A group of Russians picked up by police in an area of Chad where the military has recently been battling rebels say they were visiting “rich natural sites” in the country’s north.
A group of Russians detained by police in northern Chad have said they were tourists on a sightseeing trip.
They were picked up last week in a part of the north-central African country where the army battled rebels in April and May – in a conflict that led to the death of President Idriss Deby.
A police spokesperson said they had not broken any laws and were evacuated to Chad’s capital N’Djamena for their own safety.
One of the Russians, Alexey Kamerzanov, acknowledged on Wednesday (June 23) that world travellers do not normally visit Chad.
“…but I checked and saw the Chad Republic is very rich with natural sites, for example the Ennedi plateau, Tibesti plateau, the Lakes of Ounianga, the Sahara desert. For us travellers it’s formidable and interesting.”
Russia’s presence in Africa has been the subject of speculation in recent months. The country deployed security contractors to Chad’s neighbor Central African Republic in 2018.
Analysts said that was part of a strategy to rival Western militaries deployed on the continent.
Three Russians on that military mission were killed during an incident in May in which CAR and Chad troops clashed art a border post.
In Libya, Russian mercenaries support eastern commander Khalifa Hafat’s Libyan National Army, a U.N. panel of experts has reported.
The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board(JAMB) on Friday released results of candidates who sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) on Saturday, 19th and Tuesday, 22 June 2021.
The board added the result for subsequent days would be released daily.
The board stated these in a statement by its Head of Media, Dr Fabian Benjamin, on Friday morning.
It directed candidates to check their results by sending UTMERESULT to 55019 through the GSM number used by each candidate to obtain profile code and UTME registration with the board and their results would be relayed to them.
The statement reads: “The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has released the results of candidates who sat in more than 720 CBT centres for the 2021 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination conducted between Saturday, 19th and Tuesday, 22 June 2021.
“Nevertheless, the Board would still review all the CCTV footages and other technical gadgets for detection of possible examination misconducts.
“Extremely comparatively few results are being withheld for further investigation.
“In addition, the Board would not hesitate to withdraw the results of any candidate subsequently found to have committed any form of examination misconduct.”
Demola Adeleye and his family were sleeping in their three-bedroom bungalow when they were awoken by the sound of bulldozers demolishing the homes around them. In February a task force sent by Lagos state’s New Towns Development Authority (NTDA) started bulldozing all the structures in the coastal neighbourhood of Oke-Egan and evicting the occupants.
“I am pained and depressed,” Adeleye, 38, said with tears in his eyes.”Look at where I have been sleeping with my wife and four children,” he added, pointing to a half-finished building behind his welding workshop where his family has been staying since their house was razed to the ground.
“Whenever I wake in the morning, I cry.”Olakunle Aboyeji, general manager of the NTDA, confirmed the demolitions to the orrespondents and said it had acquired the land in Oke-Egan from the traditional owners, who were compensated with 20 hectares (50 acres) nearby.
The demolitions were the latest in a string of evictions that have ramped up over the past five years as the Lagos government clears slums, homes built on lagoons and other informal settlements to house a rapidly growing population.
Residents say in its push to create more housing the government is destroying their homes without relocating or compensating them.
Lagos is home to more than 20 million people, about 70% of them living in informal settlements, according to the latest government estimates.Anticipating that the state’s growing population would lead to housing challenges, the Lagos government drafted a housing master plan in 1981 and established the NTDA to implement it, the agency states on its website.
About 14 housing projects – more than 7,000 affordable housing units – have been built so far and more than 20 others are in various stages of development, according to the NTDA.”We plan to develop, not demolish,” said Aboyeji. He said the illegal structures at Oke-Egan were torn down to make way for the development of a new housing estate.
He noted that the general public was warned not to purchase any land within the state without seeing a title deed – known locally as a certificate of occupancy.
“The demolitions would not have taken place if there had not been encroachment on the planned sites acquired several years back for the (housing project’s) development,” he wrote in emailed comments.
Oke-Egan residents said more than 400 informal homes were demolished in the neighbourhood in February.
Adeleye said when he bought the land from the traditional owners six years ago, he was assured the sale was legitimate and only found out later that the land had already been bought by the government.
“The landowners told me the land was theirs and not the government’s. So many other people also came and bought land here,” he said. He and others who settled in the area never saw title deeds for the land they bought and did not apply for them, he said.
LAND ACT
Timothy Nubi, director of the University of Lagos’ Centre of Housing and Sustainable Development, said confusing and complicated land ownership laws make it difficult for Nigerians to access land and to know who owns the land they live on.
