Nigeria Content Online

Confronting China
and the United States in the debate over global imbalances and
currencies will not provide a solution, South Africa’s finance
minister, Pravin Gordhan, said on Thursday.

In a written
response to questions in parliament about a G20 meeting of finance
ministers last month, Mr. Gordhan said South Africa had called for
rebalancing the global economy by addressing monetary policy challenges.

“South Africa as a small, open economy, and faced with the problem
of a rapidly appreciating currency, called for a multilateral and
inclusive solution to the issues raised,” Mr. Gordhan said, reiterating
calls for the currency issues to be solved before escalating into a
trade war.

Egypt’s Orascom
Telecom will not list its Zimbabwean arm until after the outcome of a
deal between an Orascom and Russia’s Vimpelcom, an executive for the
Zimbabwe unit said on Wednesday.

Anwar Soussa, chief
commercial officer at Telecel Zimbabwe, also said on the sidelines of a
telecoms conference, that the company expects a 20 percent increase in
customers by 2011, from about 1.5 million now.

Telecel Zimbabwe said in June it may issue new shares and list its stock, in order to meet regulations on local black ownership.

But Mr. Soussa said the company was in no hurry to seek a listing.

AngloGold Ashanti,
the world’s third largest gold miner, beat its guidance for
third-quarter output and costs on Thursday, sending its shares up more
than 4 percent.

Investors
overlooked the company’s adjusted headline loss for the July-September
quarter, which was largely due to the previously announced closure of
its hedge book.

AngloGold has
closed out instruments it used to hedge against the price of gold,
allowing it to sell at market prices, boost its cash flow and profit
margins, and to push ahead on some of its growth projects.

“I’m quite happy with the results. They are managing their costs and
the whole sector is also helped by very strong fundamentals,” said Abri
du Plessis, an analyst at Gryphon Asset Management.

Nigerian automobile
imports fell by more than a quarter in the first ten months of 2010,
compared to the same period last year, as cash-strapped consumers shied
away from big-ticket purchases, industry officials said.

Vehicle sales in
Africa’s most populous nation are a proxy measure for private
purchasing power, a leading economic indicator which is not formally
available in Nigeria.

Nigerian port figures showed new vehicle imports in the first ten
months tumbled 26 percent to 29,372 units, according to Mohan Sethi,
general manager at Nigeria’s Dana Motors, which imports Kia cars and
vans.

The world’s
addiction to fossil fuels put the hangman’s noose around the neck of
Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni leaders on 10 November, 1995. That
noose was tightened under the watch of Shell through a kangaroo
military tribunal rigged by the worst dictator Nigeria ever had. Today,
we can say that every oil rig that sucks oil in the Niger Delta is a
hangman’s noose around the necks of the suffering peoples and
communities.

Today, we all stand
before history. We stand in front of a backdrop of injustice,
oppression, and ecological genocide – not just historical, but current,
and it is the threat of its progressing into the future that we must
stand together to fight.

In his statement
after the verdict of guilt was passed on him, Ken Saro-Wiwa declared,
“We all stand before history… appalled by the denigrating poverty of
peoples who live in richly endowed lands.”

We stand distressed
by “their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered
by the devastation of their land and their ultimate heritage.”

He went on to call
for “a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and
every ethnic group, and gives us all a valid claim to human
validation.”

Ken Saro-Wiwa’s
words, though spoken fifteen years ago, still ring true in our ears
today. A man with a keen sense of history, he told the agents of the
military dictator that he and his colleagues were not the only ones on
trial. Hear him: “Shell is here on trial, and it is as well that it is
represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief… The
company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will
surely come, and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it, for
there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the company
has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and
the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the company’s
dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.”

A man of history

Saro-Wiwa was
indeed a man of history. While shackled in one military jail or
another, the world recognised his worth and the validity of the Ogoni
struggles. In the last months of his life on earth, he won several
awards in recognition of his just struggles: the Fonlon-Nichols Award
for excellence in creative writing and the struggle for human rights;
the 1994 Right Livelihood Award or Alternative Nobel Prize for Peace;
the 1995 Goldman Environmental Prize, the most prestigious
environmental award in the world; the eight Bruno-Kreisky Foundation
Award for human rights; the 1995 British Environmental ad Media Special
Awareness Award; and the Hammett Award for Human Rights of Human Rights
Watch.

