Trees hold a special place in our hearts, as they possess a longevity that surpasses most other creatures. These remarkable organisms can live for thousands upon thousands of years.1 In fact, the oldest recorded tree boasted an incredible age of over five thousand years! Its roots reached back to a time when Rome stood at the peak of its glory-an inspiring testament to the longevity of trees, making them some of the oldest living beings on our planet.

We acknowledge that trees are alive, for they harness energy to sustain their existence. Though they lack the organs found in mammals, trees possess their own unique set of structures that enable their survival. But being alive, do they possess a heartbeat?

Mystery of the Heartbeat

While trees do not possess a heart in the same way humans do, the idea of them having their own rhythm and pulsation is not as far-fetched as it might seem. A recent study conducted by András Zlinszky, Bence Molnár, and Anders S. Barfod from Hungary and Denmark has shed light on an extraordinary aspect of trees-they possess a special type of pulsation akin to a heartbeat.

Using advanced monitoring techniques called “terrestrial laser scanning,” the researchers carefully observed the movements of over twenty different tree species. The investigation revealed something stunning: while trees slumber through the night, their bodies pulse in rhythm, akin to a heartbeat.

These pulses are responsible for moving water throughout the tree’s structure, much like the heart’s role in pumping blood through our bodies. This groundbreaking discovery challenges the long-held assumption that trees solely rely on osmosis for water distribution. Truly an amazing finding! These tree heartbeats occur at an incredibly slow pace, with some pulses taking hours to repeat. Their gentle nature renders them invisible to the human eye. Nature never ceases to amaze!

The study also shed light on another fact-trees engage in more movement than previously believed. Numerous tree species were observed to lower their branches by up to 10cm after sunset, a phenomenon that occurs during their sleep and is referred to as “circadian leaf movements.”

While this study provided scientists with valuable insights, there are still many questions that need to be answered. The precise workings of the tree’s heartbeat and water distribution mechanisms remain elusive, meaning we need further research to fully understand these processes. Who knows what other wonders we may uncover in the realm of trees and plant life? Recent research has even shown that plants and trees possess the ability to feel pain and emit distress signals when harmed, completely changing our prior beliefs. It is clear there is still much yet to learn and how nature continually surprises us with its workings.

The Hidden Movement of Trees

Contrary to their seemingly static nature, trees exhibit a remarkable amount of motion, as recent research has shown. While not all trees in the study showed a defined sleep cycle with lowered branches at night, the researchers observed that all trees exhibited minute and periodic pulsations. These findings suggest that trees actively pump water, acting as natural hydraulic systems.

Due to the gradual nature of these movements, these movements often go unnoticed by the naked eye. However, this surprising revelation showed that different types of trees engage in periodic movements, regardless of sleep patterns. The researchers detected previously unknown movements of up to 1cm, occurring in cycles lasting two to six hours. These movements are believed to be linked to changes in water pressure within the plants, meaning a pumping system is at work inside.

It was also noted that while all trees showed minute branch movements, only seven species demonstrated distinct sleep motions. Additionally, the length of sleep periods varied, with some trees exhibiting shorter or longer cycles. Some trees showed slow and constant movements in one direction. Factors such as disease and environmental conditions likely contribute to the motions seen.

Among the various tree species studied, the Magnolia tree exhibited the most striking movement, undergoing three complete up-and-down cycles in a single night. These short-term movements of trees correspond to changes in water pressure within their structures.

The researchers concluded that the barely seen movements of trees and other plants could serve as crucial indicators of their health. Detecting changes in overnight movements may prove to be an effective tool for noting crop stress or disease, making it easier to help earlier and use more environmentally friendly solutions.

Furthermore, trees exhibit a range of oscillating cycles similar to circadian rhythms. Many processes within trees follow distinct cycles, often lasting 24 hours, such as the opening and closing of stomata.3 Some oscillations occur annually, such as the shedding of leaves. These cycles are primarily driven by light and atmospheric conditions. Trees respond to environmental changes by adjusting their transpiration rates throughout the day, increasing water loss in the morning and decreasing it during the afternoon and night. Accompanying these changes is the slow, rhythmic pulse observed in the diameter of the tree’s stem.

The Origin of A Tree’s Heartbeat

Nearly a century ago, reports of a tree’s pulse surfaced during experiments conducted by forest scientists to measure stem growth. In 1932, Lester Henry Reineke invented the first precision dendrometer, a device used to measure the girth of a tree’s stem. Using this instrument, researchers discovered that tree stems contract during the day and expand at night due to fluctuations in water stored within their tissues.

Recent research has found that the pulse primarily originates from diameter fluctuations in the bark, a surprising revelation considering the traditional belief that bark is separate from the tree’s transpiration stream. To unravel this mystery, scientists have delved into the composition and function of the bark.

