NEWS: 20 Million Youths For 2015

January 2012 was remarkable in the history of Nigeria. It was the month that sent a message to those whose core merchandise in statecraft is insensitivity in policy formation and implementation. That month, Nigerians proved those who used to dismiss them as cowards wrong. Our legendary docility gave way to participation. Our penchant for not caring to know how our resources are massively looted in government was jettisoned for a new found love for knowing: knowing how we get our revenues and how we expend same; knowing how much litres of fuel we consume per day; knowing the exact amount it costs us to feed our president. It was this quest for knowing, and insistence on having things done properly, that pushed us to the streets to protest the blank increment of pump price of fuel. It was hugely successful.
Those eruptions were initiated by mostly young people. Under the aegis of #OccupyNigeria, youths planned such protests that staggered the establishment and jolted the pessimists. We have thought it through, and seen that the battle to reclaim Nigeria demands a new approach. We have opted for a continuation of the revolution we started with #OccupyNigeria. It has a new name: #20MillionYouthsFor2015.
What are we about? We are an assemblage of young Nigerians whose primary aim is to change the course of governance, not from the sidelines this time, but from inside the system. We plan to build a membership of, at least, 20 million people -from every tribe and religion – who will participate in educating Nigerians about the need to destroy the existing order that is fast running our country out of existence and instituting a new order that will birth equity, fairness, justice and development for all. We will be partisan because politics is too serious a business to leave for the politicians alone. We will participate fully in the politics of this country. Our army of 20 million people will organize themselves, pick intelligent, courageous, transparent and detribalized candidates for all positions in the 2015 elections and run their campaigns from ground up. There is no age limit, but leadership of the movement will be restricted to young people alone.
We are tired of just becoming critics. Aluta Continua isn’t one of our favorite quotes. We won’t continue with the struggle. WE SIMPLY WILL END THE STRUGGLE by ending the grip of the corrupt in our polity. We owe our generation the duty of saving this country, building it to become a force to be respected in the world, and passing down to our children a nation they can be proud of.
What makes us different from regular NGOs? Most NGOs are mere observers. We will not just observe. We’ll become actors in the system. We will build an entirely new country beginning from our internal processes. We have in our roadmap a system that makes power of the movement resident in the local communities. Our strength is in our membership system that replicates itself. It is called the CELL system. Every member MUST belong to a cell. Ownership is by everybody. Every leadership position is by popular votes. Bribery is abhorred and punishable by expulsion. Every member will be made to understand the importance of working hard for the movement. Our core duty is education. But we will not educate people from afar. We will bring them into our fold and educate them on citizenship participation. We have an enormous pool of human resources with which to achieve this aim.
Movement Ownership: Every member is an owner. The rules do not give room for one-man ownership. We have put every structure in place to make it impossible for the movement to become a one-man movement.
Modus Operandi: We’ll run like a world-class corporation. We have set up our system to operate like a frictionless machine, with the speed of an insurgency and the efficiency of a corporation. We’ll take advantage of the youth population in the country. We will aggressively recruit members. In fact, outreach is part of our rules.
We have found the solution. All we need to do is begin implementation. And that implementation commences the moment you sign on. It begins with you!
Our road map is available for people who are interested.

Register online at: my.20millionyouthsfor2015.org/register1976.h

Facebook: www.Faceboook.com/20millionyouthsfor2015

Twitter: @20millionyouths;

Email: Info@20millionyouthsfor2015.org

EXPOSED: The IMF and AFRICOM Join Hands To Rob the African Continent

• Lagos Dissents Under IMF Hegemony 
• Nigeria: The Next Front for AFRICOM

On a recent trip to West Africa, the newly appointed managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde ordered the governments of Nigeria, Guinea, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad to relinquish vital fuel subsidies. Much to the dismay of the population of these nations, the prices of fuel and transport have near tripled over night without notice, causing widespread violence on the streets of the Nigerian capital of Abuja and its economic center, Lagos. Much like the IMF induced riots in Indonesia during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, public discontent in Nigeria is channelled towards an incompetent and self-serving domestic elite, compliant to the interests of fraudulent foreign institutions.

Although Nigeria holds the most proven oil reserves in Africa behind Libya, it’s people are now expected to pay a fee closer to what the average American pays for the cost of fuel, an exorbitant sum in contrast to its regional neighbours. Alternatively, other oil producing nations such as Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia offer their populations fuel for as little as $0.12 USD per gallon. While Lagos has one of Africa’s highest concentration of billionaires, the vast majority of the population struggle daily on less than $2.00 USD. Amid a staggering 47% youth unemployment rate and thousands of annual deaths related to preventable diseases, the IMF has pulled the rug out from under a nation where safe drinking water is a luxury to around 80% of it’s populace.

