Loomnie

Apparently, nobody knows.

Check this out:

The Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI) has described the records of the country’s crude production and export as unclear, saying that after 58 years of oil production, the country does not know exactly the quantity it produces.

Speaking at the presentation of a research report on the Nigeria Extractive Industry in Abuja weekend, Chairman of the Board of NEITI, Prof. Asisi Asobie, said despite all the inroads made by the country to expand operations in the oil industry, it had not been able to get operators to tell the truth about the actual oil volumes produced.

“After 58 years of producing oil, Nigeria does not know how much was being produced. It is regrettable that we have not been able to get oil companies to tell Nigerians exactly what they produce. The sector is shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Read the full piece here.

1. Ignoring Africa’s present or the West’s past? – Wronging Rights

2. London faces battle to stop trading shift to eurozone – Financial Times

3. Europe agrees on Greek safety net with IMF role – Reuters

4. Scouring blogs for useful information – The Economist

5. Winner of the world’s oddest book title award – Guardian

6. What is the world’s most bizarre terror threat? – FP Passport

About politicians and courage:

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

On Europe and the EU:

… Europe is a cultural space, which does not necessarily overlap with the EU as a physical space; otherwise there would be endless Israeli-style debates about where the frontiers should be. The EU is different, as it started its life as the European Economic Community with the idea that it was an open entity. Anyone could join if they conformed to the rules, the norms and the regulations. This was very easy to say in 1958 because most of Europe was in prison. You didn’t have to worry about whether you would have to take in Slovakia, because there was no risk, no prospect of that, thanks to the Russians. All you had to worry about were the wealthy countries of the West: either small, wealthy countries like Austria or big ones like Italy or Spain. After 1989 all this fell apart. The EU became legally, culturally and institutionally committed to expanding and accepting anyone who wanted to join from a space that could be recognised as Europe. Since no one defined that space, there was no limit. Turkey at the time was not a problem: first because in those years it was mostly a military dictatorship; and second, because it was on the other side of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and those two were not about to come into the EU.

Today we live in a very different situation. Europe is defined by the rules of the EU and its willingness to take in new countries. But already in the mid-1990s it was clear that no matter what anyone said in public, in private Brussels wanted to slow this process down, and if possible bring it to a stop. The reasons were very good, because the EU succeeded on the basis of genuine interstate co-operation, in which wealthy states or regions helped poor ones, and small new members could be forced to behave well. This was fine as long as the overwhelming majority of members were big and wealthy and the only likely new members were small, and either wealthy, or if poor, very small. When this changed in the 1990s, you started to hear people saying: ‘Wait a minute, Europe must be defined culturally, it must consider heritage: spiritual, architectural and linguistic heritage.’ This was simply a way of saying: ‘We can’t take in Muslims.’ Now, I did hear the Catholics say that Orthodox Christians can’t be accepted either. People would say this in Poland, in Croatia, to some extent in Hungary, but what they were really talking about were the Russians, the Serbs and the Romanians, not the Orthodox Christians in general. However, this could not be said openly, so once again the language was misused.

The concluding paragraph:

I think what we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics. We should be more concerned than we are about inequalities of opportunity, whether between young and old or between those with different skills or from different regions of a country. It is another way of talking about injustice. We need to rediscover a language of dissent. It can’t be an economic language since part of the problem is that we have for too long spoken about politics in an economic language where everything has been about growth, efficiency, productivity and wealth, and not enough has been about collective ideals around which we can gather, around which we can get angry together, around which we can be motivated collectively, whether on the issue of justice, inequality, cruelty or unethical behaviour. We have thrown away the language with which to do that. And until we rediscover that language how could we possibly bind ourselves together? We can’t come together on the basis of 19th or 20th-century ideas of inevitable progress or the natural historical progression from capitalism to socialism or whatever. We can’t believe in that anymore. And anyway, it can’t do the work for us. We need to rediscover our own language of politics.

The full article, in the London Review of Books, is here.

Reuters: Nigeria’s Senate approved a 4.608 trillion naira budget proposal for 2010 on Thursday, up from an initial 4.079 trillion naira spending plan proposed by the presidency.

The budget assumes an average oil price of $67 per barrel and oil production of 2.35 million barrels per day. It also pegs the exchange rate at 150 naira to a dollar and economic growth of 5.47 percent.

