Once Africa’s promise, Nigeria is heaving under crime, few jobs

Policy missteps, entrenched corruption and an over-reliance on oil have pushed the country’s economy to the brink.

If there was ever a time Nigeria could have taken off, it was in 1999. Democracy had been restored, with its economy reopening after decades of mismanagement and plunder under military dictatorships.

Tomi Davies, a systems analyst, was one of thousands of Nigerians who came home to help rebuild the country. After a few years working on public-sector projects, he was offered a bag full of dollars to add ghost employees to the payroll system he was installing. When he refused, a group of men attacked him at his home in the capital, Abuja.

“I arrived like many others full of hope, but had to escape in disgust,” said Davies, 65, who returned to the U.K., where he is now chief investment officer of Frankfurt-based venture capital firm GreenTec Capital Partners.

Others like him have left too, defeated by the dashed aspirations of a nation that wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Endowed with some of the world’s biggest oil reserves, plenty of arable land and a young, tech-savvy population of 206 million that sets Africa’s music and fashion trends, Nigeria had the potential to break onto the global stage.

Instead, policy missteps, entrenched corruption and an over-reliance on crude oil mean that a country that makes up a quarter of the continent’s economy risks becoming its biggest problem. A dangerous cauldron of ethnic tension, youth discontent and criminality threatens to spread more poverty and violence to a region quickly falling behind the rest of the world.

Since its discovery in the 1950s, beneath the mangrove forests of its south eastern coast, oil has dictated the boom and bust cycles of the former British colony, with the commodity now accounting for 90% of exports and half of government revenue.

Poverty Capital

The economy has yet to recover from the oil crash of 2014, and is unlikely to do so anytime soon, meaning its population will continue to out pace economic expansion adding more poor to what is already the poverty capital of the world. Over 90 million people live in penury, more than India, which has a population seven times greater.

A presidential spokesman referred questions to the government’s economics team. The finance ministry and central bank didn’t respond to several requests for comment.

The coronavirus has only made things worse. Personal incomes are set to fall to their lowest in four decades, pushing an additional 11 million people into poverty by 2022, according to the World Bank. One in three Nigerians in the workforce unemployed, among the world’s highest jobless rates, fanning social discontent and insecurity.

Policy blunders by President Muhammadu Buhari have complicated the road to recovery. He came to power in 2015 pledging to create 12 million jobs in his first four-year term; halfway through his second term, unemployment has more than quadrupled.

Buhari, 78, revived an import-substitution drive that was popular when he was a military ruler in the early 1980s, crippling businesses that can’t get goods to survive. He has banned foreign currency for imports of dozens of products from toothpicks to cement, closed borders to halt rice smuggling and refused to fully ease exchange controls.

Policies like this have curbed foreign investment, pushed food inflation to 15-year highs and scared off companies such as South Africa’s supermarket chain Shoprite Holdings Ltd.

“The government made so many mistakes even before the pandemic made things worse,” said Amina Ado, who was one of Buhari’s oil advisers from 2017 to 2020. “We need to urgently change course because we are big enough to matter in the world.”

The roots of the malaise though, predate Buhari. Under British rule, Nigeria’s three main regions, divided along ethnic and religious lines, were awkwardly sandwiched together in a 1914 amalgamation. Since independence in 1960, elites from the largely Christian south west and south east have tussled for power with the Muslim north.

“Political instability is a huge obstacle to the kind of deep, long-term institutional economic reforms needed for Nigeria to be able to kick start,” said Zainab Usman, director of the African program at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Oil led to the dismantling of what little industry there was by opening the floodgates to cheap imports financed by a strong local currency. Countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, which were as poor as Nigeria in the 1960s, have surpassed it in per-capita income after diversifying.

A surge in corruption also wrested away resources needed for infrastructure and a reliable power supply — both of which are lacking.

“In a lot of countries, people are used to officials skimming something off the top, but ultimately delivering something,” said Matthew T Page, an associate fellow at Chatham House in London. “In Nigeria, everything is skimmed off the top and nothing is delivered.”

Security Meltdown

Mistrust of the state and poverty seeded violence. A decade-long jihadist insurgency in the northeast rages on despite Buhari’s claims to have defeated Boko Haram militants in 2015. Piracy has also made the Gulf of Guinea one of the world’s most dangerous waters, while inland, a deadly conflict between nomadic herders and farmers in the middle of the country is moving south. A new separatist rebellion is emerging in the south east, where a secessionist attempt to create the republic of Biafra sparked civil war in the 1960s.

