Fast forward to 2013 and the NFF predictably cannot sustain such bonuses. A regular company would just fire workers and consolidate but that option isn’t really open to the NFF. You can’t show up for a match with only 10 players. Hence the cut in bonuses. Cutting bonuses hardly ever goes down smoothly as they have discovered.

Its always interesting to see a classic economics idea actually happen so clearly. Hopefully they think hard about the long term consequences before hiking bonuses or doubling wages three months to elections.

http://www.kickoff.com/news/35016/nigerias-fifa-confederations-cup-bonus-dispute-has-happened-before-in-nigerian-football-

President Jonathan

In addition to her intellect, Oby Ezekwesili, former vice president of the World Bank and minister of education is known to speak her mind – regardless of who may be at the receiving end – and backing her position with facts and figures.

Understandably, when she stated publicly in February this year that the federal government had squandered about $67 billion from our foreign reserves and the excess crude account with little to show for it, the reaction of government was to try to trivialize the matter by saying she was the minister of education when the sector received N458.1billion between 2006 and 2007 – also with nothing to show for it.

Instead of responding to her statement with facts and figures, an army of government comics tried to create the impression that she simply walked home with the entire amount because they could find nothing to pin to her. When Ezekwesili challenged government to a public debate, Labaran Maku, Rueben Abati, Doyin Okupe Ahmed Gulak and other defenders-in-chief of government promptly melted into thin air to look for smaller battles.

Anyway, Ezekwesili has again made another equally important contribution to public policy and governance in Nigeria by advising President Goodluck Jonathan to stop presiding over meetings that involved award of contracts. She also urged members of the National Assembly to kick against the proposed amendment to the Public Procurement Act (2007) to make the President chairman of the National Council on Procurement, NCP.

According to Ezekwesili, it is against global best practices in procurement because the world over, presidents and ministers had no business awarding contracts to citizens. In her words, “I learnt that there is a move for an amendment of the legislation, Public Procurement Act, in order to give the chairmanship of the council to the president. Why would anybody do that?”

She explained, “The man who is carrying the elephant cannot be using his feet to look for a cricket. To make the president chairman of the National Council on Procurement is not the most effective and most efficient thing to do in the arena of public policy”. She argued that President Obama does not call cabinet meetings to discuss contracts. ”What business does a president or minister has sitting with a contractor in a meeting? “The leaders of other nations spend their times thinking about vision, strategy and policy, the others spend their time haggling over contracts. It is time for FEC to let go of spending its time on mundane things.”

Ezekwesili’s observation and call could not have come at a better time. Granted, President Jonathan did not begin the practice of gathering members of the highest executive body in the country to merely share contracts to persons and companies that in typical Nigerian practice, might have been pre-determined. Granted also, part of the functions of government include the allocation of resources for public good, but considering the immense existential, security, political and economic challenges confronting Nigeria, surely, the job of awarding contracts can be handled at lower levels?

Unfortunately, that is not the case. As a newspaper put it recently, “from local government chairmen, state governors and presidency, the story is the same: elected executives sit atop the allocation of contracts to themselves and their party faithful. This has helped to promote the culture of galloping and water-tight corruption in the country as contracts awarded by politicians to politicians are never conscientiously executed even as those contracts keep reappearing in budgets every year”.

The duty of the executive arm of government is not the award of contracts but the formulation and implementation of credible policies and programmes that would uplift the well-being of citizens. If any issue relating to award of contract is to be debated at the presidential level, one might expect the president to ask his ministers how many jobs the various contracts awarded by their ministries have created and what the multiplier effects are on the economy. They should discuss and strategize on how to implement policies to improve security, reduce poverty and strengthen democracy and the rule of law.

It is not an accident that as a matter of policy, every agency of government has supply departments and procurement officers, leading up to the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) which has the technical skills to evaluate bids and make appropriate recommendations. Why must the FEC meetings be reduced to awarding what we all know to be grossly inflated contracts to friends and cronies? Perhaps the irony is lost on the president, but the BPP recently announced that it had saved over N420 billion for the government from contracts awarded by federal agencies within the last 15 months by applying prudence in public expenditure.

