By Chukwuma Charles Soludo

Culled from Thisday.
Nigeria operates a peculiar kind of federation (unitary federalism) with overwhelming concentration of powers on the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN). Its fiscal federalism is also peculiar, with about 50% of the Federation Account shared among the 36 states and 774 local governments, and each armed with constitutional powers to spend without supervision by, or accountability to the federal government. Yes, the FGN has control over monetary, financial and exchange rate policies, taxation, external trade and finance, wage policy, and a monopoly of internal and external security. But the size, composition and quality of public sector spending still exert the greatest impacts on the economy and the welfare of citizens.

Thus, given the enormous spending powers of the other tiers of government, it means that if they do not “perform”, efforts at the federal level to improve the welfare of citizens could amount to clapping with one hand. If the local governments create prosperity at the local communities, the huge rural-urban migration and the frightening urban youth unemployment could be averted. But in over 20 states, there are no elected local governments, and the state governments also run the councils. Unfortunately, all eyes focus on the FGN and the states escape intense scrutiny.


How do we know if the states are ‘performing’ or not? We are constantly inundated with self-advertisements and propaganda by various states on what they term “unprecedented” accomplishments. Of course every new public office holder usually starts off by painting a gory picture of what he or she ‘met’ on assumption of office. Everyone starts by announcing that “nothing had been done until I arrived”. His successor also starts by stating that he only met rot and ruin, and been busy cleaning the ‘mess’, and the circus continues.

The Good Governance Tours organised by the Minister of Information has gone round some states to “see” what was on ground, while the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) has instituted States Peer Review Mechanism (SPRM) to evaluate performance and share experiences. Almost every media house or NGO now has one award or another for ‘best performing’ governors. But what exactly do they measure?


At the international level, the first effort to codify and universalise the concept of good governance was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (December 10, 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris). UDHR consists of 30 articles which have been elaborated in subsequent international treaties, regional human rights instruments, national constitutions, and laws. More particularly, the International Bill of Human Rights which took on the force of international law since 1976 consists of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and its two Optional Protocols.

Since then, the discussion and debate relating to governance found some common anchor, albeit that the communist countries and some Islamic states challenged some aspects of the Bill of Rights. In spite of these, the apparent legitimacy and colouration of ‘international best practice’ given to the UDHR and its Bill of Rights have changed the global discourse on governance and given us some universal benchmarks against which to compare performance of governments across time and space.


Chapter Two of the Nigerian Constitution on the “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy” is Nigeria’s adaptation of the UDHR, its Bill of Rights, and Covenants. King Hussein I had once argued that “the quality of life of the individual citizen is the ultimate yardstick by which to measure the success of any government”. Chapter Two of our constitution agrees, and states that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government”. It goes on to make extensive provisions on what should constitute the contract between Nigerian citizens and their governments. Sometimes I wonder how many public office holders have studied Chapter Two of our constitution. Ideally, the manifestoes of the political parties and the programmes of respective governments should spell out HOW they would actualise the blueprint for good governance as detailed in Chapter Two.


Defining or even measuring the constituent elements of the “quality of life” or “security and welfare” of the individual citizen can be subjective. Most people would however agree that the ‘quality of life’ would encapsulate a person’s spiritual, physical, social, and economic wellbeing. The Bill of Rights guarantees the individual liberties, freedoms, as well as voice and participation in how he is governed. Socialist countries or dictatorships largely ignore these universal (metaphysical) aspects of the human person and focus almost exclusively on his material wellbeing.

After all, according to this school of thought, what do liberties, freedoms, and democracy mean to a hungry person? But as we have seen from the violent protests in the Arab world and other repressive regimes in recent years, people need more than food on the table. For societies like ours where the private sector drives wealth creation while the government is the enabler or promoter, the importance of the Bill of Rights, rule of law, freedoms, voice and participation is decisive for sustainable prosperity. Unfortunately, some state governments run their fiefdoms as emperors, stifling opposition and run the elite out of town with thugs and threat to life. In those states with high insecurity, you can tar all the roads, provide the infrastructure, and have a thousand pages to advertise “dividends of democracy” and yet private businesses are on the run and poverty is on the rise.


The World Bank has recently produced its worldwide governance indicators summarised in three broad categories as follows: (1) The process by which those in authority are selected and replaced (voice & accountability; political stability & absence of violence); (2) The capacity of government to formulate and implement policies (government effectiveness; and regulatory quality); and (3) The respect of citizens and state for institutions that govern interactions among them (rule of law; control of corruption). In attempting to produce quantitative indicators of governance quality, each of the six sub-categories is further explained by several variables. Evidently, the three broad categories encompass political participation, accountability and security of life and property; the capacity of government to deliver services to the people and business; and the capacity of institutions to restrain excesses and enforce contract.

How many states will measure high on the basis of the above criteria? Check out the conduct of local government elections even in the few states that allow elections to hold. Check out the quality of institutions especially whereby the governor in most states is the chief procurement officer, and literally the sole approving authority for all matters pertaining to money. Commissioners are mere advisers without executive powers. Don’t ask about due process or value-for-money audits. The parliament is mostly co-opted and embedded within the Executive, and the governor acts as a sole administrator.

A major missing link is the absence of robust framework for measurement of performance among Nigerian states. The pioneering attempt to provide comparative state-level quantitative indicators of sound economic governance is the Business Environment and Competitiveness among Nigerian States (BECANS) produced by the African Institute for Applied Economics (AIAE), Enugu (now The African Heritage Institution). Its indicators can be grouped into five clusters: business environment index; infrastructure and utilities; regulatory services; business development support and investment promotion; and security. The data on the performance of the states over time are very revealing. Ideally, the states that score highly on good governance indicators ought to score highly on improvements in the living standards of the citizens. But do they? I am not sure the states pay any attention to the standards of living. If they do, I have not seen the numbers.


Self-evaluations of governance are done by states in terms of artefacts and intermediate inputs. Governments dole out statistics on the amount of budgetary allocations to specific sectors and programmes (without any sense of the value-for-money in the spending); kilometres of roads tarred even if most don’t survive two rainy seasons; number of chairs donated to schools or number of hospitals and schools built; etc.  There is competition among the states as to which one would outshine the others in terms of the propaganda on performance. Pages of newspapers show bungalows and buildings, bridges, roads, etc as the ‘dividends of democracy’. Some even advertise on the CNN. My guess is that the expenditure of many states on performance propaganda, including paid live TV events could exceed their expenditures on ensuring security for the citizens of their states.


Tragically, performance evaluation has become show biz. No mention is made of the final outcomes in terms of impacts on the “quality of life” of citizens. We have no information on the number of new jobs created by the private sector; what is happening to per capita income, incidence of poverty; what percentage of the citizens now have access to adequate health facilities and how is the average life expectancy improving; impact of educational spending on student grades (especially in Maths and, Science); etc.

How many states have baseline data on key performance indicators at the start of the regime and periodically publish progress or retrogression? For example, what percentage of secondary school students obtained five credits including English and Maths in the SSCE before you took over, and what are the annual percentages since you came in? What was the rate of youth unemployment in your state when you took over and what is it now? What was the statistics on number of armed robbery or kidnapping before you took over and what are they now? I have not heard any state governor beat his chest about how drastically his regime has reduced the incidence of poverty or rate of unemployment in his state. But these are the ultimate measures of performance.


In democracies with informed citizenry, no government has been re-elected if these two key indicators worsen dramatically, irrespective of any progress on physical development. If the recent statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics on state-by-state poverty incidence are correct, then even the states with the most loquacious propaganda machinery on performance should look themselves again in the mirror. What I find most amusing is that ‘performances’ are flaunted without stating costs.

