Just a nice video of Nigeria's Minister of Communication and Digital Technology @DrIsaPantami having a friendly conversation with a nice chap you may have heard of.
Nice bloke called Mohammed Yusuf who founded Boko Haram.
In his prior iteration as a Salafist Islamic scholar, Mr Pantami was known for holding hardline Islamist positions that aligned very closely with those of Mr Yusuf and his Jamāʿat Ahl al-Sunnah li-l-Daʿawah wa al-Jihād, aka Boko Haram.
Watch from the 40 minute mark for a treat😬
*Digital Economy.
Hard to keep track of the cockamamie job titles these semi literates give themselves
By the way this video is already in the cloud. Even if you get that YouTube channel to take it down, it's too late.
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A short thread using the story of Yugoslavia to explain the suicide economics that is printing huge amounts of unbacked money to fund government budgets.
One group of people in (southern) Nigeria I will always feel sorry for are the folks with N250M houses and Range Rovers and N23M in the bank who think that these things make them part of Nigeria's establishment.
I'll always be thankful to my dad for disabusing me of such notions
It is possible to live in the same neighbourhoods, eat in the same restaurants, attend the same schools, fly to the same destinations and have the same social graces as the owners of Nigeria, without ever being close to being one of them.
So many of us do not understand this.
In my lifetime, I've seen so many of said southerners rise and fall, all the while desperately keeping up appearances while the ground under their feet gives way, all the while not understanding what was happening and why.
The establishment is small. It is ethnic. It is filial.
In all my years of yabbing Zenith Bank which I've used since 2007, I've never had a situation where I do an electronic N50,000 transfer and it tells me "Transaction Completed" only for the money to vanish into a black hole.
But once you call yourself "fintech" anything goes.
Zenith Bank has done a lot of things that pissed me off including playing fast and loose with a USD transfer to my NGN account. I dragged them here for it.
But I have never seen Zenith Bank literally lose N50k of my money. I don't get how this is acceptable fiduciary behaviour.
I'm happy that some of you are so unthinkably wealthy that you can watch N50,000 ($100) of your hard earned money disappear into a completely unexplained black hole and be happy to let it happen.
Me I'm not o. The last time I was rich was in 2015. These days I work for a living.
I remember in 2016 when I traveled to Ekwulobia via Asaba airport for a Nigerian Breweries activation and I passed through Onitsha.
There were snipers with flak helmets stationed above the Niger Bridge and military roadblocks with sandbags on the main road through Onitsha.
There were assault rifles peeking out above the sandbags and sniper rifles on tripods pointing at ordinary passenger vehicles going past.
You would have thought these guys were scanning for IEDs in a hot zone in fucking Fullujah, not cosplaying GI Joe near Onitsha Main Market.
You could hear comments from people in the vehicle and their tone, and you could feel a very deep sense of resentment at being treated like they were subjects under martial law in a territory under hostile occupation.
A bank C-Suite guy makes something like N2m/month. A teller at a branch of that bank makes something like 75k/month.
The C-suite isn't paid that much because they necessarily produce 27x the value of a teller, but because their potential risk to the bank is 27x that of a teller.
If the teller goes rogue and somehow beats the control systems in place, the most they can cost the bank is a few million naira. If the Head of Network Security goes rogue, he/she can bring the entire bank down.
That's what justifies that pay. And that is my point.
No one is suggesting that Nigerian police officers should be paid significantly more because they are great people or they necessarily deserve it, but because the COST of unmotivated police obsessed with petty bribery is many times the cost of paying them well.
I always find it fascinating how conversations like the one under this tweet focus exclusively on the moral failings of the public officials living above their incomes, and completely sidestep the fact that public sector wages in Nigeria are stupidly, ridiculously low.