Podcasts about benin republic

On this episode of Catholic Forum, we talk with Father Cyrille Ulrich Migyigbena, a priest of Cotonou Archdiocese in Benin Republic in West Africa and Director of the International Catholic School of Prayer and Evangelization, "Jeunesse Bonheur." This school provides a one-year program for youth and young adults focusing on prayer, formation, communion and joyful evangelization. Father is joined by local supporter, Jocelyne Guidi.  Joe Owens has the week off, but you can find current Catholic news for Delaware, Maryland;s Eastern Shore and beyond at TheDialog.org. You can see a video of this interview, here.  Catholic Forum is a production of the Office of Communication of the Diocese of Wilmington.

In this episode, I reviewed our disappointingly poor World Cup set of qualifiers as the Super Eagles drew at home 1-1 to South Africa before incomprehensibly losing 2-1 to Benin Republic coached by former Super Eagles manager Gernot Rohr The results leave Nigeria winless with 3 points and no wins after 4 games played trailing the joint group leaders Rwanda, South Africa & Benin by 4 points with all to do in the final 6 games to be played in 2025 Check out our YouTube channel where you can also watch the episode: https://bit.ly/NigeriaFootballWeekly Linktree - https://linktr.ee/nigeriafootballweekly  Twitter - https://twitter.com/NFWPod  Host: @GoonerTwin Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/nigeriafootballweekly/   TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@nigeriafootballweekly  Facebook page Link - https://www.facebook.com/NigeriaFootballWeekly  Email - nigeriafootballweekly@gmail.com  Anchor Link:  https://anchor.fm/nigeriafootballweekly  Podfollow:  https://podfollow.com/nigeria-football-weekly  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nigeriafootballweekly/message

Enjoy the crew banter and discuss different stories around the world; - Nigeria's representatives at the 2024 Basketball Africa League, BAL, Rivers Hoopers suffered a 83-89 defeat to Al Ahly of Libya in the semi-finals. - In preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympics, the Nigeria Wrestling Federation has commenced a training camp for wrestlers on Wednesday, 29th May 2024, in Yenagoa, the Bayelsa State Capital. - Two Nigerian boxers have been eliminated from the ongoing Road to Paris 2024 Olympic qualifying tournament in Bangkok, Thailand. - Scottie Scheffler says he wants to "move on" after all charges against the world number one following his arrest at the US PGA Championship earlier this month were dropped. - Defending champion Iga Swiatek saved a match point before beating Naomi Osaka to avoid the earliest French Open exit of her career in a second-round thriller in Paris. - An off-colour Carlos Alcaraz had to dig deep to beat inspired qualifier Jesper de Jong and reach the French Open third round. - Undisputed heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury are set to meet in a rematch on 21 December, according to the chairman of Saudi Arabia's general entertainment authority. - Nigeria face South Africa and Benin Republic in the FIFA World Cup qualifiers next month June. - Marc Brys has been replaced as head coach of Cameroon - without taking charge of a game - after he was involved in a heated exchange with Samuel Eto'o, the president of the country's football federation (Fecafoot). - Ayoub El Kaabi struck four minutes from the end of extra time as Olympiakos beat Fiorentina in the Europa Conference League final to become the first Greek side to win a European trophy. - Bayern Munich have appointed Vincent Kompany as their new head coach on a three-year deal. - Barcelona have appointed former Bayern Munich boss Hansi Flick as their new boss on a two-year contract. - Real Madrid and England midfielder Jude Bellingham has been voted La Liga's Player of the Season in his first year in Spain. - Virgil van Dijk is one of three Liverpool players named in the Netherlands' final 26-man squad for Euro 2024. - Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta is heading into formal contract talks on course to become one of the best paid bosses in the Premier League. - FIFA's newly-expanded Club World Cup is reportedly at risk of being boycotted by teams from England and Spain next year.

Enjoy the crew banter and discuss different stories around the world; - A number of Nigerian athletes who have qualified for the track events of the Paris 2024 Olympics which will be held from July 26 to August 11 keeps growing with the addition of sprinters, Rosemary Chukwuma and Tima Godbless punched their tickets at the National Collegiate Athletics Association regional finals on Saturday. - Following the completion of phase one of the Ardova Handball Premier League 2024 in Benin City, Edo State, Tojemarine Academy and Safety Babes have shown their dominance as they ended as the league's first-half leaders in the male and women categories respectively. - Ferrari's Charles Leclerc held his nerve to convert pole position at his home Monaco Grand Prix into a controlled victory after a huge first-lap pile-up. - Four-time major winner Naomi Osaka said her first-round win over Italy's Lucia Bronzetti at the French Open was "like a rollercoaster". - Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving scored 33 points apiece and the Dallas Mavericks made all the big plays late again, beating the Minnesota Timberwolves 116-107 on Sunday night for a 3-0 lead in the Western Conference finals. - Table toppers Enugu Rangers started the final stretch of the ongoing Nigeria Premier Football League (NPFL) season, with 3-0 drubbing of visiting Bayelsa United in yesterday's MatchDay 33 to tighten their grip on the top spot with 60 points. - Edo Queens emerged Champions of the 2024 Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL) Super 6 Championship Playoff after they played out a 1-1 draw in their last match with the host side, Bayelsa Queens on Sunday to finish top of the table with 10 points in four matches. - The Amputee national team of Morocco on Saturday night defeated Nigeria Amputee national team in the semi final of the Amputee African Cup of Nations going on in Egypt. - Coach Nana Agyeman is expected to be in the dugout in Tuesday's WAFU B U-17 Championship third-place playoff clash against arch-rivals Nigeria's Golden Eaglets as head coach Laryea Kingston remains missing in action following the Black Starlets' 2-1 upset to Burkina Faso in the WAFU B U-17 Championship semi-finals. - George Finidi has named a 23-man squad for his first set of competitive games as the head coach of the Super Eagles. - In preparation for the next phase of the 2026 World Cup qualifiers, former Super Eagles coach, Gernot Rohr, has named his Benin Republic team to face Super Eagles. - Bundesliga champions Bayer Leverkusen battled past second division Kaiserslautern 1-0 on Saturday to win the German Cup and secure the club's first ever domestic double. - The Ligue 1 and French Super Cup champions dominated the first half at Lille's Stade Pierre-Mauroy to secure their record-extending 15th Cup title and first since 2021. - Xavi's time as Barcelona boss came to an end with a 2-1 win at Sevilla in the final La Liga game of the season. - Bayern Munich have agreed a three-year deal with Vincent Kompany to take over as head coach. - Wayne Rooney has said accepting the Plymouth job is the “perfect next step” in his management career, with the former England captain thought to have signed a three-year contract as head coach of the Championship club.

@nigeriasbest and @phoenix_agenda were joined by @AminuEcon and @Capitaltrader_They discussed the following news stories:1. The accidental bombing of Kaduna by the Nigerian military.2. The alleged opening of the Nigerian borders to goods from Benin Republic.3. Asue Ighodalo's candidacy for Governor of Edo State.

Benin Republic, Nigeria, A Conjoined Twins - Tinubu ~ OsazuwaAkonedo #BeninRepublic #Bola #Nigeria #OsazuwaAkonedo #Patrice #Talon #Tinubu https://osazuwaakonedo.news/benin-republic-nigeria-a-conjoined-twins-tinubu/06/12/2023/ By Ajuri NgelaleNgelale --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/osazuwaakonedo/message

Today we are joined by Culturalist and Historical Trauma Specialist, Iya Affo. She works as a Trauma Specialist and is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from Benin Republic, West Africa. Leanna Taylor of the Arizona Pet Project also joins the discussion of identifying generational trauma and determining the effects.Support the showwww.civiccipher.comFollow us: @CivicCipher @iamqward @ramsesjaConsideration for today's show was provided by: Major Threads menswear www.MajorThreads.com Hip Hop Weekly Magazine www.hiphopweekly.com The Black Information Network Daily Podcast www.binnews.com

Ms.Iya Affo is a Historical Trauma Specialist and is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from Benin Republic, West Africa. She joins Host Ramses Ja on today's podcast to discuss the topic of generational trauma and how she works to bring healing to those families impacted by it. Part 3 of a 3 part series. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ms.Iya Affo is a Historical Trauma Specialist and is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from Benin Republic, West Africa. She joins Host Ramses Ja on today's podcast to discuss the topic of generational trauma and how she works to bring healing to those families impacted by it. Part  2 of a 3 part series. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ms.Iya Affo is a Historical Trauma Specialist and is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from Benin Republic, West Africa. She joins Host Ramses Ja on today's podcast to discuss the topic of generational trauma and how she works to bring healing to those families impacted by it. Part 1 of a 3 part series. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Enjoy the crew banter and discuss different stories around the world. - With two days to the end of the 2023 National Youth Games, Team Delta is still in commanding lead in the medals table beating with 26 gold, 17 silver and 12 bronze medals totalling 45 medals. - The Nigerian Football Federation has retained the services of Christopher Danjuma as the head coach of the women's U-20 team. Nigeria's hopes of jointly hosting the African Cup of Nations with Benin Republic in 2027 were dashed on Wednesday after the Confederation of Africa Football's Executive Committee voted in favour of a co-bid from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda - It is now mandatory that to sit on the bench during matches, all head coaches of the Nigeria Premier Football League (NPFL) clubs must possess the Confederation of Africa Football (CAF) B Licence - MatchDay secret assessment of Referees is to make a return as the Nigeria Premier Football League (NPFL) kickoff this Saturday in all the scheduled fixtures. - Manchester United will face Newcastle in the Carabao Cup fourth round in a repeat of last season's final. - AC Milan have announced plans to move from their iconic San Siro home and build a new 70,000-seater stadium in the south of the city. Head coach Rudi Garcia says Victor Osimhen is "invested 100%" in Napoli after the striker scored in the first game since he was mocked by the club on social media - The Portland Trailblazers decided to trade Damian Lillard to the Milwaukee Bucks.