“The 2010 budget is based on government’s determination to stimulate the economy out of the recent global economic crisis through targeted fiscal interventions,” the bill said. (continue reading…)

The concluding paragraph of Peter Akinlabi’s Beyond Gadaffi: Nigeria, Federalism and Other Quicksands:

We can intellectualize these things all we want, but there are no more startling discoveries to be made as far as the causes of violence in northern Nigeria are concerned. Olakunle Abimbola’s getting a lot of verbal bashing (sentimental fool, people like you will rot in hell, among other verbal stabbing), because he dared to damn political correctness and nail the issue home to its proven veracity. If the self-indulgent Katsina legislator that was throwing empty verbal darts at Gadaffi on TV the other day had expressed such outrage at the Jos carnage similarly on air, may be we would have been on the way to true consideration of a federalist identity. Struggles for economic and political empowerment might still be less unwieldy within the federation of this crazy quilt if we de-emphasise the factor of religion as basis for ethnic and territorial identity and for violent mobilization in the northern Nigeria.

The whole article is worth reading.

My friend and sociology lecturer at the University of Ibadan, Oka Obono:

Nigeria was furious. It recalled its ambassador, told Libya off, and escalated what could have passed for hot air into substance for a diplomatic war. It forgot that its own security forces had failed to maintain peace in the affected area; that they were so busy passing blame among themselves for past failures that they did not detect nomadic herdsmen slipping past their dragnet to kill more Christians – and their babies.

Nigeria’s response amounts, therefore, to pretentious posturing. The focus should be inward, especially as some celebrated southern religious leaders agree with Gaddafi in principle that Nigeria should be divided. They differ only with regard to the number of countries that should be carved out of it. Gaddafi sought two. They seek six.

The dissolution of Nigeria at this point sounds like a game of Ludo between players who punctuate the clatter of dice on glass with “seeki-one… seeki-two…seeki-three…” The process of disintegration should be more complex than that. As the saying goes, the job of carving up an elephant for the entire community should never be left to apprentice butchers.

Seeki-six. Southern religious leaders agree with Gaddafi. Shall we recall all their pastors for “urgent consultations”? Only last week on the BBC, a certain Nobel laureate described Nigeria as a “failed state”, noting that the country was on the verge of breaking up. Shall we recall his Nobel Prize?

What then was the ruckus about? Nigeria’s ethno-religious diversity cannot be denied by any right-thinking observer. De facto divisions explain the adoption by national political parties of zoning formulae that guide the distribution of those to be elected, selected, appointed, or anointed into sundry offices. They explain the creation of bodies like the Federal Character Commission, Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board and National Youth Service Corps; adoption of quota principles in university admission; exclusion of information on religion and ethnicity from the 2006 Nigerian Population and Housing Census as a means of avoiding controversy; and, above all, the morbid Monopoly that some faceless handlers are playing with Yar’Adua’s body.

These are the hallmarks of a divided polity. To overcome them, governance should focus on the rights of citizens, not aggregate ethnicities. If democracy advances security, health, wellbeing and the pursuit of happiness at individual levels, the lines of sectional divisions would disappear.

I agree.

This is from Tatalo Alamo, writing for the Nation:

Taking inspiration from the conflict tree paradigm, we can say that while the immediate cause and outward foliage of the Jos crisis is economic, ie a conflict arising from allocation of scarce resources and the distribution of political patronage, the root causes are cultural and historical. While the current conflict is framed in terms of religious differences, Christian indigenes versus Muslim settlers, the bitterness is rooted in ancestral memory and the resentment arising from hegemonic quests.

But while ethnic resentment and bitter ancestral memory always exist in a state of dormancy in heterogeneous societies, they always require an active politicisation to become active, ie to achieve a collective and communal momentum. While members of different ethnic groups may disdain and hold each other in contempt, it always takes a degree of political mobilisation to tip over into active hatred and murderous rage.

The paradox of genocide is that although it usually involves ordinary people targeting other ordinary people, it is always an elite-fuelled phenomenon. As we have seen in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Turkey, Hitler’s Germany and now Jos Plateau, ordinary people do not simply wake up and start killing each other. It usually requires a considerable degree of elite propaganda and religion-induced dementia.

