According to the apex bank, this is a sign that ongoing policy measures to enhance liquidity in Nigeria's foreign exchange market are bearing positive results.
Monday, August 26, 2024
Video - Nigeria’s Central Bank announces a 130% surge in remittance inflows
Cows obstruct Nigeria’s capital as climate change and development leave herders with nowhere to go
Abubakar and his cattle’s presence in the city center is not out of choice but of necessity. His family are originally from Katsina State in northern Nigeria, where a changing climate turned grazing lands into barren desert. He moved to Idu — a rural, bushy and less developed part of Abuja — many years ago. But it now hosts housing estates, a vast railway complex and various industries.
“Our settlement at Idu was destroyed and the bush we used for grazing our cattle cut down to pave the way for new houses,” Abubakar said in a smattering of Pidgin English. It forced his family to settle on a hill in the city’s periphery and roam the main streets for pasture.
Fulani herders like Abubakar are traditionally nomadic and dominate West Africa’s cattle industry. They normally rely on wild countryside to graze their cattle with free pasture, but the pressures of modernization, the need for land for housing and crop farming and human-caused climate change are challenging their way of life. To keep cattle off of Abuja’s major roads and gardens, some suggest that herders need to start acquiring private land and operating like other businesses. But to do that, they’d need money and government incentives.
“It’s disheartening,” said Baba Ngelzarma, the president of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria, a Fulani pastoralists’ advocacy group. “Nigeria is presented as an unorganized people. The herders take the cattle wherever they can find green grasses and water at least for the cows to survive, not minding whether it is the city or somebody’s land.”
He added that part of the problem is the government’s failure to harness the potential of the livestock industry by offering incentives such as infrastructure like water sources and vet services at designated grazing reserves and providing subsidies.
For its part, the government has said it will address the issue, previously promising fenced-off reserves for cattle herders. President Bola Tinubu announced in July a new livestock development ministry, which Ngelzarma said would help revive the abandoned grazing reserves. No minister has been appointed.
Fewer places to go
Nigeria is home to over 20 million cows, mostly owned by Fulani herders. It has the fourth largest cattle population in Africa, and its dairy market is valued at $1.5 billion. But despite its size, almost 90% of local demand is met through imports, according to the US International Trade Administration. It’s a sign of the industry’s inefficiency, Ngelzarma said, as cows stressed from constant moving and poor diets can’t produce milk.
For Abuja, the city’s environment bears the consequence, and so do businesses when traffic grinds to a halt because cows are crossing busy roads. And in other parts of Nigeria, herders are often involved in violence with farmers over access to land, especially in central and southern Nigeria where the two industries overlap with religious and ethnic divisions.
There are four designated grazing reserves in rural areas surrounding Abuja, but they lack the needed infrastructure and have been encroached on by other farmers and illegal settlers, according to both Ngelzarma and Festus Adebayo, who’s executive secretary of the Housing Development Advocacy Network.
With those reserves not functioning, herders set up settlements anywhere and stay for as long as they can before legitimate owners claim it or the government builds on it.
Mohammed Abbas, 67, has repeatedly had to move locations over the years. Most of his current settlement in the city’s Life Camp neighborhood has been taken over by a newly constructed petrol station, and he is aware that the remaining land will soon be claimed by another owner.
As a smallholder pastoralist, he said he could not afford to buy land in Abuja for a permanent settlement and ranching. To afford one, “I have to sell all my cows and that means nothing will be left to put on the land,” he said in Hausa, sitting outside his hut.
Other pastoralists would rather resist.
“We are not going anywhere again,” said Hassan Mohammed, whose family now occupies a strip on the edge of a new estate near the Idu train station. Once a vast bush, the area has been swallowed by infrastructure and housing projects. Mohammed now also drives a lorry on the side because of the shrinking resources needed to keep cattle.
Despite repeated orders from the owners to vacate, Mohammed said that his family would stay put, using the dwindling strip as their home base while taking their cattle elsewhere each day for pasture. The landowners have repeatedly urged the government to resettle Mohammed’s family, but the government has yet to take action.
“Many don’t have anywhere to call home, so they just find somewhere to sleep at night with the cattle,” said Mohammed, in Hausa. “But for us, we are not leaving except there is a new place within Abuja.”
Making room for development and cows
Folawiyo Daniel, an Abuja-based real estate developer who has endured difficulties with pastoralists that affect his project development, said the issue is a failure of urban planning.
“Real estate development is not the problem,” he said, and the government should revive grazing reserves in the city for pastoralists.