Most state governments actually have more than three to four times the resources available to their counterparts in 1999- 2007, even adjusting for inflation. Do they have 3-4 times their performance even in terms of infrastructure? Also, we compare states with very poor allocations with others that have four times their resources. We sometimes compare apples with oranges.


We understand the political pressures on state governors with short, four-year electoral cycles and a largely poor population to concentrate governance on what the people can “see”. Governance is about here and now. Only very few governors focus on long-term sustainable development or projects whose impacts would take time to manifest. Everyone wants to launch “his own” programmes which the people can ‘see’ and attribute to him. Continuity of projects embarked upon by previous regimes is rare.

Dead assets or abandoned projects adorn most states. We can’t go on this way. If performance is solely about physical projects that we can see, then only states with huge resources (Lagos, and the oil-producing states) will be star performers. But if jobs, security, poverty incidence, life expectancy, quality of institutions, citizen participation, etc become the ultimate measures, a new governance framework will emerge and finally a consolidated national development will begin.

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Bill Gates

From the Business Insider.

It's common knowledge that success is two-parts hard work and one-part luck. But what about smarts? Are the world's richest people really the most intelligent people around?
Pretty much, yes, according to new research by Duke University's Jonathan Wai, sent to Business Insider and first reported by CNBC's Robert Frank.
Wai found that within the top one percent of smart people, the smarter you are, the richer you are.
Overall, billionaires tended to be the smartest people. Some 45% of them are part of the top 1% of smart people. That compares to 39% of not-billionaire Fortune 500 CEOs; 41% of Senators, and 40% of federal judges.
Tech billionaires and those who made their money from investments seem to be the smartest of all. Wai found that 63% in tech and 69% in finance were among the brainpower elite.
Billionaires who made their money in fashion and retail, food and beverage weren't as brilliant. About one-quarter of them were brainiacs.
Wai came to these conclusions by looking at the colleges these people attended. If they went to one of 29 "elite colleges," there were considered to be among the top 1% of smart people. These schools require high test scores for admittance and that indicates very high intelligence, he reasoned.
You can argue that this is a pretty flawed way to measure intelligence. It automatically filters out smart people who didn't attend elite colleges and automatically assigns a high IQ to those were accepted because their parents were alumni, or they got an athletic scholarship. Wai acknowledges that flaw but says those two exceptions balance each other out.
Interestingly, this research runs counter to a study done in 2007 by Jay Zagorsky, at Ohio State University.
Zagorsky's study found no correlation between wealth and IQ. It looked at people who did well on the Armed Forces Qualification Test and how their wealth grew over time. While smarter people did earned bigger salaries, they were no more likely to become super rich over time than those with an average IQ.
So maybe the answer to the question of wealth and smarts is this: It won't automatically make you a billionaire but it certainly helps.

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From the Punch  
The poor supply of electricity being witnessed across the country currently is as a result of a significant drop in power generation from a peak of 4,517 megawatts attained on December 21, 2012 to 3,443MW on Tuesday.

The 1,074MW drop is, however, a slight improvement over the 2,987.6MW peak generation recorded on April 6, 2013, when a whopping 1,529.4MW was lost.

The drop in power generation, our correspondent gathered from the Ministry of Power, was as a result of low gas supply to thermal power plants.

The power generation report provided by the Ministry of Power revealed that peak generation as of Saturday was 2,987.6 MW, while the peak demand forecast was 10,200MW. Energy generation was put at 68,953.24 megawatts hours, while the actual energy sent out was 67,360.24MWH.

This is considered by power industry analysts as a huge break from the highest peak generation of 4,517 MW on December 21, 2012 and 98,580MWH energy on December 19, 2012, one of the highest ever sent out in the country.

The Executive Operations Summary issued by the General Manager, National Control Centre, Osogbo, Mr. A. Alade, on December 4, 2012, revealed that the previous energy peak was 96,768.53MWH recorded on August 31, 2012.

When contacted, the Assistant Director, Press, Power Ministry, Mrs. Pat Deworitshe, confirmed that power generation had dropped and ascribed the development to “general system collapse.”

“There is a general system collapse. I just spoke with the MD, Power Generation Station, Egbin, and he said there is a general system collapse. However, we are trying our best to fix it so that everybody can enjoy power supply,” she said.

The PUNCH had on February 16, 2013 reported that the Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, condemned the frequent rate of system failures in the power sector.

Nebo, who spoke at the opening of a retreat organised by the Presidential Task Force on Power in Abuja, described the development as embarrassing and warned system owners and managers to sit up because such would no longer be tolerated.

The Chairman, House of Representatives Committee on Power, Mr. Patrick Ikhariale, alleged that apart from Egbin Power Plc, all the power generating companies in the country were functioning at less than 40 per cent capacity.

The minister also warned that distribution companies that sabotaged their revenue targets would be sanctioned in accordance with the law.

He said, “I have observed with grave concern the increasing frequency of system collapse of our grid and hereby encourage the operatives of this segment in the TCN to be extra diligent and vigilant.

“I shall not entertain frivolous reasons for continued system collapses. Owners of this process must sit up or be prepared to ship out. Another area of serious concern, which needed to be addressed, is the poor track record of project delivery across the value chain, and especially in the transmission segment, which will remain in government’s hands.

“Without a major shift towards improved efficiency, it could frustrate the development of a sustainable private sector-driven power market in Nigeria, and it is a veritable option in order to align to internationally acceptable business standards, thus, I will insist on this shift to happen soon.”

Nebo added, “As we progress into the threshold of handing over the sold assets to the successful bidders, the distribution companies must sit up during this transition period. Any of the officers in the distribution companies found to be sabotaging the revenue collection targets of the market will be made to face the full wrought of the law.

“This is because government will not tolerate complacency and ineptitude of these companies building up additional burdens of liabilities through the misconduct of these companies.”