In 1978, Nigeria passed the Land Use Act, which nationalised all land, and was intended to override customary land rights with the aim of making land more accessible, improving tenure security and boosting development.
But many communities do not recognise the government as the owner of Nigeria’s land, Nubi said.
As a result, even after the government has compensated traditional owners for use of their land to build housing, the owners sometimes sell their land to individuals, he added.
The process of getting a title deed is also expensive and time-consuming, Nubi noted. While there are no reliable figures on land ownership in Nigeria, various estimates by the government and land rights groups say less than 3% of land in the country is registered.
Nubi said the Act should be amended to address the current need for affordable housing in Nigeria.”Let those who are working be able to buy (homes) and those who are poor be able to enjoy social housing,” he said.
RELOCATION AND COMPENSATION
Adeleye said being evicted during the COVID-19 pandemic has made it impossible for him to find somewhere new to live.”I do not have jobs as I usually do.
It is hard to find new land to buy in Lagos,” he said.It is also difficult to rent. A one-bedroom apartment in (the area) is now 400,000 naira ($970). I do not have that kind of money.”Four days after the demolitions at Oke-Egan, the evicted families protested in front of the Lagos State House of Assembly, calling on the government to compensate them and provide alternative housing.
But the officials do not plan on paying or relocating the families, said Aboyeji at the NTDA.
He said the residents should have carried out due diligence checks before acquiring the land, such as hiring land surveyors and getting official ownership information. “It is a matter of buyers beware,” he said.While some of the people evicted from Oke-Egan have returned to their home villages, others have relocated to other informal settlements. Nubi said he agreed the residents should have sought government approval before building on the site.
But he added that the government was also wrong to evict people who had built homes and communities from nothing without helping them find somewhere else to live.
“For me, a slum is a triumph of urban poor. No man under the constitution should be denied what he has without adequate compensation,” he said.
Payment Technology company Visa Inc. said on Thursday it had signed a deal to buy European open banking platform Tink and would pay €1.8 billion (US$2.15 billion) for the acquisition.
The total financial consideration of €1.8 billion included cash and retention incentives, the company said. It said Tink would retain its brand and management team, and its headquarters would stay in Stockholm.
Visa would fund the deal from cash in hand and the acquisition would have no impact on Visa’s previously announced stock buy-back programme or dividend policy, it said.
In January, Visa and financial technology company Plaid called off their US$5.3 billion merger agreement following a US government lawsuit aimed at stopping the proposed transaction on antitrust grounds.
Investors have been struggling to interpret signals from the Federal Reserve about how hot it is willing to let inflation run before it begins unwinding pandemic-era monetary stimulus.
Measures of markets’ U.S. inflation expectations hit multi-year highs in mid-May, but fell after comments from some Fed speakers and minutes from the committee’s April meeting sounded more hawkish.
Some investors interpreted that as policymakers having a lower tolerance for an inflation overshoot than previously estimated.
The fall in inflation expectations was exacerbated by the central bank’s policymaking meeting on June 15-16, when the Fed pulled forward projections for its first two rate hikes into 2023. Since then, bets on inflation have nudged back up, likely helped by Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s insistence on Tuesday that the bank would not preemptively raise rates because of the “fear” that inflation may be coming.
The choppiness suggests investors are struggling to make sense of the sometimes conflicting signals from Fed officials, who are facing their first inflation test under a new flexible average inflation framework adopted in 2020.
“There is a lot of uncertainty among bond investors about what exactly has changed since the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)” met last week said Tom Graff, head of fixed income at Brown Advisory.
“Some are arguing that the Fed lost its nerve after a couple of inflation prints and won’t ultimately follow through with allowing inflation to stay above 2%.”
Breakeven inflation rates on five- and 10-year Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) have fallen around 25 basis points since hitting 10- and eight-year peaks in May, respectively.
The five-year, five-year forward breakeven inflation rate, which tracks the expected rate of inflation over five years in five years’ time, was recently at 2.2%, below the seven-year high of 2.4% it reached in May. Those measures have rebounded slightly in recent days.
The personal consumption expenditures price index (PCE) – the Fed’s preferred measure for inflation – rose 3.6% in April from a year earlier.
WAVERING FED?
Last August, the Fed adopted a flexible average inflation target (FAIT) that is designed to be somewhat more forgiving to price pressures than in the past, a major shift to the central bank’s approach towards its dual role of achieving maximum employment and stable prices.