Adebayo, from the Housing Development Advocacy Network, agreed, saying “it is time” for Abuja’s minister Nyesom Wike to take action and prove that “the problem of open grazing in the city of Abuja is solvable.”
Herders have to be moved to the place designated for their work or restricted to defined private property, he said.
The official responsible for animal husbandry in the agriculture ministry said they could not comment on a major policy issue without authorization, while the spokesperson for the ministry in charge of Abuja declined a request for an interview.
But in March, after the Belgian ambassador to Nigeria raised concerns to Wike about cattle roaming Abuja’s streets, he replied that efforts were in progress to stop the indiscriminate grazing without disclosing specific details.
Herders say they are not opposed to a restricted form of herding or practicing like a normal business that buys their own feedstock instead of using free pasture and water wherever they find them.
The problem, according to cattle association chief Ngelzarma, is that the government has neglected the sector and does not provide incentives as it does other businesses, giving the examples of irrigation systems for crop farmers and airports for private airline operators paid for by the government.
“The government should revive the gazetted grazing reserves fitted with the infrastructure for water and fodder production, training and veterinary services and generate jobs and revenues,” Ngelzarma said.
“Then, you can say stop roaming about for free pasture,” he said.
By Taiwo Adebayo, AP
Pro-Iran militants kill 2 Nigerian police officers
An attack Sunday by an outlawed pro-Iran Nigerian Shiite group killed at least two law enforcement officers, police said, with three more found unconscious in the capital Abuja.
The capital's police force confirmed "an unprovoked attack by the proscribed Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN)... on some personnel of the Nigeria Police Force," said a statement by police spokesperson Josephine Adeh.
During the attack on a police checkpoint, "two police personnel were killed, three [were] left unconscious in the hospital, and three police patrol vehicles [were] set ablaze," Adeh added.
Inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the late 1970s, the IMN still maintains close ties with Tehran.
It has long been at loggerheads with Nigeria's secular authorities and was banned in 2019.
Sunday's attackers carried out their assault wielding machetes, knives and improvised explosive devices, according to the police.
With several arrests made, Abuja's police commissioner, Benneth C. Igweh, condemned the "unprovoked attack," vowing to bring the perpetrators to justice.
"The situation is presently under control and normalcy restored," the police statement added.
In July 2021, after more than five years in prison, IMN leader Ibrahim Zakzaky and his wife were released by a court in Kaduna, in the north of the country.
A Shiite cleric, Zakzaky has repeatedly called for an Iranian-style Islamic revolution in Nigeria — where the Muslim population is predominantly Sunni.
Police say 20 abducted Nigerian medical students freed
Twenty Nigerian medical students who were kidnapped on their way to a convention have been freed more than a week after their abduction, police said.
Gunmen seized the students on August 15 as they travelled to a conference in Benue State, in the centre of the country, and later demanded a ransom.
“We confirm the release on Friday of our brothers and sisters and some other Nigerians who have been in captivity in Ntunkon forest, Benue State,” Nigerian police spokesman Olumuyiwa Adejobi said on Saturday.
State police said in a statement that they had “confirmed the release of the 20 students from the University of Maiduguri and University of Jos”.
The students were freed “without any ransom paid”. The group was “rescued tactically and professionally”, according to Adejobi.
The country’s police chief had this week deployed a “tactical squad” in Benue State as part of efforts to find the latest victims of a rising wave of abductions in Africa’s most populous country.
Fortune Olaye, secretary-general of the Nigerian Medical Students’ Association (NIMSA), also confirmed the release to the AFP news agency. “We’ve spoken to them on the phone. They are safe,” Olaye said.
The students were abducted while on the road in a convoy of two buses near the town of Otukpo, less than 150km (93 miles) from Enugu, which often witnesses attacks and kidnappings.
Armed gangs have been kidnapping villagers, students and motorists for ransom in northern Nigeria, with security forces unable to end the practice.
Thousands of people are abducted for ransom in Nigeria each year, though there are few reliable statistics as many cases are not reported. Cases of kidnapping have increased significantly due to a severe economic crisis which is pushing more people towards crime.
The Nigerian consultancy, SBM Intelligence, said it had recorded 4,777 kidnappings in the country between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu taking power in May 2023 and January 2024.
Al Jazeera
Related story: Nigeria police deploy drones to search for kidnapped medical students
13-year-old Nigerian girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast
The first French phrases Nigerian teenager Sara* learned when she arrived in the city of Bouaké were “Alors baiser” and “c’est douce”, to initiate sexual activity and then to fake pleasure during the act.
The daughter of her mother’s best friend had told her she was going to the Ivorian city to sell body lotion. Instead, an older woman – a “madam” – who had paid for her travel without her knowledge sent her to brothels in the city every night.
