Boko Haram attack on Nigeria oil team killed over 50.

Details emerging from Tuesday's ambush in northeast Nigeria suggest the death toll is higher than initially reported.

More than 50 people were killed in a Boko Haram ambush on an oil exploration team in northeast Nigeria earlier this week, multiple sources told AFP news agency on Thursday, warning the death toll could rise.

Tuesday's attack in the Magumeri area of Borno state on a convoy of specialists from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was the group's deadliest in months.

It underscored the persistent threat posed by Boko Haram fighters, despite government claims they were a spent force, and also the risks associated with the hunt for crude in the volatile Lake Chad basin.

Details of the ambush, which was initially thought to be a kidnapping attempt, have been slow to emerge and an exact death toll difficult to establish, as the military strictly controls access to rural Borno.

Telecommunications and other infrastructure have been severely damaged or destroyed in the conflict, which has left at least 20,000 dead and more than 2.6 million homeless since 2009.

The army said on Wednesday that 10 people were killed in the attack.

But one source involved in dealing with the aftermath told AFP news agency on Thursday: "The death toll keeps mounting. Now we have more than 50... and more bodies are coming in."

"It's clear that the attack wasn't for abduction. They (Boko Haram) attacked just to kill."

Missing university staff

An aid agency worker in Magumeri, which is 50 kilometres northwest of Maiduguri, said 47 bodies were recovered from the bush as of Wednesday evening.

"Eleven of them were badly burned in the attack. They were burned alive in their vehicle, which was stuck in a trench," he added.

"We buried them here because they couldn't be taken to Maiduguri.

"This evening (Thursday), six more bodies were recovered, including one soldier, and many more could be recovered because search and rescue teams are all over the place."

A medical source at the Nigerian Army 7th Division headquarters at Maimalari barracks in Maiduguri said: "So far we have 18 dead soldiers. Ten were brought yesterday and eight more today."

At the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), a medical worker said: "We have 19 bodies at the moment of civilians.

"Fifteen of them were vigilantes (civilian militia) and four were staff from the university. They have been taken for burial."

The head of the academic staff union at the University of Maiduguri, Dani Mamman, confirmed they had received four bodies and said two of them were academics.

"We got the impression our staff on the team were rescued because that was what the military spokesman said yesterday," he added.

"But we were shocked when we were given four dead bodies. This means it wasn't a rescue. We still have other staff that are yet to be accounted for."

Hospital and army officials told the local Punch newspaper that the corpses of 18 soldiers and 30 others had been brought to a facility in Maiduguri following the incident.

The bodies brought to the hospital included 18 soldiers, 15 members of the Civilian Joint Tast Force (JTF), a group of fighters to help oust Boko Haram, five local university staff and four NNPC drivers, Punch reported.

An ongoing threat

In a statement, Nigeria's junior oil minister and the former head of the NNPC Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu described the attack as "unfortunate" but did not give a death toll.

OPEC-member Nigeria is looking to find new oil reserves away from the southern Niger Delta, which has been blighted by attacks from rebels wanting a fairer share of revenue for local people.

With production hit by the attacks, there has been a shift in focus to explore inland basins, including around Lake Chad in the northeast, where Nigeria meets Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Both Chad and Niger are exploiting reserves on their side of the freshwater lake.

Activities on the Nigerian side had to stop in November 2014 because of Boko Haram violence but the military gave permission to resume exploration in November last year, according to Kachikwu.

Work is centred on a triangle of hotly contested land stretching from Gubio in the west of Borno to Marte in the east, and Kukawa, in the far northeast corner near the shores of the lake.

There has been no serious suggestion that Boko Haram is motivated by a desire to control oil in northeast Nigeria.

But fighters, squeezed out of captured territory by the military counter-insurgency, may have been keen to make a show of force against the soldiers and civilian militia guarding the NNPC team.

In recent months, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group affiliate has been forced to rely on guerilla tactics, particularly suicide bomb attacks, against the security forces and civilian militia.