Some market participants say the Fed may be less committed to FAIT than when it adopted the policy last summer, when Powell said the central bank would allow prices to rise faster than would have been tolerated in previous cycles.
Last week’s Fed meeting suggested “they’re walking that back,” said Michael Pond, head of global inflation-linked research at Barclays.
“We might have some inflation for now but on a structural basis, this reaction function from the Fed is likely to once again lead to a persistent undershoot,” said Pond.
But not everyone agrees that the Fed’s commitment is wavering.
“I think some people think the Fed is changing tune and abandoning flexible average inflation targeting. I don’t agree, but clearly some people are putting that trade on,” said Graff.
FED RESERVE JUNE MEETING
Powell’s argument has been that this year’s spike in inflation is transitory and related to the reopening of an economy shuttered by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Fed’s more hawkish stance at last week’s meeting surprised some market participants because the bank’s inflation forecasts a few years out had not changed dramatically.
The median Fed voter in June expected PCE to rise to 3.4% this year, compared to 2.4% in March. Projections for 2022 and 2023 were 10 basis points higher.
Market participants, weighing on every word from Powell at his address on Tuesday, did not have a clear takeaway.
Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics, said that Powell this week “re-emphasized that they have the tools to bring inflation down.”
“And while I think he was still overall sanguine about the outlook, he did say (they) were surprised about how large and persistent it (inflation) was.”
The Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva has called for synergy between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEF), Petroleum Product Pricing Regulatory Agency (PPPRA), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other security agencies in the country to tackle the increasing smuggling of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) across the nation’s borders.
Nigeria’s daily petrol consumption, which stood at 102 million litres per day in the month of May has created a lot of concern for the Federal Government. The Minister expressed worry about
Speaking at a stakeholders meeting Organised by the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), in Abuja, on how to stop smuggling in the country, Sylva said the only solution to halting the criminality surrounding the smuggling of PMS is for stakeholders to work together to ensure that the trend is halted.
Also, the Group Managing Director of NNPC, Mele Kyari, who convened the meeting said the current situation had kept the country in a state of bleeding, as it could not sustain the payment of subsidy that accompanies the volume put at 100 million litres.
According to Kyari, with the high volume of daily consumption, the country cannot sustain subsidy payment adding “as long as we don’t regulate volume until we are able to exit this current level, which I know so much work is going on, then we have to manage the volume that we are exposed to between this price of N162 and N256”.
“The difference comes back to as much as N140 billion to N150 billion cost to the country monthly. As long as the volume goes up, that money continues to increase and we have two sets of stress to face, the stress of supply and stress of foreign exchange for the NNPC. We may not see foreign exchange cheque taking place for importation,’’ he said.
Sylva said: “I would like to put it on record that whatever we are trying to do in the area of deregulation will not make sense without us exactly knowing the actual consumption of PMS.
Sylva added that illegal export of products through the borders whether the land or sea must be stopped, adding that Operation White that was commissioned in 2020 had not worked effectively until the EFCC came into the picture.
NNPC Boss said, that the introduction of Operation White and involvement of the EFCC had helped the situation adding that “from the truck out the report from the PPPRA database, we have seen the collapse of load out average move from 70 million litres to 60 million litres just in one month, that means we can do with less than 70 million, the balance, I don’t know where it goes to but we know for sure that it is not consumed in this country”.
“In very recent data, we see what we really want at the beginning of May and June, there was a day when we loaded out about 103 million litres of PMS within one day across the depots. We know it is not required, we know it is inappropriate and we also know that something wrong is happening that somebody is chasing something.
“But we in NNPC, we are not in control of that, we are not in every depot, we don’t keep products in all the depot but when the volume goes down, it comes down to us, when it is tight in supply, it comes back to the NNPC and we solve the problem,’’ he said.
The NNPC boss said that President Muhammadu Buhari had directed that smuggling must stop adding that it was the reason for inviting all stakeholders to chart the way forward.
He said that the corporation had incorporated the EFCC, the Department of Security Services (DSS), the Nigeria Customs Services (NCS), the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), on a platform to achieve this.
Commenting on the current PMS and subsidy payment, Kyari explained that with the current exchange rate, the pump price of petrol should be N256 per litre.
Nigeria’s Federal Government has called for the amendment of the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA) Act to address issues affecting seamless operations of Free Trade Zones (FTZs) across the country.
