Wednesday 26 October 2011

Wall St. Giants Seek a Piece of Nigeria’s Sovereign Fund , By AZAM AHMED

Wall St. Giants Seek a Piece of Nigeria’s Sovereign Fund





Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg News
Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian finance minister and current minister for trade and investment, helped create the the West African nation's sovereign wealth fund.


Wanted: A reliable overseas business partner to invest more than $1 billion presently trapped in Nigeria.

This is not a scam.

Nigeria, the West African nation that has gained notoriety for the illicit e-mail spammers aiming for Western bank accounts, is attracting attention for legitimate financial opportunities — investing its own savings.

In an effort to preserve and increase its oil revenue, the country recently established a so-called sovereign wealth fund, following the path of many resource-rich countries. Now, Wall Street titans like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are courting top government officials, aiming to grab a piece of a portfolio that could eventually be worth tens of billions of dollars.

“The country is at a point of inflection, and what we do in the next few years will set the pace,” said Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian finance minister and current minister for trade and investment, who helped create the sovereign wealth fund. “It’s a land of opportunities, which unfortunately has not been tapped well.”

More than half a century after discovering oil in the Niger Delta, the country continues to subsist barrel to barrel. Poverty is rampant. Public corruption is pervasive. And the government coffers are bare, even though Nigeria is the 10th-largest oil producer in the world.

By saving and investing the petro dollars, Nigeria hopes to break the resource curse. The nation, which derives 80 percent of its revenue from oil, created the sovereign wealth fund to buffer its economy from volatile commodity prices and impose fiscal discipline. The government so far has set aside $1 billion for the fund, and it could funnel as much as $2.5 billion a year, if oil prices remain high.

“One of our biggest problems in civil society is the time horizon that we’re operating on — whether election cycles or quarterly reports,” said Ashby H.B. Monk, a research associate at the University of Oxford who studies sovereign wealth funds. “The idea of a sovereign fund is to give government bureaucrats an opportunity to make long-term policy knowing that the buffeting winds of capitalism won’t blow them off course.”

Such funds have become powerful investment forces over the years. Abu Dhabi and Kuwait have amassed hundreds of billions of dollars by plowing their oil riches into stocks, bonds and other global assets. During the financial crisis, sovereign wealth funds provided critical capital to banks and other troubled firms.

To grab a piece of the lucrative business, big banks and asset managers have tirelessly cultivated relationships with governments worldwide and added teams dedicated to sovereign wealth funds. In recent months, bankers, lawyers and consultants flew to the Nigerian capital of Abuja to pitch officials on their services. The government chose JPMorgan Chase as one of its advisers on the structuring of the fund.

In other countries, the Wall Street feeding frenzy has drawn criticism. The Libyan Investment Authority, which was started in 2006, has complained that it lost millions of dollars on several investments, while money managers generated huge fees, according to documents leaked this summer to Global Witness, an advocacy group.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into whether American money managers, in trying to land business with sovereign wealth funds, violated antibribery laws, according to people with knowledge of the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about the inquiry. “If you don’t get these organizations designed correctly as sophisticated investment operations, you can lose a lot of money,” Mr. Monk said. “It’s the power of finance — for good or bad.”

Nigeria’s new fund is the brainchild of Mr. Aganga, a Nigerian native who worked at Ernst & Young’s London office before joining Goldman Sachs in 2001. Last year, the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, asked Mr. Aganga to join his cabinet.

As the minister of finance, Mr. Aganga pushed to start a sovereign wealth fund almost immediately. He had helped oversee part of Goldman’s Africa business, and knew Nigeria was among the last oil-rich nations without an investment portfolio.

“It’s important that we have some savings for the future generations,” Mr. Aganga said. “It just makes sense for your economy. You’re completely exposed otherwise.”

But Nigeria has a spotty record managing its money. In 2004, the country started plowing extra oil revenue into a separate account, as a way to build savings. At one point, the portfolio held an estimated $20 billion, analysts say.

The funds did not last long. State and federal authorities leaders regularly siphoned off money to fill budget holes, build utilities or pay for other projects. By last year, the assets had plummeted to less than $1 billion.

“There were no rules about withdrawals or whom it belonged to among the three tiers of government in Nigeria,” said Razia Khan, head of African research at Standard Chartered Bank.

To avoid making the same mistakes, Nigeria is earmarking assets for different purposes in a structure that mirrors older sovereign wealth funds. One portfolio, which will invest in stocks and bonds, is focused on long-term growth in preparation for the day when the oil wells run dry. An infrastructure portfolio will support upgrades to the country’s bridges, roads, buildings and railways.

During periods of weakness, the government will have an emergency account to prop up the economy. But officials will be able to access the money only under certain circumstances, like a steep drop in oil prices.

Commitment will be crucial. Some politicians are already grumbling that the sovereign wealth fund will divert assets that the economy desperately needs now, and they are threatening to derail the effort. Such pressure, said John Campbell, a former United States ambassador to Nigeria and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan research center, could prompt the country to “raid the cookie jar” to deal with short-term issues. “Unless there is the political will to live up to those aspirations,” he said, “it’s not going to work very well.”

“My view is, better mute the trumpets for the time being,” Mr. Campbell said.

It will come down to execution, say Nigerian officials and outside analysts. The government is tapping an independent board to oversee the investment process and to ensure compliance. While critics point to the delay in naming those directors as a potential concern, authorities defend their position. They argue that the new finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former managing director at the World Bank, who was sworn in this August, needs time to learn all about existing matters.