#prayer #prayers #praying #prevailingprayer #prevailingprayers #needforprayer #reasonsforprayers #reasons4prayers #needs4prayer #ferventprayer #fervent #prayerrequest #prayfortheworld #prayforafrica #prayerfornations #prayerforcountries #prayersforhealing #prayerforall #pray #prayerforfamily #prayerforparent #prayerforchildren #prayerfortheday #prayerforthecontinents #prayforpresidents #prayersforleaders #prayersfordeliverance #prayersforrestoration #PrayerforAmericas #PrayerforEurope #PrayerforMiddleEast #prayerforasia #PrayerforOceania#PrayerforAustralia #PrayerforNewZealand #PrayerforPapuaNewGuinea #PrayerfortheIslandsoftheSeas #PrayersforMinistersoftheGospel #PrayersfortheChurch#PrayerforPrimeMinisters #PrayersforRevival #Prayersforbirthdays #Prayersforanniversaries #PrayersforBusiness #PrayerforCareer#PrayersforExams #PrayersforMarriages #PrayersforCouples #PrayersforSingles #PrayersforWidows #PrayersforWidowers #Prayersforthebereaved #prayersforsuccess#prayersforforgiveness #prayersforrepentance #prayersformercy #prayerwithoutceasing #prayerbenefits #ambassadorMondayOgbe #kindsofprayer #typesofprayer #fasting #fastingprayer #fastingandprayer #rulesoffasting #consecration#consecrate #revivalprayer #revival #switzerland #nationalday #independenceday #Beninrepublic #republicofbenin #beninkingdom #celebration #alainberset #patricetalon Praying for Switzerland and Benin Republic on National Holiday and Independence Day Celeb August 1st - Alain Berset and Patrice Talon Youtube link - https://youtu.be/zadSpGpuii4 Podcast Link: - https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/otakada/episodes/Praying-for-Switzerland-and-Benin-Republic-on-National-Holiday-and-Independence-Day-Celeb-August-1st---Alain-Berset-and-Patrice-Talon-e27kbc7 Blog Link - Books Link: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ambassador-Monday-O.-Ogbe/author/B07MSBPFNX Partnership - https://www.otakada.org/partnership-giving/ Matthew 21:13 New American Standard Bible 13 And He *said to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer'; but you are making it a den of robbers.” Luke 18:1 New American Standard Bible Parables on Prayer 18 Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not become discouraged, Instruction - Get OUT of Religiosity and Get INTO Practical Christianity and Experience the God of Relationships in the Secret Place of Prayers Jesus was a living, breathing example of a praying machine from heaven and we can't afford to do less than He did if we must accomplish anything for the kingdom just as He did! Get more details, or for prayer request, visit God's Eagle Ministries (GEM) at our website at https://www.otakada.org or info@otakada.org Shalom! Ambassador Monday O. Ogbe God's Eagle Ministries (GEMS) https://www.otakada.org info@otakada.org +13022686313 (Voicemail) +2348032835348 (Whatsapp) Partnership - https://www.otakada.org/partnership-giving/ Direct Link - https://tithe.ly/give?c=308311 Tags: Prayer, Prayers, Praying, Prevailing prayer, Prevailing prayers, Need for prayer, Reasons for prayers, Reasons 4 prayers, Needs 4 prayer, Fervent prayer, Prayer for nations, Prayer for countries, Prayers for healing, Prayer for all, Pray, Prayer for family, Prayer for parent, Prayer for children, Prayer for the day, Prayer for the continents, Pray for presidents, Prayers for leaders, Prayers for deliverance, Prayers for restoration, Prayer for Americas, Prayer for Europe, Prayer for Middle East, Prayer for Asia, Prayer for Oceania, Prayer for Australia, Prayer for New Zealand, Prayer for Papua New Guinea, Prayer for the Islands of the Seas, Prayers for Ministers of the Gospel, Prayers for the Church Prayer for Prime Ministers, Prayers for Singles, yielded, submission, Ambassador Monday O. Ogbe, switzerland, national day, independence day, Benin republic, republic of benin, benin kingdom, celebration, Patrice Talon, Alain Berset, --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/otakada/support

Enjoy the crew banter and discuss different stories around the world. - The 2026 Commonwealth Games are in doubt after the Australian state of Victoria cancelled its plans to host due to budget blowouts. - The federal government of Nigeria has initiated a National Identification Number (NIN) verification policy for athletes. - Nigeria won a total of 13 medals at the just-concluded All Africa Para-Badminton Championship held in Kampala, Uganda. - After two unsuccessful attempts, Team Nigeria men's 4x100m relay squad will depart Lagos for Cotonou, Benin Republic, today in search of of a ticket to the Budapest 2023 World Championships. - The head coach of Nigeria senior national female team, D'Tigress, Rena Wakama has called up 18 players ahead of the 2023 FIBA Afrobasket Women Championship held in Kigali, Rwanda. Marketa Vondrousova has moved into the top 10 of the women's rankings for the first time after her stunning triumph at Wimbledon. Head coach of Remo Stars, Daniel Ogumodede, has been fined N250, 000 by Naija Super 8 organisers for inappropriate conduct in the final match of the tournament on Sunday at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena, Lagos. - Enyimba's new chairman, Nwankwo Kanu, has dismissed reports that head coach Finidi George has been sacked. - Australia's squad have criticised the gender disparity in World Cup prize money and the fact some nations do not have collective bargaining rights. - FIFA have sent the Egyptian Football Association a letter in which they announced a transfer ban on Ismaily due to outstanding dues to the Tunisian player nour zamen zammouri. - Arsenal boss Mikel Arteta says £100m signing Declan Rice can be a "lighthouse" for the Gunners and the midfielder is "exactly what we needed". - ARSENAL have placed a £50m price tag on the head of striker Folarin Balogun. - HANNAH DINGLEY has failed to land the Forest Green Rovers job full-time.

The Minister of Youth and Sports Of Nigeria, Hon. Sunday Dare on Sports Zone speaking on certain concerns of Nigerians about our sports sector. He spoke on the proposed renovation of the National stadiums in Lagos and Abuja, expressed why he stepped down the D'Tigress from the world cup, talked on the plans of the sports ministry to implement a doping testing mechanism for athletes for upcoming Olympics, discussed the premise Nigeria is looking to host the AFCON 2025, along with why the country is looking to co-host the tournament with Benin Republic rather than alone, amongst other important things.

The Nigeria Customs Service says that the Benin Republic trade policy was hostile to Nigerian traders. The Customs Area Controller in charge of Seme command, Dera Nnadi blamed the Benin Republic trade policy for the dearth of imports through the command. Nnadi also said the command recorded five import declarations with a total duty paid value of N13m paid in 10 days. He says within the period under review, 122 trucks carrying 3.77 metric tons of made-in-Nigeria products were exported. Nnadi added that the exported products had a free onboard value of N523m and the National Export Supervision Scheme fee of N2m.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4090160/advertisement

History to ExploreMore and more families across the United States want more educational options for their children. The 2020 Census Bureau data reported that the number of African American homeschool households homeschooling increased by five times — larger than any other racial group. The popularity of self-directed parent-led education is at an all-time high.Word of the EpisodeE yi so means see you soon in Fon and is from the country of Benin Republic.Let's Connect!Want to be a guest on an upcoming show? Just fill out this form, and we will send you an interview link when your request is approved.We're bringing back Cleverly Cultured Kids! We want to feature your kids on Cleverly Cultured Kids, so please complete this Interview form for kids, and we will send you an interview link once your request is approved.You can call us directly now. Please leave us a voicemail and let us know how you enjoy the show or share your questions.Order a Clever Homeschool Kit: Don't forget to order one of our exclusive Clever Homeschool Kits. The kits cost $59.99 USD and include t-shirts, stickers, a homeschool planner, books, and more.Order your Clever Homeschool Kit here.Grown Folks Talking About Homeschool PreparationsThe three best ways to make homeschool preparations are: Review your state laws Assess your child's academic needs Create a plan and gather your materials Where can you go to learn what your state's homeschool requirements are?One organization that has laid out the requirements completely by the state is the homeschool legal defense association. Visit their website at hslda.org/legal and click on your state on the digital map. When I homeschooled, I met with my state homeschool review board twice a year, once in the fall and again in the spring. Then I shared my daughters' homeschool portfolio, showing each child receiving regular and thorough education.Assess your child's academic needs Evaluate how your child/children learn best. Consider using a learning styles assessment to identify their primary learning style.Remember, people don't have just one learning style. They have several, so try to present a way to learn different materials using all three methods, which are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic or tactile learning. During the early years of homeschooling, I often daughter new information by singing (playing educational music CDs), creating models, projects, or doing experiments. I also encouraged my children to learn by playing games like a bean bag toss to practice spelling new words.Create a plan and gather the materialsMy advice is simple before you buy a complete curriculum, try it out first.Try different curriculums to see what your child likes and dislikes. Of course, you want to give your child only work that he or she likes, but you should consider how they work best so that you can avoid meltdowns. Review what children in your state should be learning based on their ages or grades. Next, write out or type up your weekly objectives. This will give you a frame,e work to stay focused and make sure your child is thriving. Read reviews, and talk to others who may have used the curriculum. Connect with Elle Website: CleverlyChanging.com Instagram: @CleverlyChanging Facebook: CleverlyChanging Youtube: CleverlyChanging Twitter: CleverlyChangin Tweetable quote: "Remember, just because you start with a curriculum doesn't mean you have to stick with it, if it's not a good fit." - Elle ColePlease share this episode ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

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The National Boundary Commission and its Benin Republic counterpart, have embarked on a joint campaign towards cementing the bond between both countries, prior to colonial rule. The Director-General of NBC, Mr. Adamu Adaji, and issued by the Head of Information Unit, Mrs. Efe Ovuakporie, says socio-cultural activities such as sports were featured as part of its efforts to promote peaceful co-existence between the dwellers along the boundary of the two countries. Adaji noted that the lack of a clear-cut demarcation of the boundary between the two countries had contributed to the issues of claims and counterclaims by border communities. He enjoined the communities to continue to play pivotal roles in ensuring the welfare and protection of the border residents.

“You are the cumulative expression of all your ancestors.” When Iya Affo meets someone, she instinctively looks for the best in that person, a seed in them that can be nurtured. To nurture others is a high calling for Iya, whose deepest identity is as Mother and Healer. Her African name, Wekenon, means Mother of the Universe, and her title, Iya, signifies Holy Mother. Both were bestowed on her in a traditional ceremony on the soil of her ancestral home in the Benin Republic of West Africa. Iya's passion is to cultivate intergenerational healing by connecting intuitive ancestral practices with modern neurobiology. A culturalist and historical trauma specialist certified in the western tradition, as well as a certified Adverse Childhood Experiences Trainer, she is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from West Africa, a Chief in the Village of Ouidah, and a High Priestess in the Yoruba tradition. Iya’s search for her individual and cultural identity formed in her childhood while growing up in New York. She was deeply drawn to the rituals observed among her Jewish friends and neighbors – from their ceremonies and traditions, their holidays, to the Yiddish language spoken in their homes. She began to wonder why her Black community had such a different trajectory; why was the history of the Holocaust widely known, but not the stories of enslavement of her ancestors? She sensed that a connection to one’s history and to ancestral land would help communities be resilient and overcome adversity. Setting off to travel alone in her late teens, Iya visited more than 30 countries to understand other cultures. She has proceeded to live abroad in five countries and experienced different spiritual environments – from China, where she practiced Buddhist meditation in a Shaolin Temple; to Myanmar, India, where she stayed at a Hindu ashram; to the Navajo Nation and the Gila River Indian Community, where she engaged in service; and briefly to France. Significant immersion in her ancestral village of Ouidah, Benin Republic, also commenced then and deepened over nearly three decades. Iya relearned how to live as an indigenous woman and now practices the Yoruba tradition in her day-to-day life among the egalitarian, indigenous people of Arizona. “Relentlessly, I pursued the truth about our enslavement,” she has said. “I received my birthright of ritual, ceremony and initiation. My greatest gift has been relearning how to live as an indigenous woman, in egalitarian society, as a wife and mother.” Iya’s early travels led to studies of trauma and epigenetics, which inform her current work. Decades-long research shows that trauma persists in the human psyche and body from one generation to the next, up to 14 generations, via physical DNA. Living in Africa helped her understand the neurobiological dysregulation that is prevalent in the United States for BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) communities. She came to realize that Western treatments – such as talk therapy or medication – are counter-productive or damaging for healing trauma in BIPOC individuals. Alternative healing practices – rituals, drumming, martial arts, and guided meditation – provide more sustaining solutions. Iya carefully says, “In communities where people have been traumatized, the best way for us to heal moving forward is to become self-healing communities. We must be healing ourselves.” Epigenetics also shows that benevolence and positive childhood experiences can be passed through generations. This knowledge gives new motivation for parents, teachers, and caregivers to practice self-regulating behaviors that foster healing, safety, and consistency, and most importantly, love. She hopes to facilitate reculturing and the subsequent healing of indigenous people all over the world. “If we, as a people, are to return to grace, we must go back to the soul of the [African] Continent,” she says. “Only in Her soil will we take root in ancestral land, fertilized by ritual, tradition, spirit and identity. Then we will blossom into a harvest of productive, happy, peaceful and evolved African people.” Through teaching about the importance of culture and neurobiology, Iya advocates for the harmonization of Traditional Medicine and Western Medicine to facilitate holistic healing. She recently stepped down from being an executive board member on the Arizona ACEs Consortium, but continues to serve as the Chair of the Historical Trauma committee. She is an Adjunct Faculty member at the Arizona Trauma Institute/Trauma Institute International, and the founder of Phoenix Rising to Resilience virtual community on the ACEs Connection platform.  Please join us in conversation with this grounded ‘Mother of the Universe’ as we explore healing intergenerational collective, historical trauma.