The bark comprises a dead outer layer and a living inner section housing a transport system called the phloem. The phloem transports sugars produced during photosynthesis in the leaves to other tissues in need of energy. This transportation process leads to a downward flow of sugar-rich sap toward the roots. Water serves as the transport medium for these sugars, and under specific conditions, water can be drawn out of the phloem and into the tree’s transpiration stream.

Thus, despite lacking a traditional heart, trees possess their unique pulse. To truly experience this phenomenon, one must sit next to a tree, observing its movements over an extended period-a remarkable reminder of the hidden wonders surrounding us in the natural world.

The Premier Daily

An Ecuadorian woman has died in hospital just days after she stunned mourners at her wake by knocking from the inside of her coffin after she had been mistakenly declared as deceased by a doctor.

Bella Montoya, 76, died last week in the Ecuadorian city of Babahoyo – or so doctors thought – before she made it clear to guests at her wake that reports of her death had been very much premature.

Montoya was swiftly removed from what was intended to be her eternal resting place and rushed back to hospital where her condition was upgraded to ‘alive.’ But after seven days of treatment she died – for good, this time – on Friday of an ischemic stroke, Ecuador’s health ministry confirmed in a statement.

Health officials added that Montoya was kept under “permanent surveillance” while in hospital. “This time my mother really did die,” her son Gilbert Barbera told local media. “My life will not be the same.”

On her actual death, Montoya was returned to the same funeral home where she first alerted mourners that her death had been declared a little too hastily. She will be buried at a public cemetery, according to reports in Ecuadorian media.

It was also reported in the country’s press that Montoya had a condition called catalepsy, the symptoms of which include seizures, a loss of consciousness and rigidity in the body – ailments which were apparently confused by a doctor for rigor mortis.

Montoya was first declared deceased on June 9. After almost five hours with her inside her coffin, mourners heard noises emanating from inside it and opened it up to discover her very much alive .

She was returned to hospital by emergency services but doctors were unable to prolong her life very much longer before she succumbed to stroke.

Montoya’s apparent Lazarus-like return to life follows a similar incident in New York State earlier this year in which an 82-year-old woman was found to be breathing while awaiting funeral proceedings. She had been declared dead three hours earlier.

Russia Today

“Out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its mission and either fulfill or betray it.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

“This generation will not pass away before all these things take place”. – Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 24/34.

What we are doing today is a momentous event in the history of the Nigerian Left. Although it is the launching, not of a richly endowed foundation, not the opening of a magnificent physical edifice of the Left but a (mere) online website, it is still an occasion of great historical significance. This is because this online website will be a window on what will be the only SOCIALIST LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES on the African continent. As an online window, the website will open out to both an online library and archive that is accessible to the whole world and a physical library and archival documents and other materials on the ground in Calabar. The epochal nature of this project can be gauged by the fact that while we know of socialist booksellers, socialist book distributors, socialist publishers and even socialist institutions for the production and training of cadres, a socialist library and archive is a very uncommon thing. As a matter of fact, only in post-revolutionary societies do we find socialist libraries that double as depositories for archives. How did this come into being, what will it add to resources available to the Nigerian Left and what new relationships between the past, the present and the future will it entail – these are the issues that I hope to address in this talk. But first, a word or two on the ground on which I stand as I give the talk.

I speak today as the Chair of the Board of Advisers and of the Board of Trustees of SOLAR, not as “Professor Emeritus” as I was introduced. I speak also as a former President of ASUU, indeed the foundation president of ASUU. I speak also as a former member of the Central Working Committee (CWC) of the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) representing ASUU in that body. And I speak as a former member of the Socialist Forum Collective (SFC) of Ife that, for more than two decades, met unfailingly every week to dispassionately review what we had done right or wrong and where we were going. I also speak as one of a small band of revolutionaries that formed a commune at Ode-Omu whose purpose was ultimately to foment a mass uprising of peasants and workers in many parts of the country. Finally, I speak as a leftist newspaper columnist who wrote continuously for major mainstream Nigerian newspapers – Sketch, Guardian, The Nation – for more than half a century. I mention these facts and points of reference because it was within the contexts they provided that I met the outstanding leftist revolutionaries, activists and thinkers of my generation and the generation that came after mine. As will become evident in the course of my talk, this is the main backdrop of the talk. It is also the central experience of my life. I do not of course under-value the scholarly and professional work indicated in my emeritus professorship; indeed, I wish to place on the record here that I am immensely proud of all the younger scholars that I joined others to produce at Ibadan, Ife, Cornell and Harvard, nearly all of them very prominent academics and intellectuals in their own right. But as all of them know, the life I have had in the Nigerian Left has been at the center of my existence in the last halfcentury. And it is from this fount of invaluable experience that I draw the substance of this talk.

