• Cynicism and the Nigerian state – NigeriansTalk
• The Un-Shock Doctrine: A defense of communism - Slavoj Žižek
• The Political Relevance of the Internet in Developing Countries – The Monkey Cage
• Time to avoid the dictatorship v democracy debate in Africa – David Booth
• Eurozone and the Greek debt – “Overindebted countries with their own currencies inflate. But countries that borrow in foreign currencies default. By joining the eurozone, members have moved from the former state to the latter.” - Martin Wolf

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

I just read from the Financial Times, through the PSD blog, that the Nigerian government is considering giving part of the proceeds of oil exploration to indigenes of the Niger Delta region. The amount is about $20 a year.

According to its architects, the Nigerian scheme could make about $555m annually available – about $20 a year for every man, woman and child of the delta’s 28m people, a significant amount in a region where 70 per cent live on less than $1.50 a day.

They are not going to get the money in cash but as some kind of share in community trust funds. Each person in each community will have a share in the trust fund of their community. This is to sort of bypass the Niger Delta state and local government authorities. (Well, we all know how corrupt those have been.)

The FT report also notes a potential source of tension:

A heated debate one recent morning in the royal hut of the Edagberi clan suggests the tensions that could emerge. “Some communities, they only have a pipeline or access road,” says Anigbo Williams, 52, chief of one of the clan’s six communities. “If you give him with his one well [a payment] and come and give me with 44 wells the same, you have a problem: we will feel we have been cheated.”

I can also see problems of how to decide who an indigene is. Those who still live there, those who were born there or those who can prove that they are from there?

What do readers think of the scheme? Do we treat it with characteristic Nigerian scepticism or perhaps even dismissiveness? Could it work?

Financial Times:

Africa governance prize finds no winners: Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese telecoms magnate, will not award his $5m African leadership prize this year, a decision seen as a rebuke to the former presidents of Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana, among others.

The prize, now in its third year, is given to heads of state who rule wisely and hand over power to elected successors.

Mr Ibrahim launched the award, along with a related index on African governance, after concluding that poor governance was the biggest impediment to Africa’s development, and deciding to devote the fortune he made selling Celtel, his telecoms company, to the promotion of leadership.

He intended the prize, which he has no say over, would stir debate on governance. This year it has, on cue. Continue reading.

reports the BBC: Nigerian officials are reportedly planning to give 10% of the country’s oil revenues to people in the Niger Delta, an area plagued by insurgencies.

Presidential adviser Emmanuel Egbogah told the UK’s Financial Times that the money would go directly to communities, bypassing powerful state governors.

Analysts say the government fears local officials would embezzle the money.

The plan is part of the government’s effort to stop militants from attacking oil installations in the delta.

Such attacks have been going on for years, but the government recently held an amnesty and claims to have persuaded a number of leading militants to hand in their arms.

The rebels say they are fighting for a fairer share of oil wealth for delta residents, but frequently resort to killing and kidnapping, and fund their activities by stealing oil.

Mr Egbogah told the FT the idea was for the benefits to “flow directly” to the delta people.

“Every community, whether blind or deaf or dumb, every citizen will say: ‘I own a part of this business.’”

The FT reports that the plans could see more than 50bn naira ($338m; £207m) diverted to the communities in its first year.

But the BBC’s Ahmed Idris in Abuja says the government’s proposals have a long way to go before they see the light of day.

He says it is likely to face stiff opposition from the regions outside the delta, because it would mean less revenue for them.

The allocation of Nigeria’s oil money is strictly governed by the constitution.

Financial Times’ Gillian Tett reviews Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street:

Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street
By Karen Ho
Duke Press £16.99, 392 pages

When I first started covering finance for the FT, I used to get embarrassed when asked about my academic past. Before I became a journalist, I did a PhD in social anthropology, a branch of social science that endeavours to understand the cultural dynamics of societies based on grass-roots analysis.

Back in the pre-credit crisis days, bankers tended to consider degrees in anthropology to be rather “hippy”. As one banker told me; the only qualifications that really commanded status were those linked to economics, maths, physics and other “hard” sciences – or, at a pinch, an MBA.

Not anymore. As the financial disasters of the past two years have unfolded, it has become painfully clear that bankers placed far too much faith on their quasi-scientific models. It has also been evident that a grasp of cultural dynamics is critical in understanding how modern finance works – or doesn’t. Consequently, the idea of using the social sciences to understand money is becoming fashionable in some quarters.

Given all that, Karen Ho has picked an excellent time to publish her fascinating new study – or “ethnography” – of Wall Street banks. Ho is currently a professor of social anthropology at the University of Minnesota. A decade ago, however, she was an employee of Bankers Trust, formerly a powerful Wall Street banking giant, and carried out research among a number of banks.

