The federal government has announced a strategic plan to utilize the N20 trillion pension fund, alongside other domestic resources, for infrastructure development in Nigeria. This initiative was disclosed by Wale Edun, the coordinating minister for the economy and finance, after a federal executive council (FEC) meeting chaired by President Bola Tinubu.

Edun emphasized the government's focus on leveraging domestic financial resources, particularly pension and life insurance funds, to foster national growth. He highlighted the potential to channel over N20 trillion available domestically into critical sectors like housing and long-term mortgage provision.

As part of the plan, the government aims to address Nigeria’s estimated 20 million housing deficit by providing significant housing and mortgage loans at 12 percent interest rates, with 25-year repayment plans. Edun pointed out that before seeking foreign investments, it is prudent to utilize the available long-term funds within Nigeria’s pension and life insurance sectors.

He explained that pension funds are long-term savings, which makes them suitable for funding infrastructure projects. The initiative will be executed in collaboration with the private sector, ensuring the expertise and capacity necessary for such projects are harnessed.

Initially, the government will offer support, especially during periods of high interest rates, but as rates decline, its involvement will decrease. This plan aims to leverage substantial domestic funds in partnership with the private sector to drive economic growth.

The construction industry will benefit from funded housing projects, and Nigerians will gain access to affordable mortgages through their pension savings. This comprehensive approach aims to boost the construction industry and provide significant economic benefits.

This initiative echoes a similar plan by former President Muhammadu Buhari, who also aimed to use pension funds for infrastructure development. However, Buhari’s proposal faced significant resistance from the Nigerian labour movement and other stakeholders. Concerns were raised about the security and safety of workers' retirement savings, with critics arguing that mismanagement or failure of infrastructure projects could jeopardize these funds.

Despite these challenges, the current administration is pressing forward, seeking to address past concerns through robust safeguards and collaboration with the private sector. Edun concluded by expressing confidence in the initiative, highlighting the collaboration of Nigeria’s top talents in achieving these infrastructure and economic growth goals.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has raised concerns over the announcement by the federal government regarding the use of pension funds for infrastructure development. Speaking out against the initiative, Abubakar warned that tapping into the N20 trillion pension fund could breach the Pension Reform Act of 2014.

The controversy arose following a statement by Wale Edun, the Finance Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, after a Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on May 14. Edun disclosed the government’s plan to unlock pension funds and other domestic resources to finance critical infrastructure projects across Nigeria. He emphasized the focus on domestic savings, though he mentioned the potential for attracting foreign investment in the future.

Abubakar criticized the lack of specifics in Edun's disclosure, particularly the absence of details on the percentage of pension funds to be allocated for these projects. He argued that such a move is not only misguided but could have severe consequences for retirees who rely on their pension savings.

“This move must be halted immediately! It is a misguided initiative that could lead to disastrous consequences on the lives of Nigeria’s hardworking men and women who toiled and saved and who now survive on their pensions having retired from service,” Abubakar stated.

He urged the government to adhere strictly to the Pension Reform Act and the revised Regulation on Investment of Pension Assets issued by the National Pension Commission (PenCom). According to these regulations, pension funds can invest no more than 5% of their total assets in infrastructure projects. With total pension fund assets around N18 trillion as of December 2023, Abubakar noted that a significant portion is already invested in federal government securities.

“There is NO free Pension Funds that is more than 5% of the total value of the nation's pension fund for Edun to fiddle with,” he emphasized.

Abubakar concluded by calling on Edun to find alternative solutions for funding infrastructure without compromising pension funds. He stressed the need for economic reforms to restore investor confidence and leverage private resources, skills, and technology for sustainable development.

Abubakar served as Vice President of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007 and was the presidential candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party in 2023.

Gaza fighting intensifies, Israel asks why armed men were at UN site

Israeli troops battled militants across Gaza on Wednesday, including in the southern city of Rafah that had been a refuge for civilians, in an upsurge of the more than seven-month-old war that has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Antagonism between Israel and the United Nations worsened as the Israeli army sought an explanation for footage showing armed men next to U.N. Palestinian relief agency vehicles. Separately, India was working to bring home the body of a U.N. staffer killed in Rafah by what the global body said was tank fire.

Israeli forces have in recent days pressed into the east of Rafah in pursuit of what they say are four Hamas battalions despite warnings by Israel's main ally, the United States, to hold off to avoid mass civilian casualties.

