The speaker of the lower house of parliament was investigated this month for “misappropriating” $140m. Meanwhile, about 70% of Nigerians live on less than $2 a day.

Hmmm!

Senseless restrictions and arcane procedures abound. Procter & Gamble had to shelve a $120m investment in a factory to make bathroom products because it could not import certain types of specialist paper.

Imagine!

An American airline waited a year for officials to sign off on an already agreed route from Atlanta to Lagos.

Because of kickbacks?

The need for new infrastructure is vast, but the price of a 50kg bag of cement is three times higher than in neighbouring countries. Fighting cartels is hard. Customs officers are bent, hindering foreign competitors. Judges are easily bought. The police are, at best, ill-equipped. One in four cops exists only on paper: chiefs collect the extra pay.

Haba!

Three-quarters of the government budget goes toward recurrent expenditure, including salaries. Parliamentarians are paid up to $2m a year—legally.

Impossicant!

More than two-thirds of Nigerians are still subsistence farmers. The majority, many of them Muslims, live far away from the coast. Incomes per head in the north are 50% lower than in the Christian south, and falling. Literacy rates in the north-east are two-thirds lower than in Lagos. A senior official in Kano, the northern capital, says 2m of the 9m residents are beggars.

What a stat!

Lamido Sanusi, the respected central-bank governor, who spent years in the private sector, says: “We need a civil war in government. We need people who will fight for change.”

That bad?

MTN, a mobile-phone company, has masts all over the country, as it does in South Africa, where the power supply is better. Operating costs are three times lower there. In Nigeria MTN must equip each mast with a generator, a back-up generator, a fuel tank, guards to protect the fuel and a lorry to deliver it.

Really?!

It is hard to exaggerate Nigeria’s power-poverty. The seventh-most-populous country in the world, and its seventh-biggest oil exporter, has as much grid power as Bradford, a post-industrial town in the north of England. Nigeria is the world’s biggest market for private generators

And, there are leaders there?!

Reform will be worth little, however, if state corruption is not tackled. That needs institutional change. In the view of many Nigerians, high officials should lose their immunity; legislators’ salaries should be cut, so as not to attract cowboys; and the publication of all government accounts would be a good idea.

No! They will NEVER do this

Nigeria is reformable, but it needs the right sort of leader. Its presidency is more powerful than its American equivalent

Incredible!

To change the system, Mr Jonathan would have to break with his backers. That is difficult, perhaps even dangerous. For instance, a mafia that embezzles vast fuel subsidies is said to be a big contributor to his campaign.

Really?!

The government spends more than $4 billion a year to sell fuel at less than half the already low American price. (Since Nigeria has no domestic refining capacity—billions allocated to repair its facilities were squandered—the fuel must be bought on international markets.)

O ga oo!

The president’s backers routinely falsify bills of lading, inflating the amount of fuel imported fivefold, then collect the government subsidy on all of it, and finally smuggle the fuel to a neighbouring country to sell at double or triple the price.

E gba mi oo!

Some see Mr Jonathan following in the footsteps of Chester Arthur, the 21st American president. Like him, he is humbly-born and bookish. Arthur was a penny lawyer, Mr Jonathan the first in his family of canoe-makers to earn a PhD (though some doubt he wrote it).

Hahahaa. Not fair! Not fair!

Both men fell in with mean political machines—Arthur in New York, Mr Jonathan in the Niger Delta—and were elevated from total obscurity to the vice-presidency by scheming regional bosses. Then the president suddenly died (Garfield in 1881, Yar’Adua in 2010), and the top job was theirs. Arthur deserted the machine that made him and put it out of business. He created the modern American civil service and throttled patronage politics. He was not re-elected.

Hey! GEJ! Please, read this.

During the election campaign he refused to debate his challengers unless he could control the rules. Voters may have promoted him beyond his natural abilities. When he was a provincial official in the 1990s, his catchphrase was “Don’t overdo things.”

Na lie! Na lie!

Alas, the man he chose as his vice-president is a patronage merchant with a huge personal fortune.

Patronage what?!

Which way Mr Jonathan will lean in the next four years should become clear soon. In early June he will unveil his new team. If he is going to defy the godfathers, this is the time to do it. The head of police, the customs chief, the chief justice, the main anti-corruption investigator—will they be partisan stooges, or men who put the country first?

A million-dollar question




http://www.economist.com/node/18741606

I dey vex.


I dey go sleep.