in a tragic play. Just that this is not stage play. It is a serious matter of life and death. The man died, presumably leaving Kogi in a sorry state. Would Kogi be rescued or would it continue to be under the stranglehold of insensitively primitive accumulators of wealth and grandmasters of shameful nepotism? Only time will tell as another illustrious son of the soil is committed to earth while the unending season of cheap violent deaths sorrowfully continues. Adieu Adinoyi Onukaba-Ojo.

  • Endless bailouts!

    SIR: “Nothing is more wasteful than doing with great efficiency that which should not be done” – Theodore Levitt.

    As it is at the moment, the federal government is showing some symptoms of being broke. So, it is not only states that need a bailout; Nigerians as whole, even foreigners and investors whose businesses have been swallowed by the economic kerfuffle needs it mostly.

    The pathetic picture of civil servants locking out the minister of finance demanding to be paid areas of allowances owed, pension scam and non-payment by government can only lead to one obvious conclusion.

    The federal government ill-advised attempt to dole out N90b loan to the states has generated some dust among Nigerians. It is like struggling to meet up a problem you can’t solve. It is not different from a dead drunk fellow offering a helping hand to an already intoxicated colleague; both of them will land in a gutter. State should be encouraged to paddle their canoe, while the federal government should do everything possible to stimulate the economy through inclusive growth.

    The N90billion is a dead policy on arrival. It will not solve any problem but a replication of the first bailout in 2015 which up till now states cannot account for or tell the workers in their various states what the fund was used for.

    Fantastically speaking, for 36 states, the average each will get from the N90b will be N2.5billion, and with some states having a monthly wage bill above N2.5b; tell me how many months would the bailout loan upset? Invariably, month to month, states will be running from pillar to post begging for more bailout.

    The state of the economy as it stands at the moment is worrisome. Just few days ago, Economic Confidence in their investigation revealed that 15 states of the federation may go bankrupt as their Internally Generated Revenue IGR, in 2015 were far below 10%. Lagos State alone was said to have swallowed 32 states all put together.

    The poorest southern state is Ekiti, which is the only state from the south to be among the 10 lowest IGR earners, while the rest in the category and bottom of the ladder are northern states. From the above scenario, you don’t need a soothsayer to tell you that there is fire on the mountain.

    Why are some states viable and others crawling like a baby? What has really gone wrong with our system? Some will jump into conclusion that “it is a global oil fall”. Where then is the true position of our country before the so called oil fall? What has been the quality of the standard of living of an average Nigerian before now? I hope we are not pushing too much of our ineptitude and blame game to where it shouldn’t.

    It seems we have quickly forgotten that some governors are financially reckless in spending; since they always believed that monthly manna will fall from Abuja. Our political leaders have been   cultured to the point that even when states allocation has dipped, their consumption appetite and life style still remain unchanged. How do you mark up in such a situation?

    It is puzzling that some people are still clamouring for creation of more states. I don’t think this agitation is born out of patriotism, because if it is, it would have been a positive thought towards ameliorating problem.

    We need to go back to the drawing board. If advanced countries like Canada, Australia, Britain and others are still operating parliamentary system, a system that gives power to the regions to develop and compete and not necessarily concentrating power and resources at the centre,we need to have a rethink.

    We can’t continue this way, we need to get it right now; political differences and sentiment can only worsen our case.

     

    • Alifia Sunday,

    Ilorin, Kwara State

  • Fixing endless economic crises

    Fixing endless economic crises

    The world economies, especially those of sub-Saharan Africa, have come under pressure in recent months as Brent oil prices slumped. The impact has been worrisome as it has taken a toll on the naira and foreign exchange reserves. Charting a way forward was the focus of the Institute of International Finance (IIF) Africa Financial Summit hosted by Access Bank Plc in Lagos, writes COLLINS NWEZE.

    In the last one month, managers of the economy have known little or no rest. They have been taking pains to explain to local and international investors the way out of the ‘economic tsunami’ that has hit the economy.

    The Coordinating Minister for the Economy and Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, used the opportunity presented by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) Africa Financial Summit held in Lagos to explain to the world what the government is doing to wriggle out of the crisis. The naira and foreign exchange reserves have been badly hit.

    The minster who spoke on Positioning Africa in the context of an uncertain global environment stressed the need for African countries to adopt belt-tightening measures to cushion the effects of the dwindling prices of crude oil on their economies.

    She emphasised the need to plug leakages, increase the drive for revenue as well as develop the non-oil sectors in the continent.

    The naira has come under pressure in recent months over sharp fall in the price of Brent oil prices, and the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN’s) determination to save the currency has badly hurt the position of the reserves.