The U.S. also wants Israel to produce a clear plan for Gaza's future, a position that Secretary of State Antony Blinken underlined by saying neither Israeli occupation nor Hamas governance were acceptable.

"We also can't have anarchy and a vacuum that's likely to be filled by chaos," Blinken said during a visit to Ukraine.

The remarks drew an apparent Israeli riposte, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying post-war planning was impossible without first completing the demolition of Hamas.

Netanyahu was later publicly challenged over post-war plans for Gaza by his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who said he had tried to promote a blueprint for an alternative Gaza administration made up of Palestinians, but "got no response" from various decision-making cabinet forums under Netanyahu.

"I call on the prime minister to announce that Israel will not rule over Gaza militarily," Gallant said. "An alternative to Hamas governance should be established"

In an apparent response, Netanyahu said any move to establish an alternative to Hamas as the government of Gaza required that the Palestinian Islamist group first be eliminated, and demanded this goal be pursued "without excuses".

RISING DEATH TOLL

Since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack, Israel's Gaza offensive has killed more than 35,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, with at least 82 killed on Tuesday in the highest single-day toll for weeks.

Hamas-led gunmen killed some 1,200 people and abducted 253 in their Oct. 7 raid into Israel, according to Israeli tallies.

With fighting picking up across Gaza, residents said Israeli tanks had destroyed clusters of homes in the northern Jabalia district but faced heavy resistance from Hamas and its ally Islamic Jihad.

Islamic Jihad said it had killed some foot soldiers in Jabalia. Israel's military said it had eliminated many gunmen in the area, where it declared major operations over months ago.

Israeli tanks have been massed around the eastern edges of Rafah and in recent days have been probing into built-up areas of the city, where hundreds of thousands of displaced people have been sheltering from fighting elsewhere.

Residents said Israeli forces had pushed into three neighbourhoods and Palestinian gunmen were trying to prevent soldiers and tanks moving towards the centre.

Israel reported one death in southern Gaza which public broadcaster Kan said was the first such fatality since the start of the Rafah ground operation last week. Netanyahu told the broadcaster CNBC that the operation could last weeks.

In the north, Israel said it had concluded an operation in the Zeitoun area, killing "dozens of terrorists". Residents said tanks had pulled back from the area, with dozens of homes destroyed or damaged, while Palestinian medics said dozens of civilians had been killed and wounded.

An Israeli strike hit a gathering of people outside a Gaza City shop that provides an internet signal for customers to call and check on relatives and friends, killing at least three people and wounding more than 20, medics said.

An Israeli air strike killed a local journalist, Hayel Al-Najar, and three of his family in his house in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, medics and fellow journalists said.

INVESTIGATION INTO U.N. FATALITY

Israel said its troops had identified fighters in the central logistics compound of the U.N. Palestinian relief agency UNRWA east of Rafah, demanding an explanation. Reuters verified the location of video released by the Israeli army but could not verify when it was filmed or the identity of the men.

"The U.N. has in part become a terrorist entity in itself because it cooperates with Hamas and covers for it," Israel's ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan told Army Radio.

UNRWA has denied cooperating with Hamas.

An UNRWA spokesperson said the agency could not verify the authenticity or content of the video or the exact timing or location, but it was likely that the video showed an UNRWA warehouse in Rafah that staff left in the week of May 6.

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters the men were there to protect aid distribution.

"These are false allegations and lies. This is a police force tasked with securing aid centres against acts of theft and looting," Abu Zuhri told Reuters.

The U.N. is investigating a strike on a car in Rafah this week that killed its first international staff member since Oct. 7, a retired Indian army officer en route to the European Hospital. It blamed tank fire in an area where only Israeli tanks were present.

The Israeli military said an initial inquiry had concluded the vehicle, whose route it was unaware of, had been hit in an active combat zone and the incident was under review.

Some 254 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began, including 191 U.N. staff, according to the U.N..

As the fighting intensifies, ceasefire talks mediated by Qatar and Egypt are at a stalemate, with Hamas demanding a permanent end to attacks and Netanyahu's government saying it will not stop until the group is annihilated.