The Students Union
of the Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria conferred on him the award of
Grand Commander of the Oppressed Masses. Surely, none of these could
have been given to a man of mean repute.

Standing on the
shoulders of history, we see clearly the beginnings of the trials that
were bound to expose those who have waged ecological wars against the
Ogoni people, the peoples of the Niger Delta and elsewhere in the
world. We continue to see a company like Shell bowing before courts and
before the Stock Exchanges in North America, accepting out of court
settlements, and paying fines to avoid prosecution on bribery and
corruption charges.

In 2005, they also
admitted to having falsified their crude oil reserve figures the
previous year, and paid some hefty fines to cover that up. Recent
reports have it that they are halting suits over bribery by paying some
fines. Last year, they agreed in a New York court to pay over $15
million to Ogoni litigants for human rights abuses.

In all these, we
are confident that the words of Ken Saro-Wiwa will come to pass. One
day, the eco devourers will have their day in the dock. And this is
already happening in The Hague, where three Niger Delta communities are
suing Shell for environmental degradation.

Perpetual death

The dominant
predatory production and consumption patterns in the world, and the
myth that crude oil is a cheap form of energy, has meant perpetual
death sentence on communities where there is crude oil and gas.

If good men like
Ken Saro-Wiwa had stayed silent and allowed the pattern of
environmental degradation by oil extractive activities to go on
unchallenged in Ogoni land, it is conceivable that things would have
been worse by now.

Today, on account
of the massive oil spills, gas flares, and careless handling of other
industry-related toxic pollutants, life expectancy in the Niger Delta
has plummeted to 41 years. If Ken Saro-Wiwa had not started the
struggle, perhaps life expectancy would have possibly nose-dived to 20
years.

We stand before
history and affirm that a sane future must be built on the platform of
solidarity, dignity, and respect for the rights of Mother Earth.

We demand an end to
fossil fuel addiction: be it crude oil, tar sands, or coal. We call for
a Sabbath of rest for Mother Earth. Over the years, she has been
abused, raped, and exploited and it is time to say enough is enough.

The blood of Ken
Saro-Wiwa and all those massacred in the ecological wars for crude oil
cry out today in demand for remaining oil to be left in the soil. With
less than 40 percent of crude oil still left in the soil, it is
foolishness to insist that we can go on driving on this dreg through
eternity.

Investors at the
Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) recorded additional gains on the value of
their equities on Wednesday, in spite of the nationwide strike that
affected many investments.

The Exchange market
capitalisation closed yesterday at N8.116 trillion, after opening the
day at N8.105 trillion, reflecting 0.13 percent upturn or N11 billion
gains. Meanwhile, about N209 billion had been gained on Tuesday,
following investors’ interest in some blue chip stocks.

The NSE All-Share
Index also appreciated on Wednesday by 0.13 percent or a gain of 32.84
points on the previous day’s figures of 25,383.37 basis units, to close
at 25,416.21 units.

Transaction volume
on the Exchange yesterday grew by 6.18 percent to close at 557.25
million units exchanged in 5,986 deals, as against a growth of 26.59
percent recorded the previous trading, to close at 524.83 million units
exchanged in 7,340 deals.

‘No selling pressure’

Olugbenga Emmanuel,
a finance analyst at WealthZone Company, a portfolio management firm,
said the market closed on a positive note because “there was no selling
pressure by investors,” a sign he called “‘the gradual return of
investors’ confidence in bourse.”

Meanwhile, a
stockbroker, who would not like to be mentioned, said the labour strike
would have stopped trading activities and subsequently affected stock
performance if some traders did not summon their staff to ignore the
industrial action.

“Initially, we
thought there won’t be trading because some staff refused to show up
early at work. But things got back to normal before the actual trading
period started,” he said.

