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Understanding Nigeria: You have two cows

By Tolu Ogunlesi. More here.

LAGOS

You have two cows. Both have appeared on the BBC so often they are now celebrities, and no longer need to produce milk. As a reward for learning how to chant “A-cow o ni baje!” you offer them employment in LASTMA and give them plots of swamp in Lekki Phase 4.

ABIA

You have two cows. No, you had two cows – until both were kidnapped. The kidnappers demand a ransom of five billion naira. You wait patiently for the kidnappers to come down to N5,000. Two weeks later they do. You blame the police for not protecting your cows.

ANAMBRA

You have two cows. Both are wanted by NAFDAC for producing fake and adulterated milk.

BAUCHI

You have two cows. Both of them belong to a religious sect and have an aversion for western-style milking, so you are forced to milk them by hand. When you sell their milk to non-members of their sect they start a riot.

EDO

You have two cows, but they live in Italy, from where they faithfully send a portion of their milk home.

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The best of commencement speeches

In what is consistently my favorite article of the year, the Times excerpts from the best commencement speeches. Here are my two favorites.

Cory A. Booker
MAYOR OF NEWARK
Yale University

“There was a group of kids that used to hang in the lobby of my building. … One in particular, he reminded me of my dad. He had that quick wit, that great swagger. …

One month into my time as mayor, I got another call for a shooting. It was on Court Street in our city, and I go down there and I do the same thing. I’m going to people, telling them about our plans, telling them that we had to pull together, that we were going to fight through this crime, that we were going to drive down the violence. I barely paid attention to the dead body on the sidewalk and another one being rolled into an ambulance.

After that night of being important, of being mayor of New Jersey’s biggest city, I went back to my home in the high-rises of Brick Towers. I sat there with my BlackBerry reviewing the incident reports of the day, and then it came to that shooting on Court Street. And I looked at that BlackBerry, and I saw the name of the murder victim. It was the kid from my lobby. It was the young man who was my father. It was this smart and charismatic young man who God had put in front of me every single day.

I looked at my BlackBerry praying that the name would somehow change, praying that it was a mistake or maybe not the same young man, but it was him. … How could we all crowd a funeral home for his death? Where were we for his life? God had put him right in front of my face, but I was charging off, to do important things. I could not see what was right in front of me.”

Jerry Brown
GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
University of California, Berkeley

“I am not saying that the big issues are going to be settled easily, that greenhouse gases will soon be curbed or that inequality will be quickly reversed. But I do affirm, based on my experience, that people can exercise power wherever they are in society. Certainly not on every occasion but, at crucial moments, imaginative and bold people make a difference. … You have the intellect. Make sure you have the will.”

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Buying champagne at Southern Fried Chicken in Abuja

From an article about Africa’s growing middle class and their disposable income, by Tim Cocks and David Dolan:

With its rows of wooden shacks selling street food and cut-price haircuts, Lagos island’s McCarthy Street isn’t the kind of place you’d think to raise a glass of bubbly. But turn into a side door on one of its ramshackle buildings, and there’s a small bar stocking Moet & Chandon, along with Hennessey brandy, Johnnie Walker whisky and Bailey’s liqueur.

The regulars at the Corner Lounge, which on a recent night included a bar worker and a fitness instructor, don’t have money to burn like Nigeria’s oil-rich elite, but they might still splash out now and then on a $110 bottle of champagne, says manager Peter Ode.

[...]

In the Nigerian capital Abuja, a fast-food joint called Southern Fried Chicken selling meals for 1,200 Nigerian naira ($7.45) also has Moet in its fridge for seven times that sum.

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77% of Nigerian women bleach their skin

A recent report by the World Health Organisation says that Nigeria has the world’s highest number of women who bleach their skin with 77 percent compared to Togo – 59 percent – and Senegal’s 27 percent.

[...]

The WHO report mentions Nigeria’s lack of regulation on sale of bleaching creams, soaps etc. Most of it is sold by roadside vendors or in unapproved drug stores without content labels [...]

Article here. I can’t find the full report. Hat tip to Chxta’s World.

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Nigeria is the fifth most dangerous country for road safety

The World Health Organization has released their 2013 Global Status Report on Road Safety [the link is a large pdf]. Hat tip to Aili.

It’s neat to see all the metrics they use to rank countries: rate of seat belt usage, seat belt laws, whether these laws apply to all passengers or just some, driving and phone use laws, policies that promote walking and biking, speed limits, speed limit enforcement, various post-crash care indicators etc. etc. The report is very transparent about missing and bad data.

Nigeria is the fifth most dangerous country for road safety. The most dangerous country is the Dominican Republic, where an average person has a 1 in 480 chance of dying in a road accident in their lifetime.

22% of global road traffic deaths are pedestrians, and 5% are cyclists.

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“If you don’t like it you can always relocate”: Lagos state and taxing merriment

From a wonderful article on taxing merriment in Lagos:

The merriment tax is provided for in the Taxes and Levies (Approved list for collection) Act of 1988…The tax is already being collected by local governments in the state and is proving to be deeply unpopular with Lagosians. It is probably not politically correct to say this but Lagosians have a serious partying addiction.