A former Chief of Army Staff, General Abdurrahman Dambazau says insurgency has gone beyond being a threat to Nigeria as it now affects about 15 countries in West Africa including the Benin Republic. He says the insecurity has become a regional issue because it is an issue that has engulfed the whole of the Lake Chad Basin region and it is an issue that also has connection with the Sahel region as a whole. He, however, says the countries have now joined the fight against terrorism through the Multinational Joint Task Force established by the Nigerian Government to checkmate trans-border security challenges.

This week, the gang returns with a movie review for the month of September in many have termed "The movie of the year" in Viola Davis' The Woman King directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. The movie tells the story of the Agojie an all-female warrior group of the old Dahomey kingdom now the modern-day Benin Republic. Under the leadership of the king Ghezo played by John Boyega, the Agojie will go on to fight against its rival but the most prominent African kingdom in the 19th century the Oyo Empire led by Oba played by Jimmy Odukoya who sold Dahomey people as slaves to Europeans. We discuss the intricacies of women's mental toughness despite sexual abuse and social degradation, Ime Udoka, Adam Levine's cheating saga + MORE. Song Outro: Master KG Ft. Zanda Zakuza - Skeleton Move Episode Sidebar - Nanisca for Oscar OUT OF AN OBTAINABLE FIVE (5) Story Telling – Naomie 5.0 | Danny 5.0 Performance – Naomie 5.0 | Danny 5.0 Production – Naomie 5.0 | Danny 5.0 Donate to the podcast – https://anchor.fm/daniel-odia/support Rate the podcast – ‎‎The Spectrum Podcast || DANANA on Apple Podcasts Follow us on IG – @therealdanana Send us a mail – thespectrumpodcastdanana@gmail.com DISCLAIMER – We hereby declare that we do not own the rights to this music/song. All rights belong to the owner. No Copyright Infringement Intended. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/daniel-odia/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/daniel-odia/support

I recently went on a Girls' Trip to the Benin Republic and while we had a swell time sightseeing, relaxing by the beach, and trying new dishes in a foreign country, we spoke about the fate of young people in Nigeria, the need to vote, and to japa or not to japa. Enjoy! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/dearyoungperson/message

Yoruba Nation Activist, Sunday Adeyemo Ighoho Released to Yoruba Leader, Banji Akintoye, French Language Expert, Adeniran by the Benin Republic GovernmentMonday March 7th, 2022 Yoruba Nation Activist, Chief Sunday Adeyemo, fondly called Sunday Ighoho, has been released by the Government of Republic of Benin.The Activist was released on Monday to a Yoruba Leader and Leader of the Umbrella body of Yoruba Self-determination Groups, Ilana Omo Oodua Worldwide, Professor Banji Akintoye and a French Language Expert/ Deputy Alana of Ilana Omo Oodua Worldwide, Professor Wale Adeniran.In a statement by the Communications Secretary to Ilana Omo Oodua Worldwide, Mr. Maxwell Adeleye, Akintoye described the release of Ighoho as a Triumph of Truth over Darkness in Yoruba Land.Details later

The Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, said the law will take its course in the cases involving separatist leaders Sunday Adeyemo popularly called Sunday Igboho and Nnamdi Kanu. Malami says the Federal Government will not interfere in Igboho's travails in the Benin Republic. He says they will allow the law of the nation that was indeed breached to take its natural course and perhaps, maybe thereafter bring him back home after the conclusion of the trial over there for the purpose of facing the Nigerian law that was accordingly breached.

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission says that three neighbouring countries did not make any payment for the second quarter of 2021. The NERC revealed that Togo, Benin Republic, and Niger and some other special customers were issued a total bill of N770m by the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading company and the Market Operator of the Transmission Company of Nigeria. The report however stated that no payment was made, adding that it is hoped the outstanding will still be paid when things begin to look up for those economies, as the pandemic played a great role in the non-remittance experienced. The Commission further stated that it has through the applicable orders set a minimum remittance threshold for each Disco having adjusted for their tariff shortfall.

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission says that three neighbouring countries did not make any payment for the second quarter of 2021. The NERC revealed that Togo, Benin Republic, and Niger and some other special customers were issued a total bill of N770m by the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading company and the Market Operator of the Transmission Company of Nigeria. The report however stated that no payment was made, adding that it is hoped the outstanding will still be paid when things begin to look up for those economies, as the pandemic played a great role in the non-remittance experienced. The Commission further stated that it has through the applicable orders set a minimum remittance threshold for each Disco having adjusted for their tariff shortfall.

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission says that three neighbouring countries did not make any payment for the second quarter of 2021. The NERC revealed that Togo, Benin Republic, and Niger and some other special customers were issued a total bill of N770m by the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading company and the Market Operator of the Transmission Company of Nigeria. The report however stated that no payment was made, adding that it is hoped the outstanding will still be paid when things begin to look up for those economies, as the pandemic played a great role in the non-remittance experienced. The Commission further stated that it has through the applicable orders set a minimum remittance threshold for each Disco having adjusted for their tariff shortfall.

After Seyi's return from Benin Republic, both friends discuss about the red flags they look out for when talking to ladies. Seyi however has a long list

The radio drama series, Àrùn ń rìnhòòhò is aimed at disbanding the rumors and misinformation related with COVID-19 & its vaccines. The title of the maiden episode is Kòró Mẹgbẹ́ ẹ̀. The characters featured in this episode are: Taye Alaga, voiced by Ajibola Akinyefa; Iya Ajao, voiced by Sekinat Adegoke; Dokita, voiced by Titilayo Akande; Akọwe, voiced by Adebayo Aare; and Anti Nọọsi, voiced by Elizabeth Bamgbose Story Idea: Taye Alaga, the Chairman of Ẹni-Afẹ community, traveled to Benin Republic for a three days vacation. Upon his return, he was advised by Dokita who gave him a medical check up to isolate himself for the next 14 days as directed by the government to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Taye Alaga ignored this advise, without knowing that he had already contracted the virus. He unknowingly transmitted it to his friend, Akọwe, and elder sister, Iya Ajao, who also transmitted it to Anti Nurse in her bid to get a cure for what she thought was malaria. At the end of the day, all other three, including Taye Alaga, who first contracted the virus survived it. But Iya Ajao, who is an elderly person did not. She died at the end of the first play. The cause of her death will be revealed and traced to her younger brother, Taye Alaga.

- Is the Police properly investigating Jumoke's death? - Will Igboho be extradited, or will he be jailed in Benin Republic? - Should the law compel political parties to hold direct primaries? Those are your Big 3, Lagos. Let's Talk. #NigeriainfoHF | Sandra Ezekwesili

This week,Benin Republic was dragged into the drama between Sunday Igboho and the Nigerian Government. Also, another deadly disease continues to spread across Nigeria. Catch up on Premium Times latest weekly Podcast

Nigeria may have lost out on a multi-billion dollar oil pipeline contract following the decision of a Chinese investor to move the project to the neighbouring Niger Republic after it reportedly first tried to site it in Nigeria. What may have led to the decision by Nigeria to reject such a deal considering the fact that analysts believe there are economic benefits for the country in such a deal. Our analysts discussed this on MONEY RADIO.

In today's edition of The BIG ISSUE, we will be discussing the arrest of Yoruba Nation agitator, Sunday Igboho, on Monday in the neighbouring Benin Republic and its implications.

Her Royal Majesty the Kpodjito Queen Mother Dr. Dòwòti Désir Hounon Houna II Guely of The Royal Palace of Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna A Queen Mother for our times, Her Majesty is the quintessential Pan Africanist. The Kpodjito is the Queen Mother of HRM Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna II Guely, the Supreme Chief of Vodou Hwendo. A bi-continental woman, The Queen Mother lives between the United States of America, and the Republic of Benin. In almost six hundred years, she is the first person in the Americas and the African Diaspora designated as a crowned head in Benin; the first Haitian to be enthroned on the African continent, and the first publicly enthroned Kpodjito or “Mother of the Leopard” in Benin Republic since the end of the 19th century. An educator, author and activist, she is a thought leader in spiritual reparations, heritage tourism, and post-modern human geography. Her Royal Majesty is also a UN committee member and works with the Abolish Slavery National Network in their efforts to end legal slavery in the US as it is allowed by the 13th amendment to the US constitution.

Her Royal Majesty the Kpodjito Queen Mother Dr. Dòwòti Désir Hounon Houna II Guely of The Royal Palace of Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna A Queen Mother for our times, Her Majesty is the quintessential Pan Africanist. The Kpodjito is the Queen Mother of HRM Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna II Guely, the Supreme Chief of Vodou Hwendo. A bi-continental woman, The Queen Mother lives between the United States of America, and the Republic of Benin. In almost six hundred years, she is the first person in the Americas and the African Diaspora designated as a crowned head in Benin; the first Haitian to be enthroned on the African continent, and the first publicly enthroned Kpodjito or “Mother of the Leopard” in Benin Republic since the end of the 19th century. An educator, author and activist, she is a thought leader in spiritual reparations, heritage tourism, and post-modern human geography. Her Royal Majesty is also a UN committee member and works with the Abolish Slavery National Network in their efforts to end legal slavery in the US as it is allowed by the 13th amendment to the US constitution.

Join Max and Yusuf for a conversation with the Queen. Her Royal Majesty the Kpodjito Queen Mother Dr. Dòwòti Désir Hounon Houna II Guely of The Royal Palace of Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna. A Queen Mother for our times, Her Majesty is the quintessential PanAfricanist. The Kpodjito is the Queen Mother of HRM Dada Daagbo Hounon Houna II Guely, the Supreme Chief of Vodou Hwendo. A bi-continental woman, The Queen Mother lives between the United States of America, and the Republic of Benin. In almost six hundred years, she is the first person in the Americas and the African Diaspora designated as a crowned head in Benin; the first Haitian to be enthroned on the African continent, and the first publicly enthroned Kpodjito or “Mother of the Leopard” in Benin Republic since the end of the 19th century. An educator, author and activist, she is a thought leader in spiritual reparations, heritage tourism, and post-modern human geography. Her Royal Majesty is also a UN committee member and works with the Abolish Slavery National Network in their efforts to end legal slavery in the US as it is allowed by the 13th amendment to the US constitution.

The Senate has condemned the unlawful encroachment and arrest of Nigerians by the authorities of the Republic of Benin.This stance by the upper chamber followed a motion by Senator Tolu Odebiyi during the plenary on Tuesday.The lawmaker drew the attention of lawmakers to reports of encroachments into Nigeria's territory by authorities of the Republic of Benin.Odebiyi noted that the arrest of these Nigerians is based on the allegation that they are resisting encroachment into Nigerian land through Igbokofi village in Yewa North LGA of Ogun State.