SOLAR’s online and on-the-ground library and archives both have their antecedents in two projects of Edwin and Bene Madunagu that are almost without duplication or comparison in the Nigerian Left: a socialist free public library that opened in 1995 and closed partially in 2018; and a passionate and dedicated archiving of the lives, struggles (and quarrels) of individuals and generations of Nigerian revolutionaries and activists from the colonial period to more or less the present period. Edwin Madunagu was/is of course not the only one in the Nigerian Left who kept an archive, but he was the most dedicated and what he colllected is numerically vastly superior to what anyone else collected. He was/is not like a collector of stamps or heritage coins; as the greatest historian and archivist of our generation, he collected documents and memorabilia on the lives and times and struggles of generations of the Nigerian Left assiduously. When it became widely known that he was “collecting”, many sought him out to donate to his ever-expanding trove. In one case – that of Pa Curtis Joseph – the tranche of papers and memorabilia that he gave to Eddie was more than a thousand pages! The free public library also has all the marks of an uncommon revolutionary project about it because, at precisely the time when government-funded public libraries were folding up in Nigeria, Eddie and Bene were running a free library in Calabar where working people and young people could come in, read newspapers, check out books, and for a small, token fee have photocopies of newspapers and documents made for them. Is there a connection between the free socialist public library and the vast archival collection of the Madunagus? Yes, there is and it is this: of all the comrades that I encountered in the Nigerian Left, none appreciated the significance of documentation and information as intellectual and cultural aspects of our struggles as did Eddie, especially with regard to relations between past and present generations of the Nigerian Left. I recall here the countless number of conversations between Eddie and myself that were sparked by some particular items in the archives, just as the free public library dedicated specifically to socialism made Calabar one of my favorite cities in Nigeria, quite apart from its own great political and historical significance in the making of Nigeria. It is these two currents, the free public library and Eddie’s vast archival collection, that are coming together in the creation of SOLAR.

Digitalisation of the archives has started in earnest, thanks to assistance from one of our collaborators, IFRA. Meanwhile, thanks to another collaborator, GPI, the books, documents and other items of the archives have been moved into a building complex that is more commodious than the physical space they had occupied in the last three decades. Indeed, we have been given a parcel of land by a senior comrade and a member of the BOT. In the fullness of time, we shall erect the permanent home of SOLAR on this piece of land. Our hope is that it will be a testament to SOLAR’s vitality to the posterity of the Nigerian Left.

It is all very promising and exciting, the movement of part of the library to the GPI building complex and the digitalisation of the lives and works of generations of the Nigerian Left. Some comrades whose lives and works are being digitalized have an abundance of written works by themselves or about them. Others do not have such rich written documentation. I think here of Comrade Tony Engurube, of cherished and imperishable memory. Fortunately, he is not forgotten and there is a surfeit of oral and written accounts and testimonies produced by other comrades about his life, his exceptional revolutionary passion and activism. Like all archival collections, in this one the dominance of written sources will be alleviated by recourse to oral materials.

The digitalised archives of SOLAR will be, first and foremost, about individuals. But ultimately, it is in generational cohorts or groupings that the archives will achieve their greatest impact. This is because as crucial as class, gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, locality and individuality are as vectors of social identity and struggles for justice and equality, generations are the wheels around which revolutionary outbreaks and social transformation turn. As Fanon famously said, “out of relative obscurity, every generation must discover its mission and either fulfill or betray it”. Generation is not destiny, but it is the greatest bearer of possibility when it comes to the need and the will for revolutionary change.

For starters, we began the digitalization process around and about three particular generational cohorts of the Nigerian Left. These are the 1940s-1960s generation; the 1970s—1990s; and the Post-SAP, Post-Neoliberalim generation. Here are some names – only a small, partial list – of each of these groups. The 40s-60s group: The Zikists; Labour Leader No 1; Dapo Fatogun; Eskor Toyo; Wahab Goodluck; Kolagbodi; Baba Omojola; Ola Oni; Chimere Ikoku; Tunji Otegbeye; Chinua Achebe; Wole Soyinka; Segun Osoba; Eno Edet Traore; Ken Saro-Wiwa; Fela Kuti; Alao Aka-Basorun and Mokwugo and Ifeoma Okoye. In Group 2: Gani Fawehinmi; Omafume Onoge; Bade Onimode; Seinde and Dunni Arigbede; Yusuf Bala Usman; Omotoye Olorode; Bene and Edwin Madunagu; Femi Osofisan; Dipo Fasina; Raufu Mustafa; Ntien Kungwai; Tar Ukoh; Jibo Ibrahim; Mahmud Tukur; Atahiru Jega; Festus Iyayi; Assisi Asobie; Niyi Osundare; Esiaba Irobi; Ayesha Imam; and G.G. Darah. Group 3: Femi Falana; Ngozi Iwere (née Ojidoh); Kunle Ajibade; Chido Onumah; Akin Adesokan; Uzor Maxim Uzoatu; Chima Ubani; Owei Lakemfa; Baba Aye; Austine Amanze Akpuda; Kayode Komolafe; Wumi Raji; Offiong Offiong Aqua; Femi Taiwo; Dapo Olorunyomi; Sola Olorunyomi, Tony Iyare and Biodun Ogunyemi. As these are only partial lists, we can see that in generations of the Nigerian Left we have an impressive numerical consolidation. As a matter of fact, it is also qualitatively impressive. This goes against the grain of the received “wisdom” about national formations of the Left on the African continent. By the light of this “wisdom”, countries like Sudan, South Africa, Tanzania, Egypt and Ghana have formations and generations of the Left that are deemed much bigger, stronger and accomplished national left formations than what historically obtained in Nigeria. One of the things that the digitalization project of SOLAR will hopefully accomplish is debunk this myth, this fallacy. For the fact is that though no politically strong or viable Communist or Socialist Party has emerged in Nigeria, and the control and guidance of labour unions by the “hard left” has never been anything close to what it has been in countries like South Africa, Nasser’s Egypt and Nimery’s Sudan, the Nigerian Left has penetrated deeper and wider into three domains of national, public affairs than any other national formation of the Left in Africa: curriculum and pedagogy in the tertiary educational sector; the penetration of Leftist writers, critics, artists and performers into the arts, theatre, popular music and street art of the country; and the ideological and political alliance of intellectual and manual labour signified, for instance, in ASUU’s membership of the NLC. Though Babangida ejected ASUU from membership of the NLC, the links have remained intact. On this note, I come to the closing thoughts of this talk.