Women and young girls in particular have been used against civilian "soft" targets such as mosques, as well as the university in Maiduguri.

Source: News Agencies/Aljazeera

Military and Political Heavyweights by Eddie Iroh.

I just wonder how many Nigerians have taken their tongue to count their teeth lately? If they did, calmly and dispassionately, without the emotive effusion that often beclouds the intellect of even ordinarily reasonable men and women, they would find that if care is not taken soon and i mean very soon their country could become a toothless bull dog. The unthinkable would happen Nigeria would disintegrate. The Not Negotiable would be negotiated.

While the focus is on Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB and Ndigbo and their agitation for or against Biafra, a geographical minority in relation to the rest of the country, the Northern Elders Forum, a behemoth led by stalwarts beside whom Kanu would be a small boy, have declared the "readiness of the North to break up Nigeria." 

From the cowards and docile elements, the Facebook pontiffs whose stock in logic is the easy resort to insult and abuse, and the others who find Kanu, IPOB and Ndigbo a soft and easy target, I have not heard a whimper or a whisper against the Elders of the North and their threat. Nor have i heard a squeak from the pips of the serving and retired Army Generals who would threaten to crush any threat against the unity and sovereignty of the Federal Republic. One is then left to resort to conjectures. One such is that this conspiracy of cowardly silence is almost certainly because the true geographical, political and military heavyweights of Nigeria have spoken. 

The politicians and "we the people" have scurried under cover even though their Kaduna Declaration, alongside the Quit Notice to Ndigbo in the North, and the sudden jettisoning of Restructuring, pose a far greater threat to the unity of Nigeria than IPOB can muster. No one is calling the Northern Elders idiots, albinos, demagogues etc, as Kanu is often excoriated. No one dared! Just because a cat looks like a tiger does not make it a tiger. Indeed a cat knows a tiger when it sees one and dares not tweak the tiger's tail.

One does not have to belong to IPOB or Ohaneze to expect equity and even handedness in dealing with any issue that goes to the very heart of the corporate existence of Nigeria. But when it comes to dispassionate examination of critical national issues, there are as many positions as there are ethnic groups. That is because Nigerians are very strange animals. And any inference to the Zoo here is totally unintended.

Eddie Iroh

MAY YOUR ROAD BE ROUGH By Tai Solarin, (Jan. 1, 1964.)

I am not cursing you; I am wishing you what I wish myself every year. I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year, may there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not so sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’? I ask for no more.

Our successes are conditioned by the amount of risk we are ready to take. Earlier on today I visited a local farmer about three miles from where I live. He could not have been more than fifty-five, but he said he was already too old to farm vigorously. He still suffered, he said, from the physical energy he displayed as a farmer in his younger days. Around his hut were two pepper bushes. There were Coco yams growing round him. There were snail shells which had given him meat. There must have been more around the banana trees I saw. He hardly ever went to town to buy things. He was self-sufficient.
The car or the bus, the television or the telephone, the newspaper, Vietnam or Red China were nothing to him. He had no ambitions whatsoever, he told me. I am not sure if you are already envious of him, but were we all to revert to such a life, we would be practically driven back to cave dwelling. On the other hand, try to put yourself into the position of the Russian or the America astronaut. Any moment now the count, 3, 2, 1, is going to go, and you are going to be shot into the atmosphere and soon you will be whirling round our earth at the speed of six miles per second. If you get so fired into the atmosphere and you forget what to do to ensure return to earth, one of the things that might happen to you is that you could become forever satellite, going round the earth until you die of starvation and even then your body would continue the gyration!

When, therefore, you are being dressed up and padded to be shot into the sky, you know only too well that you are going on the roughest road man had ever trodden.

The Americans and Russians who have gone were armed with the great belief that they would come back. But I cannot believe that they did not have some slight foreboding on the contingency of their non-return. It is their courage for going in spite of these apprehensions that makes the world hail them so loudly today.