Funmi Odushola, she is from Nigeria living in Monrovia, Liberia. She founded a market research firm called C2M that uses data to drive business decisions and bring product ideas to life with offices in Nigeria, Benin Republic, Ghana and Liberia. She shared with us her story and experiences in this exotic country in Africa. https://www.linkedin.com/in/funmi-odushola/ Women Abroad Podcast is a podcast, part of the section Women Who Inspire. The aim is to facilitate the life of female expats through interviews with successful entrepreneurs and executives overseas. These women will share with us their own stories and experiences regarding a specific country, in addition to tips, useful resources, and secrets that nobody is willing to tell you. This podcast is bilingual, some episodes will be in English and others in Spanish. Contact Editor Lizet Esquivel for further information: inspire@welum.com. Visit welum: https://welum.com/ Podcast channels The Welum Podcast and The Welum Women Abroad Podcast is available on following channels: Sportify Youtube Anchor Breaker Google Podcast Pocket Cast Radio Public Music by https://audionautix.com/

Makz na Chio ga kwa njem --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/chroniclesof2igbogirls/message

The hosts of Nevertheless took a trip to Benin Republic for the Easter holiday and they returned with a truck full of lessons, along with a chant that’s very likely to stick with them forever #TalonTalata.

Make sure to follow me on IG @Petahjay for daily story updates about this road life.Visit wwfanm.com and @wwfanm on IG to get updates.  #WiseWordsFromANaijaMan #WWFANM

We preview the upcoming games with Benin Republic and Lesotho. We analysed the team from the goalkeeper, defensive midfield and the attacking position The Super Eagles will be travelling by speed boat to Benin Republic Super Eagles return to Lagos for the first time in 20 years --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/adeola--amokomowo/message

With the African Nations cup qualifiers coming up soon, the Super Eagles of Nigeria will once again dawn the famous green white green in the hope of qualifying for the biennial tournament in Cameroon next year. The Super Eagles will come up against Benin Republic and Lesotho respectively. The Eagles have a lot of attacking options upfront, so I and (@HazSammi31) discuss which forward is the best option in the list below for the eagles in both matches. Kelechi Iheanacho Victor Osimhen Sadiq Umar Paul Onuachu

It's December 2020 and the Golden Eaglets are preparing for the West African Football Union's B qualifier. The qualifer was scheduled to take place the next month in January 2021 in Benin Republic. The Golden eaglets are Nigeria's National under 17 football or soccer team. There were 60 boys on the team. The entire team of 60 boys and coaches and support staff moved to their hotel rooms in Abuja. And they started to undergo training for the qualifiers. There were three weeks left to the qualifiers. And With only three weeks to go, the Nigerian Golden Eaglets went from a team of 60 players down to 20. Anthonieta and John are here to explain what happened. This episode was produced by Anthonieta Kalunta, John Iwodi, Dominic Tabakaji, and Sam Tabakaji. Executive producer Rahmat Muhammad. Special thanks to Rabia Hadejia, Alexandra Gekpe, Richard Anyebe, Stanley Bentu, Aredi Isha and Mala Iwa Gbado Ikaleku. Copyright (c) 2021 Triple-E Media Productions. All rights reserved. ——————————————— ▶︎Follow us @234Audio on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter ▶︎Subscribe to our 234Audio YouTube channel ——————————————— We welcome feedback. Reach out to us via WhatsApp at +234 818 230 1234 or send us e-mail at info@234audio.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thebackstoryng/support

Happy Independence Ghana! From South Africa to Niger to Benin Republic, Cameroon, Togo, today's guest is a well-travelled Nigerian-Ghanaian who argues that Ghanaians are indeed Xenophobic. He asks for a change in the status quo. He also drops his 2 cents on the illegal arrests of the members of the LGBTQ community in Ghana. If you would love to encourage us, here's the tiplink: https://useshukran.com/cr/intheneighbourhood Email: intheneighbourhoodpodcast@yahoo.com Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/intheneighbourhood/support --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/intheneighbourhood/message

Praise God and a wonderful Wednesday to you in the name of Jesus. We are still saying “ Thank You” . It important in our own life that we say thank you to people who have been with us and made a difference in our life. Yes, it is important to thank God but He also made it clear that it is important we appreciate and thank people too. 1 Corinthians 16 : 18 (AMP) For they gave me respite from labor and rested me and refreshed my spirit as well as yours. Deeply appreciate and thoroughly know and fully recognize such men. Romans 16 : 3 - 4 (NLT) 3 Give my greetings to Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in the ministry of Christ Jesus. 4 In fact, they once risked their lives for me. I am thankful to them, and so are all the Gentile churches. So, we are seeing the importance of appreciating people. In fact if we read from Romans 16 in the New Living Translation of the Bible, it is titled “Paul greeting his friends.” From Romans 16 : 1 - 16, Paul was just appreciating his friends in different places, churches and countries for how they've helped and supported his ministry. It is important to recognize and appreciate the people that help and support us as we pursue our dreams. I have a team that have made this Daily Voice Devotional and and I truly appreciate them. Femi Olaiya started this with me. He called me sometime in the year said the Daily Voice Devotional could be a blessing to more people if we turned it into a Podcast and he made it happen. The touching thing for me was that sometime in December, Femi had a health challenge and had to be in the hospital for a while and Biodun who wasn't task was was our social media engagement took over and we just ran with it. Most people wouldn't even have noticed. Femi in spite of his condition was still checking in to be sure everything was fine. I also want to thank Joseph, Tobi and Molayo for helping out with the writing too. Thank you to all our partners who support us financially, It costs us money to do these things. Some people are shocked when I tell them how much it cost us to do this on different platforms and on radio. I also want to say thank you to you that listen and read DVD with Niyi Adekunle you are helping us make a difference. Thank you to our dear subscribers in different cities and countries. Believe me we are in every single continent; I saw nations like Guam, Vietnam and a place called French Polynesia, I had never heard of the place before until I went to read about it. We have subscribers in Israel, Indonesia, USA, Japan, Philippines, Ukraine, Benin Republic, Nigeria, the UK, Ireland, Colombia, Russia, Germany, Canada, Australia and many more, we are grateful to all of you. It is not just my story; it is our story and I want to once more say a big “Thank You” to all of you for making this happen. May God send you timely help, may God refresh your soul in Jesus name. God bless you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

SymplyTachaStreetTour is live on the streets of Benin Republic

The street was all fun today @Benin Republic

Ever wandered what the creative process is behind the films, tv shows and theatre productions you watch? Well, Crew Chats is a podcast going behind the scenes and chatting to the crew that help make these productions. Tunji Akinsehinwa wasn’t sure what he wanted to do as a youngster but one day stumbled across the French film, ‘Day for Night’ which captivated him and he knew he wanted to work in the world of filmmaking. Initially wanting to be a director, Tunji went onto study for a degree in Stills Photography and Film from the University of Westminster. Whilst studying, he found the role of cinematographer to be more interesting and decided to pursue this. He went onto get a postgraduate diploma and an MA in Film Production (cinematography) from the Northern Film School. Upon graduating, Tunji was asked by a friend from University to help set up a production company in Togo on her behalf, and later with his translator went onto film a number of documentaries in the Benin Republic and Togo. Subsequently Tunji, moved to Nigeria and began working across Africa, including, Ghana, Uganda and Benin amongst others, working on a variety of different projects from documentaries, fashion films, and feature films, including ‘Ojuju’ which was recently voted one of the best 20 Zombie films by Indiewire, coming in at number 11. In 2015, Tunji moved back to the UK and has since been teaching at The Northern Film School and Ravensbourne University part-time whilst working as a cinematographer. Tunji has worked on productions such as, ‘What Lies Within’, ‘O-Town’, ‘Deer, Woman, Child’ and ‘My Own People’ to name a few. Tunji's Recommendations: -One Child Nation -Bordertown -Delhi Crime