The board “will define how effective this becomes,” said Fola Oyeyinka, an adviser to the Nigerian minister of finance. “The flavor of that board will dictate not just to Nigerians but to the world how serious we are.”

Friday 26 August 2011

Nigerian satellites are picture perfect, By Jonathan Amos Science correspondent, BBC News

Nigerian satellites are picture perfect

Auckland, NZ.  NigeriaSat-X/DMCii
A view of Auckland, New Zealand, is the first image released from the Nigerian spacecraft


Related Stories

Nigeria's latest Earth observation satellites have returned their first pictures.

The spacecraft, launched on 17 August, give the African nation a powerful new capability to map its own lands and other parts of the globe.

NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X will also assist the Disaster Monitoring Constellation.

This UK-managed fleet of spacecraft is used to picture regions of the Earth gripped by natural calamities.

These might be catastrophic floods or a big earthquake. Images sent down from space will often be critical to organising an effective emergency response.

The first picture released from the Nigerian pair is of New Zealand's biggest city, Auckland.

It was acquired by NigeriaSat-X, and reveals the buildings and the landscape surrounding this major urban centre.

It is just possible to see the wakes of ships passing under the harbour bridge that joins downtown Auckland with North Shore City.

The satellite is equipped with a multi-spectral imager for general mapping, agricultural monitoring and disaster relief work.

Nigerian engineer at SSTL

Nigerian engineers built NigeriaSat-X with the help of their British counterparts


The resolution in this picture is 22m per pixel. Vegetation is picked out in red.

Both NigeriaSat-X and NigeriaSat-2 were designed and built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford, UK.

What is interesting about NigeriaSat-X is that the work was undertaken by Nigerian engineers themselves. The skills they have learnt will now be taken home so that they can build future spacecraft in their own country.

It is a model previously followed by Turkey. Its engineers received their education at SSTL as well, and the same rocket that launched the Nigerian platforms also launched Rasat.

This remote sensing satellite (7.5m resolution) is the first to have been developed and manufactured in Turkey by Turkish engineers.

SSTL Executive Chairman, Sir Martin Sweeting, commented: "NigeriaSat-X is the product of Nigeria's training and development programme here at Surrey.

"It is a great credit to NASRDA (National Space Research and Development Agency) and their engineers that this satellite is performing well and its operations are progressing so quickly.

"These highly skilled engineers will not only help Nigeria to manage its resources, but also bootstrap its fledgling high-tech economy alongside a growing nucleus of highly trained people."

A first picture should be released from NigeriaSat-2 in the coming days. This is a much more powerful platform, able to resolve details on the Earth's surface just 2.5m across.

Few countries in the world have access to such a capability.

Thursday 25 August 2011

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency falling far short - Human Right Watch

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency falling far short – Human Right Watch

On August 25, 2011 · In News

LAGOS-(AFP) – Nigeria’s main anti-corruption agency has been hobbled by incompetence, internal graft allegations and suspicions of political interference, according to a report by Human Rights Watch released Thursday.

The report examining the work of the country’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) paints a bleak picture when it comes to prosecuting high-profile politicians in one of the world’s most graft-ridden nations.

It says the commission has only managed four convictions of nationally prominent political figures since it was established in December 2002, and those convicted have faced little or no prison time.

“Other senior political figures who have been widely implicated in corruption have not been prosecuted,” the report says.

“Despite its promise, the EFCC has fallen far short of its potential and eight years after its inception is left with a battered reputation and an uncertain record of accomplishment.”

The US-based rights group also points out that the commission faces enormous obstacles in carrying out its work in Nigeria, where corruption is deeply rooted and part of everyday life in all levels of society.

“At a fundamental level, Nigeria’s political system continues to reward rather than punish corruption,” it says of Africa’s most populous nation and the continent’s largest oil producer.

It restates the claim by former EFCC chairman Nuhu Ribadu that more than $380 billion was lost to graft and mismanagement from independence in 1960 to the end of military rule in 1999.

Eric Guttschuss, the rights group’s Nigeria researcher, cited the case of prominent ruling party figure Bode George while addressing journalists at the launch of the report in Lagos.

George, who was also chairman of the Nigerian Ports Authority, was the only one of the four nationally prominent EFCC convictions to be obtained at trial, receiving a sentence of two-and-a-half years in prison. The other EFCC convictions came through plea bargains.

But when he emerged from prison earlier this year, some of the country’s top politicians welcomed him back.

“The positive example of his conviction was diminished however when he was treated to a rapturous reception by key ruling party figures, including ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, who ironically established the EFCC,” he said.

The report makes reference to graft allegations against the EFCC under the current chairwoman, Farida Waziri, as well as the widespread perception that she has been ineffective.

It says it could find no concrete evidence of corruption, but calls for President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration to examine Waziri’s performance.

Reacting to the report, EFCC spokesman Femi Babafemi said its finding that the commission has secured only four convictions of high-profile political figures was too narrow.

He argued that certain convictions of business people as well as heads of state agencies should also qualify as high-profile, pointing in particular to Oceanic Bank ex-chief Cecilia Ibru.

Ibru, from one of the country’s most prominent families, was sentenced to six months in prison last year and ordered to forfeit funds and assets worth some 1.2 billion dollars.

Babafemi declined to comment in detail on the internal graft allegations, saying they were rumours with no proof.

“Some of these allegations are made by people who are either being investigated by the commission or made by people who have one grievance or another against the commission,” he told AFP.