[...]

The N1 billion monthly spend on parties and entertainment in Lagos is equal to the monthly IGR of Bayelsa state. Personally, I find this to be a frightening statistic, one that does not suggest that we have the right priorities as a society.

The article ends:

As [Lagos state] continues to grow it will need to continue to mine its only available natural resource. That means more money out of your pocket and more money out of mine. It’s for a good cause though and Lagosians had better get used to paying these taxes. If you don’t like it you can always relocate.

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Measuring teaching success as popularity of the New York Review of Books

Excerpts from a New York Times article called “Why do I Teach?” by Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame:

Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements. [...]

In general, people retain the knowledge that they repeatedly use in their professions. But what we studied once and haven’t taken up again and again is mostly lost. [...]

I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. [...]

The goal of the course is simply that they have had close encounters with some great writing. What’s the value of such encounters? They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. [...]

The fruits of college teaching should be measured not by tests but by the popularity of museums, classical concerts, art film houses, book discussion groups, and publications like Scientific American, the New York Review of Books, The Economist, and The Atlantic, to cite just a few. These are the places where our students reap the benefits of their education.

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Statement on upcoming elections in Equatorial Guinea

Amnesty International, Equatorial Guinea Justice, and Human Rights Watch have issued a joint statement on the upcoming Equatoguinean elections. The election environment appears so textbook-dictatorship it’s almost not interesting. I’m sure there is heterogeneity amongst these authoritarian electoral strategies, but to someone who doesn’t know much about this it seems pretty cliche to me. One interesting thing to note: there is a fear that foreign journalists might get denied visas. But Americans don’t need visas! So American journalists should be able to enter the country without trouble. It’s not very expensive to get there either. Go!

The May 26 elections will include voting for local council members and a new parliament, including for the first time 55 senators (Obiang appoints an additional 15 senators).

It doesn’t matter what happens on May 26. There is simply no way the elections can be considered free based on the current state of the media (virtually no way to hear or see any message that criticizes the government in the country except via the internet); the ruling party’s ability to use state resources for the campaign; the fear that you and your family won’t get government jobs if you publicly support either of the two parties that are not part of the ruling coalition etc. etc. etc.

Some highlights from the report:

The country has no independent and impartial body to oversee the electoral process or consider election-related complaints. The National Election Commission is controlled by the ruling party and is headed by the interior minister, a prominent member of the governing party.

[...]

[Election] observers will be permitted to travel to witness the vote only “in accordance with the program established for that purpose by the government” (arts. 11, 12, and 18).

Their [election observers'] ability to speak to the “official news media” about their “activities” during voting is subject to approval by the Information Ministry (art. 21).

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Bill Gates again calls vaccination in northern Nigeria a technical problem

Bill Gates has once again revealed that he does not understand the determinants of low vaccine coverage in northern Nigeria. Though he uses words like federal government and state government, ultimately he is defining a technical problem, not a political problem. (See my previous post on this here.) Here he explains to Ezra Klein why Somalia has higher vaccination coverage than northern Nigeria:

Well, in Somalia they’ve given up using the government. The money goes through the NGOs. Whereas in Nigeria they’ve designed a system where the federal government buys the vaccines, the state government provides the electricity, and the one level down below that provides the salaries. It’s just a bad design. You know, the north of India has very poor vaccination rates, so we picked a state up there with 80 million people and we drove it from 30 percent to 80 percent. But they had a really good chief health minister and the federal government was providing lots of money and lots of good technocrats, so the skills were there, as long as you employed them in the right kind of system.

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Africa Confidential on Ibrahim Bah and a ridiculous Italian businessman

Africa Confidential turns its focus this week to Ibrahim Bah, who was a key financial conduit between the RUF and Charles Taylor during the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars [the articles are gated]. Despite being under a UN travel ban and asset freeze, Bah travels in and out of Sierra Leone frequently and conducts business unencumbered in Freetown.  In 2008 he had a gold and diamond trading company based out of an office very close to a police station in Freetown. He is also involved in a mercenary firm that has tried unsuccessfully to engage in recent conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire and Libya. Sierra Leonean officials turn a blind eye to all of this.

The highlight of the Bah articles, however, is the connection between Bah and an Italian businessman named Vittorio Narciso Ruello. Bah appears to have screwed over Ruello repeatedly, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy diamonds but never delivering the diamonds.

In a statement to the police, Bah claimed he was not defrauding Ruello but suffering from the ups and downs of an uncertain business.

The best part, though, is that Ruello paid Bah to make him a Sierra Leonean honorary consul to Guinea Bissau (a la The Ambassador). This is even more outrageous than the Central African Republic attempt as you can’t even be a Sierra Leonean citizen unless you are of “Negro African descent” (for more on this see here and here). Anyways, Bah didn’t come through; it didn’t work. So Ruello went to the Sierra Leonean police to complain of being cheated!

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