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CNN
Is a North Korea missile test imminent?
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
NEW: Some Chinese tour groups cancel visits to North Korea
U.S. radars and satellites are trained on an area of the North's coast
The U.S. believes test could occur without standard warning to aviation, shipping
Recent North Korean threats contrast with some of its other state news reports
Are you from South or North Korea? Send us your experiences.
(CNN) -- Countries in northeast Asia remained on edge Wednesday amid warnings from U.S. and South Korean officials that North Korea could carry out a missile test at any point.
Japan has deployed missile defense systems around Tokyo, some Chinese tour groups have canceled visits to North Korea, and U.S. radars and satellites are trained on an area of the Korean east coast where Kim Jong Un's regime is believed to have prepared mobile ballistic missiles for a possible test launch.
After weeks of belligerent threats and provocative gestures from Pyongyang, the situation on the Korean Peninsula is fragile.
Adm. Samuel J. Locklear, the top U.S. commander in the Pacific, said Tuesday that he couldn't recall a time of greater tension in the region since the end of the Korean War in the 1950s.
Before the two controversial long-range rocket launches that North Korea carried out last year, the reclusive regime gave ample warning to the world. But it is keeping everyone guessing about what it might do this time around.
 Photos: Kim Jong Un and North Korea's military
 Pyongyang to foreigners: Leave S. Korea White House has message for North Korea What will happen if missile launches?
"According to intelligence obtained by our side and the U.S., the possibility of a missile launch by North Korea is very high," South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se said at a parliamentary hearing Wednesday, according to the semiofficial South Korean news agency Yonhap.
He said the missile in question is a Musudan, an untested weapon that he said has a range as far as 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles). That would mean it could reach as far as Guam, a Western Pacific territory that is home to U.S. naval and air bases and where the United States recently said it was placing missile defense systems.
A launch without warning?
Yun said he was basing his assessment on South Korean and U.S. intelligence. On Tuesday, a U.S. official said that the American government believes a test launch could happen at any time and without North Korea issuing a standard notice to commercial aviation and maritime shipping that would warn planes and vessels to stay away from the missile's path.
The official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the information, cautioned that most of the information comes from satellite imagery, so it's impossible to reach a definitive conclusion because the United States cannot gather information on the ground.
He said the launch could be "imminent" but also cautioned that the United States "simply doesn't know." Based on what the United States has seen, the belief is that the missiles have received their liquid fuel and are ready for launch.
Speaking at a Senate Armed Services hearing Tuesday, Locklear said the U.S. military would not want to shoot down a North Korean missile whose trajectory would send it into the open sea. But he said if the missile's path appeared to threaten a U.S. ally, such as Japan, interceptor missiles could be used to try to bring it down.
Japan's deployment of missile defenses in Tokyo follows similar measures taken ahead of the North's rocket launches last year.
Since the U.N. Security Council voted last month to impose new sanctions on Kim's regime over the latest North Korean nuclear test, Pyongyang has kept up a steady flow of words and acts that could give the impression of a nation heading inexorably toward conflict.
On Tuesday, it advised foreigners in South Korea to secure shelter or evacuate the country in case of hostilities on the Korean Peninsula, the latest in a string of ominous warnings.
It also kept more than 50,000 of its workers from an industrial complex jointly operated with South Korea, which had been a key symbol of cooperation between the two countries.
 Seoul prepared but thinks attack unlikely North Korea pulls workers from complex Americans vacation in North Korea North Korea's 'bluff for rewards' history
'Holiday atmosphere' inside North Korea
But on the same day, state media published articles that described festive events and international visits, suggesting a much less fraught situation inside North Korea.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that various sporting events were happening or scheduled to take place to mark the 101st anniversary next week of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea and the grandfather of Kim Jong Un.
"The ongoing sports tournaments make the country seethe with holiday atmosphere," KCNA said. Kim Il Sung's birthday, known as the Day of the Sun, is a major public holiday in North Korea.
The planned events include an international marathon Sunday in Pyongyang in which runners from North Korea and other countries will participate. KCNA also noted Tuesday the arrival by plane in North Korea of a delegation from the Japan-Korea Society for Scientific and Educational Interchange.
Such visits sit strangely alongside the North's warning last week to foreign diplomats in Pyongyang that it wouldn't be able to guarantee their safety in the event of a conflict.
Some North Korea watchers have observed that the regime's domestic propaganda has focused recently on efforts to promote economic development, while the bellicose threats appear targeted primarily at a foreign audience.
Varying levels of concern
The angry rhetoric has also failed to alarm South Koreans, who have lived through decades of North Korean bombast. Residents of Seoul have continued to go unflappably about their daily business.
But the North's fiery words appear to have had an effect on the American public, with 41% of those surveyed saying they see the reclusive nation as an immediate threat to the United States, according to a recent CNN/ORC International poll.
That's up 13 percentage points in less than a month, CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said.
"If North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wanted to get the attention of the American public, his strategy is starting to work," Holland said.
Andrei Lankov, a professor of history at Kookmin University in Seoul, noted the varying levels of concern in an opinion article for The New York Times published Tuesday.
"The farther one is from the Korean Peninsula, the more one will find people worried about the recent developments here," he said.
The tense situation does appear to have prompted some Chinese tour groups to call off upcoming trips to North Korea.
Hong Lei, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said Wednesday that some agencies and tourists had canceled plans, but he said the Chinese-North Korean border continued to operate normally.
Western tourism agencies that organize visits to North Korea haven't so far reported any changes to their activities.
A troubled industrial zone
The most tangible signs of disruption are in the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the manufacturing zone on the North Korean side of the border where more than 120 South Korean companies operate.
Last week, the North started blocking South Korean personnel from crossing the border back into the complex. And this week, it said it was pulling out the more than 50,000 North Koreans who work inside the zone and temporarily suspending activities there.
It had blocked the border crossing previously, in 2009, but pulling out the workers was a new step.
As of Wednesday lunchtime, only a few hundred South Koreans remained inside the complex, according to South Korean authorities, down from more than 800 before the North started restricting entry.
Also on Wednesday, South Korea accused the North of carrying out a wave of cyberattacks that paralyzed the networks of major South Korean banks and broadcasters last month. It is the first time that Seoul has formally pointed the finger at Pyongyang for the hacking, which affected more than 48,000 computers.

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A Patriot missile battery

REUTERS
South Korea said on Wednesday it has asked China, North Korea's only major ally, to rein in the hermit state and has raised its surveillance after the North moved at least one long-range missile in readiness for a possible launch.

Admiral Samuel Locklear, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific region, said the U.S. military believed North Korea had moved an unspecified number of Musudan missiles to its east coast.

An Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters "our working assumption is that there are two missiles that they may be prepared to launch". That was in line with South Korean media reports.

The North has been threatening the United States and its "puppet" South Korea on an almost a daily basis in recent weeks, although the threats appear to be aimed partly at boosting internal support for young leader Kim Jong-un.

The Combined Forces Command in Seoul raised its "Watchcon 3" status, a normal defence condition, by one level in order to step up monitoring and increase the number of intelligence staff, a senior military official told the Yonhap news agency in the South on Wednesday.

"There are clear signs that the North could simultaneously fire off Musudan, Scud and Nodong missiles," Yonhap quoted an unidentified official as saying.

South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se told a parliamentary hearing in Seoul that he was working through diplomatic channels in an attempt to rein in Pyongyang.

"Through close coordination with China and Russia, the Korean government has been continuing to make efforts to persuade North Korea to change its attitude," Yun said.

China is North Korea's sole major ally, although it backed recent United Nations resolutions against Pyongyang, and Moscow was a supporter of North Korea as the Soviet Union.

Pyongyang has frequently tested short-range Scud missiles but the longer-range Musudan and Nodong missiles are an unknown quantity. The Musudan missiles are reckoned to have a range of roughly 3,000-3,500 km (1,865-2,175 miles).

The North has said it would target American bases in the Pacific, although it is not known whether the untested missiles have the range to do so.

"If the missile was in defence of the homeland, I would certainly recommend that action (of intercepting it). And if it was defence of our allies, I would recommend that action," Locklear told a Senate hearing in Washington.

Pyongyang has turned up its shrill rhetoric in recent weeks after the United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions for the impoverished state's third nuclear weapons test in February.

It has threatened a nuclear strike on the United States - something it does not have the capacity to carry out - and "war" with South Korea.

On Tuesday, it told foreigners in South Korea to leave the country to avoid being dragged into a "thermonuclear war". It previously warned diplomats in Pyongyang to prepare to leave.

The streets of Seoul, a city of 10 million people, bustled as normal on Wednesday morning as commuters travelled to work in sunny, spring-time weather. Foreign embassies in the capital of Asia's fourth-largest economy have played down the latest North Korean threats as rhetoric.

The North closed a money-spinning joint industrial park it operates with South Korean companies this week, putting at risk a venture that is one of its few sources of hard cash.

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With the implementation of 10 per cent daily upper and lower price movement limit across all quoted stocks on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), the Nigerian capital market is now better aligned with other global exchanges, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Cowry Asset Management Limited, Mr. Johnson Chukwu, has said.


Other stakeholders and traders in the stock market have hailed the decision even as they have warned the NSE to take appropriate steps to check any abuse of the system.  The NSE last week made the new pricing method effective.


Chukwu explained that Nigerian stock prices would henceforth quickly adjust to publicly available information, making the equity market move further away from a partially regulated to a near perfect market.


“The more the Nigerian equities market tends towards a perfect market, the more attractive it will be to foreign investors. However, the new price movement limit has made the Nigerian equity market more attractive to speculators as it now presents better opportunities for quick short term capital gains with corresponding threat of capital losses. The threat of quick capital losses could discourage some retail investors in Nigeria who are not well informed about the market dynamics.”


