Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Video -Nigeria football supporters hopeful postponements can end soon
It's a tough time for football fans in Nigeria, where the game is the most popular among every other sports. With all sporting activities across the world suspended as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, both fans and players of football in Nigeria say they miss the game a lot. CGTN's Deji Badmus has more.
Nigeria extends coronavirus lockdown in key cities for two weeks
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has announced a 14-day extension to a lockdown in Lagos, Abuja and Ogun states to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
In a televised address on Monday, Buhari said "it has become necessary to extend the current restriction of movement" that was set to expire later in the day.
Initial 14-day lockdowns in the three areas began on March 30.
There are currently 323 confirmed cases of the virus in Nigeria, with 71 percent of them registered in Lagos and the capital territory of Abuja. Ten people have died so far.
"It is a matter of life and death," Buhari said of the nation's response. "The repercussions of any premature end to the lockdown action are unimaginable."
Economic hardship
Nigeria, with 200 million people, is Africa's most populous nation. Some 20 million reside in the megacity of Lagos.
Health experts have raised alarms over the impact of a major coronavirus outbreak, warning that the country's unprepared and underfunded healthcare system could quickly become overwhelmed.
The extension of the lockdown is expected to add to the hardship of millions of Nigerians living hand-to-mouth, often on less than one dollar a day.
Buhari said he was "fully aware of the great difficulties experienced especially by those who earn a daily wage".
"But despite these realities, we must not change the restrictions," he added.
The government has pledged a series of support measures to ease the financial pain for the most vulnerable, but there have been widespread complaints that not enough is being done for those facing hunger.
"The vast majority of Nigerians depend on daily wages, they have to go out to get money and buy food to put it on the table for their families," Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris, reporting from the capital, Abuja, said.
"For the next two weeks, they are going to stay at home with no work and no chance of getting money."
Meanwhile, police said on Monday that they were bolstering forces in Lagos and Ogun after almost 200 suspects were arrested amid fears of a spike in crime during the lockdown.
Buhari said compliance with the stay-at-home order and other restrictions introduced by state governors across the country had been "generally good".
But he cautioned that "a large proportion of new infections are now occurring in our communities".
Al Jazeera
In a televised address on Monday, Buhari said "it has become necessary to extend the current restriction of movement" that was set to expire later in the day.
Initial 14-day lockdowns in the three areas began on March 30.
There are currently 323 confirmed cases of the virus in Nigeria, with 71 percent of them registered in Lagos and the capital territory of Abuja. Ten people have died so far.
"It is a matter of life and death," Buhari said of the nation's response. "The repercussions of any premature end to the lockdown action are unimaginable."
Economic hardship
Nigeria, with 200 million people, is Africa's most populous nation. Some 20 million reside in the megacity of Lagos.
Health experts have raised alarms over the impact of a major coronavirus outbreak, warning that the country's unprepared and underfunded healthcare system could quickly become overwhelmed.
The extension of the lockdown is expected to add to the hardship of millions of Nigerians living hand-to-mouth, often on less than one dollar a day.
Buhari said he was "fully aware of the great difficulties experienced especially by those who earn a daily wage".
"But despite these realities, we must not change the restrictions," he added.
The government has pledged a series of support measures to ease the financial pain for the most vulnerable, but there have been widespread complaints that not enough is being done for those facing hunger.
"The vast majority of Nigerians depend on daily wages, they have to go out to get money and buy food to put it on the table for their families," Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris, reporting from the capital, Abuja, said.
"For the next two weeks, they are going to stay at home with no work and no chance of getting money."
Meanwhile, police said on Monday that they were bolstering forces in Lagos and Ogun after almost 200 suspects were arrested amid fears of a spike in crime during the lockdown.
Buhari said compliance with the stay-at-home order and other restrictions introduced by state governors across the country had been "generally good".
But he cautioned that "a large proportion of new infections are now occurring in our communities".