I had a very interesting conversation Shelby Grossman - political scientist at Stanford University. We talked about her research on informal trade in Lagos, and what we can learn generally about how institutions form from her findings. You can read this essay for a general background and explanation on what Shelby and I discussed on this episode.Download and other listening options are here - and you can kindly give us a rating here.TranscriptTL: Today, I am on with Shelby Grossman. Shelby is a research scholar at Stanford Internet Observatory and she is a political scientist. Welcome, Shelby. SG: Thanks so much, Tobi, for having me. TL: One question I would like to start with is that institutions that promote prosperity and positive economic activities like trade, like property rights, how do they develop in countries that do not yet have them? SG: Yeah, that's a great question and a lot of political scientists try to figure this out and you know, no one knows for sure. So there are many political scientists who think that there is a correlation between democracy and rule of law and contract enforcement. But I think what is interesting to me is how even within the same country, in different places, you can have different levels of rule of law and different types of property, of contract enforcement. TL: What are the patterns and the correlations that you noticed that really stand out from your research over the years? SG: In terms of property rights protection?TL: Yes.And so what I've observed, I think the main pattern is that good private governance, good private contract enforcement, is more likely when the state is actually threatening the group - SGSG: I think the thing that I have observed is, you know, a lot of people tend to think that when the state does not provide property rights protection, that private groups will emerge to provide this service. So private groups will emerge to provide impartial contract enforcements and those types of services. And the pattern that I've observed is that that doesn't always happen. So sometimes you have private groups that emerge that actually extort from their own group members. And so what I've observed, I think the main pattern is that good private governance, good private contract enforcement, is more likely when the state is actually threatening the group. So when the state threatens to intervene in a private group, that's when the group organises to provide these services. And in the absence of threats from the government, private group leaders actually extort from their own members. TL: I think that's one bit I found most fascinating from your field study in Lagos. I mean, usually, the intuition is that without government intervention, people would handle their business, enforce property rights within their groups. But, which I found counter-intuitive in a way, you're saying that the threat of government intervention actually promotes institutions that protect the interest of group members. What are the channels for such emergence?SG: So there are a couple of channels. To make it more concrete, my research focuses on markets associations in Lagos, so these are like when traders organise themselves or when traders are all in like a certain area and then they elect one of their own traders to be the head of the Market Association. And so to make this really concrete, there is one Market Association that I find super fascinating. It's called Oke-Arin in Lagos Island, it's predominantly a wine market. And this is a Market Association that, at least, at the time that I was studying them, they were kind of a paragon of good governance. So the market leader did all sorts of things to promote trade in the market. If a supplier sold one of his traders bad wine, like substandard wine or falsely labelled wine, he would organise a market-wide boycott of the supplier. And by doing things like that you just make it less likely that suppliers are going to cheat anyone in the market because they're afraid that they too will be boycotted. So what explains this? What is the reason for why this market is so well-governed and what I found from talking to the market leader and lots of traders is that this market is really threatened by NAFDAC, the National Food and Drug Administration, is that right? TL: Yes. SG: So NAFDAC has lots of authority to intervene in Oke-Arin and if they catch a trader selling falsely branded wine or substandard wine, they can arrest the trader. And so it's in the face of that state threat that the market leader does super aggressive policing of his own traders. So if he catches a trader selling falsely branded wine, he will lock up the shop, he will confiscate the goods. And he told me, literally...he said that 'the reason I do this is because I want to keep NAFDAC out of my market.' And you know when NAFDAC comes, it's not just NAFDAC. They come with the mobile police who are, kind of, a frightening sight sometimes, I'm sure you've seen them, they have those like big guns and the trucks and they scare away customers and so the market leader thinks it's in the best interest of the market to try to keep these people out of his market. And he does this by really regulating the quality of the goods that the traders are selling. So to step back and abstract from that, I think one channel is that when you face threats from the state, you want to keep them out of your business and so the way to do that is to not give them any excuse to intervene. And to not give them an excuse to intervene, you need to be kind of keeping your house in order, essentially.TL: Yeah. And maybe I'm trying to project too much into this one study. I'm just wondering, the findings...does it scale into other areas of the society? Like the relationship between citizens and police?SG: Interesting, tell me more about what you're thinking there? TL: Oh yeah, so what I'm thinking is, for example, there's been a movement, largely on Twitter, about the anti-robbery squad in the police called SARS. They're abusive, Amnesty just did a report recently about police brutality, which is pretty damning. They're abusive. There is no rule of law. Citizens basically have no rights when it comes to their relationship with the police. So I'm looking at this study as... if you have citizens' groups like the market associations, can they extract compromises that further entrenches the rule of law and the value for obeying the law and respecting rights in that arrangement the way we do with market associations?SG: Yeah, that's really fascinating. I think you definitely do see market associations negotiating with [the] police, negotiating with government officials. So the main way you see this...and let me know if this is not answering your question... the main way you see this is with the local government. So local government fees are set at the market level. So you can have two trade us in the same local government, but they will pay different fees depending on what market they’re at. And typically what happens is the market association negotiates with the local governments over fee collection and you can argue that this is kind of a way of encouraging rule of law, at least for, like, the well run market associations. Because sometimes market associations negotiate with the local government in a way that only benefits the market leader; essentially, the market leader and the local government are like colluding against the traders. But when it works well, what's happening is the market association is making local government taxation more predictable for the traders, more fair and I think that in itself is a form of strengthening the rule of law, because traders don't want to have unpredictable visits from my the local government where each time they come, a new fee is charged because that really makes it hard for traders to make plans for their business when they don't know what their level of taxation will be. So I think in that way - and many other scholars of argued this as well, I'm not the first person to say this - by having organised societal groups negotiate with different government entities, it can be a way of creating rule of law. The downside is that they're only creating these agreements for themselves, so it's not clear it's going to affect anyone other than the market association that's doing the negotiation. But I would argue that that's better than nothing and that is maybe the first step to a more like generalised rule of law. TL: I think you just went where I was going with that question that how does what is generally viewed as the ideal institutional form, how does it emerge from such group arrangements? And what I mean is constitutional individualism. That is, you, as a citizen, have a rights and your rights are protected and secured under the law?SG: Yeah, so there are different theories, one big theory is that war can actually make this more likely. For example, in Europe when, you know, various territories were about to be invaded, the way that they were able to defend themselves was by taxing people. Because taxes would help them pay for people who could fight off these attackers. But people aren't just going to agree to be taxed just, like, easily. They're going to want to hold onto their own money, and so the way that leaders were able to get people to pay taxes was by offering them various rights. And this is, you know, one theory for the emergence of democratic forms of government and rule of law. So it's kind of counter-intuitive that interstate war can actually make the emergence of democracy more likely. And so one of the things that's really interesting about Africa is since independence, there isn't really that much interstate conflict in Africa. Of course, there's a fair amount of intrastate, like civil war, but there isn't really that much interstate conflict. And some people argue that this has actually kind of stymied the emergence of [the] rule of law in some sense. Certainly, no one is advocating that there should be interstate war, but it's kind of a counter-intuitive silver lining of that kind of conflict. TL: What role does government capability play in this? So thinking about NAFDAC from the example you talked about, NAFDAC had this era where they took the job of regulating and policing fake and substandard products seriously. So now, the leadership changes and so is zeal or the mission for that regulatory drive. So, if the incentive or the ability or the capability weakens for government or any particular institution, does it change the incentive for the market association? SG: Yeah. Absolutely. I think, for example, I definitely don't want to say things are perfect in the US, things are not perfect in the US. We have many issues related to the rule of law, but in general in the US, you don't see like business associations operating at the same level as you do in Nigeria. And I think that's in part because rule of law is stronger in the US. And So what I mean by that is like when you can feel pretty comfortable relying on [the] courts to enforce contracts, you don't actually need these private associations to do that for you. And so what's interesting about dive of the Lagos markets is that many of the traders are themselves informal, by which I mean either that they are not registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission or some of their transactions are Informal. So some of their transactions are undocumented, and when that's the case you obviously can't rely on the courts for contract enforcement because nothing about the transaction was formal, and so that causes you to need these private associations. I think in general, as the rule of law increases, the role of the private associations decreases. That being said, that's not always the case, so there are many types of products that are sold in the US for which people cannot rely on the courts for contract enforcement. So a famous example of this that Barak Richman has done a lot of really fascinating work on is the diamond trade. It's actually really hard for courts to enforce diamond contracts for many reasons, it's also just really easy to steal diamonds and get away with it because they're so tiny. And so as a result of this, there's actually a really big role for private associations in the diamond industry in the US. In the US it's predominantly Orthodox Jews who trade diamonds and have all this really fascinating associations that Richmond has written about. But to answer your question, I think, yes, in general as a rule of law increases, the role of these associations is less critical.TL: I'm also wondering about the role of the civil society in all this. We can also view them as some form of association or groups who are trying to organize citizens like themselves and advocate for various rights or stop various form of abuses. Do they have the same incentive as traders who basically have a lot of skin in the game? They have a lot to lose if those institutions are actually predatory. Or are the incentives different?SG: Yeah, so actually one of my colleagues Hakeem Bishi is starting to work on this by looking at residents associations like neighbourhood associations in Lagos and I'll be interested to see what he finds. But my hunch is that these traders actually aren't that unique, that I think this would apply to other types of civil society groups. So you can easily imagine a head of a residents' association being predatory and collecting funds that they say will be used for private security, but maybe underpaying the security guards or saying that they'll hire ten security guards when in fact they only hire five. So I think it's simple to imagine that there will be similar incentives for other types of associations, but of course, also, it could be different, so I'm excited to see what my colleague Hakeem figures out.TL: Again, I see your study...and I'm sorry if I'm projecting too much onto this. Please stop me if you think I'm overreaching. So again, I'm just curious that in Africa we're not in the original state anymore, so, we just have intermediate states. We can't have wars anymore. A lot of the channels by which these institutions emerge are way, way into the past. And of course, globalization has allowed for all kinds of interventions. So how do you approach things like political reforms? Like you want to reform the judiciary, you want to reform the police, is it more effective with an approach like this bottom-up market association types or top-down? Which offers a country the most feasible path to credible political evolution?SG: Yeah, I mean, this is a really tough question. Like, if people knew the answer to this, then it would be pretty easy to just, you know, have judicial reform everywhere in the world. And so I think no one really knows the answer to this question. I think there are some theories that elite competition can lead to some of these reforms. There are other theories that, as you mentioned, like grassroots movements are more effective? I definitely don't know the answer to this. I think my one opinion is that I don't think international aid is really the way to go. You know, I've just seen too many examples of international organizations coming in and, like, thinking that it's just an education problem that if only people knew that this policy is better for rule of law, then they would implement it. And thinking that if you just tell people to do that, it will happen. And of course, that's not