Also, Executive Director, Dunn Loren Merrifield Securities Limited, Mr. Idowu Ogedengbe, said the NSE might have decided to raise price limit to improve market liquidity.


According to him, “The recent introduction of a 10 per cent limit up and  down limit  price band on all equities traded on the Nigerian bourse was done against the backdrop of the need to reduce market volatility while at the same time enhancing market liquidity.


“On the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) for example, circuit breakers were put in place after "Black Monday" when the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) bizarrely dropped almost 1,000 points in 20 minutes, then snapped back on extraordinary volume.
“Currently, at the start of each quarter, the NYSE sets three circuit breaker levels at levels of 10 per cent, 20 per cent, and 30 per cent of the average closing price of the DJIA for the month preceding the start of the quarter,” he said.


Ogedengbe added that the use of trading curb or circuit breaker was a global practice adopted by major stock market regulators adding that such limits are usually placed on the index instead of individual stocks as it is the case in Nigeria.

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Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, CBN Governor

The Bankers' Committee Tuesday said it will soon outline new strategies for supporting the real sector, particularly the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) through the reduction of lending rates.

This was just as business owners in Bauchi, Tuesday decried the shortage of lower banknotes for transactions.

The business owners lamented that most of their customers no longer patronise them because of the development.

However, the bankers’ committee expressed optimism that reducing lending rates would reduce social tension by enhancing employment generation in the country.

Addressing journalists after the regular meeting of the committee in Abuja, Group Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Diamond Bank Plc, Dr. Alex Otti, alongside other bank chief executives said they had extensive discussions on how to make interest rates cheaper for small businesses given that the sector had the capacity of stimulating economic growth.

He said modalities on how to achieve lower rate for the sector would be made public within the next few weeks, adding that the issue would be adequately ironed out at its ongoing bankers' committee retreat.

There are however, concerns on how such plan would be achieved considering the prevailing monetary policy conditions, especially with the monetary policy rate (MPR) at 12 percent.

"Basically, interest rates have to go down. It is going to happen," he said.
Continuing, THISDAY checks at Bauchi revealed that those mostly affected by this development particularly in Bauchi metropolis were petty traders, business centre operators, transporters, among others.

THISDAY investigation at the ever-busy Wunti, Muda Lawal and Central markets  showed that many businesses were battling to make sales due to the shortage of smaller denominations such N10, N20 and N50.
Alhaji Salisu Umar, who sells yams and potatoes at  Muda Lawal market said: “The first thing our customers do when they come to make their purchases is ask if you have change, and when you answer in the negative, they just go away.’’

“The use of smaller denominations like N20 and N50 is really becoming a problem because its circulation is very limited. Whenever a customer comes with bigger denominations like five hundred and one thousand naira and you tell them there is no change, they just change their mind and refuse to buy anything from you.”
Also, Mr. Danazumi Suleiman, a commercial motorcycle operator complained bitterly over the situation.

But the CBN Director, Banking Supervision, Mrs. Tokunbo Martins, told journalists in Abuja that the apex bank was aware of the scarcity of lower denominations. Martins explained that the scarcity was caused by the recent setback encountered in the suspended currency restructuring programme of the apex bank.

The N20, N50 as well as N200 notes had suddenly become difficult to come by in the economy. She however, assured that a process to release lower currency  as well as improving their quality had already commenced.

Meanwhile, the Bankers' Committee also, Tuesday, expressed concern over the need to further enhance structural reforms to provide conducive conditions for long term investment in the country.

Managing Director, Citibank, Mr. Omar Hafeez, said even though portfolio in-flows were necessary in any economy, long term money is preferred because the exit of  ‘hot money’ could affect rates fluctuation.

But, CBN Director of Communication, Mr. Ugochukwu Okoroafor , said, however, that the apex bank was keeping a close watch of portfolio inflows stressing that the country had significant foreign reserves to meet any shortfall should investors decide to take money out.

Also, the committee once more condemned reports of ATM charge imposed by some banks even when it had unanimously agreed to suspend such charges on customers. The Diamond Bank boss said such practice was unacceptable to the committee.

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 Nigeria and Canada are set to establish a chamber of commerce to ensure the implementation of the outcome of the Nigeria-Canada Investment Conference (NCIC) in May, Ambassador Ojo Madueke said.



Madueke, the Nigerian High Commissioner to Canada, said this while briefing newsmen in Abuja on Thursday.



He said that the Canada-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce would promote trade benefits between both countries.







``To ensure that this would not just be another talk shop and that there is momentum after the conference and results that can be monitored, measured and sustained, the mission led the drive to get a new Canada-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce.



``The chamber of commerce, which we have asked, Mr Peter Kieran, the CEO of CPCS, is driving this whole process ably supported by Dr Isa Odidi.



``We want it to be like no other Chamber of Commerce that has been established that deals with investment in Nigeria outside Nigeria.



``What we have done is to ensure that the cockpit, so to speak, of this Chamber of Commerce is manned by companies that have huge capacities and interests; we want those who really have strong stake in terms of the huge traffic, potentially speaking, between Nigeria and Canada in trade areas.



``Getting the Chamber of Commerce is a way of creating the ties that bind between Nigeria and Canada on a more permanent basis. ’’






Madueke said the Nigeria-Canada Investment Conference, which would take place from May 2 to May 3 in Toronto, Canada, would focus on sectors that would promote job creation and economic development.



``We have a dynamic labour force of about 100 million young people; the biggest asset Nigeria has is its labour force and if this labour force is given the right training, we would take over the global economy.



``This conference would create opportunities for an enabling environment for youth productivity and development to thrive, thus enabling skills acquisition and economic diversity and growth. ”



He listed mining, oil and gas, education, banking, information technology, health and infrastructure as areas of investments.



Also speaking, Canadian High Commissioner to Nigeria, Mr Chris Cooter, expressed the readiness of the Canadian government to partner with Nigeria in the areas of youth development, agriculture and film industry.



Cooter said that the conference would create opportunities for Canada to invest in “Nigeria’s future”, adding that it would also create a positive perception of Nigeria and the African continent to the international community.






``This is really setting a path for Nigeria’s engagement with the rest of the world; an event such as this is historic in our bilateral relation and beyond that, it speaks to the change in the perception of the whole world towards Africa and towards Nigeria in particular.



``We want this relationship not just to be a one-off event; we want continuity; we want to create relationships between business, people and institutions.



``We see the future with you and we need to diversify our trade relations and the big new developing countries like Nigeria are of particular priority to the government of Canada.’’



Cue out audio 2



The envoy said the Canadian government was ready to offer expertise in the areas of partnership and would invest in Nigeria’s future “because that is investing in Canada’s future”.



Cooter said that the Canadian High Commission was working towards facilitating participants’ visas, adding that applications received later than April 12 would not be processed due to time constraints.



The Nigeria-Canada Investment Conference, initiated by the Nigerian High Commission in Canada, is aimed at strengthening relations between both countries through trade.
The conference, which has as its theme “Nigeria-Canada Synergy on Vision 20:20:20”, is jointly organised by the Nigerian High Commission, Canadian Council of Africa and Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. (NAN)

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The Group Chief Executive Officer of Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI), Mr Thierry Tanoh, said on Monday that the bank was targeting a 50 per cent revenue growth this financial year.

Making the disclosure at the bank's ``Facts Behind the Figures'' forum at the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) in Lagos, Tanoh said that the bank's revenue appreciated by 46 per cent last year.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the bank posted gross earnings of N362.14 billion for the financial year ended Dec. 31, 2012 against the N235.97 billion recorded in 2011.

Its profit after tax stood at N45.49 billion in contrast to the N32.27 billion declared in 2011, indicating an increase of 40 per cent.

