President Goodluck Jonathan asks bank chief Sanusi to resign

Nigeria's president asked central bank chief Lamido Sanusi to resign over a leaked letter about missing oil funds, a source has confirmed to the BBC.

But Mr Sanusi refused, telling Goodluck Jonathan that others could have leaked his memo about the state oil firm's failure to account for $50bn (£30bn).

Ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo referred to this in a letter criticising Mr Jonathan's leadership last month.

President Jonathan was angered by the criticism, denying government fraud.
In a rebuttal letter before Christmas, the president said that Mr Obasanjo, who is also a member of the governing People's Democratic Party, was threatening "national security" by whipping up opposition to his administration.

He dismissed allegations of "high corruption" in government and said that Mr Sanusi's allegations - made in a letter dated 25 September - were "spurious".

A respected banker, Mr Sanusi has spearheaded reforms in Nigeria's troubled banking sector since his appointment in 2009.

'Heated exchange'
According to Nigeria's This Day newspaper, President Jonathan demanded the bank chief's resignation over the phone, asking him to leave by 31 December 2013.

But in a heated exchange, Mr Sanusi refused to leave his post before his term ends later this year, a source confirmed to the BBC.

Mr Sanusi said that about $10bn (£6bn) was still unaccounted for by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and expressed surprise that those responsible were not being asked to resign instead.

Mr Jonathan accused the Central Bank governor of leaking the letter to Mr Obasanjo after which the full letter was published in the Nigerian media.

Mr Sanusi said the leak could have come from the presidency or ministry of finance and the blame could not lie with him.

Nigeria has recently been listed among countries that could become the next set of economic giants in years to come - known as the "Mint" nations.

Correspondent says deep divisions have engulfed the PDP over the last year amid fears that it could lose the election under Mr Jonathan's leadership.

BBC

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Can Lagos save Nigeria?

Nigeria is arguably the worst run of the world’s seven most populated countries. Despite earning hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenue over the past decade, it is expected by 2015, by some calculations, to have the second-most destitute people in the world after India. But its largest city, Lagos, which until recently was known as one of the world’s most difficult cities to govern, seems to have turned a corner.

Even though it remains a slum-ridden and largely impoverished metropolis, with an exploding population estimated at 21 million (of Nigeria’s 170 million people), it has seen steady improvement in its governance for over a decade. The government has enhanced public transportation, cleaned up streets, upgraded the business environment and bettered the lives of its inhabitants.

So Nigeria, of all places, may be pointing the way to a strategy by which fragile states might begin to succeed: Devolve more power to cities from their corrupt and overcentralized national governments. At least in democracies, the cities have promise because their elected politicians face pressure to deliver specific services to their constituents. In the central governments, which are more remote, there is too much power and wealth to be grabbed by dysfunctional politicians and their cronies, and too little direct accountability.

The emergence of fragile states is one of the world’s most pressing problems. Such states, which include Nigeria, Iraq and Yemen, contain a rising number of the world’s poor (half of the world’s people who live on less than $1.25 a day will be in fragile states by 2015, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and contribute disproportionately to the world’s instability and terrorism. They have become a major focus of international aid efforts, but it has proved very difficult to improve governance there.

The turnaround in Lagos can be traced to 1999, when Nigeria returned to democracy and the city began holding regular elections. For the first time since independence, Lagos was able to re-elect its own leaders, or turn them out of office. And while national elections became a mud fight between elites to control the state’s enormous oil wealth, local contests forced candidates to show pragmatism and competence.

Citizens in densely populated cities find it easier to organize themselves. And in an ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis like Lagos, politicians could not afford to pit ethnic and religious groups against one another, a problem that has long bedeviled Nigeria. Simple geography also helped the city administration. The powerful and wealthy classes are more likely to insist on better governance when their own neighborhoods are affected.

And unlike national politicians, local leaders know that the better they perform, the more money their city nets. The better its roads, schools and business environment, the more likely companies will pay taxes, and individuals will buy goods and services, which also contribute to the tax base. At the national level, by contrast, the great majority of the central government’s income has little to do with government’s performance, since about 75 percent of the national budget comes from the $50 billion a year that Nigeria collects in oil revenue.

Can Lagos really save Nigeria? Alone, it’s unlikely — one factor is that the country’s population is expected to continue mushrooming to 400 million by mid-century — but Lagos can now be the model for transferring more authority to other cities, such as Ibadan, Kano and Benin City. And they, in turn, could help to shift the polarized national politics that produce the same cadre of unaccountable elites year after year.

For example, if local politicians were better able to raise and regulate local taxes, they would find themselves more accountable to the population. And they would presumably establish a more welcoming local environment for business to flourish, and perhaps start a nationwide chain reaction unleashing the country’s famous entrepreneurialism. If income levels rose, education and a rising middle class might follow. Greater affluence and aspiration, in turn, tend to act as a useful brake on population growth.

Elsewhere, other cities offer a similar lesson. In Medellín, Colombia, the city government outshone the national government in the late 1990s by setting up a network of publicly funded business support centers, investing strategically in transportation and security, and introducing its own program of cash grants to help the poor. Cities such as Chennai and Hyderabad in India have similarly outperformed India’s national government in promoting growth, educating children and reducing crime and poverty.

Can this model hold out hope for other fragile states? Countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan and Kenya all suffer from weak and dysfunctional governments, but have cities that could be the basis for a similar model of development. Regular local elections could spur significant changes in Kinshasa, Karachi and Nairobi, respectively, if the cities were granted more autonomy and the tax base was broadened to make government more dependent on local citizens and companies.

