The Nation Newspaper

Tag: US

  • K-leb Shout to embark on US, UK tour

    In a world where there is a subtle tussle for supremacy between secular and gospel genres of music, gospel artiste, Kelechi Caleb Obi aka K-leb Shout has described himself as a minstrel with the finger of heaven on his voice.

    The artiste, who has toured around cities in Nigeria, is fast growing into a reputable brand worthy of international acceptance. In line with that, he says that he is gearing up for his US and European tour which will kick off by the middle of the year.

    Promising his fans the best of good music in his forthcoming tours, he further stated that it would be soul lifting and filling with God’s goodness. His music has had him share the stage with Eben, Da Truth, Frank Edwards, Micah Stampley and a host of others.

    The budding artiste lists great talents such as Nathaniel Bassey, and Sammie Okposo as his mentors and role models.

  • US Technical Assistance Office commends NDIC

    The Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) of the United States Department of Treasury has commended the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) on the establishment of  academy that serves as a reference point for capacity building on Deposit Insurance System (DIS) for the African continent.

    The Regional Adviser of the US Treasury, Philip Morris made the commendation in Abuja during a meeting between the NDIC Management and delegates from the OTA convened to explore areas of collaboration towards the enhancement of training needs of the NDIC Academy.

    According to him, the corporation’s reputation in the international community was already acknowledged by the International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI). He added that several African countries now counted on the NDIC Academy for the capacity building for members of their staff.  He expressed his confidence that the OTA’s collaboration would further strengthen the Academy’s efforts towards achieving its vision of becoming the model Deposit Insurance Training Institute in Africa and the Asia regions by the year 2020.

     

     

  • Syrian chemical attack was staged – Russia

    Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said a reported chemical attack in Syria was staged by foreign agents.

    A spokesman for Russia’s defence ministry accused the United Kingdom of being involved in staging the attack.

    The United States and France said they have proof it took place and, alongside the UK, are considering military retaliation, the BBC reports.

    Russia, which has military forces deployed in Syria in support of the government, has warned that Western air strikes risk starting a war.

    During a press briefing on Friday, Mr. Lavrov said he had “irrefutable evidence” that the attack was staged as part of a “Russophobic campaign” led by one country, which he did not name.

    A spokesman for Russia’s defence ministry, Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said: “We have evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organising this provocation.”

    The UK’s envoy to the United Nations has called this a “grotesque, blatant lie.”

    The White House said it is continuing to assess intelligence and talk to its allies about how to respond to the matter.

     

     

  • US, UK envoys, Otedola hold talks on economy

    OVER breakfast, United States Ambassador to Nigeria Mr. Stuart Symington has urged Chairman of Forte Oil Plc, Mr. Femi Otedola to partner international business to create more jobs for youths. At Otedola’s Ikoyi, Lagos home, the U.S. ambassador praised the energy magnate for his investments and for being a role model for other indigenous entrepreneurs.

    The American envoy drew Otedola’s attention to Nigeria’s growing population, noting that the private sector has a critical role to play in creating opportunities for youths to be gainfully employed. This, Symington added, would help to address poverty and insecurity. He encouraged Otedola to explore partnerships with U.S. companies interested in investing in solar power projects and exports. Otedola, the majority shareholder in Forte Oil, is also an investor in the Geregu power plant in Ajaokuta, Kogi State. He thanked the U.S. ambassador for the visit and expressed his commitment to working with international businesses. “Nigerians are very entrepreneurial and would latch on to any opportunity to start and grow a business.

    The problem, however, has been access to cheap and longterm capital, which remains an impediment. “That is where we would like the U.S. to come in by encouraging private equity firms, venture capitalists and using U.S. export guarantees, among others, to support Nigerian businesses to become competitive and make good returns on their investments,” he said. He reminded Symington that despite the political and economic risks in the country, Nigeria remained one of the few countries where returns on investment are still high due to the infrastructure and technological gaps. Otedola hosted also British Ambassador Paul Arkwright to dinner at his residence.

    The economy, again, was the issue. Like his U.S. counterpart, Arkwright congratulated Otedola for his investment drive in the country, saying businesses such as Forte Oil, had become beacons for others to follow. He assured Otedola that given the strong historic ties between Britain and Nigeria, the country remained an investment magnet for UK companies seeking to do business in Africa.

    He advised Otedola to collaborate with other Nigerian entrepreneurs and businesses to encourage the Federal Government on creating a conducive environment for foreign and local businesses to thrive. Otedola, replying, assured the British envoy that the Federal Government had a policy and a council co-led by the private sector on the ease of doing business. “As you know, Nigeria recently improved its ranking on the World Bank’s ease of doing business index by moving up 24 places.

