Nigeria Content Online

Over the past month, one question seemed to be on everyone’s
mind at the economic conferences I attended in Europe: How did referees miss a
goal that England scored against Germany in their World Cup match?

Soccer reform wasn’t the stated focus of these conferences.

But thinking about how to improve the sport’s regulations comes
naturally to economists, especially after a few beers, because some of the same
principles should be applied to economic regulation.

The first is that the regulator – in this case, the referee – is
fallible. So the rules should make the regulator’s job as easy as possible.

Second, regulators can’t detect every irregularity, so the
emphasis has to be on getting the big stuff right. Finally, we want
performance, not regulators, to determine the outcome. The best regulators are
those we don’t notice.

In soccer, one head referee has to cover a “pitch” larger than
an American football field. He has three assistants who must stand on the
sideline. There is plenty of evidence beyond that missed English goal that
referees are indeed human. For example, referees call more fouls against the
visiting team, and against bigger players. So, what can be done?

ADD REFEREES Put at least one more ref on the field. (Basketball
has three referees on a much smaller court.) The idea is under consideration by
FIFA.

This is a no-brainer for the World Cup, which generates billions
of dollars in revenue, but in the world of financial regulation, adding
referees is costly. Governments will need to cut budgets, so we need to make
regulators more efficient, not more numerous.

ADD TECHNOLOGY Although instant replay showed that England’s
goal should have counted, FIFA officials have resisted using technology that
could help.

Many technological solutions, including embedding an electronic
chip in the ball, would make the determination of goal scoring faster and more
accurate.

Technology can help in other regulatory areas as well, and is a
good way to increase efficiency. For example, requiring banks to file their
compliance data electronically drastically reduces the time it takes to conduct
an audit.

INCREASE SCORING In the most recent tournament, the teams
together scored 2.27 goals per match, the second-lowest number in history. The
problem with low-scoring games is not just that they bore uncultured Americans
like me. Low scores magnify the importance of referees’ decisions. When a team
is awarded a penalty kick, it scores about 75 percent of the time, and that’s
very likely to affect the outcome of a low-scoring game.

In finance, a useful analogy is to increase the capital
requirements for banks. By requiring banks to have a bigger security blanket,
regulators themselves have greater margin for error.

REDEFINE ‘OFFSIDE’ The offside rule is now too hard to enforce.
When a player passes the ball downfield, no one on his team can have any part
of his body farther downfield than any defender, aside from the goalkeeper. The
linesman calling these violations runs along the sideline, keeping parallel
with the offensive player closest to being offside – all while watching the
ball.

This requires wide-angle vision that humans don’t possess. Short
of eliminating the rule, we might limit offside calls to players whose entire
body is ahead of the defenders. That should be easier to detect, and might lead
to more goals scored.

The general point is to make the judgment tasks of regulators
easier. The Securities and Exchange Commission had trouble assessing the
technical arguments that strongly suggested that Bernie Madoff was a crook, but
they could have easily had a rule requiring him to document his assets under
management.

RETHINK PENALTIES Another idea is to adjust the silly yellow/red
card penalty system. There are three levels of fouls in soccer, depending
partly on whether the action is “careless,” “reckless” or “using excessive
force.” It is asking too much to think a referee can distinguish between
careless and reckless on the fly.

A system similar to basketball’s, in which accumulated fouls
lead to expulsion, and “flagrant” fouls are heavily punished, would be easier
to put into practice, especially if an off-field official kept track of the
running totals.

The general principle here is that we don’t want small
differences in behavior, which are difficult for a regulator to distinguish, to
lead to large differences in punishment.

REDUCE FAKING Finally, there is the problem of diving. After
falling, players routinely writhe on the ground until the referee either
believes they’ve been injured, ignores them or, rarely, imposes penalties for
“simulation.” These instant injury judgments are very difficult for a single
on-field referee.

Such decisions might be turned over to referees watching video
monitors – and empowered to impose stiff penalties for faking. Diving is the
soccer version of the inevitable attempts to influence financial regulators, in
matters both legal and illegal. One can think of video replays as a
transparency requirement. We can’t expect to eliminate special pleading by
financiers for taxpayer bailouts, of course, but perhaps we can reduce the
impact of such efforts by opening them to public view through increased
disclosure about the process and its beneficiaries.