The bank's net asset appreciated to N339.92 billion, compared with N233.39 billion in 2011.

Commenting on the 2012 result, Tanoh attributed the growth to successful integration of its major acquisitions in Ghana and Nigeria and strong demand for retail banking services across its 33 country platforms.

He said that the Nigerian market contributed 40 per cent of the bank's revenue in the 2012 financial year.

Tanoh said that increased trade and commercial flows between Middle Africa and the rest of the world as well as the performance of the bank's staff contributed to the growth recorded.

The chief executive officer said that the bank would remain reactive to the yearning of its customers through strong innovations.

He, however, assured shareholders increased reruns on their investment in the years ahead.

Tanoh stated that the bank had finalised its integration with the former Oceanic Bank, noting that customers could withdraw their money from any branch.

Earlier, the Chief Executive Officer of the NSE, Mr Oscar Onyema, commended the management of the bank for its achievements.

Onyema said that ETI  was among the first quoted companies that embraced the corporate governance policy.

He urged the bank to work closely with the Federal Government to unlock the inherent potential in the Nigerian economy. (NAN)

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Nigerian bank executives yesterday urged the government to quickly pull through those structural reforms, particularly in the power and oil sector ,that would open up the economy, encourage long-term investment inflows and check influx of hot money into the system, which has remained challenging to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

The need to check the influx of portfolio investments, popularly known as ‘hot money’ and its attendant negative impact in the economy, was one of the key issues raised and discussed at their bankers’ committee meeting yesterday, where they also committed to devise means of lowering lending rates to small businesses.

The bank chiefs were of the view that if the needed structural reforms were effectively concluded, more investors, especially  long term investors, would be encouraged to commit their funds in the economy, which would then substantially discourage speculators who help drive hot money inflows.

“One of the issues discussed was the continued need for structural reforms in the country, with specific focus on the  power and oil and gas sectors. This is important because current inflows into the country are in the form of portfolio inflows, which are short term in nature. While these are important, as they bring in substantial liquidity into the market, they also exit at will.

“Therefore, the structural reforms will ensure that these monies that come into the country are not just short term money or hot money, but rather long money. The discussion was that we should try and have the structural reforms concluded in the power sector, oil industry, then we will begin to see flows migrate from short term to long term FDI,” Omar Hafeez, Managing Director, CitiBank said, while briefing on the outcome of the meeting.

But Ugochukwu Okorafor, CBN Director, Corporate Communications, told journalists that the apex bank has already flushed out a reasonable amount of these portfolio investments from  the system, with their sources being tracked on regular basis ,to forestall any negative impact in the system.
Okorafor could not confirm how much of these monies were still in circulation. He assured however, that there were enough external reserves to mitigate any unexpected shock from sudden withdrawal of such monies from the system.

Meanwhile, the Nigeria’s bank executives at the meeting pledged to reduce rates at which they lend money to the real sector, particularly the small, Micro and Small Enterprises in the country.

Alex Oti, Managing Director, Diamond Bank, said the bank CEOs had an extensive discussion on how their institutions can begin to support the real sector, the retail segment of the market, as well as the micro and small scale industries.

He acknowledged that these sectors had over the years been starved of funds and that the bankers’ decision to now support them buoys from their ability to reduce social tension by generating a lot of employment and empowering a lot of people.

And according to him, further discussions on the modalities would be held by the banks.

“Banks also discussed ways and means to reduce interest rate to these sectors of the economy generally. We had a lot of discussions and the decision that was taken by the bankers’ committee was that we would go back and sit down during our bankers’ retreat and come up with a strategy… So I assure that in a couple of weeks, we are going to come out with clear modalities on how this is going to happen,” Oti pledged.

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From Businessday
Despite the promise and enthusiasm that attended the launch of mobile money systems in Nigeria two years ago, the service is still struggling to gain a foothold in the country.

This is against the backdrop of the huge potential market size, which is expected to grow to N1.1 trillion by 2015.

Industry experts and analysts say this is because  banks, mobile money operators and other players have  failed to clearly define, articulate and communicate the benefits of using the service to prospective customers.

Analysts have also identified regulatory issues, absence of interoperability amongst disparate mobile money systems, and poor agent networks, as some of the drawbacks to the speedy adoption of the service.

“Mobile money is not getting traction in Nigeria and across West Africa...there are regulatory issues particularly amongst West African countries which have not allowed mobile money to grow as much as we would have liked it in the telco space,” Wale Goodluck, corporate services executive, MTN Nigeria said in an interview.

In December 2012, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said the total value of transactions carried out so far by mobile money operators was N17.3 billion. A recent survey conducted by Enhancing Financial Innovation and Access (EFINA), has revealed that there are about 400,000 mobile money subscribers in Nigeria, out of a population of 167million.

In contrast, two-thirds of Kenya’s 29 million mobile subscribers use mobile money. Femi Adeoti, chief executive officer of Inlaks Computers said that with Nigeria’s huge mobile subscription base, currently at 114 million, the country could surpass the success of Kenya’s M-PESA, if appropriate policies that would drive the right solutions are put in place. He added that it would be necessary to give ample support to network and licensed mobile money operators. The CBN had in 2011 licensed 16 operators to provide mobile payment services in Nigeria. But analysts say poor infrastructure has contributed massively to slow adoption.

Henrietta Bankole-Olusina, head of mobility for Accenture Nigeria, said investment in infrastructure alone cannot spur growth of the service expected to aid financial inclusion by extending banking and payments services to millions of the unbanked.” We can invest in infrastructure all we want, but if we don’t have the right business models, we will not achieve desirable results. An effective business model and a clear customer value proposition is what this sector requires to stimulate growth. We have a myriad of operators offering the same standard of products. “Nobody is telling the consumer about what values they can derive from using the service”, Bankole-Olusina  said at a forum in Lagos.

Lending his view, Franklin Chidi, an electronic payment expert and blogger, said a large number of banks have for several years, supported mobile banking and money transfer services using phones, browsers or application installed on Blackberries, iPhones and Andriod phones. “The reality is that many of the early adopters who typically help spread the phenomenon are the young and upward mobile, who are not yet jumping on the mobile money bandwagon because they have an alternative that still works for them.”

“Traction in mobile payment in Nigeria remains very low. Interoperability is a serious issue. The likelihood of growth is clearly reduced”, Chidi added.

“Only four out of the 20 licensed mobile money operators are interoperable, as the industry is currently fragmented ,with disparate mobile payment systems that don’t talk to one another, Bankole-Olusina said. The potential in the mobile money market is huge, but it is a capital-intensive, thin margin business, said Chuma Ezirim, head of e-banking at FirstBank. “There is need to manage the expectations of some stakeholders, especially on the viability of the Mobile payment deployment. The growth period might be longer than expected because of the complexity of the ecosystem.”

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Nigeria's dream of becoming a major player in the steel sector is finally coming to reality, as its first consignment of steel for export begins this month. African Foundries Limited, a foreign company operating in Nigeria, will begin export of steel to Ghana this April, to finally break the jinx and put the country on the global steel map.

African Foundries Limited, with production capacity of 500,000 tons of steel billets, has a state of the art continuous rolling facility, and is the only TMT producing mill in Nigeria, and its first export consignment is about five metric tons.

Sanjay Kumar,the company’s managing director, said exports would commence on April 27, 2013.

“Today is a proud and pleasant moment, and we are showcasing our feat to announce the breakthrough, because we have started to produce for export,” Kumar declared, adding that the firm started with one five ton capacity induction furnace in 2010.

Kumar added that the company now has multiple furnaces of bigger capacity, along with a re-bar mill and a structural rolling mill, with current capacity at 500,000 tons per year.