The big fish is never caught in shallow waters. You have to go into the open sea for it. The biggest businessmen make decisions with lighting speed and carry them out with equal celerity. They do not dare delay or dally. Time would pass them by if they did. The biggest successes are preceded by the greatest of heart-burnings. You should read the stories of the bomber pilots of World War II. The Russian pilot, the German pilot, the American or the British pilot suffered exactly the same physical and mental tension the night before a raid on enemy territory. There were no alternative routes for those who most genuinely believed in victory for their side.

You cannot make omelettes without breaking eggs, throughout the world, there is no paean without pain. Jawaharlal Nehru has put it so well. I am paraphrasing him. He wants to meet his troubles in a frontal attack. He wants to see himself tossed into the aperture between the two horns of the bull. Being there, he determines he is going to win and, therefore, such a fight requires all his faculties.
When my sisters and I were young and we slept on our small mats round our mother, she always woke up at 6a.m. for morning prayers. She always said prayers on our behalf but always ended with something like this: ‘May we not enter into any dangers or get into any difficulties this day.’ It took me almost thirty years to dislodge the canker-worm in our mother’s sentiments. I found, by hard experience, that all that is noble and laudable was to be achieved only through difficulties and trials and tears and dangers. There are no other roads.

If I was born into a royal family and should one day become a constitutional king, I am inclined to think I should go crazy. How could I, from day to day, go on smiling and nodding approval at somebody else’s successes for an entire lifetime? When Edward the Eighth (now Duke of Windsor) was a young, sprightly Prince of Wales, he went to Canada and shook so many hands that his right arm nearly got pulled out of its socket. It went into a sling and he shook hands thenceforth with his left hand. It would appear he was trying his utmost to make a serious job out of downright sinecure.
Life, if it is going to be abundant, must have plenty of hills and vales. It must have plenty of sunshine and rough weather. It must be rich in obfuscation and perspicacity. It must be packed with days of danger and of apprehension.

When I walk into the dry but certainly cool morning air of every January 1st, I wish myself plenty of tears and of laughter, plenty of happiness and unhappiness, plenty of failures and successes. Plenty of abuse and praise. It is impossible to win ultimately without a rich measure of inter mixture in such a menu. Life would be worthless without the lot. We do not achieve much in this country because we are all so scared of taking risks. We all want the smooth and well-paved roads. While the reason the Americans and others succeeded so well is that they took such great risks.
If, therefore, you are out in this New Year 1964, to win any target you have set for yourself, please accept my prayers and your elixir. May your road be rough!

Tai Solarin (1922-1994) was one of Nigeria’s foremost social activists and front line educationists, his evergreen legacy includes the famous Mayflower School, Ikenne and Molusi College Ijebu-Igbo Ogun state. This article was first published in Daily Times Newspaper of January 1st, 1964.

The Etisalat Example by Dr. Kazeem Bello.

The Abu Dhabi Government that owned Etisalat pulled the company out of Nigeria last week and gave the Nigerian ex-partners 7 days to change its name and drop its Trade name. That has been complied with. Etisalat Nigeria changed the name this past week. The news information about this I monitored on my travel to Dubai on the local news which indicated that the Nigerian Etisalat claimed it invested over $20 billion on equipment and facilities in Nigeria. The news Analyst from Dubai Business New Network TV insisted that it is not possible. The parent company invested $13 billion in Gulf Area to attract over 40 million subscribers, with high world class services , how can Etisalat Nigeria invest $20 billion for 22 million subscribers with epileptic services and a debt ridden company?

The Abu Dhabi home office is struggling to remove the negative effect of the news on the company's stock market performance. It is being very difficult because the numbers are not adding up. The questions in Abu Dhabi is what does Etisalat Head quarters know about the mammoth fraud that prevailed in Etisalat Nigeria? How can the company claim to have spent so much in investment and infrastructure and yet come out with huge debts?