Al Jazeera
Friday, April 10, 2020
Nigerians struggle as virus lockdown hits supply chains
At a market on the outskirts of Nigeria’s megacity Lagos, yam trader Olatunji Okesanya is scrambling for produce as measures to halt the coronavirus cut him off from suppliers.
“The restriction in the movement has disrupted supply — the farmers are finding it difficult to get their produce to Lagos,” he told AFP.
“The few who are able are bribing the security agents and this is making the price to rise.”
Authorities in Africa’s most populous nation are battling to stop the spread of a virus that has led to 288 confirmed infections and seven deaths.
Lagos, an economic hub of 20 million, is deep into the second week of a lockdown that has left it a shadow of its usually frenetic self.
The capital Abuja is also shut down and other states around the country have imposed their own restrictions.
Officials insist that the measures are needed to contain a disease that threatens to wreak havoc on the weak health system.
But farmers, sellers, and consumers complain the fight against the virus has turned Nigeria into a patchwork of roadblocks and regulations that have ruptured business links.
‘Losses are piling up’
Wale Oni has seen the lockdown in Lagos and neighbouring Ogun state hit his fish farm hard.
Travel restrictions have prevented him from feeding his stock properly and blocked customers from picking up their orders.
“Profits are being wiped off and losses are piling up,” he lamented.
“Feed prices and transportation costs have gone up.”
In a sign of how desperate the situation is getting many of the fish have started eating each other.
The coronavirus crisis has already battered Nigeria’s finances.
Africa’s biggest oil producer has seen government revenues gutted by a collapse in crude prices.
The authorities have frozen loan repayments for farmers and small businesses in a bid to ease the pain but many are demanding more action.
Analysts warn there could still be much tougher times ahead as the lockdowns push up costs and upset supply chains.
“As the pandemic looks set to be around for at least the next few months, we believe that consumers should prepare for even more price increases,” said Nigeria’s SBM Intelligence in a note.
“This development would have important implications for the health of the economy and largely determine whether the country’s present anaemic growth track turns into a full downturn.”
Bribes and banks
In theory food supplies should be exempt from most of the restrictions in place against the coronavirus and free to be transported.
But in a country eaten away by corruption, officers at checkpoints have often manipulated the situation to rake in money from bribes.
Other vital supplies like fertilisers fall into a grey zone and there could be a serious knock-on impact if these do not get through for the upcoming planting season.
“Our members have been arrested in some states while trying to deliver their products to farmers,” Kabiru Fara of the Nigerian Agro-Inputs Dealers Association told AFP.
Importers are also facing major hurdles that have seen the volumes of goods coming into Lagos through its clogged port dwindle.
“The banks are in fact closed and though theoretically it is possible to pay customs duties online, not all importers are able to do so,” said one employee at a major importer.
“As a result volume of deliveries of cargo are probably down 50 percent.”
‘We are getting hungry’
Securing their supplies is just one of the headaches for vendors.
In the ramshackle Obalende market on Lagos Island stallholders said that just as their costs were rising so customer numbers were falling.
The lockdown means that millions of poor in the city are struggling to make ends meet and do not have spare cash to spend.
“The price of transport has increased, so everything increases,” said Basseg Kate, sitting in front of her stores of rice, tomato paste and eggs.
“But we are making small prices for customers because they don’t have money.”
The authorities have restricted markets to working every other day, meaning produce can spoil.
“Everything is rotting,” said Ma Victor, waving flies away from her wares.
“Yesterday I wasn’t allowed to sell, now all my tomatoes are spoilt.”
Ernest Crusoe, a civil servant, was out looking for food — but he barely had any money left to buy it.
“We eat once a day now, the rest of the time we go and rest,” he said, showing the few small banknotes he had to spend.
“This thing is affecting us. We are getting hungry.”
The Guardian
“The restriction in the movement has disrupted supply — the farmers are finding it difficult to get their produce to Lagos,” he told AFP.
“The few who are able are bribing the security agents and this is making the price to rise.”