Monday 22 August 2011

Nigeria: Where religion is big business

Nigeria: Where religion is big business

Chris Okotie preaching at his church in Lagos, Nigeria
Chris Okotie preaching at his church in Lagos, Nigeria

An increasing number of Nigeria's 70 million Christians are followers of the prosperity teachings - the belief that prosperity is a sign of spiritual blessing. Services are held in megachurches that hold thousands, with millionaire pastors preaching the word.

A lady scrolls down the screen of her tablet PC as she reads the Bible along with the rest of the congregation, a huge diamond-encrusted ring shining on her finger.

Hanging from the ceiling of the Household of God Church are several chandeliers, lighting up a plush 5,000-seat auditorium.

A water fountain hisses in the distance, though it is only heard when the dazzling character on stage singing passionately and occasionally speaking in tongues falls into silence.

This is the Reverend Chris Okotie, a former pop star turned pastor, businessman and politician.

A recent Forbes rich list included him among Nigeria's five wealthiest pastors, with assets of anywhere between $3m and $10m. But is he truly this rich?

"Possibly," he replies, with his giant multi-coloured Jacob & Co brand wristwatch shining from the end of his sleeve.

Private jets

Mr Okotie is one of several millionaire pastors leading churches in Lagos that are rapidly expanding across Nigeria, the rest of Africa and the US, Europe and Asia.

One of the key messages these churches preach is that financial prosperity is a sign of God's favour.

As they have grown in popularity since the early 1990s, so has the wealth of their pastors.

Many of them own luxury cars, while a few even travel in their own private jets.

Mr Okotie argues that prosperity is an integral part of the gospel.

"It is written about Jesus, specifically, that he became poor so that the believer might become rich, because he recognised that poverty is not part of God's plan for man," he says.

The head of another church, David Oyedepo, is said to have a net worth of up to $150m.

His Living Faith Church - also known as Winners Chapel - hosts three services every Sunday in Lagos, in a 50,000-seat church, and has branches in Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Gambia, the UK and the US.

He also runs a publishing house, a university and a secondary school.

But it is another popular church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), which leads the pack, having thousands of outposts around the world - including at least 2,000 in Nigeria, and close to 400 in the UK.

Large donations

The churches earn money from sales of books written by the pastors, and CDs and DVDs of the sermons, but the bulk of their revenue is said to come from donations from the congregation.

Some people find the idea of churches amassing such wealth problematic.


Local press reports that David Oyedepo was selling two of his church's private jets led to accusations of extravagance, although his church insists the planes were used by senior staff for work.

Nigeria's anti-corruption agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, recently said that churches needed to find out the sources of larger donations, to ensure the money was legitimately earned, if the country's fight against corruption was to be successful.

The head of the commission, Farida Waziri, insists that the church's prosperity "must come legitimately".

"A responsible pastor should know where the tithe of his worshipper is coming from," she says. "How and where did you make the money that you are bringing in as tithe? It is not enough for your member to bring in a huge amount and you say 'God bless you.'"

Some Nigerians want to see a clearer line drawn between the churches' possessions and those of their pastors.

Chris Okotie says his personal wealth comes from his previous career as a musician and from his other business ventures.

But critics accuse the pastors of taking advantage of needy congregations, by telling them to give money to the church in exchange for financial and spiritual rewards from God.

These churches are "big-time businesses being managed by entrepreneurs", says Leo Igwe of the Nigeria Humanist Movement.

"It's as a result of poverty, social and economic collapse problems. Nigerians have become desperate, and gullible, and these churches service this market."

"No! No! No!" responds Prince Okpaku, a member of Chris Okotie's congregation.

"It is God that has brought us thus far, and He's not even interested in offerings. The offering is strictly for benevolence assistance," he says.

Still, the churches continue to expand and, as more branches open around the world, they are proving to be among Nigeria's most successful exports.

Thursday 18 August 2011

Echoes of Senate probe of BPE, Written by Ayodele Adesanmi Thursday, 18 August 2011

Echoes of Senate probe of BPE

Senator David Mark, Senator Ahmad Lawan, Bola Onagoruwa and Mallam Nasir el-Rufai

In this report, Ayodele Adesanmi presents the revelations, accusations and counter-accusations as they unfolded during the one-week public hearing conducted by the Senate on the activities pf the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE).

Ordinarily, privatisation and commercialisation of public enterprises is a policy meant to relief government of liabilities and waste. It was also aimed at ensuring efficiency in the running of enterprises. Those who hold this view believe that privatisation would enlarge the scope for private sector to operate.

The proponents of the privatisation also insists that it was an economic strategy aimed at reducing the role of government in economic activities believing that public enterprise have consumed a large proportion of national resources without people benefitting from the large investment. In Nigeria, it was reported that in 1998 alone, over N268 billion was spent on public enterprise in subsides and waivers, the amount that would have assisted tremendously if invested in education, health, and other social sectors.

To many Nigerians, the experience so far has been uninspiring as many of the companies sold or privatised have remained moribund. To many observers, privatisation and commercialisation of public enterprises in Nigeria mean more like enriching the few at the expense of the majority. They also see it as amounting to selling off of the common wealth of the nation to a privileged few.

The government, therefore, set up the Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) to privatise and commercialise, as the case may be, public enterprises with the objective of reducing or eliminate the drain on public treasury. It also seek to reducing corruption, modernise technology, strengthen domestic capital markets, promote efficiency and better management, reduce debt burden and fiscal deficit, resolve massive pension funding problems, broaden the base of ownership of business. Others include generating funds for the treasury, promoting governance, attracting foreign involvement and attract back flight capital. Whether the BPE has met and realised these objectives is a matter that is open for debate.