Although Nigeria produces 2.4 million barrels of crude oil a day intended for export use, the country struggles with generating sufficient electrical power and maintaining its infrastructure. Ironically enough, less than 6% of bank depositors own 88% of all bank deposits in Nigeria. Goldman Sachs employees line its domestic government, in addition to the former Vice President of the World Bank, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who is widely considered by many to be the de facto Prime Minister. Even after decades of producing lucrative oil exports, Nigeria has failed to maintain it’s own refineries, forcing it to illogically purchase oil imports from other nations. Society at large has not benefited from Nigeria’s natural riches, so it comes as no surprise that a severe level of distrust is held towards the government, who claims the fuel subsidy needs to be lifted in order to divert funds towards improving the quality of life within the country.

Like so many other nations, Nigerian people have suffered from a systematically reduced living standard after being subjected to the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP). Before a loan can be taken from the World Bank or IMF, a country must first follow strict economic policies, which include currency devaluation, lifting of trade tariffs, the removal of subsidies and detrimental budget cuts to critical public sector health and education services.

SAPs encourage borrower countries to focus on the production and export of domestic commodities and resources to increase foreign exchange, which can often be subject to dramatic fluctuations in value. Without the protection of price controls and an authentic currency rate, extreme inflation and poverty subsist to the point of civil unrest, as seen in a wide array of countries around the world (usually in former colonial protectorates). The people of Nigeria have been one of the world’s most vocal against IMF-induced austerity measures, student protests have been met with heavy handed repression since 1986 and several times since then, resulting in hundreds of civilian deaths. As a testament to the success of the loan, the average laborer in Nigeria earned 35% more in the 1970’s than he would of in 2012.

Working through the direct representation of Western Financial Institutions and the IMF in Nigeria’s Government, a new IMF conditionality calls for the creation of a Sovereign Wealth Fund. Olusegun Aganga, the former Nigerian Minister of Finance commented on how the SWF was hastily pushed through and enacted prior to the countries national elections. If huge savings are amassed from oil exports and austerity measures, one cannot realistically expect that these funds will be invested towards infrastructure development based on the current track record of the Nigerian Government.

Further more, it is increasingly more likely that any proceeds from a SWF would be beneficial to Western institutions and markets, which initially demanded its creation. Nigerian philanthropist Bukar Usman prophetically writes “I have genuine fears that the SWF would serve us no better than other foreign-recommended “remedies” which we had implemented to our own detriment in the past or are being pushed to implement today.”

The abrupt simultaneous removal of fuel subsidies in several West African nations is a clear indication of who is really in charge of things in post-colonial Africa. The timing of its cushion-less implementation could not be any worse, Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency after forty people were killed in a church bombing on Christmas day, an act allegedly committed by the Islamist separatist group, Boko Haram. The group advocates dividing the predominately Muslim northern states from the Christian southern states, a similar predicament to the recent division of Sudan.

As the United States African Command (AFRICOM) begins to gain a foothold into the continent with its troops officially present in Eritrea and Uganda in an effort to maintain security and remove other theocratic religious groups such as the Lord’s Resistance Army, the sectarian violence in Nigeria provides a convenient pretext for military intervention in the continuing resource war. For further insight into this theory, it is interesting to note that United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvaniaconducted a series of African war game scenarios in preparation for the Pentagon’s expansion of AFRICOM under the Obama Administration.

In the presence of US State Department Officials, employees from The Rand Corporation and Israeli military personnel, a military exercise was undertaken which tested how AFRICOM would respond to a disintegrating Nigeria on the verge of collapse amidst civil war. The scenario envisioned rebel factions vying for control of the Niger Delta oil fields (the source of one of America’s top oil imports), which would potentially be secured by some 20,000 U.S. troops if a US-friendly coup failed to take place At a press conference at the House Armed Services Committee on March 13, 2008, AFRICOM Commander, General William Ward then went on to brazenly state the priority issue of America’s growing dependence on African oil would be furthered by AFRICOM operating under the principle theatre-goal of “combating terrorism”.

At an AFRICOM Conference held at Fort McNair on February 18, 2008, Vice Admiral Robert T. Moeller openly declared the guiding principle of AFRICOM was to protect “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market”, before citing China’s increasing presence in the region as challenging to American interests. After the unwarranted snatch-and-grab regime change conducted in Libya, nurturing economic destabilization, civil unrest and sectarian conflict in Nigeria is an ultimately tangible effort to secure Africa’s second largest oil reserves.

During the pillage of Libya, its SFW accounts worth over 1.2 billion USD were frozen and essentially absorbed by Franco-Anglo-American powers; it would realistic to assume that much the same would occur if Nigeria failed to comply with Western interests. While agents of foreign capital have already infiltrated its government, there is little doubt that Nigeria will become a new front in the War on Terror.

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Source: Nile Bowie via InformAfrica.com

EXPOSED: How Okonjo-Iweala Misled Jonathan With Figures

On the eve of Nigeria’s general strike to protest the removal of petrol subsidy in the country by the Goodluck Jonathan administration, I have been researching the archives, using the Freedom of Information law as cover, to find out how President Jonathan reached his present anti-people policy.