the issue. There are so many reasons that things are the way they are. Various people benefit from [the] current structures of power. So yeah, I don't really know the answer.So one other thing I would say is, I think there's really space for looking at subnational variation and I have a colleague Jonathan [...] who does this. Like Nigeria is such a cool country because it's a federal system and there's huge variation in rule of law at a state level. Jigawa, Kaduna, Lagos, of course, they have their problems but I think in general people think they're relatively well government compared to some of the other states when it comes to rule of law. And so trying to figure out what's going on there, what explains that variation and some people have theories and say, 'oh, it's just because Tinubu exists.' A very like individualist account, like Tinubu has a long time horizon and for various reasons, maybe like earlier...this is an argument made by D.N. Degremont, that... when the APC did not control the Federal Government, Tinubu aspired to control the Federal Government and thought that by improving some of these things in South-Western Nigeria, that that could increase the strength of the APC vis a vis the Federal Government. So there are those types of theories as well, but I think there is a lot more room for people to do more research on this kind of subnational variation. But I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on this question. TL: Yeah, I think there is some... in my opinion, again, I should state that I don't have any clear evidence, but I think there's some credibility to that explanation. I mean, one area where Tinubu really did punch above his weight, so to speak, was in the area of revenue. When there was a power struggle between Lagos and the Federal Government over local government creation, and Obasanjo did not release federal allocation to Lagos, Tinubu did a lot of things and increased Lagos' revenue and the state was able to punch above its weight in public infrastructure projects and some of that legacy still abounds. Again, there are political benefits because he was also able to finance electoral competition for the party in federal controlled states, so I think that explanation has some merits, in my opinion. SG: Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see if the explanation holds outside of Nigeria. So like if in other federal countries where you have a similar political dynamic where there is a politician who is not currently in the ruling party but aspires to be in as a long time horizon... I don't know maybe these conditions are pretty narrow, but it'll just be interesting to see if you'll see similar dynamics playing out when those conditions hold in other federal countries. TL: What explanatory power would you grant to the so-called resource curse in all of this? SG: Yeah, I mean, I think the resource curse is really compelling. But as you just noted, I think it holds a lot of explanatory power for why the Federal Government of Nigeria is the way it is, but at the same time, it's so fascinating that Lagos was getting these oil checks as well and still felt the need to increase its own tax base for some of the reasons you were just saying, like, Obasanjo not recognizing all the local governments and withholding funds for that reason. So, I think the oil curse is not deterministic, that even in a country that has a lot of oil revenue as a percent of total national revenue, there are still ways to overcome that which we see in Kaduna, in Lagos, in Jigawa. TL: And I want to go back to elite competition, something you mentioned earlier. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, as some of my colleagues have put it. Some have argued that before we can have some of these reforms take hold in Nigeria, there has to be a new middle class that would emerge, with [a] new ethos that can drive the discourse and push back and ask pertinent questions of the government and maybe even run for office and change the system from [the] inside. But, the flip side is that without policies that promote growth, you cannot have the enrichment that allows for the emergence of a middle class. So how do I, for example, resolve that dilemma? You're the expert. SG: Well, I don't know if I'm the expert on that question, but yeah, I think the thing that's really fascinating about West Africa, but this is probably true more generally, is how expensive it is to run for office. So one of my friends, Amanda Pingston, has done research on this in Benin Republic, and she shows that it's so expensive to run for local office, to be an MP in Benin. That basically because... you know, Benin is very different from Nigeria in that it doesn't have this big of a private sector economy, and so as a result, really the only people who can afford to mount this campaigns are people who already had positions in government because that's the way that you can make money in Benin.And so as a result, the people who are running to be MPs are people who have already had positions in government, and it really prevents the emergence of a new ruling class of people who were shopkeepers and built up a little business. In Benin, the public sector employment is just such a high share of employment that that can't happen. So obviously, to some extent, that's different in Nigeria, but to some extent, it's not. So you can imagine that there are many states in Nigeria, maybe in the northwest, the northeast, where, really, the only people who could afford to run for office are people already connected to the government in one way or another. I think Lagos is a little different because there are so many other ways to make money beyond being connected to the government. So I think that's part of the problem, but it's all chicken or the egg, what has to happen first for the nature of the ruling class to change? But I definitely think money is a big part of it.TL: One other thing I want to get your reaction to is corruption. We can agree that corruption is bad, especially in relation to [the] public treasury and its influence in robbing people of the provision of public goods, which is [the] government's job. But one thing I've encountered recently from political scientists, Ang Yuen Yuen (I hope I'm getting her name correctly), using China as an example, is that low corruption, especially at the local level, can actually be harnessed for positive institutional building and building the state. She gave examples of how Chinese officials will leverage personal relationships that we would standardly label as corrupt constitutionally to provide roads, build schools, build bridges, allocate land. What's your reaction to that view? Is there a positive niche for corruption? SG: Yeah, so I have kind of complicated views about corruption and in general, I don't really use the word in my research just because I feel like people define corruption differently. So one of the things that I found so fascinating in talking to traders in Lagos is they don't mean the same thing I mean by corruption. So, for example, it is very common in Lagos for local government officials, when they collect fees from traders, to pocket some portion of them and then the other portion goes into the official local government bank account. So I would consider that corruption - that's the use of public funds for private gain. Traders, on the other hand, do not consider that corruption. What traders consider corruption is if all of the sudden the local government raises fees exorbitantly, or if the local government has been collecting 500, 500, 500 and then one time they say, ah, today, we are collecting 1500, that's what traders consider corruption. And traders don't necessarily care about what proportion of their fees are just going straight to the chairman versus into the official bank account.So, most people would say 'oh, that's bad,' that these local government chairmen and the lower level bureaucrats are pocketing these funds. On the other hand, they're probably on underpaid. So maybe this is a way of topping up their salary, not in a way that's going to let them buy a Mercedes, but just in a way that's going to give them a decent salary. So I don't really feel like it's my place to say this is bad corruption versus this is good corruption. But I think there are a lot of political scientists who actually think that focusing on corruption as a way to get to better rule of law is kind of misguided, and that actually you want to align incentive between politicians and advocates for the rule of law and maybe by getting angry about the 20 percent of the contracts they took as kickbacks is not really the most productive way to go. TL: The control of violence, how important is it in the emergence of institutions? I know Douglas North, Patrick Wallace and co. have done some work in this area but what are your views?SG: Yeah, so I don't have any great thoughts on this because I've never really studied violent areas. I guess Lagos used to be more violent than it is today, but, yeah, I think it's complicated. I'm really only familiar with these big picture arguments about the history of Europe and wars and state-making. But I think in general, violence is certainly bad for trade, in the short term at least, it just makes the lives of traders unpredictable and you really want predictability when you're a trader because it allows you to plan and make long term decisions. TL: So I have a bit of pet theory and I want you to tell me where I'm wrong. Now, the way I think about this... it's not mutually exclusive, but I see some form of tension, especially in a country like Nigeria, between rights and social order. And I think that sometimes our push for rights, especially with institutions that do not have the capacity to establish or govern that order may be a bit asking too much. So in a way, I think that for institutions to emerge and develop and mature, the state has to establish its monopoly of violence, so to speak. And in that process, citizens may have to tolerate, of course, not to a great extent, but the question is where do you draw the line? So citizens may have to tolerate some form of abuse of their rights. What do you think of that? SG: Can you tell me more specifically, like, what rights you're thinking of? TL: Okay, let me give you an example. There's a common practice here which, again, some aid agencies and nongovernmental organizations have documented quite a lot, which is arrests and imprisonment of innocent people. There's this policing form where, to establish order in a particular neighbourhood, the police just go and do these raids. You know, there are no investigations, they just pack a lot of all these young men and lock them up. And in some cases, again, I should specify...in some cases, some of them are truly guilty, but in other cases, they pack a lot of innocent people and then lock them up. Sadly, some, for years. But I've also kind of noticed that the problem with policing in relation to that problem is that the police, as an institution itself, does not have any capacity to actually investigate crime, so they just have this one-cap fits all approach. But as citizens, the way we demand for our rights to be respected is that, 'uh, well, no. There is no excuse for arresting the innocent, the police should be able to investigate the details and know who is guilty and who is not and what happened behind the scenes,' and...you know, we have this list of demands. And sometimes I feel we are demanding something that our institutions cannot deliver at the moment. SG: Yeah, that's really fascinating. I don't know. There might be something to that. At the same time, I would be a little afraid that when you arrest an innocent person and keep them in prison for several years you're going to be creating someone who when they're released is not going to be promoting societal order and is probably going to be really angry at the government and probably isn't going to be the most productive member of society after that. And also probably, you know, his entire extended family is just going to be really angry at the state as well. So I don't think that is super productive but at the same time, I hear what you're saying. Should we arrest no one because the police don't have the capacity to do true investigations? That doesn't seem like the right answer either.So, yeah, I don't really know what's best with that. And probably there is some middle ground where, I don't know, maybe you could have like community groups that partner with the police? Obviously, this could be problematic in various ways but I think there are some models of community policing where the community maybe has better information on what actually went down than the police do. But I totally hear what you're describing and I think people will comment and are like (citizens who are like), 'you shouldn't arrest anyone if you don't have a capacity to perfectly investigate the case,' I think that seems misguided as well.TL: Yeah. I agree with you. Tell us about what you're working on currently. I know you're working on disinformation, what threats does misinformation pose to developing countries like Nigeria?SG: Yeah, so, I've recently shifted a bit to focus on disinformation campaigns and in particular foreign, online, disinformation campaigns. You know, for example, I helped to uncover at the end of last year a Russian disinformation campaign that was targeting a bunch of African countries, not Nigeria, but Libya, Madagascar, Mozambique, DRC. And what was really interesting about the campaign was this was a campaign that was linked to a Russian oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin, so this is the same guy who coordinated the social media information campaigns that targeted the US in 2016. And what's really interesting about these campaigns was that he'd created all these Facebook pages that were working to bolster the ruling party in these countries or other political actors that he supported. But he actually wasn't pushing fake news or misinformation, he was just posting like hyper-partisan contents. Contents that said things like: 'wouldn't this guy make a great president again? You should vote for him.' So that's not necessarily untrue. It's not even falsifiable, it's just like a sentiment. But this operation was trying to create the impression that there was a whole lot of grassroots support for these very individuals, and I think that's really dangerous especially given that so many people get their news and information from social media these days. If you think that there is so much grassroots support for someone, that can possibly change the way that you think about things.So that's like some of what I'm doing, and then more recently I've started investigating belief in misinformation in Nigeria. So there have been a lot, a lot, a lot of untrue things about the coronavirus that has spread around the world. For example, there are conspiracy theories about the role of 5G, about Bill Gates trying to kill people, and so I've been looking into belief in those types of misinformation, which also can be dangerous. Because if you believe 5G causes coronavirus, then maybe you're not going to wash your hands because you don't believe that that's the way in which the disease spreads. TL: And what responsibility do you think that the big Tech companies who owned some of the platforms where a lot of this disinformation