In the title of the talk, I mention two terms hinting that I am counterposing one to the other. The terms are “history” and “historicity”. By “history” I have in mind the connection between periods or generations across aeons of time, like a chain of being. In contrast, in “historicity” I have in mind the distinct and unique set of conditions or, more pertinently, contradictions that make each age, each generation like no other. On this account, “history” and “historicity” are respectively like the terms “syntagm” and “paradigm” in linguistics and/or semiotics. In the syntagm or syntagmatic structures, the syntax, the links between words, phrases or signs are so clearly established that they are regulative. In contrast, the paradigm or paradigmatic structures require absolutely no nearness or resemblance between the words, phrases or signs compared. What is the relevance of this excursus on “history” and “historicity” and “syntagm” and “paradigm” to the subject of this talk, SOLAR’s digitalization of the lives, works and struggles of generations of the Nigerian Left? Well, it seems to me that in our project, analog and digital technologies will combine to abolish the gap or divide between “history” and “historicity”, “syntagm” and “paradigm” so that both connected and unconnected comparisons can be made across the board. This seems rather like the words of the second epigraph to this talk attributed to Jesus the revolutionary Nazarene: “Before this generation shall pass away, these things will take place“. In this particular conception of “generation”, five or six bio-sociological generations are all members of one mega-generation, from new-born babies to the oldest “Methuselahs”. When it is completed, the digitalized archives of SOLAR will make available to us, instantly and simultaneously, archival materials on generations of the Nigerian Left as far apart as hundreds of years, the oldest materials going back to a time when our intellectual and ideological forebears did not refer to themselves as “Nigerians” but as “Africans”.

SOLAR’s ultramodern alchemy of post-analog digitality will not abolish the divides and gaps between and within generations of the Nigerian Left. At best it will make available to us the means of productively negotiating the most problematic divides, especially those that in the last six to eight decades have widened or deepened to chasms. I have two particular sets of such generational chasms in mind. One pertains to the unbridgeable chasm between, on the one hand, generations that continue to think of themselves as universalists and internationalists and, on the other hand, generations of leftists who are beginning to espouse ethno-nationalism and “restructurenista” irredentism. In some instances, this schism exists within the same generation. The second is the chasm between generations for whom anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism are fundamental points of departure and much younger generational cohorts for whom the effective ideological and strategic context for their struggles for justice and equality stops at our shorelines and land borders, barely extending to our contiguous neighbors like Cameroon, Niger and Benin Republic. Consistent with this stance, they completely subsume their anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism under a “patriotic”, nation-state polity in which the be-all and end-all of revolutionary or democratic subjectivity are captured by “governance”, “state capture”, “stomach infrastructure”,“insecurity” and “corruption”. Indeed, there are among the younger generations many for whom figures like Fanon, Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Cabral and even Sankara evoke absolutely nothing, not even the shadow of mere name recognition! The shudder that this gives me is both literal and symbolic!