Unless one is mistaken, or there is a role reversal somewhere, is that to say that a relatively lowly bureau now vets contracts that the president and the Federal Executive Council has approved? Nigeria has more pressing challenges than to have its president poring over who supplies table water to the villa.

Ifeanyi Uddin

On Friday, June 7, the interbank foreign exchange market closed with 159 naira exchanging for 1 US dollar. Close watchers of the market gawked. By close of trading, Thursday, already slackened jaws dropped several ticks. The naira had slipped several ticks more! Despite the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) daily interventions in the interbank market over this 7-day period, the interbank foreign exchange rate closed at US$/NGN161.20. What roiled the market?

For a while now, all the talk around the economy have focused on the near-term outlook for the exchange rate. More than any other domestic index, consensus is that the exchange rate had (and still has) the largest potential for upsetting the economic apple cart. Thus, monetary policy has been deployed to its sustenance over the last 24 months. Dodgy, inflation numbers may be, but the Central Bank is persuaded that keeping the naira within the defined exchange corridor is the country’s best bet.

Are these bets still on? Everything will depend on how the economy’s “exposures” and “vulnerabilities” play out. Once the apex bank agreed to keep rates high in support of its exchange rate band, it was inevitable that we would attract capital flows in search of higher yields. Not just was exchange rate steady, official inflation numbers were trending down, oil prices were high (and expected to remain so), and developed markets were spotty. Add to this, the admission of Nigerian bonds into a couple of global indexes — giving fund managers extra incentive to graft a Nigerian component on to their portfolios.

The funds duly came. There is still much debate over the size of the economy’s exposure to foreign portfolio inflows (we have heard anything from US$10bn to US$12bn mentioned), but several “facts” are beyond dispute. A sizeable portion of these funds has driven the improved performance of equities in the last 18 months. Money market instruments have also gained much over the same period. And even the buildup in our external reserves may be due largely to these portfolio inflows.

Expectedly, as this exposure grew, concern began to emerge over the vulnerability of the economy to a stop and/or sudden reversal in the flows. On the upside, the markets remain convinced that supported by strong external reserves, we can afford to spend upwards of US$12bn defending the naira’s exchange rate over any three month spell and still have an honest balance in the reserves. Of course, there were worries over the monetary authority’s market nous. Beyond the vast arsenal with which it could take on the markets, issues around the CBN’s strategy have been aired. Still, the stalling of the domestic reform effort over the past four years further exacerbated these weaknesses. The fiscal buffers that we have bruited abroad in this period in evidence of the local economy’s continued resilience have happened in spite of our best efforts.

Finally, we all looked to domestic shocks to trigger these vulnerabilities, including from fiscal loosening as the incumbent administration begins to spend its way back to office; a potentially disorderly succession at the CBN, etc.

None of this has happened. Rather, according to a bank treasurer friend of mine, the significant volatility, which the markets witnessed over the last few days, has been the result of “expectation of the end of quantitative easing (QE) in the US”. According to him, as developed markets recover, and yields there improve, “‘real money funds’ (pension funds and insurance) will trim investments in fixed income and switch back into developed market equities. The net impact of this is that there has been a global withdrawal of funds from emerging market fixed income — Nigeria inclusive”.

Apparently, Nigeria recently witnessed a sell-off in the bond and treasury bill markets. After the release Thursday of the result of the Debt Management Office’s (DMO) bond auction, Wednesday, bond yields rallied to a 13.5% close from Wednesday’s 14.5%. According to the same well-heeled insider, “The DMO cut off the auction between 12.5 – 13.5%, selling only NGN20bn of the NGN85bn on offer to send a signal that they aim to try to curtail the increase in yields (bids were as high as 18%, whilst market was at 14.5%). T-bills are currently trading in tandem at 12.75%, gaining from Wednesday’s 13.25%. This is unsustainable as the secondary market will trade away from them especially if the FPIs continue to sell”.