campaigns happen, what responsibility do you think they should have in relation to this problem? I know there's a lot of accountability in the developed countries, but it's almost absent in public discuss over here. SG: Yeah, I think the platforms should have primary responsibility in dealing with this stuff, in part because they have more information than you or I do. They have information like IP addresses, and so they are better placed to figure out that certain posts are not coming from within Nigeria, even though they are pretending to be coming from within Nigeria, and, you know, just give it their automated methods. I think they are in a better place to put warning labels on 5G misinformation, that type of thing. And I think to some extent they're actually doing a ton. I think they're increasingly taking content moderation seriously. They found much of the Russian network targeting Africa, so to some extent, they are actually doing quite a bit of investigation into disinformation campaigns targeting countries outside the US.But at the same time, for sure, their work is US-centric and the policies that they have in place are not implemented equally across countries. I think that is problematic. And I think there should be pressure placed on the platforms to hire more people who can help them implement content moderation policies carefully across countries because it's really hard for an American to know what hate speech in Myanmar looks like. You really need someone who is from Myanmar to do that. I mean, the challenge then is that it's actually really hard to hire the right people to do this kind of content moderation work. This is a point that my boss has made a few times. If you want someone to do content moderation in Myanmar, first of all, Facebook often doesn't want to hire people who are in Myanmar. For safety reasons, they want the content moderators to be outside of the country. But then you have to find someone who's not based in Myanmar and who is kind of impartial. So not connected to the ruling party or anything like that, and that can be really tricky. I think they can be doing better but there also are real hurdles to defining the scope of some of these policies across different cultures. TL: Tell me how does a country like the US find itself in, if we were to believe the media... in a place where there's been some form of institutional decline? There are different investigations about presidential abuse of power or corruption, and even the government's response to the coronavirus. You're a political scientist, so tell me, how does a hyper-developed country like the US find itself in such a position? SG: Yeah, so it's a tough question. I think you know the big picture of what happened is we elected a populist president and populist presidents globally are generally not good for democracy. So Trump is in my mind not that exceptional. He, in many ways, acts similarly to people like Chavez and populists elsewhere. And I think there are a number of ways in which populists can lead to democratic decline. Trump is always bashing the mainstream media and that's a common, common, common strategy of populists. And when you reduce trust in mainstream media, then the only person you trust is the president and so Trump can say anything he wants and people will believe him because there're not going to believe what the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal says. So I think that's part of what explains the situation that we're in right now is that a huge portion of society just doesn't believe mainstream media anymore, and so they're willing to go along with or not try to counter various actions that Trump takes. I do think a lot of people who voted for Trump, they're not dumb. I think they do often see what he's doing and they're angry about it. But I think in general like that's what's going on. We elected a populist and he is acting in the same way that populists always do and more times than not, having a populist leads to democratic erosion. My hope is that America is strong enough to surmount this. Many other countries that have had populist presidents have been a kind of weaker democracies, like they haven't been democracies for that long and I think the fact that America has been a democracy for so long means that maybe trump won't do a ton of permanent damage, but I think it's hard to say. TL: I hope it gets sorted out as well. SG: Thanks. TL: I'm going to ask you one last question which is a bit of a tradition for the show and our listeners. What's the one big idea you're most excited about right now and that you would like to see spread everywhere?SG: I think I'm going to do two big ideas. TL: SureSG: Related to my two, kind of, fields of research. So I think in terms of the disinformation stuff, the big idea is that most disinformation is no longer untrue. So most disinformation is people spreading hyper-partisan content, but trying to deceive people about their identity. So I think so often when people think about disinformation they think about fake news, but increasingly the sophisticated actors are not pushing fake news, they're pushing unfalsifiable hyper-partisan content, and I think people need to be more aware of that. I think the second big idea that I want people to think about more is that, as I mentioned before, not all private governance is good. That often times when the rule of law is weak and private groups emerge, the leaders of those groups are predatory and extort from their own group members. And I think a lot of times when people think about private associations and civil society, they're just thinking about the upside but oftentimes civil society groups can be predatory. So I think that will be the second big idea. TL: Thank you very much, Shelby. Shelby Grossman it's been wonderful talking to you. SG: This is fantastic, so fascinating. Thanks so much, Tobi. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: So Abidemi, we've been talking about art and culture in your country of Nigeria. What about film, do you have a movie industry?Abidemi: Oh, wow! It's a great question. Yes, we do. Nigeria has a movie industry that's called Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood?Abidemi:Yeah, Nollywood. Can you guess? Nigeria, Hollywood – Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood.Abidemi: So I think, I've read that Nollywood is actually the number three producing movie industry in the world. After Hollywood, maybe Bollywood is number one, Hollywood is number two and Nollywood is number three.Todd: Wow!Abidemi: Yes, so we produce a lot of movies every year. And actually, a lot of these movies I know I watch a lot of them in YouTube or the internet. And some of our stars, some of the actresses and actors are actually going to other countries like Ghana, they are doing movies with them, collaborating with Ghana and maybe the Benin Republic, neighboring countries to Nigeria. And some actually have moved over to the United States. A little bit, they are starting to, and collaborating with some people there as well. So it is booming and people that are involved in that industry are making more and more and more money each year. To the point that before maybe 20 years ago, if a child said to his or her parent that, "I want to be an actor or actress", that was the worst job you could ever do and they would be like, “Why?” But now, it's actually something that parents are, “Alright, okay, you want to be an actor like this person or that person?” It's not so bad anymore because they can make money, if they make it, so yeah.Todd: Okay, that's great. So it's gaining respect.Abidemi: Exactly, it's gaining respect.Todd: So Bollywood has a very distinct kind of image of you know, the music and the dancing and Hollywood kind of has also like you know the action and bang, bang type movies.Abidemi: Yes.Todd: So, can you describe what a Nollywood movie is like?Abidemi: That's a great question. I think Nollywood is closer to Hollywood in the fact that we don't have as much the kind of dancing and music and the musical value that Bollywood has. Nigerian movies are more dramas, I would say. There they try to make action movies but it's not quite to the level of Hollywood just as yet. So it's more drama, it's about life stories, things that are happening in Nigeria and one thing that I've heard and that I've noticed in Nigerian movies is the fact that they try to present people that live rich lives. Nigeria is still a developing country, so many people don't have access to some things so movies tend to present people that are well-off, that live in big houses, drive big cars and can travel abroad, have education. So you have that theme going through a lot of these movies where maybe somebody, a poor girl, she meets a rich man or vice versa.Todd: Oh right, yeah.Abidemi: So, it's more for fantasy to get people to think of a different life that anything is possible. That if you, maybe if you try or maybe some day you might meet your prince charming, or what not. So there is that aspect to it, yes.Todd: Oh, that's cool.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: So Abidemi, we've been talking about art and culture in your country of Nigeria. What about film, do you have a movie industry?Abidemi: Oh, wow! It's a great question. Yes, we do. Nigeria has a movie industry that's called Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood?Abidemi:Yeah, Nollywood. Can you guess? Nigeria, Hollywood – Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood.Abidemi: So I think, I've read that Nollywood is actually the number three producing movie industry in the world. After Hollywood, maybe Bollywood is number one, Hollywood is number two and Nollywood is number three.Todd: Wow!Abidemi: Yes, so we produce a lot of movies every year. And actually, a lot of these movies I know I watch a lot of them in YouTube or the internet. And some of our stars, some of the actresses and actors are actually going to other countries like Ghana, they are doing movies with them, collaborating with Ghana and maybe the Benin Republic, neighboring countries to Nigeria. And some actually have moved over to the United States. A little bit, they are starting to, and collaborating with some people there as well. So it is booming and people that are involved in that industry are making more and more and more money each year. To the point that before maybe 20 years ago, if a child said to his or her parent that, "I want to be an actor or actress", that was the worst job you could ever do and they would be like, “Why?” But now, it's actually something that parents are, “Alright, okay, you want to be an actor like this person or that person?” It's not so bad anymore because they can make money, if they make it, so yeah.Todd: Okay, that's great. So it's gaining respect.Abidemi: Exactly, it's gaining respect.Todd: So Bollywood has a very distinct kind of image of you know, the music and the dancing and Hollywood kind of has also like you know the action and bang, bang type movies.Abidemi: Yes.Todd: So, can you describe what a Nollywood movie is like?Abidemi: That's a great question. I think Nollywood is closer to Hollywood in the fact that we don't have as much the kind of dancing and music and the musical value that Bollywood has. Nigerian movies are more dramas, I would say. There they try to make action movies but it's not quite to the level of Hollywood just as yet. So it's more drama, it's about life stories, things that are happening in Nigeria and one thing that I've heard and that I've noticed in Nigerian movies is the fact that they try to present people that live rich lives. Nigeria is still a developing country, so many people don't have access to some things so movies tend to present people that are well-off, that live in big houses, drive big cars and can travel abroad, have education. So you have that theme going through a lot of these movies where maybe somebody, a poor girl, she meets a rich man or vice versa.Todd: Oh right, yeah.Abidemi: So, it's more for fantasy to get people to think of a different life that anything is possible. That if you, maybe if you try or maybe some day you might meet your prince charming, or what not. So there is that aspect to it, yes.Todd: Oh, that's cool.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Todd: So Abidemi, we've been talking about art and culture in your country of Nigeria. What about film, do you have a movie industry?Abidemi: Oh, wow! It's a great question. Yes, we do. Nigeria has a movie industry that's called Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood?Abidemi:Yeah, Nollywood. Can you guess? Nigeria, Hollywood – Nollywood.Todd: Nollywood.Abidemi: So I think, I've read that Nollywood is actually the number three producing movie industry in the world. After Hollywood, maybe Bollywood is number one, Hollywood is number two and Nollywood is number three.Todd: Wow!Abidemi: Yes, so we produce a lot of movies every year. And actually, a lot of these movies I know I watch a lot of them in YouTube or the internet. And some of our stars, some of the actresses and actors are actually going to other countries like Ghana, they are doing movies with them, collaborating with Ghana and maybe the Benin Republic, neighboring countries to Nigeria. And some actually have moved over to the United States. A little bit, they are starting to, and collaborating with some people there as well. So it is booming and people that are involved in that industry are making more and more and more money each year. To the point that before maybe 20 years ago, if a child said to his or her parent that, "I want to be an actor or actress", that was the worst job you could ever do and they would be like, “Why?” But now, it's actually something that parents are, “Alright, okay, you want to be an actor like this person or that person?” It's not so bad anymore because they can make money, if they make it, so yeah.Todd: Okay, that's great. So it's gaining respect.Abidemi: Exactly, it's gaining respect.Todd: So Bollywood has a very distinct kind of image of you know, the music and the dancing and Hollywood kind of has also like you know the action and bang, bang type movies.Abidemi: Yes.Todd: So, can you describe what a Nollywood movie is like?Abidemi: That's a great question. I think Nollywood is closer to Hollywood in the fact that we don't have as much the kind of dancing and music and the musical value that Bollywood has. Nigerian movies are more dramas, I would say. There they try to make action movies but it's not quite to the level of Hollywood just as yet. So it's more drama, it's about life stories, things that are happening in Nigeria and one thing that I've heard and that I've noticed in Nigerian movies is the fact that they try to present people that live rich lives. Nigeria is still a developing country, so many people don't have access to some things so movies tend to present people that are well-off, that live in big houses, drive big cars and can travel abroad, have education. So you have that theme going through a lot of these movies where maybe somebody, a poor girl, she meets a rich man or vice versa.Todd: Oh right, yeah.Abidemi: So, it's more for fantasy to get people to think of a different life that anything is possible. That if you, maybe if you try or maybe some day you might meet your prince charming, or what not. So there is that aspect to it, yes.Todd: Oh, that's cool.

