There is a saying I came across recently that captures the American view about their deficit:

I favor balancing the budget by raising everyone's taxes but mine. I also want a magic pony.

This wish fulfillment desire also afflicts Nigerians as they talk about all the things that the government should be doing. The desire for magic solutions means that no real solutions will be reached, which means that nothing will happen, which means that there will be more incentive for corruption. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.

There are two main sectors in which this magic pony thinking affects us deeply: Downstream oil and gas and power.

We want investments in the petroleum downstream infrastructure but we are not willing to pay fuel prices that would enable investment to be made in that sector.

We want gas to power our power plants but we are not willing to pay electricity prices that will allow the power plants to pay commercial prices for the gas and make investments in gas collection and distribution economical.

The standard solution to the magic pony problem is that the government should do it. The Nigerian government has taken on the magic pony with pretty predictable results.

Let's take power. The government has built all these nice and fancy power plants that don't work because there is no gas. There is no gas because there is no incentive to spend billions of dollars on gas infrastructure to supply gas to a customer that will pay 10c for product that trades on the world market for 25 to 35 times that. So the government is trying to blackmail the oil companies into building it, but the government will have to bring a lot more to the table than moral suasion.

Let's take downstream petroleum products. The government answer to this was to subsidise the products. This meant that those who imported the product were relying on the government to get an economic return. The government penchant for paying late meant that people were not making an economic return, and would only make minimum investments in their distribution network. This meant old, exploding trucks, practically no pipelines, and a lot of Tom, Dick and Harry distributors in the system.

Luckily magic pony thinking is leaving the downstream sector. The Federal Government has realised that they can't afford the subsidy, the state governments have realised that they too pay for the subsidy (they thought the federal government paid everything), and it is now common knowledge that subsidy only exists in the major cities and states (with the exception of Kano). There is now a panel to decide how best to implement deregulation: this implies that the Rubicon has been crossed in terms of petroleum products but it's a long way to Rome. Power on the other hand is still in Gaul.

P.S. Someone called Amanda left a comment on my blog about a bbc world blog interview thing. Since I get a lot of spam these days, I'm tempted to assume it is indeed spam but in case it isn't my email is snazzy.rites@gmail.com

In America one of the standard past times for up and coming criminals is the store/shop robbery. The store owners are also known to deter armed robbers by keeping guns of their own. In a way it's a bit of a throwback to their fastest guns in the west phase.

However one store owner cashier in Texas did not need a gun to win the battle with her armed assailant. All she needed was Jesus. Here is what she told the guy that tried to rob her:

'In the name of Jesus, you get out of my store. I bind you by the power of the Holy Spirit.'

The assailant backed out of the store and ran away.

In a later interview with the Dallas news she said: 'It was just like this whole store filled with the power of God'

Now this is an awesome story that should be told early and often and should bring joy to the hearts of the true believers, but I would like to file this one under "don't try this at home" I mean, I'm all for faith that moves mountains, but I would not advise this as the standard operating procedure when confronted by an armed assailant.

What say you?

So this girl was at one of those house parties that are a staple of Nigerian social life. She and one of her friends were at a table with a bunch of guys. It was a slight mismatch in that there were two girls and three guys.

As these things do sometimes, the conversations soon paired up leaving one guy the odd guy out. To her mind it was conversation and relatively innocent flirting. However a guy who was at the party disagreed and thought that there were sparks flying all over the place. The guy took it upon himself to put out said sparks, telling the girl that said dude had a girlfriend.

This is clear burning of the cable, based on the guy code established from olden times that guys do not interfere with other guys relationship business. However it doesn't change the fact that a guy can and should violate said guy code when friends or family are involved.

However in this particular case, the guy was himself toasting the girl, and so this doesn't fit into the standard friends and family divide. In fact it's clear that he was only informing her of the guy's couplehood to ensure that he would still have a chance.

The girl's take on it is that she didn't like the guy like that and so any possible gratitude for the information is completely negated by the fact that he did it mainly for his own gain.

I still think that she should cut him some slack, after all as they say there is no such thing as a truly selfless act :D

One of the key features of the Yar 'Adua saga has been the lock-step agreement between the Executive Council of the Federation, formally known as the Federal Executive Council. They even went as far to issue a statement saying that Yar 'Adua was not incapable of conducting his duties, and that he would inform them if he was unable to do so.

The statement was in response to a court order mandating the ECF to make a determination of the President's capacity to conduct his duties. The ECF made the declaration without recourse to the constitutionally mandated physicians, but they made it and it stood. The declaration was unanimous and looked to preserve the status quo indefinitely as it was unlikely that the Senate and the House of Representatives were going to agree to impeach Yar'Adua.

So flash forward to yesterday's meeting of the ECF, where Dora presented a memo calling on the ECF to support the transmission of a letter to the Senate saying the Yar'Adua was going on vacation and that Goodluck would become Acting President. The reasons she gave were non-political; talking about perm secs, signing the budget, the Jos crisis and so on.

However due to the fact that the memo was not on the agenda for the day, discussion on the memo was not allowed, and all copies were handed in to avoid being leaked to the press. Unfortunately for those inclined to secrecy, members of the ECF that were in support of the memo happily leaked it to the press from memory.

The newspapers that carried the stories made it very clear that Dora was not the one that leaked the information, its almost as if they are doing their part to protect her from any possible retribution. What the papers do show is that the ECF is divided amongst itself and that many of the members were clearly thinking the same thing but were afraid to speak out.

Dora's memo has clearly brought things to a head, and I salute her courage. She has said that she will table the memo again next week Wednesday and here is to hoping that the ECF will have the courage to take a decision that will be in the best interests of Nigeria. As she reportedly said "If we fail to act now, history will not forgive us"

The newspaper accounts
ThisDay
Next
Punch
BusinessDay

As a random aside, Next is starting to annoy me by cropping the stories and telling the reader to go and read the newspaper. It's one of those things that seems like a good idea in theory but is horrible in practice.