The courts have given the Nigerian cabinet 14 days to determine whether the president is fit to lead the country. You might recall that the president has been away from the country on treatment for close to two months. From Reuters: Judge Dan Abutu ordered the cabinet to pass a resolution on Yar’Adua’s fitness within… Read More »
1. Turns out Nigerian foreign minister knows the ‘visions’ of a president he hasn’t talked to in close to two months! (See this BBC Hardtalk excerpt). Hmm… maybe we really don’t need a president then. 2. Intelligent Life on online fashion shopping. 3. Haiti and the Catastrophic Role of the International Financial System by Saskia Sassen. HT @jranck… Read More »
From FT reporter Tom Burgis: Two of Nigeria’s most prominent bank chief executives are to be forced to stand down under new rules introduced by the central bank as part of the governor’s ongoing tussle with some of the country’s most powerful tycoons. Lamido Sanusi, who took over as governor in June, has already rocked… Read More »
My saxophone instructor, a Muslim, asked me today about the ‘religious violence’ in northern Nigeria. I tried to explain to him that most of the violence that is reported from northern Nigeria is about a weird definition of who an indigene is and who a settler is, and that most often, the immediate cause of… Read More »
In a group interview in September, 18 disgruntled truck drivers in Cotonou, Benin, vented their frustrations to two Trade Hub consultants: driving freely from Cotonou to Ouagadougou was impossible without harassment, they said. They sometimes spend three days at borders where customs officials hold up paper work when they refuse to pay bribes; meanwhile, their… Read More »
My column of this week. December 25, 2009: A Nigerian-born male, with secondary education in Togo and university education in London, said to have been radicalized during his university days in London, and to have been further radicalized in Yemen, attempted to detonate an ‘incendiary device’ that he had sown into his underwear before getting… Read More »
I just read from the Financial Times, through the PSD blog, that the Nigerian government is considering giving part of the proceeds of oil exploration to indigenes of the Niger Delta region. The amount is about $20 a year. According to its architects, the Nigerian scheme could make about $555m annually available – about $20… Read More »
Former American ambassador to Nigeria, Princeton Lyman, writing on today’s (ir)relevance of Nigeria. If Nigeria fails? I have a long connection to Nigeria. Not only was I ambassador there, I have travelled to and from Nigeria for a number of years and have a deep and abiding emotional attachment to the Nigerian people, their magnificence,… Read More »
The Nigerian government has decided to implement a common year-end for Nigerian banks. The point is that, because banks have had different fiscal cycles they could move money around amongst each other to inflate the value of their total assets. Which was part of what contributed to the banking crisis of ’09. The immediate reaction:… Read More »
The International Telecommunication Union recently published their Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009 – Africa. The 76 page document details their statistical analysis of the progress of telephony and internet in Africa in the ten years up to the end of 2008. And guess what? Nigeria ranks highly in the fastest growing categories for mobile subscription,… Read More »