New rules in either soccer or finance shouldn’t put any more
burden on individual referees. As Larry Summers, the director of the National
Economic Council, said recently, in revising financial regulations, we do not
want to require anyone to get any smarter.

Richard H. Thaler is a
professor of economics and behavioral science at the Booth School of Business
at the University of Chicago.

© 2010 New York Times News Service

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re
still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 –
the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died – the hottest
such stretch on record.

Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one
year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite
tricks of climate-change deniers: They point to an unusually warm year in the
past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!”
Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date – but the point is that
the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a
nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on
its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “OK, I guess I was wrong,” and
support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate?
Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been
many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts
about the science. Every piece of valid evidence – long-term temperature
averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume,
melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows – points to a
continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior.

You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against
climate researchers – allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning
e-mail of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has
received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was
eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then
bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can
happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate
legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort
of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of
markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to
put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in
limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s
growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that
killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow
the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a
price on carbon, but certain industries – above all, the coal and oil
industries – would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation
campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate
change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think
tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy.
Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of
funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has
spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch
Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two
decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously
opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You
already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the
aid of cowardice – above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a
threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted
their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out
one in particular: Sen. John McCain.

There was a time when McCain was considered a friend of the
environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring
legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas
emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential
campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back
climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t – and
it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to
sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years
added to his political career.

Alas, McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill.
Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the
price.

(c) 2010 New York Times
News Service

The recurring crises in Jos, heartland of the Middle Belt, call
for prayers, vigilance, atonement and repentance. Too much blood has been shed;
too many dreams aborted in the evil and misguided belief that something good
can come out of violence.

In the last decade thousands of lives have been wasted. In the
first quarter of this year, close to 1000 people were killed in a mindless orgy
of violence. Since then combatants on the different sides of the divide have
perfected the stealthy act of smoking out their victims in the dead of the
night before hacking them to death.

It is an unconventional warfare, conceived by hatred, nurtured
by bigotry, and executed with cruelty. The latest harvest of deaths came
Saturday, July 17 in Mazzah village where another eight lives were snuffed out;
four alone from a clergyman’s household comprising of his wife, two children
and a grandson.

Regrettably, this wanton destruction of God’s children is a
manifestation of lingering ethno-religious-socio-economic problems, which have
not been addressed with the honesty of purpose they require.

The economic basis of the crises is rooted in the clash between
pastoral and agrarian communities in their search for land to pursue their
livelihoods.

Because the parties involved are broadly split into two dominant
ethnic groups, expressing two religious faiths, the conflict also wears an
ethnic and religious toga.

It is economic because largely itinerant Hausa-Fulani herdsmen,
in search of pastures to graze their cattle, periodically clash with Berom
farmers, who see the incursion of the pastoralists as an unfriendly invasion of
their farmlands.

Because the Berom are largely Christians and the Hausa-Fulani
predominantly Muslims, each party also sees the contest as a religious contest
for supremacy.

This explains why religious houses are easily targeted; churches
and mosques are burnt to shake adherents’ faith, confuse and disorient them.

The failure of governance over the years to manage this tension
between the two faiths has deepened distrust so much that access to government
patronage through employment, provision of social amenities, and business
contracts is seen through Christian-Muslim prisms. This cocktail of economic
injustice, religious persecution, communal frustration, ethnic subjugation, and
social discontent, has stunted efforts to build trust upon which progress,
peace and development are hinged.

The result is the easy recourse to violence to redress these
feelings of injustice.

Because past perpetrators of violence are seldom punished, the
state has sustained a culture of impunity, which encourages reprisal attacks,
in the unending cycle of each party wanting to prove to the other it does not
have a monopoly on violence.

The skewed federalism that we practice has also contributed to
this pervading insecurity.

A state governor, in theory, is described as the chief security
officer. In practice, internal security is in the hands of the police, a
federal institution. A state commissioner of police takes his directives from a
federally appointed Inspector General of Police. Intelligence passed to the
police at the communal or state level is subject to federal approval.

When the army is involved, presumably to help the police bolster
security, the pattern of uneven handedness also prevails. A perceived policy of
religious favoritism in the security network especially in the last three
decades lends credence to the growing charges that such centrally controlled
security machinery is inadequate and should give way for a more compact,
trust-engendering, community-based security arrangement that can respond faster
to states’ security needs.