Does this make me sound like one of the “old Methuselahs” of Jesus’ conception of the mega-generation that contains a multiplicity of generations? I hope not! Like the entirety of the “generations” that listened to Christ’s sermon, all Nigerians, from the youngest to the oldest that are past the hundredth year mark, hope that “something” is coming that will deliver us all from the terrible suffering and darkness that envelope the land. Other than this “metaphysical” hope, SOLAR’s online digitalized archive of generations of the Nigerian Left will not pretend that all the multitudes, all the generations of the living and the departed speak with or in one voice. But neither will we project a cacophony, a Tower of Babel, a Day of Pentecost in which a riot of tongues locked the peoples – the generations – in the prison houses of their mutually incomprehensible languages and discourses. Ha, if only the universalists and internationalists could or would make common cause with the irredentist ethno-nationalists! But that is not the goal. When our online-accessible archives become available, a new renaissance will follow closely in its wake – studies, readers, anthologies, booklets, full-length books all derived from the great harvest of SOLAR’s digitalized archives will be published in waves and cycles. In this respect, SOLAR is not without antecedents and precursors in the distant and recent past of the Nigerian Left. But fundamentally, it is, or will be a synthesis of institutional bodies of the Nigerian Left that were half-formed or stuck in a limbo of neither viable nor unfeasible projects: “abiku” socialist bookshops that just barely managed to survive from one month, one year to the next; socialist book distributors who, in good conscience, never paid proceeds from books they sold to the comrades who wrote and published the books, converting the monies to their own use just to keep body and soul together; and socialist book publishers in varying degrees of precarious individual-cum-collective forms of proprietorship and authorship. SOLAR will surpass these relics of our past and present attempts at institution building and financial independence and self-reliance – but we will make haste slowly! ** Biodun Jeyifo is professor emeritus and research professor in Comparative Literature in Harvard University, USA. He is a radical critic, scholar and public intellectual. He has also taught at Cornell University, Ithaca, U.S.A and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria.

This is the full text of remarks orally presented  at the formal launching of the website of SOLAR on Friday, 16 June, 2023.

PT

A glut of unsold Nigerian oil has built up again with as much as half of output due to be loaded next month still searching for buyers.

Traders of the nation’s oil said the surplus has been caused in part by a request for back taxes from shipping companies, which caused a wariness among some of the firms about sending their vessels to collect the west African nation’s barrels.

While the government subsequently clarified that there would be a six-month grace period to comply with the tax request, traders said the lack of sales demonstrated that Nigeria needs to do more to resolve the issue.

The surplus is a sign that global reductions in oil supply from leading producer nations is yet to tighten every market. There are between 20 and 22 cargoes that remain unsold for July, about half the total, according to the traders of West African crude. Shipments are typically about one million barrels.

Earlier this month, some shipowners were said to be avoiding the West African nation after a series of multi-million dollar tax bills were sent out, seeking to claw back unpaid duties from 2010-2019. The country’s tax authorities have given shipping companies the grace period to reconcile the tax backlog through a committee involving shippers and regulators. 

The cost of shipping oil from Nigeria was $53,463 a day as of Thursday, above the year-to-date average, according to data from the Baltic Exchange. Freight for ships hauling about 1 million barrels of crude from Nigeria to Europe surged the most in more than a year last week because of the tax issue. 

Nigeria’s slow sales contrast with a more bullish picture in Angola, where crude supplies are sold out for July and differentials are inching higher, the people said. Supplies from Gabon and Chad are also mostly sold for July. 

Much of Angola’s output is of a heavy-sweet variety that is popular with refiners in China, where demand remains healthy. 

Angola’s Cabinda grade traded at a 60-to-70 cents a barrel premium to Dated Brent for July loading earlier this week, increasing from a premium of 30 cents for June barrels. 

Bloomberg

Nigeria has accumulated up to $3 billion in debts to trading houses such as Vitol and oil majors such as BP for fuel supplies and is trailing four to six months behind schedule in repaying them with cargoes of crude, four traders and executives told Reuters.

Nigeria will likely take months to clear the debt, which will complicate reforms by new President Bola Tinubu aimed at weaning Africa's largest economy and most populous nation off costly fuel subsidies that have contributed to growing debt and foreign exchange shortages.

In his first two weeks in office, Tinubu removed petrol price caps and restrictions on the naira currency – liberalisation changes that investors have been awaiting for more than a decade.

As part of those reforms, Nigeria, Africa's top oil producer, plans to scrap an old scheme by which it swaps its crude for gasoline imports. Nigeria for years sold the gasoline, bought at the open market price, to its population at a discount, and the government paid the difference.

The subsidy costs about $10 billion last year. The last time the government tried to end the scheme, the move led to protests. Nigeria needs imports because it lacks the refinery capacity necessary to meet domestic demand.

Head of Nigeria's state oil firm NNPC, Mele Kyari, said earlier this month it was ending the swaps - known as Direct Purchase Direct Sale (DSDP) - after years of criticism by civil society groups including the Nigerian Extractive Transparency Initiative for a lack of transparency and corruption.

Kyari said payments would be now made in cash but traders say NNPC is still importing gasoline via swaps for July delivery and has to pay for those cargoes in crude as well as the pending payments for previous months of swaps.