Sara says she is paid between 3,000–5,000 Central African Francs (CFA) – between £3.90 and £6.50 – for every man she sleeps with for a “short-time” and 25,000 CFA for an overnight stay. The money is split three ways between the brothel, Sara and the madam.
Three months after arriving in Bouaké, Sara is still waiting to earn enough to pay off debts of 2.5m CFA to the madam for travel, clothes, sustenance and bribes paid to agents, and return to Nigeria.
“She [the madam] took my Nigerian sim card when I came here, so I couldn’t call my people at home for the first month,” says Sara, who now goes by the name of Sugar and refused to give her real age.
Trafficking is a major crisis in Nigeria, with between 750,000 and 1 million people forced into begging, prostitution, domestic servitude, armed conflict and labour exploitation.
Some of those are being trafficked out of the country. Sara is one of thousands of Nigerian female sex workers scattered across towns and cities in Ivory Coast, according to Nigerian officials who spoke to the Guardian.
The girls and women are mostly trafficked by agents who are taking advantage of record unemployment in Nigeria and operate under the guise of offering better paid work. Ten years ago, the Nigerian naira was triple the value of the CFA; today N1 equals 0.38 CFA.
Due to its stable economy and prostitution being legal, although soliciting sex is not, Ivory Coast has become an attractive destination for sex work. Some victims go on to become madams who source other girls, to recoup money they spent and to regain their own freedom.
Across Nigeria, recruiting agents go into rural communities or post in jobseekers’ groups on Facebook, talking ambiguously about hustles that yield plenty of rewards and sending photographs of girls and women they have recruited to known madams.
They coach recruits to tell immigration officials, who are sometimes aware of what is happening or simply don’t care enough to carry out proper scrutiny, that they are crossing the border to go to the nearby market in Cotonou, an auxiliary port for Nigeria.
Many recruits say agents, who have been known to be a relative, do not accompany them on the journey but pass their numbers to other agents who guide them across the porous borders. With no means of identification, they gain access by paying bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA, sometimes paid ahead to the driver by the agents.
Unlike Sara, most of the sex workers trafficked from Nigeria live deep in the Ivorian jungle, far from the eyes of the law.
In Tengréla, 7km (4.3 miles) from the Malian border, there are several artisanal miner’s camps used by men from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea to earn money before returning to their countries. Nigerian sex workers aged from about 14 to 38 also stay here in small settlements of makeshift tents made of black nylon held together with sticks.
At the maquis – as the small bars are known in Francophone Africa – owned by madams in the settlements, both sets of immigrants fraternise, first publicly and then privately.
“There is an odd belief in some of the gold mining regions that sex helps you find gold, which in turn [fuels] demand for sex trafficking,” says one former Nigerian official who was previously stationed in Ivory Coast. “The cocoa [production] communities also have high sex demands to keep the men satisfied.”
The Guardian spoke to at least two dozen girls and women in the forest, some as young as 15. Some of them said they had been starved for refusing to work or beaten up by angry patrons. Many barely speak French and say they don’t know the country well enough to be able to escape.
Nigerian officials who have managed to repatriate girls trapped as sex workers say they have seen girls as young as 13 in the interior.
“A lot of the girls we found claim to be over 18 and doing sex work of their own free will, but most of the time from their physical appearance, you know they are not,” says the former Nigerian official. “Tests to determine their age, such as scanning a wisdom tooth, cost about 50,000 CFA so you have to talk to them, but if they are insistent, you let them go back.”
Ivory Coast has a law criminalising trafficking, but it is barely enforced, and the country has been criticised by the US state department for its failure to tackle the problem.
The escadron, a notorious Ivorian police unit, has burned down some of the settlements where traffickers operate, but new ones keep springing up, partly because security personnel who come into the jungle allegedly demand weekly bribes of 1,000-2,000 CFA for each trafficked girl.
Adekoye Vincent, spokesperson for the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (Naptip) in Nigeria, declined to comment when questioned about girls trapped as sex workers in Ivory Coast. The Ivorian national police and gendarmerie did not respond to requests for comment.
For Sara, the wait to return home goes on. She was in junior secondary school in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria, before dropping out to travel to Ivory Coast. These days she is learning how to barter condoms for other items.
“I really don’t like the work I’m doing here. I miss my people at home,” she says.
* Names have been changed
By Eromo Egbejule, The Guardian
Related stories: Woman who ran prostitution ring extradited from Nigeria to Italy
25,000 trafficked women, girls from Nigeria trapped in Malian mines
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