In the face of the widespread failure of many of the privatised companies, many are quick to say that the exercise had failed. One of such Nigerians is Senator Ahmad Lawan, former Chairman, Senate Committee on Public Accounts who moved a motion on the floor of the Senate to draw attention to the activities of BPE in the last 12 years. Lawan, alongside 25 other senators, had moved the motion in July, seeking a probe of the activities of the BPE as regards privatised companies. The senators contended that the Federal Government embarked on the privatisation and commercialisation of federal public enterprises through the enactment of the Privatisation and Commercialisation Act No 25,1988, the Bureau of Public Enterprises Act No 78, 1993 and the Public Enterprises Act, 1999.

Lawan, who moved the motion, recognised that the primary and fundamental purpose of privatisation by the Federal Government is to divest and free the subsidies that were paid into the operations of the enterprises, in order to better fund the provision of critical and crucial infrastructure. He said that the senators were surprised that the chairman of the National Council of Privatisation (NCP), Vice-President Namadi Sambo, told the nation that 80 per cent of government companies that have been privatised have failed to operate properly due to lapses in the privatisation process. He observed that, due to the collapse of the privatised companies, there are massive loss of jobs and colossal loss of financial returns to the national economy, giving the example of the steel sector that used to employ up to 20,000 workers, but now with less than 4,000 workers.

At the end of the day, the entire Senate supported the motion and an ad hoc committee was subsequently set up to investigate the activities of the BPE from 1999 to date. The committee, which has two weeks within which to submit its reports, has Senator Lawan as the chairman with Senators Babafemi Ojudu, Alli Ndume, Philip Aduda, Infeanyi Okowa, Hope Nzodima and Mohammed Magoro as members. According to its terms of reference as spelt out by Senate President David Mark, the committee is to investigate the process through which the BPE privatised the companies and establish the agreements and conditions upon which the privatisation was consummated. The committee would also determine how much was realised from the sale of the companies and where the proceeds were paid into; determine how many jobs were lost and gained after the privatisation exercise and identify factors that are militating against the expected improved and good performance of the privatised companies.

The Senate President, during its inauguration, said; “the purpose is to find out why the privatisation has not gone the way government intended it to go. Let me say, straight away, that it is not to witch hunt anybody, nobody is a target. Government may have made some mistakes in the process. The idea is to find out where the mistakes are, rectify them and see whether we can put them back. We represent the people and we hear the grumblings and the pains of the people, which is, indeed, the feelings of Nigerians. That is what we are expressing here today and that is why we set up this committee to look at what has happened with all the privatised companies.”

Stating that no position has been taken yet, Mark said “Senate has not taken any decision until the committee completes its findings. The finale position would be the outcome that would emerge at the end of the exercise. There is no doubt that you will be under tremendous pressure because you are dealing with powerful people and organisations. You will be exposed to temptations and if you do not give in, there would be blackmail but you should be courageous in your findings”.

The Ahmad Lawan-led committee immediately set for work and called for memorandum. It also set aside six days for public hearings on the steel rolling mills, the automobile assembly plants, ALSCON and EMCON; the cement, gas and oil and marketing companies and the Eleme Petro-Chemical Company Limited. Also on the list of schedule for public hearings are hotel and insurance and sugar companies, former government-owned media, mining companies, the Tafawa Balewa Square (TBS), the LITC and paper mill companies, as well as the sea ports, aviation industry and fertilizer companies. The sitting lasted from Monday to Saturday.

Incumbent BPE Director-General, Ms. Bolanle Onagoruwa, was the first to face the panel. She agreed that there is clear evidence that public enterprises in Nigeria have failed woefully to live up to expectations, noting that ”most rational Nigerians, including this distinguished committee, have recognised that privatisation is desirable and inevitable – state capitalism has failed, is outdated and unsustainable.”

She revealed that the BPE had privatised 122 enterprises from 1999 to date and that the percentage of performing privatised enterprises, vis-a vis the non-performing ones is 66:34, despite the difficult operating environment. She insisted that policy inconsistence, failure of government to perform its own obligations and infrastructure deficits are some of the critical challenges facing the privatised enterprises.

Onagoruwa, while failing to give the gross total amount got as proceed from the privatisation exercise, said; “from the 122 enterprises that have been privatised so far, N146 billion has been realised from the sales. 33.6 per cent of them are doing poorly while 66.3 per cent are doing well. The privatisation and labour expenses are deducted before the balance is remitted for effectiveness. It is the net sum that is remitted and that is in line with the guideline approved by the National Council on Privatisation (NCP). What we are trying to do is to nurture the companies to growth. It is not that the investors have not made efforts, but there are constraints. We try to look at policy issues to see where we can help them. If we are discipline on the policy issue, we will make progress.”

However, Senator Lawan cited Section 19 (1) of the Privatisation and Commercialisation Act to fault the BPE DG’s claim, declaring that the lodgments of the sales proceeds in commercials banks are illegal. He also pointed out that Section 80 (2) and (3) of the 1999 Constitution allows the BPE to only carry out expenses based on the appropriation of the National Assembly. Querying why the BPE should operate any other account outside the law which provided for only an account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Lawan directed the BPE DG to furnish the committee with details and list of all the banks where the sales proceeds have been lodged, including the interests yielded from 2000.

Asking which part of the 1999 Constitution or the Act empowers the BPE “to open these accounts in commercial banks?”, he said; “Just calm down, if you don’t have the figure for the gross sales now, you can give us later. But that information is essential. Nigerians need to know the total amount before any deduction was made. Provide all the accounts, the proceeds amounts and all the interests yielded so far.”