“With this plant and the two others in Ikorodu, Lagos and Suleja, in Niger state, we are targeting 1 million metric tons per year to be able to position ourselves for the 1.5 million metric tons Nigerians demand for steel.”

African Steel mill has 200,000 metric tons capacity while Abuja Steel mills in Suleja which will be commissioned soon have 150,000 metric tons per year capacity.

Kumar said the company's products are at par with what obtains in other parts of the world, adding that the main component is scraps sourced by about 5,000 otherwise unemployed youths.

African Foundries' clients are drawn from the construction industry, where lots of heavy construction projects are on-going across the country. This is complemented by the normal market consumption from the 36 states.

“Big construction firms depend on us and we produce to their specifications”, says Kumar who highlighted several challenges of which infrastructure and import duty regime are key.

“The steel industry will develop better, if the import regime is favourable. Nigeria is one of the richest ,especially in iron-ore, and the development of the industry will put the country at par with others in five years,” Sanjay said, adding that infrastructure such as good roads is hampering production.

The country’s feat is coming on the heels of the Federal Government’s protracted failures to develop the steel sector due to mismanagement and abandonment of its several steel companies.

The Federal Government in 1971 established an extra-ministerial agency called “Nigerian Steel Development Authority” (NSDA) and backed up by Decree to focalise efforts required to focalise a steel plant.

The agency that was later dissolved, gave birth to Ajaokuta Steel Project, Ajaokuta, Delta Steel Company, Ovwian - Aladja , Jos Steel Rolling Company, Jos , and Katsina Steel Rolling Company, Katsina.

Others are Oshogbo Steel Rolling Company, Oshogbo, National Iron Ore Mining Company, Itakpe, National Steel Raw Materials Exploration Agency, Kaduna, National Metallurgical Development Center, Jos and Metallurgical Training Institute, Onitsha.

Today however, despite the huge resources ploughed into Nigeria’s steel industry, the sector has been comatose and Ajaokuta Steel Complex, Kogi State; Delta Steel Complex, Aladja, Delta State; Osogbo Steel Rolling Mill and Katsina Steel Rolling Mill, are in pathetic situations.

But where the government has failed, African Foundries Ltd, a flagship of the African Steel Mill group, commissioned in 2011 and located in Ogijo, Ogun state has succeeded and will begin export of about 5,000 metric tons of TMT rebar to Ghana by the third week of April.

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Abdullahi Dikko, DG, Nigerian Customs

Terrorist threats, rise in piracy and economic downturn in Europe have been described as the impediments that may rob the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) of achieving the N1.4 trillion 2013 revenue target handed over to it by the Federal Government.

The above development, economic experts say, has led to a sharp drop in cargo that comes into the country’s ports. A recent agency report said a spike in piracy off Nigeria’s oil-rich coast has shown gangs are willing to venture further afield and use more violent tactics, thus increasing the risk of doing business in Nigeria.

This has forced ships to arrive Nigerian ports in convoy, to further guarantee the security and safety of the vessel, occupants and the cargo on board. Customs Area Controller, PTML Command of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), Apapa, Lagos, Z. A. Jibrin, has also expressed fears that the command may not meet its projected N90 billion revenue target. “Cargo volume drop is affecting us in the command and our revenue. The problem was high in February.

I hope the drop will not persist and if it does, it will affect our revenue target. But we are hopeful that it will subside. If it does, we shall meet our revenue target and even surpass it,” he said. The Nigeria Customs Service failed to meet its self-imposed target of N1.2 trillion last year and fears are rife that the same scenario will repeat itself this year.

Recall that the Federal Government set a revenue target of N800 billion last year for the NCS, which the Service hiked by N400 billion in setting its self-imposed N1.2 trillion 2012 target. The Service, however, had been able to attain the Federal Government’s 2012 N800 billion target, exceeding it slightly. The premier command, Apapa Area 1, in the breakdown of revenue distributed to the various area commands has the highest target of N470 billion, going by its monthly target of N39 billion.

The Tin-Can Island Port Command is expected to generate a monthly target of N28 billion, adding up to N339 billion this year. Other commands such as Lagos Industrial and Lilypond commands are expected to generate a monthly target of N1billion, respectively, while Kirikiri Lighter Terminal Command has a target of N3 billion. PTML and Seme Border commands, respectively, have a monthly target of N10 billion and N1billion.

The Murtala Muhammed International Airport Command has a monthly target of N4 billion. All the revenue-generating commands had failed to meet the revenue target set for them last year by the Customs Headquarters.

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From Sunnewsonline
The Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) has raised the alarm over Nigeria’s continued escalating public debt profile estimated at N48.5 billion as at December last year. President of the chamber, Mr. Goodie Ibru, stated this in Lagos yesterday at the first quarterly media briefing on the economy.

According to him, the current debt profile is not sustainable, taking into account that current debt service is about 20 per cent of total revenue of government.

Ibru stated this at the first quarterly press conference held yesterday in Lagos. He noted that if Nigeria discounts the agriculture component of GDP in the ratio analysis, the ratio will be much higher than the set threshold.

He observed that only about N1.5 trillion is earmarked for capital project while N560 billion is earmarked for debt service in the 2013 budget thus raising issues of prioritization of resource allocation.

He stressed that the cost at which the government is borrowing is too high and creating distortions in the credit market, adding that private sector is being crowded out when investment in treasury bills and government bonds are more attractive than putting money in fixed deposits.

“There is an urgent need therefore to moderate the growth of domestic debts and free resources for investors in the economy. There should be full compliance with the provisions of the fiscal responsibility Act with regard to debt management,” he said.

He said that borrowing should be on concessional terms with low interest rate and with a reasonable long amortization period subject to the approval of the appropriate legislative body where necessary.

He said that government should ensure that the level of public debt as a proportion of national income is held at a sustainable level as prescribed by the National Assembly from time to time on the advice of the minister.

He said that government borrowing is also creating liquidity problems in the financial system and crowding out the private sector in the market.

Government is borrowing at a high cost of between 14-66 percent which is one of the highest globally.

Ibru regretted that the N48.5 billion debt, domestic debt accounts for N41.97 billion while external debt accounts for 6.53 billion, lamenting that domestic debt presents a much bigger challenge for the economy, thus raising sustainability concerns.

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CBN Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi

From Sunnewsonline.
Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) yesterday promised to inject lower denominations of the naira so as to resolve the shortage of the currency in the economy. This decision came against the backdrop of the problem the shortage is causing in the economy.

Speaking after the Bankers Committee meeting in Abuja, Director, Banking Supervision of the CBN, Mrs Tokunbo Martins disclosed that the apex bank was aware of the problems being encountered by the people on account of shortage of the lower naira denominations in the country. According to her, the scarcity of the currency was because of the truncation of the CBN’s currency restructuring exercise.

She, however, promised that plans are under way to print more lower naira denominations. Apart from flooding the economy with the currency, the director stated that the quality of the notes to be released would be higher than the existing ones. Also, the Bankers Committee expressed worry over the fragile security on bank premises nationwide saying that the banks would support the police to curb the insecurity in Nigeria.

The bankers committee at the meeting, which was attended by the Inspector General of Police discussed extensively on the poor state of security in the banks and resolved to improve the security situation in the country as it affects the banks by collaborating with the security agencies. Besides, the bank chiefs made up of Union Bank, Diamond Bank and Citi Bank, Messrs Emeka Emuwa, Dr Alex Oti and Omar Hafiz respectively, also said that the banks are planning interest rate reduction for small and medium scale enterprises.

The Chief Executive Officer of Diamond Bank, Dr Alex Oti said the committee also deliberated on structural reform in the country. Specifically, he said the committee was worried over the situation whereby the portfolio investment coming into the country was short term in nature. He noted that with massive investment in power, oil and gas, there would be long-term investment in the country with the attendant boost on the economy through employment and income generation.