How deep are we in this new bog? A lot is riding on how the CBN addresses itself to the problem. My contact believes, however, that “the CBN has effectively failed to hold their defined line at the first time of asking. This is important as we may see a clear break much higher, if they do not act decisively, which they appear unable to do. There is significant demand out there and people are willing to buy at these levels”.

In short, a number of feral birds might be on their way back to roost.

He was born and raised in Benin Republic. He lived briefly in France with his parents as a child, and he currently lives in the United States.

He will be contributing opinions on music, music videos, and musical trends around the continent and the world. According to him, “the column will start off mostly with discussions about music and music videos and down the line films, documentaries or whatever visual art strikes my fancy.”

Mafoya speaks French, Fon, and English languages, and can be found on twitter as @mafoya.

President Goodluck Jonathan

In just nine days, the self-styled Africa’s largest political association, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) suspended two of its governors, with reports that more may also be suspended. Given the role of Nigeria’s all too-powerful governors in hijacking the instruments of state to deliver electoral results that are as improbable as they are criminal, that it is destroying its own nest is indicative of fundamental upheavals within the PDP.

Most hapless Nigerian voters may not be aware of it yet, but our politicians may demand that we go and vote again next year – not in 2015 as widely believed. This may explain why, halfway into President Goodluck Jonathan’s less then lackluster two years in office, the politicking to ensure his reelection for another four years has already started. Clearly, the mandate is to deliver victory at all costs. And clearly too, the garrison commanders have been ordered to take no prisoners.

A frightening face of PDP’s strategy has been exposed by its refusal to accept the election of Governor Rotimi Amaechi as chair of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) because the party establishment preferred the Jonathan-backed Jonah Jang. Where the ‘Locomotive Governor’, who has been unable to maintain peace in his state, plans to get the energy to manage 35 other state governors is another matter.

Another aspect is the reported N10 billion released by government to facilitate the victory of Jang. There is no governor in Nigeria that will spend less than N100 billion this year from their state coffers. About five states are already approaching the half a trillion naira mark in annual spending. And because most governors hardly bother to draw lines between personal and state funds, they have near total control of these sums. Yet, this fact did not deter the presidency from bribing, or at least, attempting releasing money to influence them.

If any doubts remain that the N2.6 trillion that vanished in the name of fuel subsidy was used for politics, then the N10 billion reportedly released for something as routine as the choice of governor to lead the NGF is proof. It also explains why all the forward and backward motions by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on the matter remain just that – motion without movement.

The posers are: how much will the government of Jonathan spend to secure another four years in office? Is any price too steep to pay for the PDP? Is the American Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) possible scenario of a break up of Nigeria in 2015 inching towards reality? Will Jonathan and the PDP accept the results of any elections they didn’t win, even if the definition of winning means out-spending and out-rigging the opposition? The warning lights are on, and the sirens blaring.

Meanwhile, a comical sideshow to the NGF saga is the fragmentation of the smaller Northern Governors Forum, especially the reaction of Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi state, who claimed that Jang was the candidate of the North. Which North, the North of 10 million almajirai or the north of abject destitution?

If their collective performance is anything to go by, this crop of northern governors is the worst ever, in terms of security and economic development. It is easier to believe that there is no governance in the North, and much easier to believe that Yuguda is only salivating at the prospects of becoming Central Bank of Nigeria governor under a Jonathan second-term administration.

Maybe the joke was lost on Yuguda when he said he would boycott meetings of the Northern Governors Forum because he felt betrayed that members did not keep their promise to vote for a northern candidate in Jang. For a man whose political life and career are epitomes of betrayal to now complain of betrayal would be funny, had it not been tragic. So it is painful to be betrayed? Welcome to the club: That is what most Nigerians feel when politicians come with all kinds of promises only to betray them once they are in office.

To return to the discourse: If the reaction of the PDP (read, Jonathan) to the defeat of its candidate for the chair of the NGF is anything to go by, what would happen if Jonathan loses the presidential election next year? Actually, nothing.

The level of awareness and political sophistication of Nigerians is changing. The dynamics at state levels have also shifted significantly because fewer governors are up for reelection and do not have the motivation to rig elections as crudely as they did in 2011, assuming that the emerging opposition under the All Progressives Congress (APC) would allow them. But more importantly, most Nigerians that fell for the fresh air and transformation gimmick are still wondering how they managed to fall for such shallow promises.