The committee was told, on its first day of sitting, that the Aluminum Smelter Company of Nigeria (ALSCON) was sold at the sum of $250 million and that $120 million is yet to be paid. The Deputy Managing Director of ALSCON, a Russian, Vitally Kuznetov, was ordered by the committee to immediately arrange for the payment of the balance of $120 million as it has no justification to continue to hold on to the money. The committee also discovered several irregularities in the sales and commercialisation of many public companies. It faulted the realisation of N146billion from the sales of 122 companies, noting that the fund amounted to nothing after deducting expenditure incurred in the exercise.

The committee also summoned Musa Sada, the Minister of Mines and Steel Development, to explain how Ajaokuta Steel Rolling Mill was sold. This was sequel to the denial by Ms Onagoruwa of any knowledge of the sale of the company.

On the second day of its hearing, the committee discovered that BAU Group of Companies originally bided and emerged the preferred bidder for the Delta Steel Company, Aladja, Delta State. It immediately advised the BPE to return the ownership to the company.

The DG, during the sale of the steel company, Dr Julius Bala, said the winner of the bid was BUA Group, but the then Federal Government preferred Global Infrastructures. He said, “There was a bid and BUA Group emerged winner and when they were submitted to the National Council on Privatization (NCP), they directed that the DSC must not be sold for anything less than $25million.

Bala, who admitted that he signed the Share Purchase Agreement (SPA) for the purchase, denied ever signing the letter which gave BUA Group the approval to pay for purchase of DSC. “Before the DG signs any agreement, there has to be approval from the chairman of the NCP. So there was approval given to me to sign by the NCP. I signed the agreement as the DG against the background of the political situation and despite the fact that it was made known to me that I was leaving. I was made to sign the agreement but I was not blackmailed.”, he said.

It was also discovered that Indorama has 75 per cent shares in the Eleme Petrochemical Company Limited, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) has 10 per cent, the host communities have 7.5 per cent, workers in the company have 2.5 percent, while the Federal Government has five per cent.

The committee, however, directed the BPE to suspend further transactions on the sale of the Federal Government shares in the company. Equally the BPE was asked to return the sum of four billion naira, being the five per cent of the total amount paid by Indorama to buy the petrochemical company because it was illegal since it is by law reserved for the Federal Government. Indorama, which bought the company at the sum of N3.2 billion in 2006, was asked to further pay for the reserved five per cent.

Meanwhile the adhoc committee, on Wednesday, asked the BPE to make available records containing total earnings of all privatised companies since 1999, as well as all the bank accounts and interests accruing to the government. The committee was also told of the demand by the Bachana community in Adamawa State which is demanding the cancellation of the privatisation of the Savannah Sugar Company, Numan, to Dangote Group. The community had submitted a petition through the former president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Comrade Pascal Bafyau, to that effect.

The community said that Dangote Group had defiled the terms of agreement leading to the privatisation and that it has refused to expand the sugar company, even when the community had volunteered lands.

Former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, on Thursday, told the committee that political interference was the cog in wheel of the successful privatisation exercise in the country. el-Rufai, who was the DG of the BPE between November 1999 to June 2003, disclosed that the mess in the BPE started with the appointment of his successor from outside the bureau against his recommendation.

He said that he had wanted the appointment to come from within the Bureau because of the huge amount of money spent on training of the officers and their knowledge about the privatisation process and the technical nature of the process.

“But the government employed someone that was literarily fired from the BPE. We have never investigated anybody for corruption, but the only person that we had course to have investigated ended up being the DG of BPE. I knew everyone that work with me, their capability and competence. The public hearing will not be completed without speaking about the staff of the BPE. I worked with them and knew each of them by the first name; they were only 180 staff. I am very proud of the BPE because my years there are my very best. But unfortunately one of the people we investigated ended up being the DG,” he said.

According to him, the government was losing N265 billion to support inefficient and corrupt enterprises before privatisation, adding that the objective of the privatisation in Nigeria was not to create job, but to make those companies functional. He added that 23 companies were privatised, out of which 22 were concluded before his exit, adding that he paid into the government treasury the sum of N57 billion within the period, noting that Nigerians should be grateful to the BPE for saving them the pains of running inept public enterprises.

The Stakeholders Forum on the Concession of Lagos International Trade Fair Complex also accused the Federal Government of conniving with AULIC Nigeria Limited to acquire the entire trade fair at a reduced cost of N10 billion. The forum was reported to have invested about N70 billion in the Trade Fair complex. Stakeholders who presented petition to the Senate Committee said, despite the court decision ordering AULIC Nigeria Limited not to tamper with the area occupied by the traders, Nick Eze, who is the owner of AULIC, was adamant and has continued to collect rent on the complex in contravention of the agreement.

The battle for the ownership of the Daily Times of Nigeria (DTN) also took the centre-stage with the preferred bidder, Folio Communication Limited, insisting that it fully paid the sum of N1.2 billion for the company in 2004 and received the approval of the BPE to sell some of the assets of the company. The Managing Director of the company, Mr Seminu Makanjuola and Chairman of Folio Communication, Mr Fidelis Anosike, both tendered documents to buttress the position of the company. But representative of DSV, business partner to Folio, Senator Ikechukwu Obiora, told the committee that Anosike should not have emerged core investor on the ground that he initially did not put any money down but used part of DTN assets to obtain loan to pay for the company.

However, in his presentations, Anosike told the committee that he won the bid for the company and was duly given the company by the BPE which also approved his moves to secure credit from a commercial bank to pay for the company.