Reuters

After alleging his life and family were in danger, FirstNews editor, Segun Olatunji, walked out on his job and the messy situation of Nigeria’s state security agents going feral on him. Their actions were not out of character. When a situation embarrasses one of the country’s many self-important “big men,” violence is always their resort. In this case, the big man with a punctured ego is the president’s Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila.FirstNews had written an unflattering story bordering on corruption and abuse of office about him, a civic action that turned out to be a mistake on the part of journalists who took the fact of Nigeria’s democracy as self-evident. For now, one cannot definitively state whether the case peaked with the editor’s resignation.

Some military men were said to have arrested Olatunji from his Lagos home. According to Olatunji’s narration of accounts, they arrested his wife and used her as bait to get to him. They (officers of the Army, Air Force and Defence Intelligence Agency!) burst into his home, bundled him into a van parked outside his house, and whisked him away. They blindfolded him and transported him to Abuja in a military helicopter. They also detained and tortured him. When confronted, they at first denied their involvement in his arrest. It was thanks to a sustained media campaign that Olatunji was later released. It probably helped too that the FirstNews management also apologised to Gbajabiamila stating that their report contained “falsehoods and fabricated stories handed out to us as facts by a misleading source.” Trouble is, in situations like this, you never know what constitutes a genuine apology and what was obtained under duress.

Several commentators have already addressed the issue of the journalist’s abduction. What I am curious about is the role of Gbajabiamila in all of these. Is he satisfied with the outcome? Is this how he is going to be resolving issues going forward? Notably, he was silent all through the saga (or maybe I just never came across his statement on the issue). However, we are Nigerians enough to know that the state agents would not deploy that much resources to arrest a single journalist if they were not acting on “orders from above.” The fact that he was publicly silent does not absolve his fangs of this venom.

As you might know, Gbajabiamilia is a trained lawyer with many years of practice in the United States. Yes, his career was blighted by professional misconduct but he was still a practitioner. Back home in Nigeria, he cut his political teeth by working among the breed of activists/intellectuals whose perpetual claims on the public never surpass their glorious days of challenging military despots. It is consequential of how we (mis-)attribute our freedom from autocratic government to these people that someone like Gbajabiamila eventually rose to become the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In short, Gbajabiamila is a man whose professional career and political credentials have been defined by the law—the rule of law, advocacy against an unruly order, and the making of the law.

So, why would a man like that fight supposed libel/slander through means that repudiate the law? Why did he abjure the path of pursuing a civil case and instead opt for the very “Gestapo” military techniques that negate the ethos of Nigeria as a democratic society? I am genuinely curious if, at any time during Olatunji’s saga, Gbajabiamila was struck by the irony of a lawyer/lawmaker defending his supposed integrity using brute despotic tactics. Is this not another instance of Nigeria as the quintessential Orwellian animal farm?

There are many disasters in Nigeria today, and Olatunji’s abduction illustrates some of them: those who boast they fought for democracy were never fully convinced of democracy’s true potential; those presently vested with power do not believe in the country enough to let us attain our true potential. At every turn, and every opportunity they get, they subvert our chances of becoming the nation where “peace and justice shall reign.” As it turns out, even the man who has worked with the law all his life does not even believe in the law enough to let the law take its course. He could have gotten FirstNews to apologise if he had filed a civil case in the court, won, and the judge ordered a retraction. Instead, he took a shortcut. For a country where insecurity is perpetually rife, security agents sure wasted resources to make a spectacle of the vindictiveness of self-vindication.

When you read the FirstNews report that triggered the abduction, what you see is a case of losing a needle and invoking Sango to help retrieve it. Ultimately, the expenditure of summoning a wrathful God will outweigh the value of what was initially lost. Like millions of Nigerians, I never even heard of FirstNews until the arrest of their editor. I had to go dig up the story online, and there it was: a wishy-washy and gossipy report that lacked substance. If there was any truth to that account, it was buried deep down in the shallowness of that reporting.

You look at the article now gleefully republished on the internet and wonder, what is it about this tripe that triggered the autocratic instincts of a lawyer, lawmaker, former Speaker, and Chief of Staff to the President? It really does not take much for people with really small feathers to have them ruffled. Then you look at the whole situation again and it suddenly gets clearer why Nigeria is in a state of administrative mess: our leaders are not busy enough. Those who are tasked with carrying the elephant of national responsibilities on their heads are obsessed with using their toes to dig up crickets in the soil of Nigeria’s decaying media institutions.

