Poland signs with Nigeria to replace Russian gas

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has become the first leader in the Eastern European country’s history to ever visit Nigeria since the two nations established diplomatic ties some 60 years ago. It was no mere courtesy visit.

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and western sanctions that followed, the rouble went into a free fall. In a bid to save its currency, Russia, Europe’s largest gas supplier, insisted that all purchases must be made in rouble, a demand that Poland has rejected.

Poland eventually terminated its contract with Russia. With Europe now facing an energy crisis due to Moscow’s decision to slash oil and natural gas exports, energy prices have gone through the roof and sent the cost of living soaring across Europe.

Poland, consequently, has turned to Nigeria, already one of its gas suppliers, to increase its LNG shipments.

Speaking through an interpreter during a meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja, President Duda noted that Nigeria, being rich in gas, will ensure a steady increase of LNG supply to Poland and to the EU.

“The Russian aggression against Ukraine, which is totally unjustified, has sparked off a very serious food crisis and a very serious energy crisis,” he says.

“Nigeria is indeed very wealthy. And I want to add that the first supplies of the LNG gas to our LNG gas terminal from Nigeria had already happened, just like the import of crude oil performed by our oil company Latos.

“Those shipments did happen in recent years. And that means well for the future, because we do want to further develop this cooperation. We want to increase the supplies from Nigeria to Poland. And in this way, we also want to contribute to the development of economic relations between both our countries,” he adds.

EU lobbies Nigeria

President Duda’s overtures were not a one-off. Back in May, the Deputy Director-General of the EU’s Energy Department, Matthew Baldwin, said the 27-country bloc needed additional gas supplies from Nigeria amid cuts from Russia, which before the war provided around 40% of Europe’s gas needs.

“The EU imports 14 percent of its total LNG supplies from Nigeria and there is potential to more than double this,” Baldwin told Reuters. “If we can get up to beyond 80 percent, at that point, there might be additional LNG that could be available for spot cargoes to come to Europe.”

Can Nigeria deliver?

It remains to be seen whether Nigeria, whose economy is badly battered, would be able to meet the demand with a violence-hit energy sector, plagued with unprecedented crude oil thefts by militants in the Niger Delta.

But Nigeria’s Oil Minister Timipre Sylva has high hopes that his country could turn into one of the major gas suppliers of Europe, urging the EU to increase investments in the Nigerian oil sector.

“We are positioning ourselves to be an alternative supplier to Europe,” he says. “We are already working with Algeria to build the Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline that is going to take our gas all the way to Europe.

“We are also having a partnership with Morocco to extend the West Africa Gas Pipeline to Morocco and across the Mediterranean to Europe. We believe that Europe needs this gas and it is a win-win for all of us and it is in their interest to reduce these discriminatory investments that their banks are doing.”

Investment banker and economist Adetilewa Adebajo believes that Nigeria could indeed meet some of the vast European demand if there is the political will.

Speaking to The Africa Report, the managing director of the Lagos-based Corporate Finance Group highlights that Nigeria had recorded some successes in the oil and gas sector, particularly LNG which recorded an additional $8bn investment for the expansion of the seventh train.

“Investments of this nature could be replicated across the gas sector in Nigeria, in particular to drive power generation,” he says.

By Eniola Akinkuotu

The Africa Report

Nigeria dominates as Google supports 60 African startups

Speaking at the event, the Head of Startup Ecosystem, Sub-Saharan Africa, Folarin Aiyegbusi, said “Africa is a diverse continent with massive opportunity but the continent is faced with the challenge of limited diversity in venture capital funding flow. We hope that the Black Founders Fund program will be able to bridge the gap of disproportionate funding between expat startups over local and black-led companies.”

Google has said that 60 African startups have been selected for the second cohort of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund for Africa with $4m funding.

The global firm said this on Tuesday during the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund 2022 winner announcement in Abuja.

It was disclosed that Nigeria dominates the selection list, which features 23 Nigerian startups.

Other countries benefitting from this funding programme include Kenya with 12 grantees, Rwanda with six grantees, South Africa with five grantees, Uganda with four grantees, among others.

It was disclosed that each of the selected startups will get support in the form of a six-month training programme that includes access to a network of mentors to assist in tackling unique challenges.

In addition to being a part of tailored workshops, support networks and community building sessions, the 60 grantees will also get non-dilutive awards of $50,000 and $100,000 and up to $200,000 in Google Cloud credit.

It was disclosed that fund will be distributed through Google’s implementation partner, CcHUB.

Speaking at the event, the Head of Startup Ecosystem, Sub-Saharan Africa, Folarin Aiyegbusi, said “Africa is a diverse continent with massive opportunity but the continent is faced with the challenge of limited diversity in venture capital funding flow. We hope that the Black Founders Fund program will be able to bridge the gap of disproportionate funding between expat startups over local and black-led companies.”