The final day of the committee was equally revealing as it was disclosed that the privatisation exercise was disrupted by the feud between President Olusegun Obasanjo and his deputy, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. The former DG of BPE, Irene Chigbue and the present DG agreed that Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar had in 2005 engaged in bitter crisis of confidence which disrupted the success of the privatization exercise.

It was made known that, at a particular point during the rift, the former vice-president, was also the Chairman of the National Council on Privatisation, was by-passed by the BPE on issue critical to the exercise and was directly dealing with Obasanjo.

However, a Lagos-based lawyer and human rights activists, Mr Femi Falana, informed the committee that Nigerians have been short-changed, based on the revelations, saying that privatisation was “just to invite the foreigners to come and steal.” Falana asked the committee to summoned Obasanjo for violating the due process, noting that BPE should be prosecuted for ‘selling’ Nigeria illegally.

At the end of the hearing, the chairman of the committee, Senator Lawan, said that despite the closing of the hearing, the committee would still be receiving presentation. He said the committee would use the next two weeks to sit down and analyse all the submissions, after which it would travel to go and inspect, first-hand, all the companies to assess and see the state of development. He assured that after concluding, the committee would submit its report to the Senate at the plenary and that no government would set aside the outcome of the committee, but “we will ensure that all the recommendations would be implemented.”

Wednesday 3 August 2011

The unluckiest men in history,

The unluckiest men in history

By
Hugh Wilson, contributor, MSN Him, 03/08/2011 09:14



From time to time, you might think you've fallen victim to bad fortune, but your trials and tribulations cannot compare to those inflicted upon the unluckiest men in history.

You pour out some cereal, and realise you've run out of milk. You open the front door and see a clear blue sky, and the heavens open as soon as you step through it. Your train is late, and when you get to the office you remember it's a bank holiday.

And then you lift your head to the gods and cry: "Am I the unluckiest man in the world?"

To which the only answer is, no, no, and thrice no. Here are some of the unluckiest men in history. You're nowhere close.


Major Summerford

Major Summerford was fighting on the fields of Flanders during the first world war when a bolt of lightning threw him from his horse.

Years later, in 1924, lightning struck the tree he was sitting under. In 1930 he was hit again as he strolled in a park.

The Major died two years later. Four years after his death, during a fierce storm, a gravestone was struck by lightning and smashed into pieces. Guess whose gravestone it was?



Tsutomu Yamaguchi

Last year death finally came to claim poor old Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only man to be caught up in two atomic bomb blasts.

In 1945 he was on a business trip to Hiroshima when an American atomic bomb detonated above the city, killing 80,000 people in an instant (and many more from the effects of radiation later). He was knocked to the ground and suffered serious burns, and spent a terrible night in an air raid shelter among thousands of his screaming, dying, mutilated compatriots.

In the morning he negotiated his way through the ruined streets and caught a train back to his home - the city of Nagasaki. Heavily bandaged, he reported to work a day later, and was just relaying the terrible events of Hiroshima to colleagues when he witnessed once more the terrible flash of an exploding atomic bomb.

Again, he survived, but being present in the only two cities ever to be attacked with atomic weapons must make Tsutomu Yamaguchi the unluckiest survivor of all.

On Bing: read more about the experiences of Tsutomu Yamaguchi


John Lyne

Dubbed 'Calamity John' by the press, John Lyne must surely be Britain's unluckiest man.

In 2006 he fell down a manhole at work, injuring his back, his leg and both knees, but by his own standards the accident was hardly worth mentioning.

By that point the 52-year-old had suffered 16 major accidents, including - as a child - falling off a cart and being run over by an oncoming van. As a teenager, Lyne broke his arm falling out of a tree, and broke it again when the ambulance taking him home from hospital crashed.

On Bing: read more about 'Calamity' John Lyne


William "Bud" Post

William Post felt pretty lucky when he scooped $16.2 million on the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988, but not for long.

His brother hired a hitman to try and kill him and an ex-landlady successfully sued him for a share of the loot, claiming Post had agreed to split any winnings.

Other siblings pestered him to put money into businesses that were no better than money pits, and he incurred the expense of six divorces. By the end of it all Post was $1 million in debt and living on food stamps. "I was much happier when I was broke," he moaned. He died in 2006.

On Bing: lottery winners who ended up broke


Wilmer McLean

Wilmer McLean's farm in Prince William County, Virginia, was being used as a Confederate headquarters when a Union cannonball - one of the first shots fired in anger in the American civil war - came through his fireplace.

Wilmer McLean's home was repeatedly ransacked owing to its significance to the start of the American civil war

McLean moved his family 140km north to Appomattox County where, four years later, his parlour became the scene for the surrender of Confederate general Robert E Lee to his Union counterpart Ulysses S Grant.

Confederate-supporting McLean said that the war, "started in his front yard and ended in his front parlour." He later lost his home because he couldn't keep up payments on the mortgage, in part due to the pillaging of furniture and furnishings by Union forces anxious for mementoes of the triumphant occasion.


Henry Ziegland

The story goes like this. In 1893 Texan Henry Ziegland broke off his engagement and his heartbroken girlfriend shot herself. Her brother then shot Ziegland before turning the gun on himself. But the bullet had only grazed lucky old Henry, before lodging itself in a tree.

Twenty years later, Ziegland's luck changed. He wanted the huge old tree removed and decided to use dynamite. The force of the explosion dislodged the bullet and shot it across the yard, hitting Henry in the head and killing him - as it was meant to do 20 years before.