Chairman Senate Committee on Trade and Investment, Francis Fadahunsi, made the call during an oversight visit, alongside board members of NEPZA to the Snake Island Integrated Free Zone (SIIFZ) in Lagos.
He said the amendment of the NEPZA Act would close up on all issues for easy operations of FTZs.
While appreciating the various free zone enterprises and the huge revenue generated for the government through agencies stationed in the zone, he specifically commended SIIFZ’s contribution to the growth of the NEPZA in supporting one single free zone authority over the years.
Vice-Chairman of the committee, Ishaku Abbo, who also commended SIIFZ’s investment initiative, stated that the oversight visit was aimed at ensuring consistency in the payment of appropriate revenue into the federation account, through the regulatory body, while ensuring that the free zone operates optimally.
Speaking on behalf of the board and management of SIIFZ, the Chief Executive Officer, Maher Jarmakani, said SIIFZ has contributed immensely to the growth of the Nigerian economy by attracting major industrial investors and manufacturers.
He said the move had brought about mass employment, technology transfer and capacity development to the country.
Specifically, he mentioned that the free zone had contributed through employment generation, infrastructure and investments by registered enterprises in the areas of terminal operations, ship repair, heavy industries, pollution management, fabrication and training among others.
One of the directors, SIIFZ, Yusufu Abdullahi, as a matter of urgency, tasked the committee to put an end to the confusion on free zone regulatory issues.
This, he said, was to assure investors of the safety of their investment “by protecting the current Free Zone Scheme under NEPZA.
Nigeria’s economy could be leaning against the wind as the country’s external reserves fell to a 13-month low last week, tumbling quickly to $30 billion, the level it was between 2015 and 2017.
Last Thursday, the figure slid to $33.79 billion, as it dropped by $30 million. This represented a 0.09% decline compared to $33.824 billion recorded on Wednesday, June 16. A total of $1.58 billion has been lost in reserves year-to-date, while month-to-date loss stands at $405.33 million, hardly reflecting the marginal gains in rising oil prices in recent months.
The reserves fell by $222.3 million between May 31 and June 10 to $34.0 billion, according to figures published by the Central Bank of Nigeria. The last time it fell below that mark was between June and July of 2017.
The country’s forex reserves continues to trend downwards despite the positive rally recorded in the global crude oil market, with Brent crude currently trading at $73.5 per barrel. It has sustained a steady troubling decline in the past two months after a short-lived upswing that took it to $35 billion.
The foreign reserves lost $120.18 million last Tuesday, the highest single-day loss recorded since February 22, 2021.
This is largely attributed to the decline in crude oil sales, due to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the buying capacity of India, which is one of the world’s largest importers of oil.
However, reports suggest that India’s oil imports are beginning to pick up after months of lessened activities due to the pandemic’s effect on its economy. This also comes as good news to Nigeria as India remains one of the highest importers of Nigeria’s crude.
The U.S. has banned imports of material for solar panels from Chinese firm Hoshine Silicon Industry Co, over allegations that it uses forced labor.
Washington has banned imports of a key solar panel material from Chinese firm Hoshine Silicon Industry over allegations of forced labor; according to Reuters sources.
The Commerce Department has also restricted exports to Hoshine, as well as three other companies and a paramilitary organisation.
At least some of the firms are major suppliers of silicon products used in solar panels.
The U.S. says they’ve all been involved in the use of forced labor by Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups in China’s Xinjiang province.
Beijing is accused of holding more than 1 million people camps there – allegations that China strongly denies.
The region accounts for about 45% of all the polysilicon used in solar modules.
That means restrictions could pose problems for the renewable energy industry.
Though experts say polysilicon can still be sourced from other parts of China.
None of the firms involved would comment on the reports.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman strongly condemned the U.S. move, and said Beijing would take all necessary steps to safeguard its firms.
U.S. factory activity climbed to a record high in June, but manufacturers are still struggling to secure raw materials and qualified workers.
U.S. factories are humming. Manufacturing activity climbed to a record high in June even as companies struggle to secure raw materials and workers.
IHS Markit reported Wednesday its flash manufacturing PMI rose to 62.6 this month from 62.1 in May.
That bodes well for economists’ expectations calling for double-digit growth in the second quarter. Demand for goods remains robust even as the economy reopens.
But that strong demand is feeding into higher inflation as raw materials and finished products prices skyrocket and uncompleted work piles up.
Activity is moderating for businesses in the services sector, which also worries about rising inflation and the difficulty of securing qualified workers. The flash services sector PMI dropped in June. But it was still the second highest on record.
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