While Etisalat Group is facing serious backlash at home over this monumental fraud, in Nigeria, our CBN is not even asking any question to unravel why the company suddenly went bankrupt. Instead, our CBN and Ministry of Finance from the above are struggling to take over the company's debts and pass it to the unsuspecting tax payers under the umbrella of the debt ridden AMCOM.

The Chairman of the Board and all Board members of the defunct Etisalat Nigeria resigned and walked away free leaving Nigerians with another private sector mismanaged debt ridden company.

Actually, the major reason for my worried contribution here is on the Banking System in Nigeria and the financial mess we may have found ourselves in. Many Nigerians may not know this for a fact because the authorities will never tell you the truth, just like it took several years of noise for the NNPC to admit that the corporation is debt ridden and bankrupt. The Government of Nigeria will not admit it that the CBN of Nigeria is currently running at a Deficit Financial Model. This is called a DEF Model operations in Central Banking structure and practice. For references, you can google " Greece Monetary Collapse" and also the great fall in Brazilian financial system in the 90's. The CBN is almost at those crescendo from all indications going by several body languages, utterances and news from the international financial circle.
The CBN may not be able to cover import bills for more that 15 days from now as we speak which is a huge red flag! The CBN is currently not in any position to bail out the Government in any form due to distress in its liquidity-money creation matrix. CBN cannot perform its role as lender of last resort to the Government of Nigeria as we speak, a major function of Central Banking system. This may be the reason why last week, the Hon Minister of Finance addressed a press conference to tell Nigerians that they are in trouble but most Nigerians just did not understand how to interpret her unspoken words. She said clearly that Government will have to aggressively borrow money from abroad to implement the 2017 budget. Her reason was predicated on the wrong and super inferior analysis that Nigeria has a low debt-capital ratio hence there are rooms for more external debts. We better find a way to stop her from running a huge debt that OBJ was able to clear up during his regime but was kept low during Jonathan's regime due to oil windfall which makes borrowing unnecessary then.

Now with disappointing and falling oil prices, low income-revenue generation by Government, NNPC totally broke running at huge deficits, CBN's inability to bail out Government, we seem to have no choice than to go back to external borrowing at premium at all cost.

Something is pathologically wrong with the Nigerian system. I have written about this in early December 2016 when the budget estimates came out. I pointed to the totally wrong budget appropriation and tagged it a budget of " Economic Contractions". I mentioned that by 3rd quarter of the year, the bubble will burst if something is not done and the Economy may slide into a full blown depression far worse than recession. It is not known what the facts are right now because there are various attempts to hide facts and give erroneous figures to the unsuspecting public. The situation is really bad based on International Analysts facts and figures especially with perceived not admitted dire financial crises at the CBN. We may see an Economic Emergency Bill very soon showing up at the desk of the Senate President but with the current face off between the Acting President and the Senate leadership, it is doubtful if such required bill will ever come to surface. That will be an instrument for the " hawks" in the Senate to roast the Acting President and blackmail him further of incompetence. In the fight between two giant elephants, the grass will have to pay dearly and suffer for it. Nigerians will grow in more poverty, no power, no infrastructure, high inflation, and low economic activities and no salaries for work done.

Back to the Etisalat case, this is the fact of the matter and CBN has not deemed it fit to raise any probe on the huge bank lending to one single company without adequate collateral. Indeed what asset does Etisalat own aside from its license that will be worth the amount of debts being cited? I don't live in Nigeria but at least on my visits, I have not seen any such assets except power masts all over the place.

The same Nigerian Banks gave billions to all the debt ridden GENCOs AND DISCOs with no collateral and yet we have no power. Again, I have written on this issue before. How the power system in Nigeria was defrauded by the collusion of the so-called investors, Nigerian Banks and some officials in the defunct FGN. Nigerians are very prayerful people, we are still trooping to the worship places to pray for steady power supply when some are swimming in billions from the fraud in the sector. Our dream for steady power supply is daily becoming a mirage, to say the least.