As field-sites go, Wall Street is not classic anthropological territory: ethnographers typically work in remote, third-world societies. Ho admits that studying banking tribes was hard: “The very notion of pitching a tent at the Rockefellers’ yard, in the lobby of JP Morgan or on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange is not only implausible but also might be limiting and ill-suited to a study of the ‘power elite’,” she writes. Continue reading…

At the blog of the Association of Social Anthropologists. The full announcement:

The ASA blog’s attempt to discuss the financial crisis currently occurring around us seeks to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, who work on the cultural political economy, anthropology of money, class, labour, industry, economic anthropology, informal economy, wall street as an ethnographic site, micro finance, the nature of capitalism and the modern state so as to comment and examine the current situation. Seemingly an ‘unanthropological’ topic this blog (from mid September 09 to mid December 09) is not about personal opinions of the bloggers only. This discussion would also highlight how ethnographic techniques can be applied to explore such dynamic issues in the modern world. Gillian Tett, an anthropologist who is the Assistant Editor of Financial Times predicted the credit crisis two years ago when she was largely ignored by the banking world. She felt how her training in social anthropology alerted her to the danger and the need to listen to ’social noise’ as well as ’social sciences’. To quote Tett (Barton 31st October 2008, The Guardian):

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.

“But the other thing is, if you come from an anthropology background, you also try and put finance in a cultural context. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it’s basically a given and they think it’s completely apersonal. And it’s not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.”

These and other related issues will be discussed by the following group of bloggers from mid September 09 till mid December 2009:

Mid September – end September: Dr. Alexander F. Robertson, Anthropology, Edinburgh University
Early October – Mid October: Dr. Gillian Tett, Anthropologist and Assistant Editor, Financial Times
Mid October – End October: Prof. Stephen Gudeman, Anthropology, University of Minnesota & Dr. Massimiliano Mollona, Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London University
End October – Mid November: Prof Karen Z. Ho, Anthropology, University of Minnesota
Mid November – End November: Prof. Keith Hart, Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, London University
Early – mid December: Prof. Bob Jessop, Sociology, Lancaster University

Please visit the blog, participate, comment and take part in the discussions.

Governor Lamido Sanusi

Mr. Lamido Sanusi, Nigeria’s not-so-long-ago-appointed Central Bank Governor, a risk-management person, is at it. From Financial Times:

“A few Nigerian banks, mainly due to huge concentrations in their exposure to certain sectors … but [also] due to a general weakness in risk management and corporate governance, have continued to display signs of failure,” Mr Sanusi said.

The banks are:

1. Afribank Plc
2. Intercontinental Bank Plc
3. Union Bank of Nigeria Plc
4. Oceanic International Bank Plc
5. FinBank Plc

The Central Bank sacked the MDs/CEOs of the banks and appointed new ones. They are also going to get some more loan from the government. From NEXT:

Backed by the confirmation of CBN governor, Sanusi Lamido, that N400 billion [$2.6bn, €1.8bn, £1.6bn] is to be injected into the five banks whose chief executives and management were sacked this morning to “enable them continue normal business”, industry insiders have asked shareholders to stop listening to and spreading rumours.

I followed the news as it unfolded on NEXT newssite. See this, this and this. Don’t forget to read the comments too.

From BBC:

Mr Sanusi said the five banks had accounted for almost 90% of exposure to the central bank’s so-called discount window, which allows banks to borrow in the short-term from the central bank to meet their needs.

“The excessively high level of non-performing loans in the five banks … was attributable to poor corporate governance practices, lax credit administration processes and the absence or non-adherence to credit risk management practices,” he said.

Addendum
It is really nice to have a news website that is nimble on its feet. Nigerian newspapers are going to have to learn from NEXT. I think NEXT too has to find a way of dealing with a lot of traffic to their website. It must have been hit by so much request yesterday that at some point it was almost impossible to get it to load.

Time Magazine reports that  South Korea’s Daewoo Logistics leased 3.2 million acres of farmland from the Madagascar government. The land would be used as a farmland, and the South Korean company hopes this would help secure food supply for their country. The lease is for 99 years.

A Daewoo manager, Hong Jong-wan, told the Financial Times that the crops would “ensure our food security,” and would use “totally undeveloped land which had been left untouched.” Land is scarce and expensive in South Korea, which makes it the world’s third-largest importer of corn. Daewoo says the Madagascar land will be leased for a price of around $12 an acre, which is a fraction of the price for farmland in the corporation’s home country.

The full story is here.

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