And in the end though, Nigerians know that no politician or party is bigger than the country. Which is why nothing will happen if Jonathan loses the presidential elections next year.

Photo credit: backpacking.tv.it

A much anticipated report encompassing the new development agenda set to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) when they expire in 2015 was recently published. This report is the outcome of an interactive process and importantly touches on topical issues. Yet questions arise over how different this development agenda is from the MDGs and whether the targets are relevant within the context of a structural shift in the global economy characterised by a “crisis”-ridden West, an “emerging” East and notably, an Africa “rising”.

The new development agenda unveiled by the High Level Panel (HLP) on post-2015 (PDF) set up by the UN Secretary-General, proposes a more expansive 12 goals with 54 targets compared to the MDGs’ eight goals and 21 indicators. If the HLP report were to be assessed solely on its coherence, then it would score the highest points for the clarity of its overarching agenda devoid of technical jargon.

Crucially, the report outlines five “transformative shifts” which underline the proposed goals, such as economic transformation and inclusive growth, and building peace and effective institutions. These shifts encapsulate issues that have dominated policy makers’, civil societies’ researchers’ and conferences’ agenda recently, from Lagos to London and from Brussels to Brasilia.

As a self-styled “universal agenda” applying to both the industrialised and developing countries, the proposed development agenda has the ambitious aim of “ending poverty by 2030”. Targets on jobs creation and equitable growth, natural resources management, transparency of financial transactions and good governance and effective institutions are relevant not only to the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa – the only region that will not meet the MDG Goal 1 of halving poverty by 2015 – but also and perhaps for the first time, austerity-hit parts of the industrialised European Union (EU)!

The most obvious strength of the post-2015 report lies in its ambition as well as the very process that birthed it. From the onset, a consultative approach was undertaken by the HLP involving UN Member states, over 5000 civil society organisations, business enterprises and ordinary citizens around the world. No doubt, this engaging process is greatly facilitated by new media and Web 2.0 tools. For instance, I found out about the My World Survey – which aggregated the priorities of ordinary people for a better world – on Facebook and after I had completed it, I shared it on Twitter. To further buttress how bottom-up this process was, India and Nigeria are the two countries out of 194, with the most respondents to the online survey.

A glaring “deficit” of the report however, is the absence of an explicit goal to address inequality in the proposed development agenda, given how pivotal a factor inequality is to eradicating poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa where the centre of gravity of global poverty has shifted to since 2000, half of the population lives below the $1.25 poverty benchmark yet the sub-continent has 6 of the 10 fastest growing countries in the world. Billionaires like Aliko Dangote, Isabel Dos Santos and Patrick Motsepe, who top the list of the richest black people in the world, come from some of the richest and most unequal countries in Africa such as Nigeria, Angola and South Africa more than half their populations live under the poverty line.

Though the HLP report emphasises on the need for “national policy in each country, not global setting” as best suited for tackling rising inequality, goal explicitly targeting inequality would however be more appropriate because, as the old management maxim states, you cannot manage what you don’t measure. Thus if an explicit goal is not defined and targets are not set on addressing inequality, what incentives do national governments then, have to make the necessary changes in their development plans required to tackle inequality? In Nigeria for instance where rapid economic growth averaging 7.4% in the last decade has been paralleled by sharp regional inequalities between a booming south and a declining north, if a goal on directing policy towards addressing inequality is not included, then how will it the benefits of economic growth be spread more equitably?

Curiously, the post-2015 report glosses over the much-needed reforms of global governance institutions that is, multilateral financial institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and even the UN system itself. These global institutions’ structure, staffing and philosophy skewed in favour of developed countries undermine the bargaining power of developing countries, especially Sub-Saharan Africa.