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From Businessday
Google is in talks to acquire cross-platform messaging application WhatsApp, a new report claims.

Google and WhatsApp have been talking for "four or five weeks," according to Digital Trends, citing a person who claims to have knowledge of the negotiations.

So far, WhatsApp has been able to push the acquisition price to nearly $1 billion by "playing hardball," Digital Trends' source says.

WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging applications available to mobile users.

The app allows users on just about any mobile platform, including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, to instant-message with each other, as well as send images, audio, and video messages. The messaging app essentially allows for cross-platform texting without having to pay for SMS.

In January, WhatsApp announced that it had set a personal record on New Year's Eve, with 7 billion inbound messages sent that day. Another 11 billion outbound messages were sent. WhatsApp's previous one-day record stood at 10 billion total messages.

Whether WhatsApp is actually worth $1 billion, though, is up for debate.

That's the price that Facebook paid for Instagram last year, and some believed the deal didn't land in the social network's favor.

WhatsApp, while popular, doesn't have the kind of cache that Instagram did at the time of that acquisition, making such a valuation seem high.

And since the Digital Trends story comes from only one source, it's important to take it with a grain of salt at this time.

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“Our Continent, Our Future” – Photo & Essay Contest (02 April – 10 May 2013

Publication Information

Document Type: Other

Date ofThe New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Planning and Coordinating Agency (hereinafter referred to as the “NEPAD Agency”) and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP - EU (hereinafter referred to as “CTA”) have joined forces in celebrating 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).   It is within this context of Pan Africanism and African Renaissance, which is this year’s AU Summit theme that the NEPAD Agency and CTA are jointly organising a Photo and Essay Contest which will from April 2 to May 10, 2013.

The Contest will focus on Youth, Women and Rural Agricultural Development. Photo (hereinafter referred to the “Photo” or the “Photos”) entries will depict what NEPAD Agency and its partners are doing in empowering rural youth and women in agriculture.

The Photos and Essays can make reference to NEPAD Programmes and Projects where youth development is directly and indirectly involved such as Gender, Food and Nutrition Security, the School Feeding scheme CAADP and Climate Change.

Entry Categories

Amateur category (Photo): 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd place for best Photo depicting the theme and title of contest.

Essay category: 1^st, 2nd and 3^rd Prize for best written essay on NEPAD and rural empowerment through agriculture of youth and women.

Awards and Prizes

Amateur category (Photo):

1st place: R 20 000 and a Digital Camera

2nd place: R 1 000 and a Digital Camera

3rd place: R 5 000 and a Digital Camera

Essay category:

1st place: R 30 000

2nd place: R 20 000

3rd place: R10 000

It is expressly agreed that the winning Photos and the wining Essays shall be printed out and framed, captioned and exhibited at Africa Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa for one (1) month or more

The winning Photos and Essays might also be displayed at the special African Union’s 50th Anniversary Summit in Addis Ababa and during the Africa Week on NEPAD during the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013, in New York, when world leaders will meet to recommit and redouble their efforts in the fight extreme poverty, uses expressly acknowledged and agreed by each entrant/contestant.

The winning Photos will be printed into posters and branded with the NEPAD logo and tagline for used at NEPAD Agency all events and public engagements, whatever their nature and duration, whenever and wherever they shall take place in the world.

Period

02 April – 10 May 2013 (closes at 24:00 CAT)

Eligibility

• The Contest is open to all youth aged 13 to 35, who are citizens of African Union Member States, with no restrictions on gender. Minors are responsible for ensuring their submission is in compliance with the legal requirements of their country (hereinafter referred to as the “Contestant” or the “Contestants”).
• Photos must have been taken in the past six months, i.e., not before November 2012
• The Essay cannot be more than 1 page;
• Entry is free of charge.
• All entries not respecting the theme or the technical/authorship requirements set out below will be systematically ruled out.
• Staff members, including immediate family members, working for NEPAD Agency, the African Union, CTA including other partners and sponsors of this competition are not qualified to participate in the contest.

Submission Rules

• There will be two categories of contestants: a) amateur (photo) and b) essay.
• Contestants may enter either as amateurs (photo) or essay, but not both.
• The Photos should be a vertical shot for purposes of turning it into a poster.
• Only images not yet published may be submitted. Photographers can publish their photos after the contest results are announced in May, 2013
• Photos entered will not be returned to contestants and will be used in the NEPAD Agency publications and website.

Submission Guideline

All photo entries must provide images with the following specifications.

• Image data files created with digital still cameras (including medium and large-format cameras).
• File format: JPEG
• File size per JPEG: more than 1500 x 2100 pixels/more than 150dpi/up to a minimum 2MB
• Photo files can be submitted in the following formats: JPEG, PNG and GIF.
• No Photo should be digitally altered or enhanced except for basic cropping or colour correction. The content and context of the image should in no way be altered or enhanced.
• Each image that is sent should include the following information:
  Full name and contact details of Contestant; location of Photo; date Photo was taken; include a caption of the Photo(s), and the full name of the person/people with their image captured in the Photo(s).
• The information must be repeated on the entry form.

* Note: Winners may be requested to provide higher resolution images for publication or display purposes related to the Contest.

All Essay entries should include the following documents:

• The Essay in word format; a cover page will be included and on this page, the category for which the Essay is submitted must be clearly indicated;
• A short biographical note (to introduce the applicant/Contestant), including his/her full contact details (email address, telephone number(s), postal address, town, country, etc.)
• The Essay cannot be more than 500 words.

Indemnity

• NEPAD Agency is not responsible for any damage or loss that may occur during the sending of entries via the Internet.
• NEPAD Agency is not responsible for any problems or damages experienced by the Contestant due to forces beyond the control of the Agency, such as but not limited to troubles relating to computer networks, computer virus infections or unauthorized computer access.
• During the performance of the Photo shoots or the writing of the Essay, each Contestant shall have strictly complied with the laws and regulations in force in the country where the Photo(s) was/were taken or the Essay(s) was/were written; and more especially the laws and regulations in force related to the Intellectual Property Rights.
• Contestants must possess the exclusive intellectual property rights to each of its entered work (i.e. the Photo(s) and the Essay(s)) and are responsible for having obtained any necessary permissions relating to the subject/subject matter. NEPAD Agency will not be responsible for any claims or complaints against infringement of rights or damages from third parties relating to the subject/subject matter of entries, and the Contestant agrees to indemnify and hold NEPAD Agency harmless in such cases.
• A Photo which displays an identified or identifiable person(s) may infringe on such person’s right of privacy or may disclose such person’s personal information. Contestants shall have taken all the necessary actions to avoid any infringement of personal rights, including the rights to image from the person captured in the Photos. Thus all Contestants are deemed responsible  to have formally obtained from such person(s) all necessary permissions and assignments of all rights) to use their image(s) by the NEPAD Agency and CTA, for an unlimited duration, for the whole world, for all forms, supports and media limitless in terms of number