Nigeria must make up her mind on the political philosophy of
development she wants to embrace. Our professed liberal democracy guarantees
religious freedom, which expects that no one should be molested while
exercising his/her constitutional rights. It has no room for burning of places
of worship, or vengeful killings while the security officials appear helpless.

Conflict resolution does not have a quick fix approach. It
requires a judicious blend of short and long-term measures that will deliver an
enduring outcome. In the short term, internal security should be reappraised.
Since the Jos metropolis is as important as its outskirts these dawn assaults
on poor citizens in the villages must be contained by expanding the frontiers
of protection. The state must partner with relevant citizen-groups to create
confidence-building measures that will engage the populace in the business of
reconstruction and drum in the message that nothing good comes out of destruction.
Lopsided appointments in the top echelons of our security outfits should be
avoided.

An equitable arrangement must also be fashioned to protect
economic rights of farmers while developing buffer zones for pastoral grazing
in the short term; ultimately the transition to modern ways of cattle husbandry
will bridge the gap between the past and future.

The time is now for all people of good conscience to partner
with the state in this search for peace, knowing that we are all God’s children
tied together to understand ourselves, appreciate our differences, but
acknowledge our common ancestry as creations of a truly awesome God.

The people of Abia State are living in a
perpetual, some would say primal, state of fear – and that is no
exaggeration. Observers will tell you that the security situation in
the state is grave. A recent report by this paper shows that citizens
have no faith that they are safe, even in the most basic way.

This is after all the state where armed bandits
now give victims notice before an onslaught. In June, when robbers went
into First Bank and Fidelity Bank right in the centre of Aba, they had
written to inform the banks of their intention.

And they kept their word.

It’s the stuff of urban legend, and it would have
been funny if it weren’t so tragic. What kind of spectacular failure
would our security services have to be that they cannot even prevent a
crime about which they have been pre-informed? There can only be two
options: either the forces are working in tandem with the crooks, or
they are just incapable of responding to the threats to life and
property.

Morbid as it sounds, we can only hope that the
former is the case. It is surely better to imagine that our lives can
be protected; that the government responsible for our well being has
the capacity to keep us safe and simply chooses not to do.

But to imagine that there is no minimum ability to
safeguard life and property; in essence that we live in a society where
anything goes, we shudder to imagine the consequences.

The new trend of course is kidnapping in the east,
of which Aba has now become the capital, starting from 2009. The
stories are truly fear inspiring. Residents speak of criminals using
sledgehammers to break through the wall of houses. It gives a whole new
meaning to brazen.

Anarchy, lawlessness: these are not words one
expects to associate with any political grouping in any civilized
society, much less a supposedly functioning democracy, but people who
live their lives and run their business in the area find that these are
the only words that capture the essence of their daily realities.
Beyond mere formality, little evidence exists in much of this region to
show that government still functions. And it’s been downhill for
everything.

Aba used to be famous as one of the country’s
commercial nerve centres. Compared to its reputation however, it has
now become a ghost town, and this goes beyond the fact that nightlife
has all but disappeared. Businesses are closing up on a regular basis,
and it goes without saying that no one is in a hurry to invest in the
area. Those who still have businesses standing complain about a drastic
drop in sales. Indeed, Aba used to be the place where customers buy in
bulk and bring to Lagos and other urban centres to sell. No more.

“Things have somersaulted in this town”, says Uche
Awa, the Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association, Aba branch, all of
this leading to even more jobless youths lining the streets of a city
already bursting at the seams with the unemployed.

There are no empty words of faith or hope to offer
the people of Aba and other parts of the state. Their government –
including the governor, the police, and the president who is in charge
of the police force – seems to have abandoned them to their fate.

But of course, on hand to give much-needed
re-assurance to a panicked people is a senior police officer who calmly
tells us it is all in our minds. Ebere Onyeagoro, Area Commander of the
Aba Area Police Command, thinks the whole situation is greatly
exaggerated and the people of Aba just like a bit of drama. “The thing
is not so high,” he says. “The only thing is the people are blowing it
out of proportion. In those days there was more of it but now it is
only once in a while.” This is despite the fact that even corporate
organisations including Lever Brothers, Nigerian Breweries, Aba Textile
Mills and, most recently, Dana Motors have had to, yes, flee the area.

Well, at least – unlike the Imo State governor – he didn’t blame it on the Stock Exchange.