    But the Federal Government is not resting on its oars because it wants to improve on the current ranking. “We in the private sector continue to meet with government ministries and agencies and collaborate with them in areas where more improvement is needed so that we can attract more foreign direct investments into the country. “And I am sure that with the support of the UK government and businesses in some of these areas, we will continue to see improvements in all sectors of the economy,” Otedola said. He thanked Arkwright for the visit and expressed his commitment to working with British businesses on exploring new ventures in Nigeria.

  • US unveils new TV drama In Love and Ashes

    The United States Diplomatic Mission to Nigeria has unveiled a new television drama series, entitled: In Love and Ashes. 

    The event held at the Muson Centre, Onikan, Lagos.

    It was attended by the United States Ambassador W. Stuart Symington, musician Innocent Idibia and other guests. 

    The eight-part series, funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), highlights the impact of war and terrorism on the common man.

    The star-studded event featured a screening of the first episode, which centred on the predominantly Kanuri-Muslim society of Borno State.

    The ongoing insurgency in that region and the resulting disruption of institutions, destruction of infrastructure, and displacement of people have hit this society hard. Despite the devastation, hope still thrives on the streets of Maiduguri, where the drama is set.

    The series touches on themes such as tribal and religious  intermarriage, the status of women and girls, the drivers of radicalisation and violent extremism, the influence of political “godfathers,”  and the hardships connected with being an internally displaced person.

    “This series illustrates what every Nigerian knows by heart: the greatest resource of Nigeria is the Nigerian people themselves,” Symington said.

    “This dramatic and entertaining series reminds us why so many Nigerians take such pride in being Nigerians. It celebrates Nigerians’ diversity, resilience, dynamism, creativity, tolerance, and warmth. Those are the forces and the qualities that unite Nigerians and Nigeria.”

    The title track of the series was produced by NowMuzik, which was performed by Idibia at the launch.

    “In Love and Ashes” was scripted and produced by Watershed Entertainment, and will be broadcast by Ebony Life TV starting today, with additional broadcasts on NTA and Startimes channels to follow.

  • US Visa applicants to provide social media history

    The US government is proposing to collect social media identities from nearly everyone who seeks US Visa, according to a State Department filing on Friday.

    The proposal, a broad expansion of the information gathered from applicants for U.S. visas, if approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), would require most immigrant and non-immigrant visa applicants to list all social media identities they have used in the past five years.

    The information will be used to vet and identify them, according to the proposals, which would affect about 14.7 million people annually.

    The proposals support President Donald Trump’s promise to institute “extreme vetting” of foreigners entering the United states to prevent terrorism.

    Previously, under rules instituted last May, consular officials were instructed to collect social media identifiers only when they determined “that such information is required to confirm identity or conduct more rigorous national security vetting,” a State Department official said at the time.

    The State Department said then that the tighter vetting would apply only to those “who have been determined to warrant additional scrutiny in connection with terrorism or other national security-related visa ineligibilities.”

    The American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern, saying the move would have a “chilling” effect on freedom of speech and association.

    “People will now have to wonder if what they say online will be misconstrued or misunderstood by a government official,” Hina Shamsi, director ACLU’s National Security Project, said in a statement.

    “We’re also concerned about how the Trump administration defines the vague and over-broad term ‘terrorist activities’ because it is inherently political and can be used to discriminate against immigrants who have done nothing wrong,” he said.

    “There is a real risk that social media vetting will unfairly target immigrants and travelers from Muslim-majority countries for discriminatory visa denials, without doing anything to protect national security.”

    The new proposal was published in the Federal Register on Friday. The public has 60 days to comment on the revised procedures before the OMB approves or rejects them.

    If approved, the measures also will require applicants to submit five years of previously used telephone numbers, email addresses and their international travel history. They will be asked if they have been deported or removed from any country and whether family members have been involved in terrorist activities, the department said.

    The department said it intends not to routinely ask most diplomatic and official visa applicants for the additional information

  • Africa seems oblivious whilst US sounds the alarm on China

    Former US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, visited Nigeria this week after issuing a warning about the dangers of Chinese loans to African countries. It seems rich coming from the top US envoy in the era of Donald Trump’s “America First” and considering that nearly two-third of Africans take a positive view of China in Africa according to a recent Afrobarometer survey. Tillerson’s intervention should not be lightly dismissed. The pessimistic picture he and others paint of China’s expanding footprint in Africa is admittedly a skewed one. Still, they point to well-founded concerns about some unhealthy habits underpinning Sino-Africa relations.

    Well-meaning Africans should welcome Chinese investments. Nowhere is the need more apparent than in Africa’s strategic power sector where current levels of investment significantly lag fast growing needs. Nevertheless, a closer reading of this sector also exposes how China instrumentally tailors its investments to further narrow advantages whilst ignoring inconvenient truths about sustainability and the environment. Deconstructing the Chinese-Africa “partnership” on energy offers a much-needed corrective to both the distorted lens that Beijing employs to view its own Africa role and Mr Tillerson’s thinly disguised anxiety over China’s growing influence there.