Also speaking at the event was the Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency, Kashifu Inuwa, who said that the recently passed Nigeria Startup Bill by the National Assembly will help to institutionalise legal frameworks that will enhance startup growth in Nigeria.

Opinion Nigeria

Nigeria To Establish Special Economic Zone for Bitcoin

Nigeria is seeking to create the first economic free zone for bitcoin and cryptocurrency in West Africa through the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA), per a press release.

NEPZA is in discussions with Binance, one of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges, as well as Talent City which specializes in building special economic zones.

Our goal is to engender a flourishing virtual free zones to take advantage of a near trillion dollar virtual economy in blockchains and digital economy," said Adesoji Adesugba, NEPZA's managing director.

Furthermore, NEPZA explained that if a partnership is reached, the final product would mirror that of the Dubai Virtual Free Zone.

In fact, this past December, Binance entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Dubai World Trade Center. The memorandum intends to make Dubai a hub for bitcoin and cryptocurrency related products and services by creating a “new international virtual asset ecosystem.”

In February of last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a letter banning regulated institutions from “dealing” with bitcoin or cryptocurrencies. Following the ban, Nigeria saw an uptick of 27% in peer-to-peer (P2P) bitcoin transactions across the country.

Indeed, just last year Africa as a whole became the largest country in P2P transactions in the world by volume. Around the same time, Chainalysis reported a global adoption index which showed Nigeria in the top 10 countries worldwide for its adoption of bitcoin.

Moreover, as Dubai and Nigeria look to establish special economic zones to benefit bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, we can take a look at existing economic zones. For instance, the free city of Próspera is an example of a customizable economic framework. 

By Shawn Amick

Bitcoin Magazine

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Nigeria, others battle state-sponsored cyber threats

With escalating geopolitical and geo-economic tensions, Nigeria and other countries with weak cyber security profiles are threatened by a barrage of state-sponsored malicious cyber activities.

These could pose an enormous risk even when they occur at low-level intensity, experts have warned. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has issued at least six cyber-attack warnings since the beginning of the year. The warnings came on the back of a rising incidence of cyber-attacks, both globally and locally.

From software supply chain compromises to alleged attempted theft of sensitive COVID-19 vaccine research to power-supply cutoffs, state-sponsored cyber incidents have compromised the security of critical infrastructure in countries around the world.

In response, governments and businesses around the world should be developing new cybersecurity strategies and initiatives. These were made known at the ongoing Cybersecurity Virtual Reporting Tour scheduled for August 29 to September 16. Organised by Foreign Press Centres of the United States, the event is themed, “A Shared Responsibility: Prioritising Public-Private Partnerships in Cybersecurity.”

It was revealed that in 2021, the United States set a record for the highest data breaches and other cyber incidents affecting companies, governments and individuals.

According to the latest data breach report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute, a research centre dedicated to privacy, data protection, and ethical research standards, the cost of data breaches in 2021 stood at $4.24 million, which was a 10 per cent increase from the average cost recorded in 2019.

In the first quarter of 2022 alone, the number of reported breach incidents increased by 14 per cent compared to the same period in 2021, the report said.

With reference made to Cybersecurity Ventures, it was disclosed that the global average cost of cybercrime peaked at $6 trillion in 2021, driven mostly by ransomware attacks. This could hit $10.5 trillion by 2025.

While speaking on the topic: ‘Overview of Cybersecurity and its impact’, National Cyber Director and Advisor to the President of the United States Joe Biden on cybersecurity, Chris Inglis, said there is a need to understand who is responsible for what in cyberspace.

“If we get the roles and responsibilities right in cyberspace, if we get the people skills right in cyberspace, if we get the technology right in cyberspace, we will have dealt with all three of the really important pieces of the noun of cyberspace. Cyberspace is technology and people and roles and responsibilities,” he said.

Inglis said cyber is important because of what it does for the people, stressing that cyber is more than technology that it’s people and doctrine, and requires that people deliver what is expected of it.

According to him, three things are essential; “one, we need to make sure that we make the investments required to make sure that it’s resilient and robust by design, in the same way to my earlier point we do that for cars and airplanes and therapeutics. We invest in those to make sure that we can have confidence in the functions that they perform before the events occur. We try to avoid bad experiences as opposed to simply responding to things that happen to us or around us.

“Also, we will – if we make the investments necessary – create a resilient system, a defensible system, but it will never be a perfectly secure system, meaning that these systems do not defend themselves. We must actively participate in their defense, and that defense needs to be a collective defense, one where each of us makes contributions to the defence of all of us.”

This must be an international effort where we have a social contract amongst nations that determine: how we collectively make the investments necessary to create resilience in this space; how we collectively make contributions to defend what then results in this space as a series of critical functions upon which our societies depend?

