There are more fun ways to spend one’s afternoon than in the company of four egg-heads, eachwith very strong views on the direction in which the Nigerian economy ought to be headed. Thursday last week was one such day – it was not so much that the respective directions favoured by each of my interlocutors were mutually exclusive, it was [...]

“Organized crime threatens peace and human security, violates human rights and undermines economic, social, cultural, political and civil development of societies around the world.” ~ UNODC In the last century, organised crime has drawn a lot of attention globally, with its transnational dimension as the main focus. According to Howard Abadinsky, an American professor of criminal justice and legal studies, [...]

I am in no doubt that general conditions in the country today are worse than they were several years ago. It is not just that governments across the three tiers are more louche. Even though this in itself is simply unacceptable. It is just as much a matter of roads going so bad that travelling on them becomes an act [...]

My initial response to news reports that the National Assembly was looking to rein in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), through an amendment to its enabling statute, was to wonder whether we are not about to throw the bath water away because a stroppy moppet would not take its bath. From the day he took office, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi [...]

Issues is a new NT series in which academics and policy experts write on their areas of expertise. If you would like to contribute to the series send an email to Olumide (his email address is on the page under the link).  The columnist this week is public policy analyst Abimbola Agboluaje. I was delighted when I discovered that President Goodluck [...]

A couple of weeks back, seated across the table from some bank treasurer friends of mine, the conversation invariably drifted away from how much of a commentary on the banking industry’s health the banks’ recently released year-end results represented. June was a month that that would not stay down. Like an uninvited guest, it would not depart the august gathering, [...]

There is clear mismanagement, fraud and abuse of due process in the way Nigeria’s aviation agency is run The Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria has been a drain on the nation’s economy as millions of naira is lost to phony deals and contracts executed by the agency’s management, an investigation by this newspaper has shown. According to documents available to [...]

On Friday, 13th April 2012, the Nigerian mainstream and new media were awash with reports of Nigeria’s dwindling savings. In particular, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala raised alarm over the depletion of the Excess Crude Account (ECA) from $20 billion in 2006 to current levels of $3.6 billion. Ngozi thus confirmed what many analysts [...]

In the on-going debate on the need to restructure Nigeria economically and politically, the two terms of resource control and fiscal federalism have featured prominently as solutions. I think it is important to give a brief explanation of the two policy proposals: Resource control takes its roots in the oil-producing Niger Delta, where they have been advocating that the entire [...]

Ever since the details of the 2012 budget were released, Nigerians have been treated to a lot of comedy and melodrama regarding the budget items. Besides the perennial lop-sidedness of our budgets with regard to the capital expenditure being less than the recurrent expenditure, a closer look has revealed that even some of the capital expenditure items are either bogus [...]