    First, it is useful to distinguish between China’s commitment of capital to the energy (upstream) and power (downstream) sectors in Africa. The latter usefully focuses on the power generation and distribution opportunities that Africa needs to upscale towards unleashing its latent productive capacities whilst capturing more of the local energy resources into domestic value chains. It contrasts with the upstream energy sector investments which primarily aim to open up resources for export to China and other global markets.

    Angola’s case is illustrative here. It attracted a miniscule share of China’s $22.3bn loan to African power projects (out of a total $34.8bn investment committed to energy as a whole since 2000). China’s investment into Angola has been predominantly through the China Sonangol “Queensway” syndicate, which is heavily focused on upstream oil extraction. In what is perhaps the most iconic of these new Chinese “partnerships” in Africa, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse and Africa’s second largest energy producer have failed to translate their growing engagement into any appreciable improvement in Angola’s manufacturing capacity. Little wonder then that the country continues to import more than 70% of its consumer goods needs, with little in the way of domestic production capacity even for the most basic of consumables.

    The second point relates to the first, and is clearly reflected in the hydro-electric bias in Chinese power investments in Nigeria, Uganda and others. Hydro is admittedly a clean source of energy, but research suggests that it is decreasingly price competitive relative to other greener sources such as solar. Hydro requires huge capital outlay, with potentially serious fiscal implications for countries taking on concessional Chinese loans that need to be repaid in future. Also, China’s significant capacity and know-how is being rolled out in Africa at a rapid pace that belies the Asian giant’s pivots to greener energy technology such as solar and fuel cells in its home market. It has in some reckoning recently overtaken the US in clean energy technology. This lends credence to those who fret that China avails Africans of power sector loans to find outlet for its own overcapacity in dam building. Typically, there is an overwhelming reliance on Chinese workers and very low absorption of African labour into most such Chinese-funded hydro projects.

    Third, with the increasing water stress such as along Africa’s Nile basin, which is stoking tension between Egypt and Ethiopia for example, critics argue that China’s dam-building activities pay scant regard to environmental impact. This mirrors the criticisms of China’s own giant Three Gorges dam and the attempts to replicate it in Africa such as through the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance dam that is also Chinese-funded. Such a major water-intensive project has the potential to provoke serious environmental challenges, not to mention the stoking of geopolitical tension with neighbours also dependent on the Nile waters.

    In Nigeria, Chinese state lenders have shown serious interest in major dam-building projects such as in the Mambilla pleateau of central Nigeria where inter-communal clashes over arable and pastoral lands led to the killing of 20 persons in just one single incident in early March 2018. China is responsible for providing 85% of the $5.8bn cost of the Mambilla hydroelectric project. It is interesting that this significant investments in Nigerian hydro schemes occur against the backdrop of China’s relative lack of success in dominating Nigeria’s oil and gas production on the same scale it has managed in Angola for instance. Beijing should show more interest in gauging externalities even whilst continuing to demonstrate strong commitments to supporting development-oriented projects across Africa. Unlike the Obama-inspired US Power Africa initiative which aims to deliver an additional 30,000 megawatt of electricity to Africa through primarily green sources (now currently championed by Mr Tillerson’s State Department), China is far from committing unequivocally to back Africa’s transition to the green energy that China itself now covets.

    The import of all of these is not to deny the potential or even the concrete benefits that China’s energy partnership can unleash in Africa, especially at a time that western backed lenders have drastically scaled down their own financial support to key projects. The real urgency is that African leaders must become less supine, pushing for a more equal relationship, and nudging current and future deals to deliver more for Africa. This should help to create local jobs even whilst working to reorient China’s overall lending so that Africa ultimately becomes more self-sufficient and primed to participate in emerging clean energy technologies. Here too, Africa has unparalleled potential from abundant sunshine to wind to the platinum required for fuel cell catalyst, etc.

    Beijing and its African partners urgently need to appreciate the folly of rehashing the west’s historical failure and parochialism in Africa. A new Africa-China orientation requires a coherent pushback by African governments against the lop-sidedness highlighted by the China sceptics such as Secretary Tillerson. He has been scathing in his assessment of China’s Africa engagement on his latest tour of African capitals. China for all its protestation will do well to heed such advice, regardless of the provenance. Unless fundamentally revamped, China’s investments as currently structured will fail disastrously to strengthen African partners or lay the foundation for local ownership and long-term sustainability. A relationship of intertwined futures and equal partnership – of the type that China trumpets – must meet these key tests at the very least.