This asymmetry is especially glaring in global trade, where heavy agriculture subsidies by the US and the EU governments make African agricultural produce uncompetitive in the global market; in the leadership of the World Bank and IMF restricted to the USA and the EU respectively; and in the composition of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council which doesn’t include any African or South American country. A long-held disenchantment with this unbalanced system is driving the growing momentum by emerging powers to lay the ground work for an alternative development bank, the BRICS development Bank, to rival the World Bank and the IMF, for instance.

Certainly, the failure to acknowledge the imperative of addressing such an asymmetric system, at least as one target in the proposed Goal 12 of Creating a Global Enabling Environment, is a potentially missed opportunity by the HLP given the breadth of consultations held, to shore up greater legitimacy and confidence in the UN in the developing world, to show its commitment to a more democratic global governance system.

Despite these shortcomings, the HLP post-2015 report given its depth, scope and focus on global issues of relevance is robust. That it glosses over some key issues like global governance reform, or doesn’t explicitly articulate others like inequality doesn’t detract from the consultative process that led to the outcome which is at least, one significant step towards a universal development agenda.

The latter’s position, arguably deploying much larger values for the country’s gross external debt than the minister has so kindly obliged, has been essentially that we are headed into a “debt peonage” every inch as familiar and harmful as that which we allowed to build up in the 1970s and 1980s. The minister demurs. Not just is the final tally of our external debt (to date) much smaller than the doomsayers have indicated. Relative to our domestic output, it is piffling.

Indeed, the cost alone of servicing our previous debt burden, before we so graciously exited the trap, was in multiples of the current total external debt count — US$8 billion in 2006 and US$10.1 billion in 2005. And we owe this new debt, contracted on concessional terms, “to foreign creditors such as multilateral agencies [like the Africa Development Bank, World Bank, the Islamic Development Bank], as well as other bilateral sources [including the China Exim Bank, the French Development Bank or the Japanese Aid Agency], or to private creditors such as investors in our Eurobonds”.

So, may we ask, “What has changed?” The French critic, journalist, and novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr writing in 1849 (admittedly about matters quite different) put the problem we confront on our external debt pithily: “the more things change, the more they stay the same”! Those who worry about our “rising debt profile” appear to have forgotten the least and learnt the most. When in October 2005, the Paris Club of Creditor countries announced that it had reached agreement on a comprehensive treatment of Nigeria’s debt the following members of the Paris Club participated: representatives of the governments of Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
In addition, representatives of the governments of Australia, Canada and Norway as well as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Commission, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Secretariat of the U.N.C.T.A.D. were observers to the negotiations.

Technically, therefore, in terms of the character of our creditors, not much has changed since 1970. Nor has much changed in terms of the conditions of the credit. We have nearly always borrowed from bilateral and multi-lateral sources on concessional terms. In those days too, creditors included gallingly seductive moratoria on initial service and repayment (often as long as 10 years) to sweeten the loan deals. And anyone who remembers the atmosphere in the 1970s, when higher oil prices meant a higher revenue take at the federal level will recall that most foreign “experts’ on our economy then did argue that we were under-borrowed. As indeed, the Honourable Minister of Finance may be suggesting in our new circumstance.

Experience does, however, teach that in Nigeria, the road from “under-borrowed and well able to meet debt service obligations” to “a debt trap and the regular capitalisation of due payments” takes a fork in the road where oil prices reach much lower than our domestic planners expected. There is strong reason to believe that we are nearing this junction. Therefore, despite the finance minister’s panglossian take on the subject, we do well to be very concerned.

Part of our problem is that we have failed to take advantage of relatively strong oil prices since 2004 to address structural imbalances in the economy, including our continued dependence on oil revenues for most of our spending, a huge and growing domestic debt burden, decrepit physical and social infrastructure, the dead hand of the public sector on the economy, etc. Essentially then, the economy is not much changed from 2004, just before the epic debt write-off.

I have heard arguments to the effect that similar to 2004 though it may be, the economy is different from what it was in the 1970s and 1980s. There have been changes, true, but, largely all at the margins. All of which (at present) is reversible, at any point, going forward. Thus, if we must borrow, it should be to change the structure of the economy in a way that supports its resilience and long-term growth prospects.