Almost half of the developing world’s population now lives in cities, and rapid urbanization is expected to increase this proportion to two-thirds within a few decades, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. The city is now the main driver of growth and stability across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. And the example of Lagos shows that countries can begin to work better when their cities are well governed and thriving.

In other words, cities can help save countries.

Written by Seth D. Kaplan

NY TIMES

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Comedian Basket Mouth under fire for rape joke

The Nigerian comedian Basketmouth has come under fire on social media after posting a joke about the difference between dating "white girls" and "African girls". In a nutshell, white women put out after a couple of dates, but African women keep holding out, so on the ninth date a bit of rape is required.

Funny? No. Instead, most Nigerian and other African commentators found it offensive. Basketmouth was trivialising rape in a country suffering from an epidemic of sexual violence.

"Show me a man who is insensitive to rape and I'll show you a man who is capable of rape&hellip," tweeted the Nigerian novelist Chika Unigwe.

Basketmouth had his defenders, who went the usual route of calling those who criticised him over-sensitive, or humourless, or saying they perhaps missed some grand satirical intention.

The comedian himself eventually claimed that he was trying to flag up an important social issue: "I would never in a thousand lifetimes encourage rape, I broadcasted a joke that many clearly misunderstood and have found offensive and I sincerely apologise, the intention however was to highlight an unfortunate trend and the ridiculously flawed comparison between money & the worth of a woman."<

But his full apology only came after a half-hearted first attempt, and he has form – a year ago he entertained a British crowd with a charming granny-rape joke.

Basketmouth is just one in a pantheon of international stand-up comedians to use the rape of women as a subject for a cheap laugh (British 'comic' and tax avoider Jimmy Carr has been mining this seam for years). But in Africa he is a lightning conductor – he's the one with the big profile, who chose to shout out his rape joke to his one million Facebook fans. He's the big goofy team mascot for those Nigerian men who think women are teases and there for the taking. #basketmouthgate, as nobody called it, opened up a whole debate about the subject of rape in Nigeria and beyond.

There is no doubt that rape is a problem in Nigeria. When writer Elnathan John spoke about marital rape, he was attacked by angry men for daring to suggest that a woman could withhold sex once the ink on the marriage contract was dry.

On Twitter this week he said: "There is a reason Basketmouth makes so many people laugh with female rape jokes. We condone it. It is not yet a big deal here… All rape is abominable, but I tell you if men got raped as often as women, there would be no celebration of rape jokes."

Victim-blaming is widespread in Africa and much of the world – an Indian judge recently said that a Dalit woman who was brutally raped had indicated her sexual availability by going out of her house after dark. Across many countries in Africa, so called mini-skirt laws are being debated – the implication being that men are animals and women pieces of meat who should know better than to flash the flesh at their predators.

What happens in Nigeria is that women are often raped. They are raped in their homes by their husbands, on dates with men who think that a meal or a few drinks have purchased her consent; they are raped in police custody; they are raped by their teacher, professor or fellow students when they're trying to get their education.

The state colludes with this by failing to collate coherent statistics about rape and sexual violence, rendering these crimes invisible – or at least until some buffoon raises his head above the parapet to joke about them.

It seems that perpetrators can often get away with rape, but that critics jumping on a rape joke by a comedian is beyond the pale for some. Get a sense of humour and stop messing with our fun, was the general message from Basketmouth's apologists, mostly men. Nigerian-British blogger Mia Farraday (a pseudonym) was one of Basketmouth's biggest detractors on Twitter. "I made a fuss about this quite deliberately. Not because I've never heard a rape joke before or because I'm a secret Basketmouth hater… It's because Nigeria has a real and present rape epidemic and because our sense of humour about everything is often detrimental."

Writer and former Basketmouth fan from Zimbabwe Barbara Mhangami addressed a strong blog post to him after the joke was made public. In it, she says:

"From an early age girls are taught to view themselves from the negatives that are heaped on them because men rape. It is girls' fault that men are depraved. We teach them not to walk alone after dark, not to be alone with boys, to wear 'decent clothes. Yet after all this, many are still raped. Why is that, Mr Basketmouth? BECAUSE BOYS AND MEN ARE NOT BEING TAUGHT THAT RAPE IS NOT A JOKE!"

Of course, rape culture diminishes men as well as women. A woman is passive, a thing, without agency – but a man is, says the rape culture model, a flesh-covered skeleton with a penis and a bunch of uncontrollable impulses. Yes, most of humanity are capable of gross abuses of power if they are conditioned to them and feel they have the backing of the crowd – what is wrong can seem like the norm, or even funny or enjoyable.

Challenging rape culture is about calling out the men, one by one, who joke about or belittle women, and violence against them. It's about looking one man in the eye – your colleague, your family member, your friend – looking directly at them and explaining why one flippant comment can add to the weight of ALL the comments, which in turn diminish women as humans, which in turn makes it easier for a man to do what he can to them without their conscience reacting.

And this time, on Twitter at least, Nigeria fought back. Its women, and many of its men, called bullshit on Basketmouth, they hit him where it really hurts – in the wallet – by threatening to boycott his shows and by alerting his sponsors to his joke.

As Nigerian TedxEuston organiser Patrick Anigbo put it: "Well done to my people for rejecting this scourge totally. And those few thousands that did not get it, I hope you have learnt today."

Several Twitter users even suggested that Basketmouth should use his platform to educate his fans about rape culture – or even become an anti-rape activist. So, Basketmouth, the ball's in your court. But the ball is also in the court of every citizen of Nigeria and any other country where rape culture reigns.

Guardian