Kidnapping has surged to its highest in at least a decade, according to data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Nearly 900 students were taken from schools in mass abductions since December, according to the United Nations.

It wasn’t always like this. As a child in the 1980s, Alvari Banu remembers the short road trips to visit the family farm between Abuja and the northern city of Kaduna. Now, kidnappings on the same road have kept him away for almost three years.

“The situation is getting worse,” said Banu, 41, a financial consultant. “The government has completely failed to provide even basic security.”

Disorder is a huge impediment for growth, costing the economy $10.3 billion in 2020 — more than the federal government’s total revenue that same year, according to official estimates. Without key reforms, Nigeria’s economy will remain anemic, expanding little more than 2% this year and next, still below the population growth rate, according to the International Monetary Fund.

In the meantime, the government is living on borrowed money, with debt service costs eating up over 80% of its revenue.

“This could end up in an external debt default if things don’t change,” said Charlie Robertson, global chief economist with Renaissance Capital, an emerging and frontier markets investment bank.

To avoid calamity, the government needs to allow the currency to depreciate, invest in electricity and campaign to lower fertility rates, which at 5.3 births per woman is one of the world’s highest and saps savings, said Robertson. Climbing oil prices, a planned sovereign bond sale and upcoming disbursement of IMF resources will help the country muddle through for now, said Omotola Abimbola, an analyst at Lagos-based investment bank Chapel Hill Denham.

The brunt of the economic decline is falling on the young, two-thirds of whom are either jobless or under-employed. With a median age of 18, the country’s population is growing restless and disconnected from the aging political class that lives in luxury. Last year, protests over police brutality became a nationwide uprising that paralyzed major cities, curbed only by a violent crackdown that killed dozens.

“There is a lot of frustration because there are a lot of overqualified people unemployed,” said Chioma Okafor, a 32-year-old public health-care expert who moved back to Nigeria in 2014. After two years making $200 a month in consulting in Abuja, and with no prospect of a better job, Okafor borrowed money to buy a one-way ticket back to the U.S.

“When Buhari came to office, people were expecting things to change,” she said. “But it’s not just Buhari that failed. The system is broken.”

SOURCE: BLOOMBERG

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US House to vote to repeal Iraq war authorisation

Symbolic vote expected later this week as lawmakers and Joe Biden seek to revise and update legal basis for US military action.

The United States House of Representatives will vote later this week to repeal the authorisation of war that Congress gave to former President George W Bush in 2002 enabling the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Global African Family Meeting

The motion to repeal the Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) in Iraq, coming for the first time with support from President Joe Biden, is expected to be taken up in the House on Thursday, CNN reported.

The Biden administration said on Monday that the US “has no ongoing military activities that rely solely on the 2002 AUMF as a domestic legal basis” and its repeal “would likely have minimal impact on current military operations”.

But the upcoming vote is seen as a start in a larger debate in the US Congress about revising and re-establishing the US legal basis for the deployment of military forces in Iraq and elsewhere in what congressional critics call the “forever wars”.

“The President is committed to working with the Congress to ensure that outdated authorizations for the use of military force are replaced with a narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats,” the White House said in a statement on Monday supporting the House repeal.

However, without a replacement authorisation that addresses modern-day circumstances in Iraq, repeal of the US law faces scepticism from legislators in the Senate, which also must agree for the House resolution to take effect.

“The 2002 AUMF was largely about Saddam Hussein, it is also clearly used to address terrorist threats in and emanating from Iraq,” said Representative Michael McCaul.

“Unless we hear from our military that the 2002 AUMF no longer serves the purpose of protecting Americans, we should not repeal before replacing,” said McCaul, a Republican.

The issue came to the fore most recently with the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani by US forces on Iraqi soil, an act many members of Congress viewed as unjustified and reckless. The Trump administration later cited the 2002 Iraq war authorisation as legal justification for the Soleimani hit.

US and NATO troops invaded Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks and the former Bush administration then pushed for and obtained authorisation from Congress to invade Iraq in a preemptive war to topple Saddam Hussein and prevent Iraq from obtaining weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush administration’s pretext for invading Iraq was later shown to be based on false claims and former President Barack Obama agreed to withdraw most US forces from Iraq in 2011.