More gainers

The number of
gainers at the close of trading session on Wednesday closed higher at
48 stocks, as against the 43 gainers recorded the previous day, while
losers closed at 21, compared with the 20 losers recorded on Tuesday.

Nigerian Breweries
and Lafarge Wapco topped the price gainers’ table with an increase of
N1.97 and N1.49 on their initial prices of N77.00 and N40.51 per share,
respectively. Cadbury and Oando followed in the chart with an increase
of N1.00 each, to close at N28.00 and N65.50 per share.

On the losers’
side, Dangote Cement and Conoil led the price losers’ chart with a loss
of N6.72 and N2.04, from their opening prices of N134.66 and N40.98 per
share. Flour Mills Nigeria and African Petroleum followed with 98 kobo
and 94 kobo losses respectively, to close at N70.02 and N24.00 per
share.

Active subsector

The banking
subsector led the most active subsectors’ chart with 300.927 million
volumes of shares, valued at over N2.395 billion.

The volume recorded
in the subsector was driven by transaction in the shares of Union Bank,
Zenith Bank, First Bank, United Bank for Africa, and Oceanic Bank.

The total volume of
224.79 million units, valued at N1.96 billion, traded in the shares of
the five stocks accounted for 33.03 percent of the entire market volume.

Nigeria
is ranked first among the top 10 remittance recipients in 2010 in sub
Saharan Africa, according to the World Bank’s latest Migration and
Remittances Factbook 2011 released on Tuesday.

Nigeria
received $10 billion (about N1.5 trillion) from remittances, followed a
distant second by Sudan, with $3.2 billion; Kenya, $1.8 billion;
Senegal, $1.2 billion; and South Africa, $1 billion. The report also
listed Nigeria among the top 10 emigration countries in the region
alongside Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali,
Sudan, Eritrea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Africa.

The
report described remittances to developing countries as a resilient
source of external financing during the recent global financial crisis,
with recorded flows expected to reach $325 billion by the end of this
year, up from $307 billion in 2009. The report added that worldwide,
remittance flows are expected to reach $440 billion by the end of this
year.

The true size of remittances, including unrecorded flows through formal and informal channels, is believed to be larger.

Official
data for the months of January-August 2010 indicate that the Central
Bank supplied approximately 27.1 percent of the $52 billion of inflows
to Nigeria’s foreign exchange market, with “autonomous sources” oil
companies, international institutions, and remittances accounting for
the rest.

Source of financial support

“Remittances
are a vital source of financial support that directly increases the
income of migrants’ families,” said Hans Timmer, director of
development prospects at the World Bank.

“Remittances
lead to more investments in health, education, and small business. With
better tracking of migration and remittance trends, policy makers can
make informed decisions to protect and leverage this massive capital
inflow, which is triple the size of official aid flows,” Mr. Timmer
said.

Christian
Udechukwu, West Africa regional director, Money Transfer International
(MTI), a money transfer firm, said more remittances inflow into the
region can be achieved when regulators of countries, which have high
numbers of Diaspora population, lower barriers on remittances from
their countries.

“These
barriers are usually in terms of restrictions on minimum remittances,
stiff documentation requirements, and outright refusal of permission to
financial intermediaries to license companies who are keen to serve the
diaspora remittances market,” Mr. Udechukwu.

The
World Bank report stated that officially recorded remittance flows to
developing countries are estimated to increase by six percent to $325
billion in 2010. This marks a healthy recovery from a 5.5 percent
decline registered in 2009.

“In
line with the World Bank’s outlook for the global economy, remittance
flows to developing countries are expected to increase by 6.2 percent
in 2011 and 8.1 percent in 2012, to reach $374 billion by 2012,” the
report said.

The
top remittance sending countries in 2009 were the United States, Saudi
Arabia, Switzerland, Russia, and Germany. Worldwide, the top recipient
countries in 2010 are India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and
France. As a share of GDP, however, remittances are more significant
for smaller countries – more than 25 percent in some countries.