    The foreign exchange reserves stood at $37.5 billion on Monday and analysts insisted that the fall in the international price of Nigeria’s benchmark Bonny Light crude to about $78/barrel has fuelled fears that the CBN will be unable to hold the line on the naira exchange rate which closed last week at N176 to dollar.

    The minister also urged policy makers in the continent to strive to ensure economic prosperity, arguing that with the right policies, Nigeria and other nations in the continent would be able to sustain growth despite the economic headwinds.

    She admitted that events unfolding over the last six months have cast a shadow on global economic recovery in the aftermath of the 2008/09 financial crisis.

    Mrs Okonjo-Iweala said the slowdown in global economic activity, coupled with the end in the quantitative easing in the United States (U.S), will affect sub-Saharan Africa’s economy, in addition to other challenges  faced at the moment.

    She said: “Many countries on the continent depend on commodity exports as the main source of revenue. The ratio of commodity exports to total merchandise exports is very high in several African countries – and to give a few examples, the ratio ranges from 60 per cent in South Africa to 89 per cent in Zambia and Ghana, 96 per cent in DR Congo, and so on.

    “In Nigeria, our crude oil exports alone accounted for about 83 per cent of the value of our total exports in 2013, according to our National Bureau of Statistics.”

    The minister advised countries in the region to aggressively look for alternative sources of revenues and stem leakages.

    “It is now imperative to drive up domestic resource mobilisation, especially taxes. In several African countries, including Nigeria, tax revenue to Gross Domestic Product is below 15 per cent – the conventional (International Monetary Fund) IMF threshold for satisfactory tax performance. There are many leakages and gaps to be plugged, and more effective tax administration could contribute to improving revenues,” she said.

     

    Revenue leakages

    The Washington-based thinktank, Global Financial Integrity (GFI), said at least 60 per cent of the nearly $1 trillion in illicit flows from the continent is due to trade mispricing and international tax evasion.

    The minister said the GFI has been asked to carry out a study on Nigeria. This, together with the work being done by McKinsey to strengthen tax collection will go a long way to support efforts to drive revenues up.

    “Based on the results of the first few months of the year, I’m fairly confident that additional tax revenues from these efforts will surpass the $500 million previously estimated for 2014,” she said.

    She explained that based on 2013 data, about 70 per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s merchandise exports go to countries or zones that are experiencing challenges at the moment- the U.S (10.01 per cent), Europe (26.5 per cent), Japan (three per cent), China (21 per cent), Brazil (three per cent), and India (seven per cent).

    The minister said a marked slowdown in these markets would weaken demand for commodity exports from the region, with immediate negative spillover effects on our external and fisscal positions.

    She said: “This year, we’ve seen a fall in the prices of several commodities, the most recent of which is oil. Our crude oil – bonny light, which traded at $110.2 per barrel in January this year, reaching $114.6 per barrel by June, is now trading at about $83 per barrel.

    “The price of gold, which peaked at about $1383 per ounce in March this year is now trading at around $1160 per ounce. Iron ore which traded at around $130 per dry metric tonne at the beginning of the year is now trading at around $76 per dry metric tonne, which is a loss of more than 40 per cent of its value this year.”

    Continuing, she said prices of some agricultural commodities are also on a downward spiral, with the price of cocoa falling by about 10 per cent from $3,252 per tonne at the end of September which is just a few weeks ago, to about $2,900 per tonne now. Cotton has also taken a hit, from about 93.5 cents per pound a year ago to 63.5 cents now, while coffee which traded at 221.4 cents per pound just a month ago, is trading at about 186.3 per pound now – which is nearly 20 per cent fall in price within a month.

    The minister said the end of quantitative easing by monetary authorities in the U.S. is resulting in a reversal of foreign investor sentiment in emerging markets including frontier markets such as sub-Sahara Africa.

    “Capital outûows are putting pressure on countries with large external financial needs. In addition, regional challenges, such as the recent outbreak of the Ebola virus in West Africa is weighing down on the region’s short to medium term economic outlook,” she said.

    Okonjo-Iweala said the ensuing decline in activity may lead to reduced appetite for investment, with more long-term implications on the growth momentum in the sub region. She added that sub-Saharan Africa’s economy is expected to continue to perform respectably in the face of global economic challenges.

     

    Access Bank CEO speaks

    The Group Managing Director, Access Bank Plc, Herbert Wigwe said banks are not fringe players in global economic equation, arguing that many of the lenders have helped in building multinational companies that have made Africa proud.

    Wigwe said: “At Access Bank, we believe in the future of Africa. We have set ourselves the ambitious target of becoming the world’s most respected African Bank. For us that means more than being the biggest, the fastest growing, or even the most profitable in the short term.