This week, I discuss my thoughts on Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s Whispering Trees, the fourth story on the shortlist of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing. Many other bloggers are participating in what Aaron Bady spearheaded as a “Blog Carnival”: thoughts and opinions on each of the shortlisted stories. Find the rest of the reviews on twitter via the hashtag #CainePrize.

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Of all the stories I have read since this Caine Prize carnival began, Whispering Trees is one I have read twice fully, from beginning to end. It is a story about Salim, a young man who became disabled, and lost his eyesight, in a car accident and along with it his dignity and prospects, and who eventually finds a different kind of vision staring at “souls” of people, and seeing visions.

I read the story twice not because I particularly enjoyed and understood it all the first time, but because I didn’t fully grasp it and wanted to be sure about the intentions of the author and the character. Many of my thoughts from the first reading were confirmed by a second reading: it is a story about coping with disability, but a little also about faith, and psychic and supernatural outer body experiences, and love. The author doesn’t succeed in developing each of these areas, but we see that it was his intention that we see them. Away from the second reading, I realized that there were no hidden meanings other than the fact of the hero’s disabilities and eventual psychic evolution. It tried very hard to be didactic, but failed at that too. The last line, italicized for effect, read “I realize that happiness lies, not in getting what you want, but in wanting what you have.” I certainly had not come to that conclusion merely by reading the story, and including it as the last line did not drive it in either.

I could be uncharitable and say that Whispering Trees could have borrowed a leaf from the handling of the crises of faith and disability from reading Tope Folarin’s Miracle, or that it could have portrayed the homeliness of young hapless men under a tree deliberately named by reading Elnathan John’s Bayan Layi. Heck, it could have done better with romance under pressure by reading Pede Hollist’s Foreign Aid, but that would be assuming that the author wrote the story with the Caine Prize in mind, only after reading these other stories. It is most certainly not the case, so I will only say that whatever moved the author to write this story could most certainly have been better served by a shorter and smarter handling of the plot. There are many issues that can be raised from this story about of the helplessness of disabled people in Nigeria, particularly those wounded as a result of man-made disasters like car accidents. There are also angles of societal neglect and the non-existence of public facilities to make the life of disabled folks much easier. These however are from my own mining of the story’s schizzy fields. The author doesn’t consciously lead me to them.

The part of the story detailing the problems of disability were affecting, but seemed artificial and forced, helped by the tortured use of some figures of speech. The most uncharitable word for these instances of use is “amateurish”, providing a major obstacle to enjoying the story. Here are a few:

Personifications:

Sometimes it worked beautifully: “I remained there until my anger forced tears out of my damaged eyes”, but most times it didn’t: “Silence answered me.”, “Insomnia would claim me every night”, “My mind climbed up to the gates of heaven once more, seeking admittance”, “She would talk and weep until blessed sleep stole her away”, “I heard the trees screaming in agony as they were cut down”, and “But my mind was not very happy about this.” Nobody should ever write like that.

Similes:

There were some passable lines: “Her tears, like rain, fell on the wild fire of anger raging in my heart and extinguished it.” Others were not: “I discovered a whole new world of numbers and was as excited as Columbus must have been when he stumbled upon America” and “She pranced in front of the house calling for Saratu just like Achilles before the walls of Troy.”

Hyperbole:

In describing a rash and angry response of an otherwise reasonable citizen, the following was written: “Faulata fetched some petrol and poured it on the house. She was about to set it ablaze when they seized her. She struggled fiercely and wept because they would not let her burn down the house. Later, Saratu’s parents came to apologise. Neither Faulata nor I said a word to them. Then the elders came and delivered a long, boring lecture about forgiveness and reconciliation and, to get rid of them, I said it was over. So Saratu kept her distance.” The attempted arson described here could as well be the most hurried description I’ve ever read. I am trying to see how Faulata could have poured petrol on the house. The event to which Faulata was responding by trying to set a house ablaze didn’t also seem to warrant this kind of response either, so I chalked it down as a failed hyperbole regarding plot.