Copyright

• Photos submitted for the Contest shall include the names and contact information of all people shown therein. Minors – meaning children under the age of 18 years – shall have the signed approval of their parent(s) or guardian(s) before being photographed. Contestants must attach the signed release form from parent(s) or guardian(s) with their entries. This form will be provided on the website and other platforms when the Contest is advertised. The signed release shall. 
• Alternatively, Contestants should submit a declaration bearing responsibility for the subject and subject matter in the Photos as well as express warranties that all the third parties involved such as the persons with their image captured in the Photos have expressly authorized the use of their image and assigned in full, the intellectual rights attached to their image.
• The copyright of submitted and winning Photos will be owned by the participating Contestants. The winning Photos shall be exclusively owned by NEPAD Agency and partners (such as CTA) for non-commercial usages such as promotion, publicity, news, informational education or awareness usage relating to the NEPAD Agency and partners such as CTA. Therefore, all the winning Photos shall be graciously vested in NEPAD Agency and its partners (such as CTA) with full title. The rights thus assigned to NEPAD Agency and its partners (including CTA) shall cover the whole world, rights of use, rights of reproduction, of representation, of adaptation, such uses taking any form whatsoever including such forms as are not at present envisaged and shall be limitless in terms of both time and number. Therefore, the NEPAD Agency and its partners shall be fully entitled, but not limited, to use the Photos for all print media and off-media, publishing, edition, all public  editorial or press relations, for educational, journalistic, informative purposes, for all sponsoring, festival, cultural events, all expositions or exhibitions, during international or conferences events, In addition, the rights assigned includes the diffusion of the Photos in all public places and on all data processing networks (Internet world on-line and off-line, interactive terminals, e-cards, savers of screen, down loaded or not, CDROM, DVD).
•  Contestants will be able to use their Photos, which they retain the moral copyright to, in their print and online portfolios, exhibitions, books and other publications and to disseminate – including sell – their Photos to interested clients. They will be identified as the authors of the Photos.
• Contestants who are submitting Essay(s) shall assign NEPAD Agency and its partners with all the authorship rights attached to the Essay(s) which include but is not limited to the right to use, publish, circulate, reproduce, translate; represent and adapt the Essay(s) in any and all forms whatsoever and limitless in terms of both time and number. Such assignments shall cover the same scope of assignment of rights than the rights described hereinbefore for the Photos.

How to Enter

After carefully reading all the information on this page, download the entry form below, fill it in and send your image/essay along with the entry form to competition@nepad.org

Submissions must be made via laptop; desktop computer; tablet computer or smartphone.

Notification to Winners

The winners will be notified through email by end of May 2013.

Download entry form

Disclaimers

At the time of entry, entrants are deemed to have read, understood and be in agreement with all rules and conditions. The NEPAD Agency reserves the right to rule on any issue(s) not covered by these rules and disclaimers. In the event that an entrant should disagree with any decision made, that entrant will have the right to withdraw his or her entry. All related expenses incurred shall be borne solely by the entrant.

In the event that the efficiency, security, selection procedure, fairness of the contest or any related operations are deemed to have been compromised by forces beyond the control of NEPAD – such as but not limited to troubles relating to computer networks, computer virus infections or unauthorized computer access – then the receipt of some or all entries via the Internet may be postponed or discontinued.

Pillar

• NEPAD

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From Businessday
From the quantitative perspective, the pace at which infrastructures are being developed in Nigeria is breath-taking.  Providing dragnets for millions of rural dwellers who find little or no alternatives to the drudgery of farming, there is no state capital that is not bursting at the seams in terms of physical expansion.

Houses are springing up everywhere. With the implementation of the Land Use Act bastardised, land speculators are having a field day selling and reselling a piece of land to unsuspecting multiple land buyers.

Nigeria’s road network remains the envy of most African countries, with Julius Berger, hitherto an obscure construction company back home in Germany, emerging as a recurrent decimal in ambitious, sophisticated and stupendously expensive road contracts.

However, it is on the quality front that Nigerians are confronted with nightmarish realities. Unlike you will find in the forms of rest points on highways in more civilised countries, no provisions are made for conveniences for motorists on stretches of Nigeria’s expressways. People then resort to “doing it” in bushes, with all the attendant risks of being bitten by snakes and other hazards.

In Kenya, as you go from Nairobi to Lakes Nivaisha and Victoria, where present, there are viewpoints from which visitors take in scenic spectacles presented by combinations of fauna and flora. It shows the extent to which the sectors of road development and tourism are integrated.

While there seems to be a boom in the housing sector in Nigeria, this doesn’t go anywhere near alleviating a massive housing deficit. The popular belief is that the majority of houses in high-brow sections (GRAs) in Nigerian cities are either unoccupied or scantily populated. Thus, in places like Asokoro, Maitama and Wuse 2 in the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, for example, you have houses belonging to persons who are not domiciled in Abuja who only come occasionally to inhabit them. For much of a given year, it is the security personnel who inhabit the houses.

Of course, being the status symbol that they are, the houses come big, with as many as 10 rooms.

Despite the glitter that they exude, modern infrastructures in urban centres in Nigeria are a constant reminder of missed opportunities.

The other dimension of inadequacies in Nigeria’s housing is provided by gated estate development. The developers hardly provided for education and recreation, preferring, instead, to stuff the whole place with houses. The result is that children who should be receiving pre-primary, primary and secondary education in the large estates in which they reside – in which they are entitled to recreational outdoor facilities – are compelled to shuttle to other locations for education and recreation.

With every house providing its own water (boreholes) and alternative energy (electricity and liquefied cooking gas), the estates lack the sense of communalism that gated estates are supposed to provided. Every family is a form of government! What is often ignored is the danger posed by an influx of artisanal service providers that makes security management cumbersome.

Every household sinking its own borehole and using its own generator cannot be without environmental hazards. For this reason, why can’t water development authorities outlaw sinking of individual boreholes and compel estate developers to subscribe to centralised services? Why can’t the national electricity regulatory body outlaw individual generators and compel estate residents to subscribe to centralised stand-by generators as inevitable alternatives to the services of PHCN?

Who, indeed, are monitoring physical development in Nigeria to ensure that the environment is not impaired to the detriment of future generations?

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From the Sunnewsonline.com
Indications emerged last night that the Federal Government may have resolved to scrap some of its agencies in line with the recommendations of the Steve Oronsaye-led Presidential Committee on the Rationalization and Restructuring of Federal Government Parastatals, Commissions and Agencies following the completion of study of its White Paper Committee report. Among those scrapped are Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UMTE), National Examination Council (NECO), Public Complaints Commission, National Poverty Eradication Programme (NAPEP) and the Fiscal Mobilization and Allocation Commission among others.

The Oronsaye committee had recommended the abolition of 38 agencies, the merger of 52 and the reversion of 14 to departments in the ministries from which they were carved out, a move the committee argued would save the government more than N862 billion between 2012 and 2015 should its proposal be adopted. A reliable government source confirmed that President Goodluck Jonathan, Vice President Namadi Sambo and selected senior aides of the president met twice and eventually took decisions, which included the scrapping of some agencies and merging of others.

Another source revealed that the with the scrapping of the UTME, individual universities in the country would conduct their own admission examinations and admit students while the Joint Matriculation and Examination Board will set and ensure compliance to standards as it acts as the clearing house. The source said JAMB would be modeled along the line of Universities and Colleges Admission Service (UCAS), the central organization through which applications are processed for entry to higher education in the United Kingdom.

According to the source, “individual university will do their own examination and admission. If you want to apply to a university, you do so but in order not to have a situation where one person gets multiple admission, JAMB acts as a clearing house to free up spaces. All the universities are free now to admit students.” Even though details were still being worked out, it was learnt that government’s decision, was informed by the need to promote merit in admission into the nation’s universities because “the idea is to ensure that the best students go to the best universities.”

The source further disclosed that the president had also approved that the West African Examination Council (WAEC) is now expected to take over the functions and vast infrastructure of NECO, which now ceases to exist. The sources confirmed that WAEC would now conduct two external examinations in a year, January and November. The Public Complaints Commission is to be merged with the Human Rights Commission, just as NAPEP would also be scrapped and replaced National Agency for Job Creation and Empowerment.

The Oronsaye-led Presidential Committee on the Rationalisation made far-reaching recommendations, which, it explained, were aimed at helping the government to effect a drastic reduction in the size of its bloated bureaucracy, eliminating duplication of functions and bringing down the cost of governance. The committee submitted its report to the president in April last year.

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