    “It means building a strong, sustainable institution that sets new standards in governance and transparency and which actively helps other financial institutions to do the same. It means driving financial inclusion by extending banking services to a new and growing cohort of businesses and individuals who will be the growth champions of tomorrow. And it means keeping our customers at the heart of everything we do.”

     

    Africa rising

    Wigwe said Africa’s private sector has woken from its slumber and a new spirit of entrepreneurship is sweeping across the continent.

    “The criticisms in the 1960s that Africa has underdeveloped middle class that does not contribute to the growth of capital would be ludicrous today. A vibrant, growing consumer class is increasingly serviced by innovative local capital. From Fast Moving Consumer Goods to telecoms, street vendors to sophisticated local retailers, the African private sector is driving economic growth.

    “When taken together, the investment case is clear. We have the market, the market environment, and the entrepreneurial zeal that means that business can thrive,” he said.

    Wigwe said Africa must align with global standards and best practice while maintaining the cultural identities and local knowledge and worldview which allow it to act and react to local economic realities.

    “We must take on board and test new innovations in banking while ensuring that we maintain the best aspects of the ways we work today. And we must also take advantage of the technological revolution that is changing the face of banking all over the world but be careful to ensure that we do not become slaves of data; that it doesn’t replace judgment and experience.

    “Technology has enhanced access to capital, expertise and distribution, and aided the storage and use of data; it presents us with a profound opportunity to deepen and widen access to financial services to people and companies across the continent and we should ensure that we use it for good,” he said.

     

     Africa economies

    Senior Manager at IIF, Andrew DeSouza, said South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire and Zambia constitute one of the fastest growing areas of the world this year estimated at 4.9 per cent. However, several factors, both internal and external, have stopped it from growing  faster.

    He explained that prospects for stronger growth next year and beyond are encouraging, but there are pockets of concern.

    He said:  “Lower commodity prices and faltering global demand in recent years have hit export earnings and weakened the current accounts in several countries. The impact has not been uniform, however, due to varying degrees of natural resource dependence and deviations in price movements across different commodities. Diversifying economic activity, broadening the export base, and adding domestic value to natural resource extraction will be key to sustaining growth and reducing vulnerability.”

    Hydrocarbons are becoming more important in Africa, and will continue to do so going forward. Oil and gas discoveries in East Africa could be a game changer over the next decade, providing revenue for much-needed infrastructure development and turning around large current account deficits, he added.

    DeSouza explained that a major constraint on growth and economic diversiûcation has been the grossly inadequate power generating capacity in most countries. The tide now appears to be turning, however, and plans are already being implemented in a number of countries to ramp up generation and improve transmission and distribution.

    For him, fiscal pressures have intensified and government debt is on the rise. “The biggest challenge is to increase revenue without dampening growth while shifting resources towards development spending. The countries with the largest deûcits tend to be those that have let their wage bills spiral,” he said.

    The IIF manager said the rapid adoption of mobile technology in recent years has led to a marked increase in ûnancial inclusion in many countries. Kenya was at the forefront of this revolution with the introduction of M-Pesa in 2007, but this has spread to other countries and the technology is becoming increasingly more sophisticated and widely adopted.

     

  • Endless agonies of Women of Owu

    Endless agonies of Women of Owu

    Not only emotion, but also sympathy, outcry, agony and supplication for help that indeed surrounded the circumstances of the Women of Owu.  The play which is on now at the National Theatre, Lagos, is the re-enactment of part of the 19th Century Yoruba wars in which the city of Owu was besieged for several years by the combined forces of Ife, Ibadan, Ijebu and Oyo.  Owu people had been recalcitrant to the rest of Yoruba and this was not a welcome development.

    With the students of the Drama department of the Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos, involved in the play this year, it was easy to notice the level of resilience and stage craft and mobility which the youthful artistes brought to bear on the play.  Watching them on stage showed that there is indeed hope for the stage theatre in Nigeria today.

    Their ability to raise the tempo of the play, their ability also to highlight and interpret the nuances in very emotional and sympathetic ways embedded in the play helped the scenes to register in the minds of the audience.  The play itself is a dirge.  It is a dirge anchored on the sorrows of women who had to face the humiliation of defeat.  After the city was razed and pillaged, the palace was despoiled, while some of the shrines were profaned and burnt to ashes.

    In this devastating scenario only women were left.  All the men of the city had been beheaded.  The idea, more or less, was never to let Owu people breed men any more.  It was to teach them an everlasting lesson not to dare the rest of the Yoruba nation in future.  And this worked because on and on the women wept, cursed and mourned and moaned.  Yet no help or intervention came from anywhere.