It all started on 6 December last year, when Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, the Finance minister and the coordinating minister for the economy (a position not provided in our constitution) presented ‘briefs’ to the Federal Executive Council on why the Jonathan administration must end the subsidy in less than a month.

When Nigerians go through these so called facts, they will find that Okonjo’s conclusions are the typical, ‘working to the answer’. Her thesis cannot stand the test of a strict scrutiny and indeed calls into question her credentials as a financial expert.

For starters:

1. Okonjo’s thesis was wrong from the beginning: she says that subsidy does not reach the poor, that only the rich and the middle class are the beneficiaries. The hollowness and shallowness of the position have been profoundly proven by the cries of agony by Nigerians. Who have been the most hit by the anti-people measure? The poor. Who have been crying loudest? The poor.

Even, if we accept her theory that the rich and middle class are the greatest beneficiaries of oil subsidy, are they not Nigerians? Are they not entitled to some goodies from their government?

2. Okonjo posited that Nigeria had spent N3.6 trillion on subsidy in five years, an average of N660 billion yearly, but fails to explain how the figure rose to N1.3 trillion in 2011, the same year like 2008 when international oil prices shot to the roof.

Using Okonjo’s statistics, the average crude oil price in 2008 was $101.78 dollars, compared with $113.98 in 2011. The amount of subsidy in those years was at variance by more than 10 per cent that any reasonable, rational, logical person will expect. What accounted for this difference? Was subsidy fund stolen to fund Jonathan’s re-election campaign? Was the increase in subsidy expenses because the oil cabal presented bogus claims for settlement?

Mrs. Okonjo Iweala did not explain and no one provided any details.

3. Okonjo’s analysis to paint subsidy as bad and to justify why it must go, were based on two oil prices and it was obvious she did so to arrive at her bogus conclusion.

In one breath, she used $113 dollars as the base price of crude oil to determine how Nigeria’s subsidized oil price ranks with other African countries. At 46 cents, petrol is cheapest in Nigeria, compared with mainly non-oil producing countries, such as Cape Verde, CAR, Malawi, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, and Mali etc. Angola, an oil producer is also classified as selling its petrol higher than Nigeria at 69 cents a litre. If only Mrs. Okonjo had looked at her figures and graph, she would have seen two other oil producers in Africa, seating pretty below Nigeria on this price graph. These countries are Algeria, which unlike Nigeria sells more refined products than Nigeria, which sells its crude to the world, without trying to add value, by refining and creating jobs at home. The other country is Libya. Algeria sells a litre of petrol at 32 cents and Libya sells its own at 17 cents. They are fellow oil producers like our country. According to Okonjo, these countries offer cheap fuel to their people because they are not as populated like Nigeria and because they have higher per capita than Nigeria.

However missing from her explanation was whether those countries behave like Nigeria’s irresponsible rulers, spending three-quarters of their budget on recurrent expenditure, cutlery, bullet proof cars and so on.

4. In another breath, Mrs. Okonjo compared Nigeria’s oil price last year, with a mixed bag of European, Latin America and African nations, all oil producers. These statistics showed that Nigeria’s price at N65 was not the cheapest in the world. Although petrol sold cheaper here then than Angola and Sudan, in Venezuela, it is almost free at 3 cents. Brunei, Yemen, Oman, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran all offer their petrol very cheap to their people. In Iran, it is 10 cents, compared with Nigeria’s January 2012 price of almost $1. The Saudis sell their oil at 17 cents, Kuwait at 22 cents.

5. With subsidy removed, we can already feel the effects the increase has had on the Nigerian people: it has further pauperized them and has made things more difficult for the 90 per cent living on less than $2 a day, according to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central bank governor.

6. In further analysis, Okonjo presented another graph that shows Nigeria’s position, among other oil producers and African nations after the subsidy removal. The graph puts the cost of fuel at 69 cents, using another oil price as basis—$90 per barrel. Of course all Nigerians know that the fuel they are selling at gas stations is between N141 and N150, which is very close to $1. Curiously, on the same graph sits USA. There, a litre of oil is 80 cents, cheaper than what the Russians (84 cents), the Indonesians (83 cents), war-torn Iraq (81 cents) pay for a litre of fuel.

7. Nigerians need to ask Okonjo the logic that supports citizens of an oil-producing nation, like Nigeria, paying more money for fuel than the Americans, oil importers, pay. America has a greater per capita than Nigeria; the least income earner in America earns at least $24,000 a year, compared with Nigeria where 90 per cent live on $2 a day.

Will this policy not diminish further our people’s capacity to get out of the vicious bracket of poverty? How now will 90 per cent of Nigerians starving on $2 a day, not be economically asphyxiated when commodity prices have jumped, in some cases by 100 per cent?

In my view, her argument and the entire policy of removing the fuel subsidy are ill thought out and ‘callous’ as some Nigerians have said.

Written by Bayo Onanuga via naijacommunity.net