Some people claim the story is too remarkable to be true, but it has been reported in serious news media for years. And is it really less believable than the following (100% verified) story?


Frane Selak

Is Frane Selak - a Croatian music teacher - the world's luckiest or unluckiest man? He's suffered enough accidents to suggest he's cursed by bad fortune but the fact that he has survived them all makes him extremely lucky too.

In 1962 Selak survived a train crash that killed 17 passengers, though he ended up with hypothermia, shock, bruises and a broken arm. A few years later the door of the aeroplane he was flying on blew off and he was sucked out of the cabin. He landed on a haystack while 19 of his fellow passengers lost their lives in the subsequent crash. In 1966, the bus he was travelling on skidded into an icy river, killing four while Selak again survived.

By 1970 he'd obviously had enough of public transport, but the car he was driving burst into flames on the motorway. He fled the stricken vehicle moments before the fuel tank exploded.

After a couple of more minor mishaps his final death-defying moment came in 1980, when his car careered through a crash barrier and down a 300ft ravine. He managed to throw himself clear moments before impact and watched from a tree as the car exploded.

And then, in 2005, he won the lottery with his first ever ticket, the lucky so-and-so.


John Wade Agan

Florida resident John Wade Agan was taken to hospital earlier this year after suffering a lightning strike - in his own home. He was talking on the telephone at the time.

Previously, Agan had been robbed at gunpoint in his taxi and locked in the boot, stabbed in the chest with a butcher's knife and bitten by two poisonous snakes - at the same time.


Roy Sullivan

There have been several mentions of lightning in this list already, but nobody could attract lightning like Roy Sullivan, a ranger in the Shenandoah national park in Virginia. You have about a one in 10,000 chance of being hit by lightning once in your life.

Roy Sullivan, the national park ranger struck by lightning on seven separate occasions

Roy Sullivan, the national park ranger struck by lightning on seven separate occasions

The chances of getting struck by lightning seven times, as Sullivan was, is about 22 septillion to one against. In other words, it almost defies belief.

And yet it happened to Sullivan, whose ill luck earned him a place into the Guinness Book of Records. It didn't end with lightning though. Sullivan shot himself, aged 71, over an unrequited love.


Adrian Campbell

Chichester man Adrian Campbell was a keen basketball player before he was struck down with myasthenia gravis, a muscle-wasting illness that effects just one in 7,000 people. While recovering from that, Campbell was afflicted with neuromyotonia, a condition that weakens neck muscles and has a hit rate of only one in 100,000.

Despite these misfortunes, Campbell was making progress in his recovery and getting his life back on track... right up until he was struck down by Morvan's syndrome, a disease that can affect short-term memory.

There have been only 14 recorded cases of Morvan's syndrome in the world. Campbell is now slowly recovering from a rash (sorry!) of medical bad luck that doctors reckon carries odds of 700 million to one against

Friday 15 July 2011

Nigeria dead trap roads

This is what it looks like on Nigeria roads during raining season

http://youtu.be/ZP8uLyXl9p4

Saturday 15 January 2011

Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope. By Chinua Achebe, a professor at Brown University, is the author of “Things Fall Apart.”

AFRICA has endured a tortured history of political instability and religious, racial and ethnic strife. In order to understand this bewildering, beautiful continent — and to grasp the complexity that is my home country, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation — I think it is absolutely important that we examine the story of African people.


In my mind, there are two parts to the story of the African peoples ... the rain beating us obviously goes back at least half a millennium. And what is happening in Africa today is a result of what has been going on for 400 or 500 years, from the “discovery” of Africa by Europe, through the period of darkness that engulfed the continent during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and through the Berlin Conference of 1885. That controversial gathering of the leading European powers, which precipitated the “scramble for Africa,” we all know took place without African consultation or representation. It created new boundaries in ancient kingdoms, and nation-states resulting in disjointed, inexplicable, tension-prone countries today.

During the colonial period, struggles were fought, exhaustingly, on so many fronts — for equality, for justice, for freedom — by politicians, intellectuals and common folk alike. At the end of the day, when the liberty was won, we found that we had not sufficiently reckoned with one incredibly important fact: If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin.

This is how I see the chaos in Africa today and the absence of logic in what we’re doing. Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves, forgotten their traditional way of thinking, embracing and engaging the world without sufficient preparation. We have also had difficulty running the systems foisted upon us at the dawn of independence by our colonial masters. We are like the man in the Igbo proverb who does not know where the rain began to beat him and so cannot say where he dried his body.

People don’t like this particular analysis, because it looks as if we want to place the blame on someone else. Let me be clear, because I have inadvertently developed a reputation (some of my friends say one I relish) as a provocateur: because the West has had a long but uneven engagement with Africa, it is imperative that it also play an important role in forging solutions to Africa’s myriad problems. This will require good will and concerted effort on the part of all those who share the weight of Africa’s historical albatross.

In Nigeria, in the years before we finally gained independence in 1960, we had no doubt about where we were going: we were going to inherit freedom; that was all that mattered. The possibilities for us were endless, or so it seemed. Nigeria was enveloped by a certain assurance of an unbridled destiny, by an overwhelming excitement about life’s promise, without any knowledge of providence’s intended destination.

While the much-vaunted day of independence arrived to much fanfare, it rapidly became a faded memory. The years flew past. By 1966, Nigeria was called a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The national census was outrageously stage-managed to give certain ethnic groups more power; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were corrupted by foreign business interests.

