His Highness Khalifa Muhammad Sanusi II has got to be one of my top truth-tellers.
First, the good news: the war in Ukraine has negatively impacted many nations/regions, but Sub-Saharan Africa is actually doing BETTER than predicted so far this year.
Then, the bad news: if our woes in Nigeria can’t be linked to the war in Ukraine, that means our woes in Nigeria are linked to…. Nigeria. The dollar is gaining strength and we continue to be an oil economy with no oil revenue.
Yikes - presentation interrupted by the entrance of BAT.
Back on track now.
The gap between projected and actual oil revenues continues to widen. So… over the past several years, the Nigerian federal government turned to the central Bank for general ways and means.
The CBN has lent FGN 100x what the limit is. #KADInvest7
“If you put 2 trillion naira into your economy and your dollar reserves do not increase, what happens? Your currency devalues.
There has been a fundamental lack of understanding of how economies work.”
The result of this has been devaluation of the naira and massive inflation. An 18% rate of inflation means on average, the price of everything will double in 4 years.
“When I say that our problems are of our own making… there’s no way you can buy dollars at below market rate & not introduce arbitrage, rent seeking, & corruption. If you can access $1 million dollars at the official rate, you can make a profit of 300 million naira”
“According to official stats of motor gasoline consumption, we should be seeing 4,000 tankers on the roads every day - 2,000 full going out to sell and 2,000 empty going back to refill.
“Look at this chart and draw your own conclusions. We are told that we are importing and consuming three times as much fuel per capita as Pakistan, a country with comparable GDP per capita and comparable roads.”
“We have no plan. We see the problem, but we’re going to continue. I feel sorry for whoever will step into the office of the president next June and remove the fuel subsidy.”
I’ve had a lot of strange experiences living in Nigeria for the past 12 years, but this is a new one! Currently flying from Lagos to Kaduna with a plane full of soldiers… 😳
Never seen anything like it! We are all mixed together, civilians and men/women in uniform. I tried to ask one of them about why they are flying commercial but he stonewalled me. I was like… “don’t you usually fly in military planes?” And he said “not today.”
I told the soldier “I’ve never had this experience before in my life” and he said “well, now you have.” 😂😂😂
Scientists love to argue about nature versus nurture. The “nature” argument makes the case that everything we are today and everything we will become tomorrow is all a result of our genetic background – it’s almost an argument about destiny.
If you’ve seen the movie GATTACA, you will understand this argument perfectly.
The “nurture” argument, on the other hand, makes the case that our environment and the way we were raised– everything from the cultural context, to our nutritional intake, to the habits that our parents help us form– plays a far larger role in determining the course of our lives.
I’m not sure how to organize my thoughts... I have friends & loved ones who served, & I don’t want to believe it was such a colossal waste. Some parts of this article are reminiscent of Vietnam, others reflexively make me think of Nigeria...
I’ve pasted some key parts of the article that stood out to me below.
1. Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.
"Supported by decades of research, the Lack of Fit model demonstrates that women face discrimination when there is a mismatch or “lack of fit” between the attributes perceived necessary for success in a male-typed domain and those that women are stereotypically believed to have."
"As a consequence, women are expected to be less capable than their male colleagues in male-dominated work contexts unless objective evidence of actual task performance proves otherwise." advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/48/e…
"Venture funding allocations are particularly vulnerable to the gender bias that underlies the lack of fit phenomenon..."
The long and short of things is that when you’re farming as a lifestyle, you are farming for what you can eat. By contrast, when you’re farming as a business, you are trying to get MORE out of the ground than what you put in (ie you are trying to turn a profit).
Wait a sec, you ask - don’t lifestyle farmers want to make money too? Well, no, not really. They just want their cost of production to be lower than the cost of purchasing the same thing in the open market.
When people ask me if they can invest in farmers through TJ, I try to explain that it's not easy to deliver returns like this. We're only now getting to the point where we can make farmers productive enough to walk away with a 20% profit after paying back their loans.
We effectively charge about 5% interest over the course of the season, and we're lending to the farmers against our own balance sheet. So, the overall profit of the farm is 25%. The farmer gets 20% and we get 5%.
If we took 3rd party money... the farmers profit would go down. 2/
Given how hard farming is, I don't think it's fair to cut a farmer's profits in half from 20% to 10%, especially if right now we still have a big enough balance sheet to do the lending ourselves.
Eventually, we might have to take on external funding to be able to make loans. 3/