Look at it this way, #BokoHaram started at about the time the Niger Delta militancy were getting their amnesty.
A decade after, we are still paying amnesty to creek boys, and #Nigeria’s numerous internal security crises have intensified.
In pretty much all geopolitical zones of the country we are seeing rising violence, often challenging the Nigerian state for territorial control.
Kidnap for ransom is now a full business venture aided by lots of ungoverned spaces. bit.ly/3i9MqH0
Sambisa Forest is a good example of how this violence affects the economy...
Now used as one of #BokoHaram’s key staging areas, the British colonial administration had gazetted Sambisa as a reserve in 1958, making it one of the conservation legacies bequeathed to the Nigerian state by the colonial government.
In 1977, Sambisa was re-gazetted as a National Game Reserve for the preservation of rare animals and also as a way of generating funds from tourism.
The forest is/was home to a variety of wild animals and 62 different species of birds.
@Allianz recently showed that 45% of global piracy in Q1 2020 occurred in the Gulf of Guinea with 47 incidents, up from 38 in 2019. bit.ly/33CGqCD
These figures are a totally different discussion about the impact of violence in oil-producing areas that somehow affect oil production, leading #Nigeria to lose about 400k barrels of oil to crude oil theft.
In 2019, the country lost about ₦1 trillion to oil theft.
In a country squeezed for revenue thus leading to questionable policies such as stamp duty on rent or an anti-business policy to make @NipostNgn a competitor to, as well as a regulator in logistics, we haven't taken into account how rising levels of violence affects our image.
What affects our image, in turn, affects the economy.
@StateDept’s travel advisory for 2019 totally advises its citizens against travelling to at least 24 out of 36 states in Nigeria. bit.ly/3k8eFaF
When @USinNigeria announced the suspension of interview waivers for visa renewals for applicants in #Nigeria, it was not just because Nigerians overstay their visa.
It was also that non-Nigerians were using Nigerian passports to apply for US visas, a security threat to the US.
There are a lot of things #Nigeria needs to fix, but if it would seek to command respect globally, it must fix its internal security apparatus.
Still on the issue of insecurity, y'all should read @MacHarryCI tell the story of how a complete breakdown in the riverine areas of Delta shows how severely under-policed we are...
There has been a lot of recrimination due to the musician, Brymo's misguided tweets. I won't join issues with him except to mention that as a Tinubu supporter, he is simply doing what I have said, so many times, would be done by Tinubu supporters, ethnicise the elections.
What I want to talk about, very briefly, before returning to @EdPaiceARI's excellent book is the tendency for Nigerians, in general, to keep behaving like our country's civil war did not end 52 years ago.
Igbo people in #Nigeria are generally treated like we are all fifth columnists who secretly support Biafra.
This ahistorical view completely ignores that even during the war, there were Igbo people, Ukpabi Asika and Ike Nwachukwu as examples, that fought for Nigeria.
I had a discussion with someone yesterday that brings to my mind the nature, to some extent, of the damage that the current Japa wave is doing. This time, not to the body-corporate #Nigeria
The #LekkiMassacre of two years ago merely accelerated what was already a trend.
But not much is being said about the effect of this trend on the lower classes, the people who used to be house helps, nannies, stewards, drivers, cooks and maiguards.
Bear in mind, this was written before #America's mid-terms...
Faced with the implications of his words during his presidential campaign, the Biden administration rediscovered the concept of realpolitik and tried to make good with the Saudis by visiting #SaudiArabia in July and ending up with that infamous fist bump.
In November 2019, Joe Biden fingered MBS in the killing of @washingtonpost contributor Jamal Khashoggi and committed to making the Saudis pay.
He followed up upon assuming office by rejecting contact with MBS and stopping US assistance to Saudi efforts in its war in #Yemen.
On #FreshlyPressed981 with @SopeMartins and @monsieurceee this morning, we'll be asking how the NNPC came to the conclusion that petrol will sell for ₦462/litre without the subsidy.
The NNPC is just involved in unnecessary fear-mongering.
Our neighbours, who are poorer, pay a lot more than we do for petrol. What I see in all this is people committed to maintaining their cushy subsidy scam going on.
Consider the attached chart, published in February.
As of February, based on the exchange rate, we were paying 40 cents per litre of petrol. In #Benin it was 95 cents, in #Niger it was 97 cents, in #Chad it was 89 cents, and in #Cameroun, it was $1.09.
For all the flak that the Nigerian media gets, people tend to forget one crucial fact: they are products of their environment, working within that same environment.
Only a very few people in this life have the fortitude of Job.
The overwhelming majority of humanity, including me these days, would make the required compromise to just keep things moving.
One problem we have in #Nigeria is that we never interrogate these things. We must ask, "why"?
In the 1963 movie, Cleopatra, there was an interesting dialogue between Mark Anthony and Octavian, the man who would later become Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome about the birth of Julius Caesar's son, Caesarion:
Mark Antony: "You were so shut at the mouth just now one would think your words were are precious to you as your gold."
Octavian: "Like my gold, I use them where they are worth most."
This is instructive...
Also instructive is that during his 19 years as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan did not give any interviews. Having taken over from the inflation-busting Paul Volcker, Greenspan knew that words from his position carried weight and so had to be used sparingly.