The arrangement has for years involved more than a dozen foreign and local trading consortia and backpayments are expected to continue until at least October 2023, according to the four traders involved in business with NNPC.

NPPC, which claims the government owes it $6 billion for subsidised fuel sales, declined to comment. The government declined to comment. Swaps participants including Vitol, Mercuria, BP and TotalEnergies (TTEF.PA) also declined to comment.

"Swaps will ultimately stop but not yet. We are getting our swaps crude cargo in October at the earliest," one major player said.

NNPC had made a rare cash payment in May to some partners of around $200 million, two trading sources said, but no further payment has taken place since amid the government's cash struggles.

Nigeria's falling oil production has exacerbated the country's fiscal problems, because it reduces the revenue that could be used to repay debt.

Nigeria used to produce 1.8 million barrels per day of crude but output has fallen in recent years to as little as 1.1 million during due to lack of investment and massive theft.

PRIVATE IMPORTERS

Paying for fuel deliveries with crude cargoes means there is less crude for Nigeria and NNPC's to export, and so less revenue.

NNPC's contribution to state coffers went from a peak of more than $30 billion a year in 2011 to zero in 2022 as it retained revenues to cover gasoline sale losses.

International monetary experts have long suggested Nigeria remove fuel subsidies and liberalise its foreign exchange to address its fiscal crisis.

In recent years, Nigeria's central bank kept the naira fixed at an artificially high rate that gradually rose from 200 to 450 naira to the dollar that only a few players, including the NNPC, could access. That shut out potential private petrol importers from the market.

President Tinubu allowed the naira to fall steeply in recent weeks, and eliminated preferential naira rates, a move that means all potential importers get the same forex costs and could compete in fuel imports.

But the naira volatility, which makes it tough to calculate potential profits, and uncertainty over whether firms will be able to get money out of the country due to continued dollar shortages, has for now deterred private firms from importing fuel.

Besides private importers, Nigeria will also depend on businessman Aliko Dangote's refinery to cover fuel demand in the future. Nigeria's first major oil plant is unlikely to start full-scale operations before next year.

Reuters

Nigeria’s naira bonds and treasury bills, priced in the local currency, are turning out to be something investors from abroad want to stay away from as the country’s high inflation makes the yields on those assets unattractive for them.

At 22.4 per cent, price levels in Africa’s biggest economy increased to their highest levels in nearly two decades last month, outrunning rates at which such securities are priced so much that returns on them will have been much eroded by the time they fall due.

That has made their real yields negative, and foreign investors want notes to be priced higher to make up for inflation’s adverse impact.

Bloomberg cited a London-based institutional investor on Thursday as saying only rates in the 15-20 per cent band could tempt it to plough money into naira-denominated securities. An analyst at another told the news outlet that treasury bills’ yields need to really reflect the monetary policy rate to encourage foreigners to invest in the local debt market.

The circumstances are being complicated by Nigeria’s ongoing currency overhaul, which has collapsed its numerous exchange rates into a single reference rate and helped bridge the gulf between the parallel and official rates.

Removing that spread, which was as wide as 60 per cent before the new reforms, implies foreign investors looking to invest in naira bonds and T-Bills have to pay that percentage more to do so since they have to convert their capital into the local currency to make that happen.

Yet, the trend is a departure from Nigeria’s Eurobonds, which this month quickened to a 5-month high, after considerable interest from investors excited about the foreign exchange revamp.

“We’ve benefited from a big rally on the Eurobonds as spreads have declined by over 200 basis points,” Kevin Daly of London’s Abrdn Investments Limited told Bloomberg.

“We expect spreads to compress further.”

His firm offloaded its investment in Nigeria’s T-bills three years ago following policies pegging the exchange rate and introducing capital controls.

Daly said Abrdn will be willing to reinvest when rates reach between 15-20 per cent and the local currency steady in the neighbourhood of 750 to a dollar.

“T-bill yields may have to rise to re-establish the policy rate as the anchor for interest rates before foreign portfolio investors can be confident to reengage with Nigeria,” Ayo Salami, chief investment officer of an asset management company in London, told the news outlet.

His company, Emerging Markets Investment Management Limited, controls around $40 million in investment in Nigeria’s bonds and stocks.

Unless Salami “sees a genuine willing buyer, willing seller foreign currency market,” he is not prepared to invest in Nigeria, his company having been forced to cut back its activities in Nigeria after the previous government introduced foreign exchange curbs.

PT

Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja, on Friday, admitted as exhibit
President Bola Tinubu’s academic records obtained from the Chicago State University, United States of America.

The five-member court headed by Haruna Tsammani admitted the documents as exhibits, while the legal teams of Tinubu, APC, and INEC argued that the documents were not admissible and promised to give their grounds objection in their final addresses.

The documents were tendered by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, who is challenging the outcome of the 25 February presidential election.

Atiku had filed a petition calling the court to overturn Tinubu’s victory.