Authorities in Africa’s most populous nation are battling to stop the spread of a virus that has led to 288 confirmed infections and seven deaths.
Lagos, an economic hub of 20 million, is deep into the second week of a lockdown that has left it a shadow of its usually frenetic self.
The capital Abuja is also shut down and other states around the country have imposed their own restrictions.
Officials insist that the measures are needed to contain a disease that threatens to wreak havoc on the weak health system.
But farmers, sellers, and consumers complain the fight against the virus has turned Nigeria into a patchwork of roadblocks and regulations that have ruptured business links.
‘Losses are piling up’
Wale Oni has seen the lockdown in Lagos and neighbouring Ogun state hit his fish farm hard.
Travel restrictions have prevented him from feeding his stock properly and blocked customers from picking up their orders.
“Profits are being wiped off and losses are piling up,” he lamented.
“Feed prices and transportation costs have gone up.”
In a sign of how desperate the situation is getting many of the fish have started eating each other.
The coronavirus crisis has already battered Nigeria’s finances.
Africa’s biggest oil producer has seen government revenues gutted by a collapse in crude prices.
The authorities have frozen loan repayments for farmers and small businesses in a bid to ease the pain but many are demanding more action.
Analysts warn there could still be much tougher times ahead as the lockdowns push up costs and upset supply chains.
“As the pandemic looks set to be around for at least the next few months, we believe that consumers should prepare for even more price increases,” said Nigeria’s SBM Intelligence in a note.
“This development would have important implications for the health of the economy and largely determine whether the country’s present anaemic growth track turns into a full downturn.”
Bribes and banks
In theory food supplies should be exempt from most of the restrictions in place against the coronavirus and free to be transported.
But in a country eaten away by corruption, officers at checkpoints have often manipulated the situation to rake in money from bribes.
Other vital supplies like fertilisers fall into a grey zone and there could be a serious knock-on impact if these do not get through for the upcoming planting season.
“Our members have been arrested in some states while trying to deliver their products to farmers,” Kabiru Fara of the Nigerian Agro-Inputs Dealers Association told AFP.
Importers are also facing major hurdles that have seen the volumes of goods coming into Lagos through its clogged port dwindle.
“The banks are in fact closed and though theoretically it is possible to pay customs duties online, not all importers are able to do so,” said one employee at a major importer.
“As a result volume of deliveries of cargo are probably down 50 percent.”
‘We are getting hungry’
Securing their supplies is just one of the headaches for vendors.
In the ramshackle Obalende market on Lagos Island stallholders said that just as their costs were rising so customer numbers were falling.
The lockdown means that millions of poor in the city are struggling to make ends meet and do not have spare cash to spend.
“The price of transport has increased, so everything increases,” said Basseg Kate, sitting in front of her stores of rice, tomato paste and eggs.
“But we are making small prices for customers because they don’t have money.”
The authorities have restricted markets to working every other day, meaning produce can spoil.
“Everything is rotting,” said Ma Victor, waving flies away from her wares.
“Yesterday I wasn’t allowed to sell, now all my tomatoes are spoilt.”
Ernest Crusoe, a civil servant, was out looking for food — but he barely had any money left to buy it.
“We eat once a day now, the rest of the time we go and rest,” he said, showing the few small banknotes he had to spend.
“This thing is affecting us. We are getting hungry.”
The Guardian
Nigeria Ending Fuel Subsidies With Oil at Record-Low Prices
Nigeria is ending decades of subsidies paid to ensure uniform gasoline prices in Africa’s biggest oil producer with crude prices at historical lows, the state-owned energy company said.
Official gasoline prices have been cut twice in as many weeks, a move the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. said was intended to bring them in line with the current market situation. Nigeria relies on fuel imports to meet its domestic needs with four ill-maintained state refineries barely functional.
“What we are putting in place today is a situation where market forces will take control of prices and eliminate subsidy,” Mele Kyari, group managing director of the company also known as NNPC said in a Twitter post. Savings from the measure would be spent to build infrastructure, boost health care and education, he said.