From her perspective, Principal Deputy National Cyber Director, Kemba Walden, said cyberspace activities are high, stressing that ransomware is an activity that requires an all-hands-on-deck approach.

Walden said all countries and communities need to be a part of the solution. Speaking on how it is related to cryptocurrency, she said ransomware is not necessarily new, adding that it wasn’t born out of the development of cryptocurrency or even blockchain technology in the olden days, stressing that people use prepaid cards to be able to execute ransom.

According to her, the costs of doing business as a ransomware actor are far too low, stressing that there is a need to raise the costs of doing the business and raise the entry of doing business as a ransomware actor such that it becomes less profitable and more difficult to do, which impact activities of criminals.

By Adeyemi Adepetun

The Guardian

Ex-Militant Tapped to Protect Nigerian Pipelines He Once Blew Up

Nigeria’s government has turned once again to a man it previously hunted as a thief and enemy of the state, recruiting him to curb rampant theft on the oil pipelines he used to blow up.

Oil production in Nigeria has plummeted over the past two years, hitting the lowest level in about half a century. The government blames rampant crude theft, pipeline sabotage and illegal refining, which it says siphons off as much as a fifth of output every day. To stem the losses, the state-owned energy company has hired security companies linked to one of the most feared of the Niger Delta’s onetime warlords: Government Ekpemupolo.

“We are going to move into serious action where we will stop all the illegal activities in the Niger Delta region,” Ekpemupolo, 51, more commonly known as Tompolo, told reporters on Sept. 2 in the town of Oporoza in Delta state.

Few people know more about wreaking havoc on the Nigerian oil industry than Tompolo, who -- as a leader in a loose coalition of heavily armed rebels -- waged a campaign from the mid-2000s for greater local control over the delta’s hydrocarbon wealth. Their attacks slashed nearly a third from peak production of 2.5 million barrels a day, before he and his peers accepted a government amnesty that granted them lucrative pipeline surveillance contracts and put an end to the violence.

That truce soured after President Muhammadu Buhari came to power seven years ago, terminating the contracts and renewing hostilities with Tompolo in particular -- as of this week he is still listed as a wanted man by the country’s anti-corruption agency.

But daily production is currently nearly 800,000 barrels lower than it was at the militants’ peak, while the Nigerian government is spending billions of dollars subsidizing gasoline and earning less than its debt-service bill.

At a media briefing last week, Mele Kyari, chief executive officer of the Nigerian National Petroleum Co., defended the decision to hire, among others, two companies connected to Tompolo as part of a plan to use private security to protect the vulnerable pipelines that crisscross the delta in the south of Africa’s largest crude producer.

“Contractors were selected through a tender process for people who can do it,” he said on Aug. 30. “Not everyone can do it.”

Tompolo has stakes in two of the companies contracted by the NNPC -- Tantita Security Services Nigeria Ltd. and Matton International Services Ltd. -- according to his spokesman, Paul Bebenimibo.


“We don’t want to be second-class citizens in this country because we produce the oil that feeds everybody in this nation,” Tompolo said in the Sept. 2 television interview. His argument echoed those made by militants in the late-2000s to justify attacks on pipelines.

Average daily crude production in Nigeria fell to about 1.2 million barrels in July from about 1.9 million barrels as the Covid-19 pandemic struck in the first quarter of 2020, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The unfolding collapse has left the country unable to meet its OPEC+ quota or to benefit from high oil prices.

Top military officials have disputed the levels of theft advanced by the NNPC and other oil companies, pointing to the firms’ inability to maintain aging facilities or good relations with local communities. But Kyari said Nigeria could be producing up to 700,000 barrels a day more if not for criminals stealing crude and oil companies holding back for fear of theft.

“There is no company that will produce oil and then lose 80% of that and continue to produce the oil,” he said.

Companies injecting into onshore pipelines in the eastern Niger Delta are facing the most trouble. The Shell Plc-operated plant at Bonny, Nigeria’s largest export terminal, received an average of only 42,000 barrels a day in May, less than a fifth of 2020 input, according to government data. Sixty miles away, the Eni SpA-owned Brass terminal has experienced a similar deterioration.

Since June, the 180,000-barrel-a-day Trans Niger Pipeline, one of two that feed Bonny, has ceased transporting oil altogether due to theft. The pilfered haul is either turned into black market fuel at illegal refineries in the delta or barged out to sea for sale overseas.

Now the government is betting on one of the men responsible for a previous production crisis to resolve an even larger dip, despite accusing him in 2015 of being behind a new wave of attacks and seeking his arrest in early 2016 for an alleged 46 billion-naira ($106 million) fraud.

Tompolo told reporters last week that he planned to spread the benefits of the new pipeline security contracts widely in the delta.

“I have been in this struggle for all these years and I know that greed is the cause of all the problems in the country,” he said.

By William Clowes

Bloomberg 

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