Nigeria’s electoral commission, INEC, on 1 March declared Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) winner of the race.

But continuing his quest to have Tinubu’s election nullified, Atiku’s lead counsel, Chris Uche, led the 27th witness, Mike Enahoro-Ebah, in evidence before the court on Friday.

At the proceedings, Enahoro-Ebah, a star witness for the petitioner, narrated how he obtained several documents detailing Tinubu’s biodata.

Enahoro-Ebah, who identified himself as a public interest litigator, told the court that his attorney in the US obtained Tinubu’s academic records from Chicago State University.

He said the university was subpoenaed by a US court to release Tinubu’s academic records.

“I obtained the academic records from Chicago State University purporting to belong to Tinubu with a forwarding letter by my counsel based in Chicago.

“A subpoena was issued to the Chicago State University, which gave out the Academic records. A copy of the actual degree certificate issued by Chicago State University and Tinubu’s admission letter dated 1977 is attached,” Enahoro-Ebah told the court.

He said the degree certificate from Chicago State University bears the name “Tinubu Bola Adekunle”.

Enahoro-Ebah also tendered Tinubu’s transcript from the South West College in the US. He added the transcript, issued in 1977, identified Tinubu as “female.”

The court admitted the documents as exhibits.

In addition, the court admitted a “notarised judgement of criminal forfeiture” of Tinubu’s assets over alleged drug trafficking in the US.

The court further admitted a photocopy of Tinubu’s purported Guinean citizenship passport, which Enahoro-Ebah tendered.

Enahoro-Ebah also said he obtained Tinubu’s biodata from INEC, which was tendered before the five-member panel of the court

A certified true copy of Tinubu’s nomination form as flagbearer of the APC for the presidential election was presented as an exhibit.

The form was accompanied by a cover letter from INEC and a payment receipt for the certification.

The witness equally presented a National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) discharge certificate bearing “Tinubu Bola Adekunle”Objections

In their responses to the various documents, the respondents’ lawyers objected to the admissibility of Tinubu’s records from both the US and Nigeria.

INEC’s lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, said reasons for his objection to the admissibility of the documents would be advanced at the close of arguments in the case.

Tinubu’s lead counsel, Wole Olanipekun and APC’s lawyer, Lateef Fagbemi, urged the court not to admit the documents in evidence.

But no reasons were stated as they promised to articulate their objection later.

As of the time of filing this report, the court stood down Enahoro-Ebah’s cross-examination until 3:00 p.m. Friday.

Enahoro-Ebah may be Atiku’s last witness in the trial that has lasted three weeks.

Atiku is expected to close his case against Tinubu on Friday after calling 27 witnesses and tendering tons of electoral documents as evidence before the court.

After that, Tinubu and other respondents in the suit are expected to commence their defence on 30 June.

Atiku is also challenging Tinubu’s victory because the president “was fined $460,000 for an offence involving dishonesty, namely narcotics trafficking imposed by the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, in case no:93C 4483″ between the United States of America and Bola Tinubu.

After calling 27 witnesses and tendering tons of electoral documents, Atiku , on Friday, closed his case at the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja, which he prayed to upturn President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the 25 February poll.

Citing the prehearing session report of the court and provisions of the Electoral Act, Uche informed the court that he had come to the end of Atiku’s suit challenging Tinubu’s victory.

Referring to Enahoro-Ebah, Uche told the court, “My Lords, this will be our last witness in this case. Pursuant to the prehearing report and the Electoral Act, we apply to close the case for the petitioners.”

After the close of Atiku’s case, the respondents – INEC, APC and Tinubu – are expected to open their defence soon.

The five-member panel of the court headed by Haruna Tsammani had scheduled 30 June for respondents to commence their defence.

But after Atiku concluded his case, a lawyer in INEC’s legal team, Kemi Pinheiro, urged the court to allow the electoral body to open its defence on 3 July.

Toeing Pinheiro’s line, Olanipekun and Fagbemi prayed the court to allow them to open their clients’ (Tinubu and APC)’s suits after the “Sallah break.”

The Sallah break meant to mark Eid-el-Kabir, an Islamic celebration, is expected to commence from 28 to 30 June.

After listening to the lawyers, the court granted the request and adjourned the suit until 3 July for defence.

PT

Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, on Friday, closed his case at the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja with the 13 witnesses he called to prove his case against President Bola Tinubu’s election.

Mr Obi had proposed to call 50 witnesses but could only call 13 within the court allotted time. He also tendered tons of electoral documents.

Nigeria’s electoral commission, INEC, had declared Tinubu winner of the 25 February election.

Displeased with the results, Obi, who came third in the election, filed a petition at the court to challenge Tinubu’s victory.

He and his party filed the petition 20 days after Tinubu was declared president-elect.

Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who came second at the polls, is also challenging the election outcome separately. He also closed his case on Friday with 27 witnesses, although he had proposed to call 100.