Crude prices are down about 40% from the budget peg of $57 per barrel as the collapse of demand due to the coronavirus pandemic and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia pushed crude prices to record lows. Brent crude, which compares with Nigerian export grades, traded at $33.65 per barrel as of 17:05 p.m, in London, after trading under $30 in the previous two weeks.
By Elisha Bala-Gbogbo
Bloomberg
Official gasoline prices have been cut twice in as many weeks, a move the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp. said was intended to bring them in line with the current market situation. Nigeria relies on fuel imports to meet its domestic needs with four ill-maintained state refineries barely functional.
“What we are putting in place today is a situation where market forces will take control of prices and eliminate subsidy,” Mele Kyari, group managing director of the company also known as NNPC said in a Twitter post. Savings from the measure would be spent to build infrastructure, boost health care and education, he said.
Crude prices are down about 40% from the budget peg of $57 per barrel as the collapse of demand due to the coronavirus pandemic and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia pushed crude prices to record lows. Brent crude, which compares with Nigerian export grades, traded at $33.65 per barrel as of 17:05 p.m, in London, after trading under $30 in the previous two weeks.
By Elisha Bala-Gbogbo
Bloomberg
How the basic Nigerian email scam evolved into sophisticated malware attacks on corporates
Nigerian internet fraudsters, best known for romance scams and infamous business propositions from “Nigerian princes,” are now operating with a lot more sophistication.
Last August, a major bust by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) offered some insight into the growing scale and capabilities of Nigerian online fraudsters. Federal agents arrested 14 fraudsters operating within the US as part of a prolific network of scammers and named 66 others in a 252-count federal grand jury indictment. The fraudsters had defrauded victims of up to $10 million in one of the “largest cases of its kind in US history.” In total, the ring had attempted to steal $40 million from victims in 10 countries as well as the US.
A new report by Palo Alto Networks, a California-based cyber-security company which says it has researched Nigerian cyber-crime for five years, tries to show how these fraudsters have become a lot more proficient at scams over the past five years, employing more sophisticated tactics and tools to carry out Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. It’s a long way from the classic “Yahoo Yahoo boys” scams 15 odd years ago.
While Nigerian actors were previously classed as “emerging” with regard to malware attacks, recent evidence suggests they “have evolved to a point where they are demonstrating signs of maturity consistent with established threat groups in their delivery techniques, malware packaging, and technical abilities,” Palo Alto Networks’ report notes. Last year, the firm’s malware tracking service identified around 27,000 samples of malware associated with Nigerian actors.
The researchers note the “dominant proportionality and sheer enormity” of BEC scam attempts from Nigerian actors. Last year, BEC scam attempts from these fraudsters resulted in an average of 92,739 attacks per month—172% increase from 2018.
Here’s how BEC scams work: fraudsters use hacked email accounts to convince businesses or individuals to make payments that are either bogus or similar to actual payments owed to legitimate companies. As part of the scam, fraudsters also learn about key personnel in companies who are responsible for those payments as well as the protocols necessary to perform wire transfers in various companies. They then target businesses and individuals that regularly perform such wire transfer payments.
Around $1.7 billion in losses were attributed to BEC attacks last year, more than losses to romance scams, phishing, identity theft, credit card fraud and ransomware, according to the annual report of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
The antics of these fraudsters have come at a wider cost for most Nigerians, as students, business people and tourists are often subject to extra scrutiny from international payment platforms, potential business partners and embassies for visa applications. While successive Nigerian governments have made significant efforts to curb international online fraud from the source at home by awarding notable powers to its anti-fraud agency, the state of the country’s weak economy and large swathes of educated, unemployed young college graduates means fraud is still seen by some as being worth the risk.
However, while growing sophisticated in their methods, Nigerian online fraudsters still “remain indiscriminate in their targeting” with attacks attempted on small and large businesses, healthcare companies as well US government institutions. However, high-tech companies bore the largest brunt of these efforts recording around 313,000 attacks last year—more than double the number in 2018.