The other day, I was having a discussion with a Chinese group of investors on telephone and internet network projects. They mentioned that with about $5 billion dollars in investment in highly powerful telecom equipment and satellite infrastructure, they will supply over 120 million in Nigeria with highly efficient phone and internet network service with super easy, small and latest technology. So why is Etisalat with $20 billion in investment not able to supply good phone and internet network service in Nigeria? Yet poor Nigerians are paying for poor services and will again pay the company's debt through our taxes.
The same way the same people buy and pay for banks and goes around to liquidate the same bank while the tax payers takes over the debts through AMCON. 

Nigeria's Solution to the Problem of Electric Cars By Pius Adesanmi.

Scandinavia, Britain, France, Netherlands, India, China, the US - everyone is in a scramble to announce the end of fuel-powered cars by 2040 and so on. Everyone is announcing that every car on their roads will be green by 2040. Only electric cars. No more petrol and diesel cars.

Many of my friends, who still are yet to come to terms with just how terrible the psychology of Nigeria's political elite is, have been agonizing. They are worried about what happens to an oil-dependent, monocultural economy like Nigeria when all the buyers of her oil go green and her oil pretty much becomes useless.

Well, I can tell you for sure that from Aso Rock to the National Assembly, to Governors, down the ladder to the most inconsequential member of the political class - you can add the socioeconomic elite too - they are already thinking and planning ahead for the advent of electric cars in 2040.

They are just not thinking the way you are thinking.

If you do a laundry list of the solutions they have found as a class to the challenges of modern living in the 21st century, you will gain an insight into how they are going to handle the transition to electric cars.

Problems of space in their built environments in Ikoyi, VI, and Maitama? They destroyed master plans, built on green areas and public parks, built commercial ventures in residential areas, commandeered communal rail track areas for parking lots of private schools, etc. Other elite in tight spaces in Hong Kong, Singapore, etc, will experiment with innovative mastery of space by applying engineering and architectural genius to achieve vertical derring-do in building design. The Nigerian elite will visit violence and aesthetic chaos on her own built space because she has too much money and too little culture.

Bad roads and death traps? They are buying more and more helicopters; their jeeps are getting bigger and sturdier. The other day, I saw Senator Ben Murray-Bruce and a group of other pregnant male Senators inspecting Federal roads in worse condition than the farm paths used by Askia the Great in the Songhai Empire in the 15th century.

The Senators say they are members of one of these useless Senate committees and they had come to do a firsthand assessment of the roads. This was some expressway linking Edo state to the deep south. As the Senators granted TV interviews, talking rubbish, you could see their jeeps in the background. I shook my head in anger. Useless people. They have now seen that the roads have gotten worse. They will return to Abuja to suggest bigger and sturdier jeeps capable of coping with the roads for all Senators in the 2018 appropriation.

Poor health facilities? Well, you have been witnesses to their nakedness and utter shamelessness on display in London this week as a political class. Foreign hospitals will remain their only answer to Nigeria's health issues.

So, how do you think an elite that has handled its own lived environment, roads, and health in this manner will handle the question of electric cars and the imminent end of the fuel economy?

Well, by now, I can bet that some of them are already making inquiries from the innovation sectors of Scandinavia, Britain, France, the US, China, and India. When can we start to place individual orders for these cars of the future? When can we start to queue up for customized versions of these cars? How many can you deliver to me in Lagos or Abuja on January 1, 2040?

How can they be attempting to place orders for cars in 2040 when they cannot guarantee that they will be alive even tomorrow? Never mind. Members of Nigeria's political elite are not intelligent enough to think like that. Their singular focus will be to be the first elite in the world to use cars they cannot manufacture.

And by the time the electric cars are being delivered over their dead bodies to their children in 2040, their own goal of being able to manufacture pencils in Nigeria sometime in this 21st century may still not have been realized.

If the owner of morning says it shall be well with the leaders of Nigeria, the owner of evening will disagree.

Pius Adesanmi