The political situation deteriorated rapidly and Nigeria was quickly consumed by civil war. The belligerents were an aggrieved people in the southeast of the nation, the Biafrans, who found themselves fleeing pogroms and persecution at the hands of the determined government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, which had been armed to the teeth by some of the major international powers. My fellow Biafrans spent nearly three years fighting for a cause, fighting for freedom. But all that collapsed and Biafra stood defeated.


It had been a very bitter experience that led to the hostilities in the first place. And the big powers got involved in prolonging it. You see, we, the little people of the world, are constantly expendable. The big powers can play their games, even if millions perish in the process. And perish they did. In the end, more than a million people (and possibly as many as three million), mainly children, died either in the fighting or from starvation because of the Nigerian government’s economic blockade.
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After the civil war, we saw a “unified” Nigeria saddled with an even more insidious reality. We were plagued by a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry and corruption of the ruling class. Compounding the situation was the fact that Nigeria was now awash in oil boom petrodollars. The country’s young, affable head of state, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, ever so cocksure following his civil war victory, was proclaiming to the entire planet that Nigeria had more money than it knew what to do with. A new era of great decadence and decline was born. It continues to this day.

What can Nigeria do to live up the promise of its postcolonial dream? First, we will have to find a way to do away with the present system of political godfatherism. This archaic practice allows a relative handful of wealthy men — many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs — to sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials, chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference.

And we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian. Today, we have a system where only those individuals who can pay an exorbitant application fee and finance a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury are the ones able to run for the presidency.

But we must also remember that restoring democratic systems alone will not, overnight, make the country a success. Let me borrow from the history of the Igbo ethnic group. The Igbo have long been a very democratic people. They express a strong anti-monarchy sentiment with the common name Ezebuilo, which translates to “a king is an enemy.”

There is no doubt that they experienced the highhandedness of kings, so they decided that a king cannot be a trusted friend of the people without checks and balances. And they tried all kinds of arrangements to whittle down the menace of those with the will to power, because such people exist in large numbers in every society. So the Igbo created all kinds of titles which cost very much to acquire. In the end, the aspirant to titles becomes impoverished in the process and ends up with very little. So that individual begins again, and by the time his life is over, he has a lot of prestige, but very little power.

This is not a time to bemoan all the challenges ahead. It is a time to work at developing, nurturing and sustaining democracy. But we also must realize that we need patience and cannot expect instant miracles. Building a nation is not something a people do in one regime, in a few years, even. The Chinese had their chance to emerge as the leading nation in the world in the Middle Ages, but were consumed by interethnic political posturing and wars, and had to wait another 500 years for another chance. America did not arrive at its much admired democracy overnight. When President Abraham Lincoln famously defined democracy as “the government of the people, by the people, for the people” he was drawing upon classical thought and at least 100 years of American rigorous intellectual reflection on the matter.



Sustaining democracy in Nigeria will require more than just free elections. It will also mean ending a system in which corruption is not just tolerated, but widely encouraged and hugely profitable. It is estimated that about $400 billion has been pilfered from Nigeria’s treasury since independence. One needs to stop for a moment to wrap one’s mind around that incredible figure. It is larger than the annual gross domestic products of Norway and Sweden. This theft of national funds is one of the factors essentially making it impossible for Nigeria to succeed. Nigerians alone are not responsible. We all know that the corrupt cabal of Nigerians has friends abroad who not only help it move the billions abroad but also shield the perpetrators from persecution.
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Many analysts see a direct link between crude oil and the corruption in Nigeria, that creating a system to prevent politicians from having access to petrodollars is needed to reduce large-scale corruption. For most people, the solution is straightforward: if you commit a crime, you should be brought to book. But in a country like Nigeria, where there are no easy fixes, one must examine the issue of accountability, which has to be a strong component of the fight against corruption.

Some feel that a strong executive should be the one to hold people accountable. But if the president has all the power and resources of the country in his control, and he is also the one who selects who should be probed or not, clearly we will have an uneven system where those who are favored by the emperor have free rein to loot the treasury.

Nigeria’s story has not been, entirely, one long, unrelieved history of despair. At the midcentury mark of the state’s existence, Nigerians have begun to ask themselves the hard questions. How does the state of anarchy become reversed? What measures can be taken to prevent corrupt candidates from recycling themselves into positions of leadership? Young Nigerians have often come to me desperately seeking solutions to several conundrums: How do we begin to solve these problems in Nigeria where the structures are present but there is no accountability?

ONE initial step is to change the nation’s Official Secrets Act. Incredible as it may seem, it is illegal in Nigeria to publish official government data and statistics — including accounts spent by or accruing to the government. This, simply, is inconsistent with the spirit and practice of democracy. There is now a freedom of information bill before the National Assembly that would end this unacceptable state of affairs. It should be passed, free from any modifications that would render it ineffectual, and assented to by President Goodluck Jonathan. This can and should be achieved before the presidential election in April.

In the end, I foresee that the Nigerian solution will come in stages. First we have to nurture and strengthen our democratic institutions — and strive for the freest and fairest elections possible. That will place the true candidates of the people in office. Within the fabric of a democracy, a free press can thrive and a strong justice system can flourish. The checks and balances we have spoken about and the laws needed to curb corruption will then naturally find a footing.

And there has to be the development of a new patriotic consciousness, not one simply based on the well-worn notions of the “Unity of Nigeria” or “Faith in Nigeria” often touted by our corrupt leaders; but one based on an awareness of the responsibility of leaders to the led and disseminated by civil society, schools and intellectuals. It is from this kind of environment that a leader, humbled by the trust placed upon him by the people, will emerge, willing to use the power given to him for the good of the people.