Meanwhile, by descending on Olatunji so high-handedly, reasonable people are left wondering why anyone would move a muscle over something so forgettable. It had to have triggered something in a seared conscience. While we will never know the truth of what happened, the overreaction suggests that there must be a raging fire underneath the wispy smoke ofFirstNews’ report.

Olatunji’s story is yet another lesson for Nigerians who accede when government officials advocate more social media regulation. Now you can see that when people like Gbajabiamila go around whipping up a moral panic around social media, claiming social media is a menace that must be regulated, what they are actually doing is putting themselves beyond incrimination when they take certain extrajudicial actions like abducting and torturing a journalist. What they are trying to achieve by disseminating such glaring nonsense is a situation where they can justify themselves when they express their own unregulated power. Do not be beguiled, the real menace to society is those unaccountable to no one and who will observe no limits in their expression of coercive force.

Nigeria is a place where virtually everyone with a modicum of power does not hesitate to rain down abuses by using state-invested power, and here is another frightening instance. What is far more annoying is how the same state security agents who cannot protect us against crime, terrorism, banditry, and all sorts somehow always have enough resources to salvage the ego of the big man who is apparently too soft-skinned to take public criticism. For Nigerian soldiers who make videos to complain they fight Boko Haram and bandits without sufficient resources to fly a non-violent “offender” in a military helicopter shows an abject lack of seriousness in their organisation. But that imprudence is the nature of our democracy. There are never enough resources to do any public good, but they somehow manage to privatise the little that exists to assuage the feelings of puny gods who want their feelings worshipped.

Punch

Dropping your prices to get more customers may not lead to more profit. While this approach may have benefits in the short term, pricing psychology research reveals that lowering your prices too much can negatively impact your customer satisfaction scores and brand perception.  

Years ago, I had the chance to learn valuable lessons about pricing psychology from Brad Fallon, a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur with whom I interned as a college senior.

Brad and his wife co-founded MyWeddingFavors.com in 2004. Within two years, they had turned a $2,000 investment into $32 million.

Following this success, Brad launched StomperNet, an internet marketing company, which made $12 million in 12 hours, setting a record for the highest launch day sales for an information product up to that point in history.  

Brad's insights about pricing psychology were deep because, among other things, he sold digital products. Persuading people (especially in the early 2000s) to pay a high price tag for information products is hard because you're selling an intangible solution. 

Among the most valuable lessons I gleaned from him and others about pricing psychology is this: How consumers evaluate value, the worth of a product or service, is subjective and rarely rational. 

I'll give you an example. 

Mind over matter

In a 2008 study, participants were asked to rate wines at different price points while inside an MRI scanner, which allowed researchers to observe their brain activity. Ultimately, participants rated the wines with the heftier price tag as the best tasting.  

Researchers saw more activity in participants' orbitofrontal cortex, the brain region that processes pleasure, when people drank the pricer wines.

But here's the kicker: It was all the same wine. The only difference? The price tag. 

People believed the pricier wine tasted better and was of higher quality. As they say, perception is reality.

A pricey perspective

These insights relate to profit margins. You may have set your prices using competitive analysis or a cost-plus model. 

Competitive pricing means setting your rates based on your competitors' pricing, while cost-plus pricing involves adding a markup to your production costs to create a profit margin.

While these pricing strategies are useful, they have a drawback: They fail to consider your customers' perceptions of value and what they're willing to pay.  

In other words, these two pricing strategies overlook the most valuable person in a pricing conversation: your customer, the one who's paying you. 

Van Westendorp

Luckily, tools like the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter, developed by a Dutch economist in the 1970s, can be invaluable for analyzing what your customers would be willing to pay for your product or service.  

It can help you find the optimal price range by asking your target audience four simple questions in a survey:  

• At what price is this product or service too cheap?
• At what price is this product or service a good value or bargain?
• At what price is this product or service getting expensive but still worth considering?
• At what price is this product or service too expensive?

As you gain insight into what your customers are willing to pay for your goods and services--and why--you may discover something: Their beliefs about your solution's value and how much they're willing to pay for it may surprise you. 

It could be better or worse than you think. And it would be hard to uncover these insights with other pricing strategies. 

So use the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter to reduce the risk of underpricing or overpricing your products and services.  

Whether you're selling wine or wedding favors online, never underestimate the power perception and psychology play in shaping people's buying behavior. 

To overlook this would be a big price to pay.

Inc