In another part of the story, a character makes an attempt at quoting Oscar Wilde. The original poem, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, reads:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

In Ibrahim’s story, there was the following:

Hamza and I talked some more until he rose and said, “I must leave now. Now that you are here, I can leave. But see how beautiful this place is, see how pure and full of life it is. Yet, someday, the living will come and destroy everything.” He started off, “Man destroys that which he claims to love.”

In another instance, the author tries to write in Nigerian Pidgin English, yet gave us the following:

The oga’s voice was raucous. “How much you find for ’im body?”

The first man said, “Four thousand naira, sir.”

The oga grumbled, “These ones se’f, them no carry plenty money. Oya, put ‘im body with the others but hide the money before people come.”

Yes, that was ‘im body, se’f, and other unconvincing attempts at Nigerian Pidgin. In pidgin, there would be no apostrophe in any of those words, and “body” would surely have been written as bodi.

I realize then why I found the story hard to enjoy as fiction, or anything other than the writer’s attempt to be profound and didactic with magical realism: it tried too hard, with little skill, and failed (at least as a worthy representative of this year’s shortlist of the best of African fiction. As some have wondered aloud: “thank goodness we won’t have to read the other ninety non-shortlisted pieces!”).

Now, so that this does not end up as a completely disappointed rant against something that Mr. Ibrahim surely put a lot of effort into writing, let me admit that I found the first sentence quite charming and inviting: “It’s strange how things are on the other side of death.” Had the promise of that initial sentence been followed by equally strong and well sustained passages, and had the story been a lot shorter, or at least the characters better developed, we might have had a different offering.

The other paragraph that I found absolutely delightful is as follows:

“The rains came and went. The grasses grew lush green and faded into a pale, hungry brown. I could hear the dry, cold harmattan winds blowing through the starved savannah; I could feel it on my desiccated skin. The weather grew unpleasantly chilly. Everything was cold, including my heart. Faulata was gone”

Unfortunately, gems like this were far in-between, and did not tie the story together as a tale of resurrection, redemption, and a soulful realization of an inner strength and power as the author clearly intended the story to be.

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Kola Tubosun is the editor of the NT LitMag, found on twitter as @baroka

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Photo credits: The BBC

Victor spoke with LitMag editor Kola Tubosun

When did you start making the work in that exhibition? Which one of them is the oldest?

What is next?

Maybe a book – but I have very little control over where the muse drags me sha.

On the average, how long did it take you to complete each of those paintings?

I measure time in hours, because I can be in the studio for 13 hours at a stretch or more. For proper understanding, some works take five minutes, others 5 days and some large ones 5 weeks. There are works that span months and continents in execution. It really depends on the work.

Concerning sales, how do you assess the attitude of the Nigerian art consumer. What is your experience so far?

Very encouraging. People are beginning to see the benefit of collecting art, especially now that the secondary market is in the upswing. This is the time to jump in because the world is now paying attention to Nigerian art in serious economic terms.

Thank you for your time.

I’m honoured.

I recently completed my dissertation and thought to share the highlights of it. If anyone is interested in reading the full dissertation please send me an email at nobikil1 [at] Binghamton.edu. A very brief summary is posted below.

In economic development, Africa has lagged behind the rest of the world for many decades, certainly since the early 1960s, when most of today’s African states became independent of European colonial powers. Recent research suggests one reason for Africa’s slow development is its unique experience of the intercontinental slave trade from the fifteenth century through the 1800s, prior to the era of European colonization.

Nunn (2008) examines the relation between GDP per capita of modern African states and the slave trade experience of the ethnic groups now living in the state. He finds that an African country has lower GDP per capita today if the ethnic groups within the country suffered higher slave export intensity – that is, number of slaves exported relative to population – in the precolonial era. He speculates that this is because the production of slaves, which occurred through domestic warfare, raiding and kidnapping, impeded the formation of broader ethnic groups. This may have led to ethnic fractionalization and the weakening and underdevelopment of political structures which hindered the development of postcolonial states. Whatley and Gillezeau (2011) show that, within Africa, areas where demand for slaves was highest are indeed characterized by higher ethnic fractionalization today. Easterly and Levine (1997) show that across countries outside as well as inside Africa, higher ethnic fractionalization is associated with “low schooling, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, and insufficient infrastructure,”(1997, p. 1241) which are in turn associated with low output per worker, at the national level. Easterly and Levine argue this supports “theories that interest group polarization leads to rent-seeking behavior and reduces the consensus for public goods, creating long-run growth tragedies”(1997, p. 1241), and can account for much of Africa’s uniquely poor development. Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) show that Africans belonging to ethnic groups that suffered higher slave export intensity express less trust in relatives, neighbors and local governments today, and suggest this mistrust has damaged modern Africa’s political institutions. All of these studies rely on data from the current era of independent African states. All appear to suggest a channel from pre-colonial slave export intensity to modern-day poverty running mainly through the effect of inter-ethnic group conflict on the quality of post-independence states.