And yet, the digital persona linked with young Nigerians has started to change markedly in recent years given several success stories in the country’s fledgling tech ecosystem over the last decade. Nigerian tech startups, innovating to solve many of the country’s systemic problems—from digital payments to online education—have attracted the most funding across Africa last year from major investors.
Nigerian software developers have also become widely sought afterbeyond the country’s shores, partly prompting a $100 million dollar bet on African development talent by software giant, Microsoft.
But even in Nigeria, local police have often “profiled” young men with laptops as online fraudsters as an excuse for harassment and extortion. This has led to significant protests and crowdfunding legal aid by the burgeoning tech community.
By Yomi Kazeem
Quartz
Last August, a major bust by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) offered some insight into the growing scale and capabilities of Nigerian online fraudsters. Federal agents arrested 14 fraudsters operating within the US as part of a prolific network of scammers and named 66 others in a 252-count federal grand jury indictment. The fraudsters had defrauded victims of up to $10 million in one of the “largest cases of its kind in US history.” In total, the ring had attempted to steal $40 million from victims in 10 countries as well as the US.
A new report by Palo Alto Networks, a California-based cyber-security company which says it has researched Nigerian cyber-crime for five years, tries to show how these fraudsters have become a lot more proficient at scams over the past five years, employing more sophisticated tactics and tools to carry out Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams. It’s a long way from the classic “Yahoo Yahoo boys” scams 15 odd years ago.
While Nigerian actors were previously classed as “emerging” with regard to malware attacks, recent evidence suggests they “have evolved to a point where they are demonstrating signs of maturity consistent with established threat groups in their delivery techniques, malware packaging, and technical abilities,” Palo Alto Networks’ report notes. Last year, the firm’s malware tracking service identified around 27,000 samples of malware associated with Nigerian actors.
The researchers note the “dominant proportionality and sheer enormity” of BEC scam attempts from Nigerian actors. Last year, BEC scam attempts from these fraudsters resulted in an average of 92,739 attacks per month—172% increase from 2018.
Here’s how BEC scams work: fraudsters use hacked email accounts to convince businesses or individuals to make payments that are either bogus or similar to actual payments owed to legitimate companies. As part of the scam, fraudsters also learn about key personnel in companies who are responsible for those payments as well as the protocols necessary to perform wire transfers in various companies. They then target businesses and individuals that regularly perform such wire transfer payments.
Around $1.7 billion in losses were attributed to BEC attacks last year, more than losses to romance scams, phishing, identity theft, credit card fraud and ransomware, according to the annual report of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
The antics of these fraudsters have come at a wider cost for most Nigerians, as students, business people and tourists are often subject to extra scrutiny from international payment platforms, potential business partners and embassies for visa applications. While successive Nigerian governments have made significant efforts to curb international online fraud from the source at home by awarding notable powers to its anti-fraud agency, the state of the country’s weak economy and large swathes of educated, unemployed young college graduates means fraud is still seen by some as being worth the risk.
However, while growing sophisticated in their methods, Nigerian online fraudsters still “remain indiscriminate in their targeting” with attacks attempted on small and large businesses, healthcare companies as well US government institutions. However, high-tech companies bore the largest brunt of these efforts recording around 313,000 attacks last year—more than double the number in 2018.
And yet, the digital persona linked with young Nigerians has started to change markedly in recent years given several success stories in the country’s fledgling tech ecosystem over the last decade. Nigerian tech startups, innovating to solve many of the country’s systemic problems—from digital payments to online education—have attracted the most funding across Africa last year from major investors.
Nigerian software developers have also become widely sought afterbeyond the country’s shores, partly prompting a $100 million dollar bet on African development talent by software giant, Microsoft.
But even in Nigeria, local police have often “profiled” young men with laptops as online fraudsters as an excuse for harassment and extortion. This has led to significant protests and crowdfunding legal aid by the burgeoning tech community.
By Yomi Kazeem
Quartz
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