Some US forces remain in Iraq following US-led campaigns to push back the ISIL (ISIS) group (ISIS) and contain the civil war in Syria. US forces have continued to clash with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

“There are Iran sponsored terrorist groups active today inside Iraq who threaten our diplomats, our soldiers and our citizens,” McCaul said.

Defense Department lawyers in the prior Trump administration had strongly opposed a stand-alone repeal of the 2002 Iraq AUMF because it would remove the authority for US military action against the militia groups.

Nevertheless, there is broad support among Democrats in Congress repeal of the 2002 authorisation of war in Iraq, as well as an earlier 2001 authorisation Congress passed related to al-Qaeda and Afghanistan.

Biden has put in motion plans to withdraw US and allied foreign troops from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaeda attacks.

Across the years, both the 2001 and 2002 AMUFs have been used by successive presidents to justify a range of military actions, including drone attacks in Yemen, that in some cases have little to do with the original conflicts Congress sought to address.

“The idea that they have not been repealed or ended just doesn’t make any sense,” said Representative Jim McGovern, a leading Democrat.

“It’s either that we just haven’t done our due diligence, or we are not keeping a close watch on these things,” McGovern said on Monday.

SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

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Teenage pregnancy, a threat to girls’ Education and Empowerment

 GNA – Yaawa Jonas, a 17 year old teenage mother and a school dropout, has attempted suicide severally but has been thinking of who will take care of her 18 month old daughter, the reason for dropping out of school at the second year of the Junior High School.

The thought of not being able to pursue her education to become a nurse, a career she has cherished since her childhood and watching the young man who impregnated her pursue his education, breaks her heart and sometimes she is tempted to take away her life to end it all.

Yaawa’s parents are labourers to a cocoa farmer in a small farming community near Atiwa in the Atiwa West District of the Eastern Region and she is the third of a family of eight. Like many other girls in rural communities, she has to do some form of work to generate income to support her schooling and other personal needs.

She, therefore, undertakes several menial jobs such as labouring, carting cocoa beans from farms and at an oil palm production centre to get something to cater for her needs especially during her monthly cycle.

Yaawa’s mother, a victim of the same circumstance looked up to her to become a nurse and an example for her younger siblings and did everything within her means to support her especially when her father thought the place of a girl, like Yaawa is the kitchen and should stop schooling and get married.

Four months after her delivery, her beloved mother who helped her through the period of pregnancy and had made arrangements to take care of the baby to enable her go back to school painfully died.

Now, Yaawa has no one to take care of her baby for her to return to school and she cannot walk the three kilometres each day with the baby to school and back. The burden of caring for her baby and the shattered dream is just unimaginable for poor Yaawa.

Sharing her story with the GNA, under the “Mobilizing the Media for Fighting COVID-19″ project being implemented by the Journalists for Human Rights in collaboration with the Ghana Journalists Association (GJA)”, Yaawa could not hold back her tears.

At age 17 when she was supposed to be in school, she is a mother already with no source of sustainable livelihood whiles the future looks bleak for her as well as her daughter.

Yaawa is one of the thousands of girls across the country whose future looks bleak because their education has been truncated by teenage pregnancies due to several factors.

These unfortunate girls are not likely to enjoy the Free Senior High School policy introduced by the government as well as the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) to ensure that they are empowered through education to grow to become self-reliant women who would make meaningful contributions to their societies in future.

Apart from losing the opportunity to go to school, they also risk being victims of child marriages and all the negatives it come along with as many parents of these unfortunate teenage mother’s find it more convenient to allow their girl children who gets pregnant to marry and settle to begin a family, rather than to take the child and allow them to continue their education.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) notes that United Nations Convention on the Rights of Children (CRC) provides signatory government’s and societies in general with the basic elements for the protection of girls and boys up to the time they reach adulthood, any departure from this goals and principles constitutes violation of the rights child, and governments, as duty bearers are accountable to respond to this violations.