Both opposition candidates claim the presidency, alleging that Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) did not win the election.

Resumed hearing

At the resumed hearing of Obi’s suit on Friday, his lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu, led Tanko Yunusa, a stalwart of the Labour Party, as a witness.

Yunusa, a Peter Obi Presidential Campaign Council spokesperson, was cross-examined by INEC’s lawyer, Kemi Pinheiro.

Tinubu and APC’s lawyers, Wole Olanipekun and Lateef Fagbemi, also took their turns to grill Yunusa during the cross-examination session.

Yunusa was asked if he knew about a Federal High Court decision that dismissed the Labour Party’s suit challenging vice president Kashim Shettima’s nomination because of the alleged double nomination. He responded, “No.”

A lawyer in Obi’s legal team, Ikechukwu Ezechukwu, invited Peter Yari to the witness box as the 13th petitioner’s witness in the case.

Yari was a presiding officer during the presidential election in Kaduna State. He adopted his witness statement on oath.

Under cross-examination by the respondents’ lawyers, Yari said he had difficulty uploading the presidential election results on INEC’s Results Viewing Portal.

At the close of his testimony, Obi’s lawyer, Uzoukwu, told the court, “My Lords, that is the petitioners’ case.”

Afterwards, the court adjourned further hearing until 3 July for the respondents – Tinubu, INEC and APC- to open their defence.

PT

Lagos state has been ranked 4th most unlivable city in the world, according the latest report of the Economic Inteligence Liveability Index.

The survey, conducted annually, revealed a surge in liveability scores worldwide, reaching a 15-year high.

Recall that the 2022 survey had reported that Lagos was the second most unlivable city, after Damascus. 

The 2023 survey highlights the global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, with healthcare and education scores witnessing enhancements across numerous cities in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

These positive developments have played a significant role in boosting overall liveability.

However, the report also indicates a decline in stability scores compared to the previous year, as several regions faced episodes of civil unrest.

Despite this setback, Lagos has managed to gain ground, showcasing resilience and progress amidst a challenging environment.

Lagos, one of the largest cities in Nigeria, finds itself among the bottom-ranking cities in the survey.

Nonetheless, the city’s healthcare and education sectors have seen some improvements. 

Vanguard

Nigerian workers have achieved a significant milestone by securing the second spot in the global ranking of the hardest working employees, surpassed only by their Mexican counterparts. According to a recently published report by the World of Statistics, Nigerian workers dedicate an average of 2,124 hours per year to their jobs.

The World of Statistics report reveals that Mexican workers topped the chart, with a mere four-hour difference from their Nigerian counterparts, clocking in an average of 2,128 working hours annually. This makes Nigeria the most industrious nation in Africa, highlighting the strong work ethic and dedication of its labour force.

Average annual hours worked:

Mexico — 2,128

Nigeria — 2,124

Costa Rica — 2,073

Colombia — 1,964

Chile — 1,916

South Korea — 1,910

Malta — 1,882

Russia — 1,874

Greece — 1,872

Romania — 1,838

Croatia — 1,835

Poland — 1,830

United States — 1,791

Nigerian work hours and industries

In Nigeria, the standard working hours for most public and private sector employees span eight hours per day, typically from 8 am to 4 pm or 9 am to 5 pm, Monday through Friday. However, certain sectors such as media, healthcare, security agencies, and manufacturing industries may require extended workdays that include weekends and shift rotations.

The report acknowledges that informal workers, often go above and beyond by putting in up to ten hours of work per day, reported Vanguard. While the study does not specify the nature of the work undertaken, it suggests that the top-ranked countries in terms of working hours are not primarily driven by technology-oriented occupations.

Global ranking

Following Nigeria's lead, three countries from Central and South America trail closely behind. Costa Rica claimed the third position with 2,073 hours, followed by Colombia in fourth place (1,964 hours), and Chile in fifth place (1,916 hours). Surprisingly, South Korea, known for its high-tech advancements, ranks sixth, with workers averaging 1,910 hours per year. Other notable countries include Malta (1,882 hours), Russia (1,874 hours), Greece (1,872 hours), and Romania (1,838 hours).

The report also sheds light on the working hours of workers in major global economies. The United States, the world's largest economy, secured the 13th spot with an average of 1,791 working hours per year, while Japan, the third-largest economy, lags behind in 30th place with workers putting in 1,607 hours annually. Germany, Europe's dominant economy, ranks 50th, with employees working an average of 1,349 hours each year. South Africa emerged as the second-highest on the African continent, with workers dedicating 1,513 hours annually, placing them at a distant 36th on the global list.

With Nigerian workers contributing 2,124 hours annually, it signifies that each employee spends a minimum of five hours engaged in productive activities compared to their South African counterparts, who work four hours less. This strong commitment to work highlights Nigeria's potential for increased productivity and economic growth.

WION