    By: Dr Ola Bello, Executive Director, Good Governance Africa (GGA). He holds MPhil and doctoral degrees from the University of Cambridge

  • NACC to lead delegation on trade mission to US

    The Nigerian-American Chamber of Commerce (NACC) plans to lead businesses, investors, government representatives across sectors on a trade mission to the United States.

    The mission will see delegates participating in the Africa Trade and Investment Global Summit (ATIGS), featuring over 2,000 participants, 70 countries, 16 economic sectors, 150 speakers and 350 global investors.

    The Chamber said the  mission, scheduled for June, was a yearly commitment in promoting the development of trade, commerce, investment and industrial technological relationships between the public and private sectors of the country and the U.S,  adding the mission will further drive socio-economic growth and development for all.

    According to the statement, the six- day event will see participants involved in sector presentation and round-table business to business (B2B) meetings and engagement with the Nigerian Diaspora Business Community.

    The statement added that the event will offer participants the opportunity to leverage the chamber’s initiative to meet new international buyers and distributors, expand into new markets, exchange market knowledge, network, gain insight from industry experts and promote their business across border as well as further generate new business for their company.

    It said the NACC had been organising trade missions to the US, adding that last year, the Chamber led delegates to Miami Florida, US, recording success stories in new deals and investments.

    This year, the Chamber, in its scope of linking businesses in Nigeria to global enterprises, will not only create business opportunities for participating delegates, but lead a movement of many more success stories.

  • Cow owners and the rest of us

    SIR: A few weeks ago, Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti State, technically made the head of cow sellers in Ekiti State to take responsibility for any mishap that might be caused in Ekiti State by Fulani herdsmen.

    It appears we are all getting it wrong. We are all focusing only on the havocs of Fulani herdsmen but, not on cow owners who actually armed these herdsmen. We need to identify others so that the rest of us may go on our knees to beg them so that their hired herdsmen might stop their destructive tendencies.

    Let’s face it, if the rest of us were bent on not allowing the promoters of Biafra to divide the country, we would not also allow the sponsors of herdsmen to expand their territorial ambitions into our backyards. The era of expansion of the territory by force of arms is gone and gone for ever in Nigeria.

    A professor of Fulani origin once told us that the Fulani do not eat cows. He said that the Fulani were born to rule. Now we know their agenda.

    The APC has mandated Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to advise the party. I hope he would be forthright to tell the party that it is losing ground to its opponents with the non-stop of the killings by the herdsmen all over the country.

    He should be bold enough to tell the party home and bitter truth.

    APC has done a lot to change and reposition this country but, the unrelenting killings by Fulani herdsmen are proving to be a waterloo for the party.

    Nobody will remember the good works APC is doing so long those arming the Fulani herdsmen remain unidentified in the Nigerian environment.

    A few weeks ago, I went to Kara on Lagos/Ibadan express road, my research was alarming but educative. The first things I learnt was that even though most of the cows came form the North, many of them also belong to the southern elites mostly politicians and top civil and retired and serving officers. These are the “untouchable Nigerians” who hold the reign of power in the country. That was why the Inspector General of Police was very much handicapped.

    I would like cow owners to realize that they are in the business of cow rearing like other businessmen and women in Nigeria. They cannot harry the rest of us to submission. The cow owners are committing sins against God and humanity and it is definitely going to have boomerang effects later in their life.

     

    • Dr. Sunday O. Ajai,

    omoajai_sunday05@yahoo.com

  • US, firm empower techpreneurs in fisheries

    The United States Embassy in collaboration with Andela, a global training organisation, has gathered designers, developers and other experts in Lagos, Benin, Ibadan and Abuja for training in fishery, DANIEL ESSIET reports.

    Techpreneurs are successful because they bridge the gap between businesses and consumers with innovative solutions. One way to get these solutions is through hackathon, a forum where people come together and use technology to transform ideas into reality.

    Fishackathon is a public-private partnership, which uses digital solutions to address fishery challenges.

    The United States government in collaboration with Andela, a global trainer, assembled designers, developers, and experts to provide tech solutions to fisheries’ problems.

    The event was held in Lagos, Abuja, Benin, Lagos and Ibadan.

    Fishackathon organiser, West Africa Andela, Anuoluwapo Onifade, said the event was organised by the US Embassy to inspire the creation of digital solutions to address sustainable fisheries and marine challenges.

    According to him, the challenges involved providing solutions to problems in areas, such as overfishing, pollution, and other hazards threatening the extinction of marine species.

    He said mentors help teams bring their ideas into execution that will solve problems.

    The winning team, he explained, would receive $5000 and top teams would move on to the regional and global finals.

    HackerNest is the Managing Partner for Fishackathon, a global hackathon series, launched in 2014 by the U.S. Department of State that advises the president and leads the country in foreign policy issues.