    The more the women wept, recounting how their woes and problems began and hoping upon hope to have some respite, the more the invading soldiers taunted and hounded them to submission.  It was such a harrowing and colossal situation that Professor Femi Osofisan, the playwright, was able to capture and embellish the play with surplus dances and songs.

    The dances and the songs were well handled by the student actors and actresses.  The total epitome and beauty of the play was found in the flexibility of the dancers whose sorrowful dirges indeed helped in defining the historical importance and sequence of the invasion.  The whole episode is the total manifestation of what historical issues can do to encourage people look back into time.  Osofisan was detailed in his presentation, he looked succinctly at the nuances of the people, even the stubbornness of an average Owu person in those days was replicated over time to make it a vivid historical play.

    In the end, the dramatic effects of what he did become a point of reference.  History is replete with such events that touched the society in various core areas of their social, political and economic lives.  The idea of staging the play is to help students who would offer English Literature in the next West African School Certification Examination, (WASCE).  It is part of the syllabus and so it is imperative that the play is staged now to help literature students master the techniques of the book better.  It is to show them practical theatre.

    Basically, this was why young undergraduate students were used to propel it on.  The age range is not too far from what the secondary students can easily identify with.  In fact, their deep involvement in the play on stage, showed that they too got infused into the story itself.  They were carried away by the emotional aspects of the story, swinging away on stage, attired in simple costumes with other dirty and local linens, just to totally depict the sorry situation of the women of Owu.

    As soon as you enter the cinema hall of the National Theatre where the play was staged, the first attraction is the splendour of the stage.  Built by Biodun Abe, the newly appointed Director of Abuja Carnival, the simple village setting embossed on the painting on stage made the whole exercise look real and convincing.  Known for his practical and daring attitude to stage décor and mesmerisation, Abe confessed that he did the stage to register a real village pattern of the time and to also situate the historical relevance of the story.  “The people have to see what the rural life of the people was like in those days.  This was a bush path, very narrow indeed, through which movements from place to place were made possible in those days.  This becomes your first point of contact as soon as you enter the cinema hall,” he said.

    The representation of mud houses and the thick bushes on both sides of the village settlement, the desolate nature of the village further defined that the people were at war.  The whole village was deserted and that in itself evoked profound pity.  Abe drew on people’s emotions with that stage design that you needn’t be told that a core professional was at work to give opulence to a play that still remains poignant in the annals of Yoruba history.  The play dissects love, it treats romance, intrigues, backbiting and it especially dwells on why most powerful men of history marry or fall in love with bitches.

    With total and bewitching beauties, most of the women were able to hoodwink powerful generals of the invading armies to evade punishment and possible death.  They all added to the import of the power of female anatomy, but also gave the play its proper place as an epic, a didactic expose of the norms of the people and their likes and dislikes.

  • Endless quibbling by Oodua siblings

    As a people of culture the Yoruba people are conservative but futuristic. To the extent that they invest heavily on the future they are often described as progressives with great value placed on peaceful change. For them, power is acquired often for the service of the people. Intrigue is a common feature among the people because of individual’s feeling of self-worth and value placed on family name which started to wane with the advent liberal participatory democracy. As siblings competed as political adversaries, nothing was to be the same again. Even the hallowed positions of the obas, the guardian of the peoples culture became threatened .as the new emergent political elite became more desperate. Thus today, the current Ooni of Ife whose father the Olubuse1 told the British hegemonic powers in 1903 that ‘an Oba no matter how powerful cannot wear a crown if his father did not wear one’ has since crowned all the Baales of Ife quarters including that of Modakeke that had engaged Ife in two devastating wars in the last 40 years. The seed of discord was sowed by politicians who in the name of democracy and quest for votes discouraged the Modakekes from paying taxes on Ife farm-land which was then the economic mainstay of Ife elite. The Ooni, who in 1931 when seniority crisis erupted between the Alaafin of Oyo and the Oba Ado as the Oba of Benin was then known, told the colonial powers that the latter was number two while the former was number three. The Ooni’s quibbling children have since challenged their father’s supremacy. When the Alaafin threw his own challenge not too long ago, there was an MKO Abiola, a wealthy powerful politician who had just acquired the all important Oyo chieftaincy-title of- ‘Are Onakankafo’ on hand to nudge him on. Abiola was to turn history on its head when he publicly said, ‘we have heard of Oyo Empire but never an Ife empire’. The Alaafin himself has since been challenged by the Oba of Ogbomoso who as late as 1903 was addressed as Baale of Ogbomoso.