In this dissertation I explore the possibility that the historical experience of the slave trade has reduced per capita GDP in Africa today by retarding the development of human capital through education, specifically the development of literacy. Many studies show that, within Africa and outside Africa, literacy is positively associated with real GDP and other indicators of economic development. Economic theory as well as empirical evidence suggest the relation is at least partly causal, as literacy is an element of human capital. Across countries, differences in average levels of education account for a substantial portion of variations in GDP per worker (Lucas, 1988; Mankiw, Romer and Weil, 1992; Hall and Jones, 1999). Across African countries today, literacy rates are negatively correlated with exposure to the slave trade. Indeed including literacy rates as an explanatory variable in Nunn’s baseline regressions reduces the magnitude and significance of the effect of the slave trade.

Of course, the correlations in the cross country data do not show the direction of causality. If the slave trade damaged Africa’s economic development through any channel, one would expect to see the negative correlation; poor countries cannot provide good schooling. Even if the relationship is causal, it would not be surprising given the common argument that the slave trade damaged African development through the quality of post-independent states. Dysfunctional states also cannot provide good schooling.

My evidence, however, is from the era of European colonization of Africa, after the end of the slave trades but prior to the independence of modern African states. I rely on data from censuses carried out by the British government from the 1920s through the 1950s in the colonies that have become the modern states of Nigeria and Ghana. These colonies contained many different ethnic groups, which had widely differing degrees of exposure to the pre-colonial slave trade. I find that ethnic groups with higher slave trade intensity had lower literacy rates during the colonial era. Using data from recent years, I find that the relation between slave trade intensity and ethnic groups’ literacy persists in contemporary Nigeria. The relationship holds controlling for many confounding factors such as the presence of missionaries, religion, disease environment, the nature of the ethnic groups’ socio political institutions in the precolonial era, and indicators of groups’ economic development in the colonial era. The relation is not related to inter-group conflict in any obvious way, as it holds across small geographic areas that were each dominated by a single ethnic group.

My evidence suggests that the relation between slave-trade history and literacy in Africa today is indeed at least partly causal. Perhaps more importantly, it shows that the slave trades affected current economic development through channels distinct from inter-ethnic group conflict or the quality of formal state institutions. Within British colonial Nigeria and Ghana, the quality of formal state-level institutions was the same for all ethnic groups. The relation between precolonial slave intensity and colonial literacy must reflect something more basic, operating at the level of families or the informal institutions of villages and towns.

I speculate that the relation can be explained by a hypothesis that experience of the slave trade undermined the development of social capital within ethnic groups. Social capital is defined by Putman (1993, pg. 167) as “the features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks, that can improve the efficiency of society.” Coleman (1988), Knack and Keefer (1997), and Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) show that higher levels of social capital are associated with higher levels of human capital. I examine this hypothesis in chapter 2. Using data on expenditure of cocoa farmers in Western Nigeria from 1952, I show that farmers in townships with higher social spending individually spend more on education. The relationship holds after controlling for various characteristics of the farmers and the townships. This suggests that it is possible that the slave trade affects human capital through its destructive effect on social capital.

Finally I examine the effect of the slave trade on political fragmentation within ethnic groups. Using descriptions of local politics of ethnic groups from Murdock’s 1959 ethnographic atlas, I find that ethnic groups with a higher slave export intensity are more politically fragmented.