However, there are plenty of evidence that in these countries and societies where the right of the child are honoured and respected, girls and boys grow up and develop to their potential and become empowered adults who can function accordingly, unfortunatley there is also evidence of the opposite tendency, devastating consequences especially for girls” says the UNFPA.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately 12 million girls aged 15-19 years and at least 777,000 girls under 15 years give birth each year in developing regions and complications during pregnancy and child birth are the leading causes of death for 15-19-year-old girls globally.

Health experts explain that that adolescent mother’s (ages 10-19 years) are at higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20-24 years and babies of adolescent mother’s face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions.

According to the District Health Information Management System (DHIMS) of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), a total of 109,888 teenage pregnancies were recorded in 2020 with the Ashanti Region topping the national league table with 17,802 cases followed keenly by the Eastern Region with 10,865 and Central region with 10,301 cases in that order.

A Ghana Health Service report indicates that between 2014 and 2016, the Eastern region, which occupies the unenviable position as the second with high rate of teenage pregnancy cases recorded a total of 25,285 teenage pregnancies, 669 out of this were aged between 10 and 14 years, whiles in the first quarter of 2016, about 3,000 cases had been recorded already.

What these figures mean is that, over 100,000 teenage girls in Ghana including those in the Eastern Region lose the opportunity to take advantage of the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education and free Senior High School policy, an effort by the government to promote education to the higher levels particularly among girls as a tool to bridge the gender disparity.

Just like Yaawa, if nothing is done about this, women’s representation at decision making levels will continue to suffer.

Education is considered as a milestone of women empowerment because it enables them to respond to the challenges of society and culture to confront their traditional roles and gender stereotypes to better their lives and their families.

Mrs Joyce Larnyoh, Country Director of International Child Development Program (ICDP), a non-for profit organisation focusing on girl child education and women empowerment in Eastern Region described the situation as scary and called for concerted effort to deal decisively with the root cause of the problem.

She blames irresponsible parenting as the major contributing factor and called on the Municipal and District Assemblies (MDCEs) to implement the by-laws which sought to protect children from acts and practices inimical to their education as well as make parents more responsive to the needs of their children’s upbringing and education for a better society.

In her view, the role of parents and guardians are critical to any strategy and containment measures to remedy the situation, stressing that, parents have a responsibility towards the needs of their children, as a stakeholder in the collective effort to leverage on education to improve the status of girls and women for national development.

She also called for intensification of the awareness on reproductive health and sexuality in schools to uncover the issues around sex and pregnancy as well as reactivation of the social welfare systems and structures to ensure that, “the men who impregnated this girls are held accountable and contribute to the care of the teenage mothers and their babies”.

Mrs Larnyoh mentioned that teenage pregnancies had a multiple effect on the socio-economic development in that most of the girls after getting pregnant are either married off or made to co-habit with the father of their children, which further deepen the vulnerabilities of these girls as well as increase poverty and underprivileged lives.

Unfortunately, the issue of teenage pregnancy seems not to be a matter of priority for the various Municipal and District Assemblies (MDAs). As their prime focus is on infrastructure development, the gravity of teenage pregnancies on socio-economic development calls for the significant involvement of the MDAs, which are mandated with local and community development.

She said the socio-economic implications of the phenomenon was very huge since it entrenched the factors for poverty among generations and called for a national conversation on what penalties should be imposed on parents and guardians who fail in their roles.

The Government of Ghana through the Ghana Education Service (GES) realising the threat of teenage pregnancy on national development, has instituted the re-entry policy for girls who drop out of school due to teenage pregnancy or child birth as a measure to tackle all gender-based and pregnancy related issues, which confront girls’ education.

However, Madam Patricia Bravo, Eastern Regional Girl-child Education Coordinator of the Ghana Education Service indicate that most of girls who drop out of school due to pregnancies do not return to school after childbirth inspite of the re-entry policy due to several factors.

She mentioned that stigmatization and parents failure to take care of the babies as the key impediments in the re-entry programme, adding that, it was impossible for the teenage mother’s to send their babies to school and so parents support was key in realising the goals of the policy.

Again, she said fear of being stigmatized was also preventing most of the girls from going back to school even when their parents were ready to take care of their babies, the policy according to her gives the allowance for such girls to change schools yet some still find it difficult to go back.

Government in recognition of the huge threat teenage pregnacies posed to national development has introduced the re-entry policy, but there are indications that it is not that easy to go to school after giving birth as a teenager, everything therefore must be done to prevent teenage pregnancies.

GNA

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