Despite bitter ancestral memory about thwarted conquests, repulsed invasions and attempted cultural domination, there have been long periods of history when the so called indigenes and settlers of Jos lived side by side with each other in peace and harmony. Despite cultural and historical differences, children of both communities often found common political cause even as they joined the army in droves. Some of the notable leaders of the revenge coup of 1966 are from this region. Many of them fought valiantly to keep Nigeria one.

The so called Langtang mafia that wielded disproportionate influence in the post-Shagari military dispensation are from the region. Governor Jonah Jang himself was an outstanding product of this cultural mishmash until he began to sing about being unfairly cashiered from the Air Force. Surely, his ethnic identity did not prevent him from being enlisted into the armed forces in the first instance. And it did not prevent him from receiving the gubernatorial nomination of the ruling party, the PDP.

We have heard tales of how some of the most physically ineligible cadet candidates from the region were summarily enlisted on the orders of the late Sardauna. Except in hushed tones of ancestral recriminations, nobody, particularly from outside the region, could tell who was what among the political elite. Population-wise, no ethnic group loomed disproportionately over others. There are some Berom who are Muslims just as there are Hausa/Fulani supporters of Jonah Jang. The late Joseph Garba told a riveting tale of how his father, a native chief, finally succumbed to Sardauna’s proselytisation.

The most telling irony of the Jos tragedy is that post-military politics seems to have opened the Pandora box of ethnic bitterness and religious hatred on the plateau. This is precisely what has also happened in the Kaduna metropolis which has led to a virtual partitioning of that beautiful city. The liberating tonic of politics has turned out to be an ugly poison. It is a steep descent down a dark and dangerous precipice. In political dispensations, unlike military dictatorships, there are usually more elite mouths to feed and the feeding frenzy is usually driven by the politics of exclusion and the politicisation of ethnic and sub-ethnic identity.

Unfortunately in Jos, the army, the ultimate national institution, has been fingered as being part of the problem. There are dangerous insinuations out there that the Nigerian Army is partisanly embroiled in the Jos conflict. For weeks, serious allegations have been flying around about the culpability of the entire military command in the Jos tragedy. These allegations are a veritable threat to national security and are simply unprintable. God forbids the army of an ethnically combustible and religiously fractious nation being led by mullahs and religious fanatics. But when a normally sedate and even-tempered four-star General like Domkat Bali dismisses the military commander in Jos as an idiot, we have reached a most dangerous flash point.

Fortunately for conflict resolution, there are intriguing plays of signifiers across the rigid binary division in Jos. The Christian Berom indigenes are predominantly in the ruling party, the PDP, while the Muslim Fulani settlers appear to have pitched for the opposition ANPP. The hegemonic group is not in the hegemonic party. The imperialising culture is not part of the imperialist faction. It is a profound local difficulty. So, when the PDP rigs in Plateau State, it is rigging against the national consensus of its own party and its hegemonic thrust.

The open partisanship displayed by Umaru Yar’Adua did not allow him to take advantage of this sly adumbration of the forces in contention. Hence an embarrassingly ineffectual policy which could only have encouraged impunity on the part of a principal faction. General Obasanjo did not fare any better. His military frame of mind led him to slam an unwarranted and unjustified state of emergency on the fractious state. As a military tactician, it was the thing to do. But as a political strategist, it simply means that the poor general could not see beyond his nose. The result is that the ruling party is at the end of its tether and there is open genocide on the Jos Plateau.

Goodluck Jonathan can fare much better than his two predecessors. The first thing to do is to order an immediate and swift redeployment of General Saleh Maina from the theatre of genocide to a posting where his offensive skills would be better appreciated. Second, he should, as a matter of urgent national priority, inaugurate a National Restitution Commission which will look at the Jos catastrophe in a holistic manner and come up with acceptable solutions. This is not the usual job for the boys. Jonathan must source for tested patriots and experts of conflict resolution.

Jos has put Nigeria on the international spot. It is a purulent boil on the body politic and the earlier we lance it the better for our collective health. It is not enough to condemn Muammar Ghaddafi as a madman. We must first convince the global community of our own sanity.

Reuters: The bank expects economic expansion of 4.6 percent in 2011 and estimates the region grew by between 1.0 and 1.1 percent in 2009, said Andrew Burns, the bank’s manager of global macro economic trends.

Split Nigeria in two.