     

    But beyond the internal intrigue, what has prolonged the nightmare of the Yoruba is their involvement in national politics witch pitched them against other Nigerian ethnic groups at different levels of cultural development. Today the Yoruba bear the brunt of an unworkable Nigeria project. Their attempt to develop along their own line of national aptitude was resisted by other dominant ethnic groups and past successive attempts to forge a national alliance to move the nation forward ended in disaster.

    Awo’s attempt to replicate  his achievements in the West  at the centre in order to move the nation forward was resisted by the forbears of the current beneficiaries of today’s anarchy, who clamped him into prison swearing he would be ‘too old by the time he comes out to question how we run Nigeria’. Akintola’s attempt to cut a deal to remain in power against the will of his people following a sanction for anti-party offences by his party leaders equally ended in disaster.  MKO Abiola who was forgiven and rehabilitated after his initial betrayal of the progressive forces that provided him with a scholarship to study accountancy in London secured a pan Nigeria mandate after an election rated as the most credible in the nation’s history in 1993. The result was annulled by the reactionary forces. He spent his four years term in prison and died protecting the mandate he was freely given.

    Bola Ige was an outstanding Nigerian as well as a Yoruba irredentist who out of a ‘feeling of self-worth’ decided to spite his Yoruba cult of elders by joining a much despised Obasanjo at the centre. The mix adventure encouraged by Obasanjo out of mischief ended in brutal assassination of Bola Ige in his bedroom by those suspected to be agents or reactionary forces he chose to dine with, albeit briefly. Obasanjo, undoubtedly a progressive in view of his futuristic policies as military head of state, and as a two term president, thought he was smarter than his Yoruba compatriots as he self-conceitedly boasted he had achieved on a platter of gold what others fought for while he was a mere bare-footed secondary school student. He however now has enough time to reflect on his intervention in the Nigerian project.

    In the Nigerian unworkable enterprise, the Yoruba has been the greatest loser. A people that have been producing graduates and PhD holders since the mid 1800 have lost the initiative to even plan the education of their children. The national average of success in the last WAEC was put at 33%. With the virtual collapsed infrastructure which has led to the flight of multi-nationals that were once the strength of the zone, the Yoruba has lost the command of the economy now controlled by smugglers and importers of labour of other societies while our children roam the streets for non-available jobs. Today, the Yoruba that is not even represented in this administration because of siblings quibbling has nothing to fight over, as against the north and the east that have identified what they want from the nation. The former has even threatened to go to war over oil revenue sharing and the latter as survivalist with 60% of their compatriots spread over the country want the indigene-ship clause removed from the constitution. Ironically the two dominant ethnic groups who have often act as if their only stakes is what they can get out of the country have jointly ruled the nation since independence.

    Now that those the Yoruba have invested heavily on in recent times are defecting back to PDP that has for 15 years called darkness light, I think it is time the Oodua siblings stop quibbling.

    Last Sunday, Nuhu Ribadu, one-time AC presidential candidate and a pillar of APC defected to PDP claiming no party has monopoly of thieves. He now wants to be governor of his Adamawa State.  Like Atiku Abubakar who the Yoruba has equally invested on, Ribadu doesn’t seem to believe in anything. Pat Utomi, a presidential candidate several times over and a pillar of APC is said to have obtained his PDP nomination form from Delta. Like Ribadu, he now wants to be governor of his oil-rich Delta State. Ali Modu Sheriff, two-time governor of Borno State and one time senator, widely demonized by PDP as the father of Boko Haram has now been welcomed by PDP with open arms. Last week, the cream of Igbo from the South-east attended a Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) rally where President Jonathan was endorsed for 2015. Before then, TAN had been spending money like water to make spurious claims of President Jonathan’s achievements.

    These peddlers of fraudulent claims along with respected Igbo leaders and revered members of their communities such as Ribadu, Atiku Abubakar and Pat Utomi are the partners the Yoruba have been condemned to work with in addressing the nation’s national question.

    Now with the elders of quibbling Oodua siblings hobnobbing with Mimiko, Daniel, Omisore, Fayose,  men who have not demonstrated they have the capacity for a vision for our people,  as desperate federal government unleash rascals, and characters who move around with  hooded armed soldiers intimidating our people, the only choice left for our current authentic political leaders is to stop dissipating energy on those who do not share their common vision of society and turn inwards as their forbears did  in the 50s. The petty wars going on in Ogun, Oyo,  Edo and other parts of the South-west  must stop in the interest of our people  If  it is impossible to have a common vision of society with those at different levels of cultural development, it is a challenge of present privileged Yoruba political leaders to combine the lesson of our past with their today’s activities to fashion out a vision of tomorrow for our people.