Anxious to redeem ourselves after our foray into Angolan cuisine, we attempted Amiwo from Benin Republic in West Africa. We think we did a decent job. Visit the blog (https://taplink.cc/tunukamedia) for pictures and references. © 2020 TunukaMedia

Nathalie grew up in Billings, Montana but moved to Wyoming when she was 12. She talks about fun times growing up in the #CowboyState; tubing, skiing, doing sports and living on a ranch. She also talk about some of her adventures beyond the mid-west, affinity for international travel & love for all things tea. Some countries Nathalie has visited: India, Kenya, Seychelles, Australia, Malawi, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Italy & Benin Republic.

Nigeria and six other members of the Economic Community of West African States on Thursday demanded a crucial extraordinary meeting to discuss the controversial renaming of the CFA Francs as ECO by eight of their counterparts.The demand was contained in a communique issued at the end of a meeting by the countries, namely Nigeria, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.On December 21, 2019, the eight French-speaking West African countries announced their decision to dump the French CFA Francs for the ECO single currency scheduled to take off this year.ECO is the name adopted for the common currency of the ECOWAS by the Authority of the Community’s Heads of State and Government at their 55th Ordinary Session in Abuja.The announcement was made by the Ivorian President, Alassane Ouattara, on behalf of the eight countries, namely Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Togo Republic.The adoption of the common currency, expected to be issued in June 2020, is part of efforts by ECOWAS to realise its over 30 years’ aspiration to establish a single currency among its members and ensure regional economic integration in the region.Ghana had applauded the decision of its Francophone counterparts to break from the shackles of the French colonialism to team up with their ECOWAS colleagues.Many analysts described the French President, Emmanuel Macron’s role in the eight former colonial territories as an attempt to hijack the ECO single currency project.But, at the end of the extra-ordinary meeting, the Ministers of Finance and the Governors of the Central Banks of the West African Monetary Zone on the ECOWAS single currency programme condemned the eight countries for taking a unilateral decision over the issue. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/newscast-africa/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My Conversation with Adedayo was an enjoyable experience, as you can tell from the lighthearted tone. He is brilliant and still very much underrated. He also has an incredible personal story - the triumph of choice, opportunity, and knowledge. I hope he gets to tell it one day. The recurrent theme in our conversation is knowledge (human capital) and its importance to development. You can also listen on Stitcher here or read the transcript below. Many thanks to Quadbee for the continued Herculean efforts in making these conversations possible.TranscriptTobi: This is Ideas Untrapped and I am here with Adedayo Bakare. Adedayo is an investment banker, an economist, an entrepreneur and an all-round smart guy. So Dayo it's nice to have you here.Dayo: Thanks for having me, Tobi. I've been looking forward to this and...so I'm very excited.Tobi: So have I, actually. So...let me just jump right in on something you said very recently about trade that, for example, if a country collects twenty percent of its taxes in tariffs, it's definitely killing trade. Just explore that angle a bit and get us into your frame of mind in thinking about that.Dayo: I think I was responding to a tweet about the implications in terms of tax revenues if Africa countries get to implement this continental trade agreement that was recently signed that would start being implemented in 2020. And so I think one of the issues, (i mean) at least protests, from some segment of, say, policy analysts is that a lot of African countries actually depend on revenues from trade - that is, tariff revenues - and one of the ways I think that happens is...(I mean) most African economies are informal in nature. In Nigeria, for instance, I think IMF estimates that [the] level of informality we have in the economy is around sixty percent. So what happens is if government is not able to tax a lot of productive activities that is going on in the economy, and one of the easiest ways to continue to raise money, which is also tied to industrial policy, is around [raising] tariffs.In Nigeria, for instance, we are very big on tariffs to encourage what they call local production even if in some cases we do not have the capacity to do it, but [the] government never stops. The auto policy for instance that was implemented under the Jonathan  era raised tariffs on motor vehicles to like seventy percent to encourage FDI into assembly plants for cars and all sorts. Then you start to imagine how does this even make any sense when we really do not have the capacity, we don't have the skill, expertise, we don't have a good business environment that will support industrialization. So why are we embarking on such a policy? And since the implementation of that policy it has failed woefully, because, obviously, I think it's only Innoson that has been able to, at least, benefit from that policy; and even when you think in terms of his manufacturing capacity, how many cars does he produced in a year? In terms of how affordable the car is, is it affordable for the ordinary Nigerian to buy? It's not. So obviously you have... you have that problem.The starting point should not be that a lot of African countries will lose revenues from tariffs. The starting point should be that does it even make sense for an economy to be reliant on trade for its revenues, that is, in terms of tariff revenues as a share of total government revenues. - ABNow in terms of revenues, one of the easiest ways to actually raise revenue is also to raise tariffs. You can have thirty percent tariffs, you can have fifty percent tariffs on some items and that is why overtime when you combine that with a largely informal economy (where taxation is very very [low], tax to GDP ratios are lower than, say, other emerging markets and advanced economies) then you tend to get a sense of why tariff revenues make up in a very large of share government's revenue.Now, my argument is, the starting point should not be that a lot of African countries will lose revenues from tariffs. The starting point should be that does it even make sense for an economy to be reliant on trade for its revenues, that is, in terms of tariff revenues as a share of total government revenues. If we look at most of, say, the advanced economies you'll see that tariff revenues are a very very small component...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Of total government earnings and I feel like that is what Africa should try to explore.Clears throatAnd by exploring that we could open up a new vista of opportunities for the economy which could propel growth and prosperity. But the catch is this, it is very very easy to quantify one, the other is very hard to quantify. Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: You can easily quantify the fact that, oh, if we export a certain amount of goods in a year, if we tax it at this rate we're going to obtain this size of revenue. But when you tell a government to, oh, relax your tariffs to encourage maybe even your manufacturing sector such that they have access to quality raw materials, it's hard to capture into, you know, the productivity gains for the company or basically the employment potential of it, and even the taxes that accrue to the government from that extra productivity. It's actually hard for economies to quantify them. So that is why it is easy for someone to come out and say, oh, Cote d'Ivoire is going to lose 10% of their, er...Tobi: Revenue.Adedayo: Revenues... because of the implementation of the AfCFTA [African Continental Free Trade Agreement]. So apart the fact that a lot of Africans do not even trade... a lot of African countries do not trade with Africa, so a large chunk of the tariff is actually trade with external partners, that is, Asia primarily now and maybe Europe in the case of Nigeria. I think our major trading partners are Asia and Europe. So even when we start to develop, you know, local value chains to say, oh, we're exporting into the African market. Some of the natural resource that we have, most African countries do not even have the capacity or the industry to use it so we still have to export a lot of those things outside Africa and you can still generate whatever tariff revenues you're obtaining from that. But really the idea is that, for African countries, we have to look past trade as this money-spinning machine for the government. It's something that should spur enterprise and development and the development of processing industries and local value chains. We should see it as something...we should see in the sense that... the way the World Bank captures ease of doing business, say, oh, access to roads or the time it takes to...er say...Tobi: Register a company.Adedayo: To register a company or to register a property. Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Trade should also be something like that. I mean, tariffs should also be something like that - how liberal your tariffs are. Especially in the developing countries. Because it is also important, it goes a long way in what you have in the manufacturing sector and I think nobody would argue, even the government, with what we've seen  between 2015 and 2016 when we had the currency crisis and a lot of manufacturing companies could not obtain raw materials to use in production and we saw the impact on the books those companies and even for government which eventually collects revenue from them. So I think that is the way to actually think about it [but] unfortunately trade is very very contentious, and...Tobi: Why is that, really? Is it really a case of failing to learn from history because, I mean, you talk about quantifiability, it may be difficult in the case of any specific country to prospectively quantify how much you'll gain from trade. But historically we know there are gains from trade. Huge gains actually. So is it simply a case...or what is really the constraint?... why is trade so contentious for us?Adedayo: Umm, it's really the way we think about it. In Nigeria for instance, many people see trade - imports - for instance, they see it as "if you're importing from someone, you're at a disadvantage". That's the general idea which the Nigerian media will call waste. So Nigeria wastes 200 million dollars in importing tomato paste.Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Or Nigeria wastes...Tobi: Or we're losing...Adedayo: Oh, we're losing our FX [foreign exchange] in importing iPhones...but they never say that about iPhones...LaughsTobi: Or Champagnes for that matter.LaughsAdedayo: They never say. So you start to wonder why? I think there are several reasons. One of the reasons that I feel like most people overlook is: the average Nigerian believe that when it comes to certain kind of products, (agriculture is one) the Nigerian might have a palm oil tree in their house or they do maize, you know, in their backyard - they plant maize in their backyard which even if it's not commercial farming, for subsistent use - and a lot of them...it's hard for them to understand that people trade based on what we now know as comparative advantage. You specialise in something you can do better than other countries such that by the time you're exporting to other countries they will buy it cheaper and it's good for everybody.But the average Nigerian believes, you know, agriculture. We are very big on agriculture. We have the land so I can plant oranges behind my...in my garden, so why are you now saying Nigeria cannot produce this and we have to import it? They do not understand that it's probably cheaper, maybe fifty percent even cheaper to plant rice in Thailand or Vietnam than in Nigeria. Most do not understand that maybe the soil you have (the soil formation you have) is not conducive to deriving high yields of those products; and it is on that basis that you have trading with other nations because you assume that oh, a country can do it better than you and you go there to import it; and basically the average Nigerian doesn't understand that. They just want to know that - palm oil...we are good at palm oil. Malaysia - they came to get their seeds...Tobi: Yeah, how true is that story by the way?LaughsAdedayo: I actually don't know how true that is but they will tell you that - Malaysia - they came to get their seeds for palm oil in Nigeria. And now look at them, they're the largest producers of palm oil... [stuttering]Tobi: Whatever proxy we use...Adedayo: Exactly...in and the world. And you begin to ask that okay so let's even assume they got the seedlings from Nigeria, what have you done to improve those seedlings? There are different varieties of palm oil, for instance - they have this Tenera, there is Pisifera, there is another one [Dura]. And what you find that a lot of Nigerians are planting, they are varieties that have not been improved. So in terms of yield, it's very very poor. The gestation period is extended, some go into six, seven years. You see palm trees taller than houses- like, you're basically going to hire someone to help you harvest your fruits. Many do not think in the sense that that is unproductive. They don't think in the sense that yields are very very poor; because when you process, what you can derive, the output you can derive is actually very very low compared to other countries. They just think in terms of we can plant it in Nigeria. They don't think in terms of "can we plant it better than other countries"? I mean, rice or palm oil or whatever it is essentially. So in a way, I feel like that is actually a crucial factor because in my discussions with ordinary Nigerians, they will tell you "I plant cassava, I plant this" but the question is not if you can plant it... Tobi: We have Bamboos so why do we have to import toothpicks?Adedayo: Why did we have to import toothpicks, exactly. But do you have the ecosystem to support the production of toothpicks? Oh, we have... there [are] tomatoes wasting in the North why are we importing tomato paste?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It goes beyond primary production, being able to produce tomatoes. Then you start asking, what kind of variety of tomatoes are you even producing? Are they suitable for processing? So those are the questions that Nigerians do not understand. Then there's also the case which is something connected to what is, I think, happening all over the world. We're seeing rising protectionism.Tobi: Yeah...yeah.Adedayo: It's actually all over the world and one of the things is...Tobi: It's sad.Adedayo: It is sad. LaughAdedayo: So for trade, overall, there is a net gain, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It's been proven historically that there is a net gain to society from trading. However, there could also be displacements...Tobi: Definitely.Adedayo: In certain sectors or industries, so you have politicians appealing to those sentiments and a lot of that view. People too, we tend to appeal to those sentiments because even when you see the conversations around the free trade agreement in Africa, a lot of people would say, "oh, they will come and dump goods in Nigeria - the manufacturing sector, they're going to kill jobs, they're going to do this"; and I always tell them "have you even taken a look at the manufacturing sector in Nigeria?" As a share of GDP it's not so big, but when you take it in absolute terms I think there are only, maybe, three more countries that have bigger manufacturing sectors - maybe Egypt. Morocco is also doing a lot now and South Africa.Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Now the challenge with Nigeria is our manufacturing is not quite as sophisticated or complex as what you have in South Africa, in Morocco or in Egypt for instance. But in terms of saying "oh, do we have a big manufacturing sector?" Yeah, we have a bigger manufacturing sector than most of [our] African peers. We actually export a lot of manufacturing products through land and, of course, there's a question where... also when you think in terms even the trade balance (manufacturing trade balance with other African countries) I think we only have a negative trade balance with probably South Africa. When you look at West Africa as a whole in terms of manufacturing, we actually have a positive trade balance with West Africa because we have a big manufacturing sector even if it's just textiles or footwear and garments being manufactured in Abia... I mean Aba. We are sending it to [the] Benin Republic, we're sending it to Togo, we're sending it to Cameroon. If it's not even as sophisticated but we are, at least, doing something.Tobi: The problem is we don't want them to send to us.Adedayo: Exactly. Now, the problem is you don't want those things to come into Nigeria. So in that sense, there's a lot of fear around the dislocation of, maybe, workers, and there's a lot of literature on it as well and many people would usually say "oh, they should, maybe, train people who lose jobs and try to integrate them into other sectors of the economy" but I think one of the things we're missing is: even in terms of manufacturing, if we have liberal trade in Africa it could actually open the doors for other industries which we've actually not looked at in Africa that would actually take up some of the [un]employed people. As a share of employment, the manufacturing sector is very low. I don't think the manufacturing sector employs up to ten percent. We all scream "Dangote! Dangote! Dangote!" How many people can Dangote Cement employ? And even that is connected to my ideas around seeing manufacturing as a way to growth and prosperity in Africa.Tobi: Yeah, we will get to that.Adedayo: When you start to explore it. So, really, trade is actually very very tedious in terms of the underlying concepts called comparative advantage. The ordinary man does not understand that and I think that is really the biggest misconception about trade and why we have challenges [in] having to implement liberal trade policies in Africa.Tobi: You talked about agriculture.Adedayo: Yeah.Tobi: I'll like to explore something I was discussing recently with some people. You know, agriculture (and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this) currently employs about fifty percent of the workforce...Adedayo: Very close. Very close. Yes, forty-five... about forty-five percent.Tobi: But, again, when you look at history for example; over, say, the last 300 years; the global population - we've grown the global population by about sevenfold from around a billion to seven billion currently. We've grown agricultural productivity to about tenfold, that is, we actually produce a lot of food. But when you see agriculture share of employment, it has gone from about 75% to about 2.5% currently.Adedayo: Exactly.Tobi: So, now, my question is, isn't our share of agricultural jobs really a problem for productivity rather than people looking at it as a positive, you know, like, "oh, agriculture is the largest employer of labour in Nigeria hence you have to direct resources to it here". But isn't the correct framework to look at it be that to achieve agricultural productivity we might actually have to lose agricultural jobs?Adedayo: Yeah, absolutely. It's very interesting because there was something I explored when I was at PwC [PriceWaterhouseCoopers] and we were looking at job creation in Nigeria and we were looking at basically services, the industrial sector, and agriculture and that forced me to, like, look at advanced economies and to see the structural transformation of the economies (that is, the structure of the GDP over time) and what you discover is as these societies evolve, as they continue to grow, the share of [agriculture] employment has reduced drastically, later on manufacturing starts falling and really what starts expanding is [services]. It's the services that really becomes the biggest share of GDP. So in Nigeria, it's actually quite interesting that you mentioned that because we have too many people in agriculture. I believe we have too many people in agriculture and they are largely unproductive. So...I've been reading a lot about what I call political crops in Nigeria.Tobi: That's interesting.LaughsAdedayo: They are very political. Rice is one of them...Tobi: Okay...Adedayo: Tomato is one of them...Tobi: Okay...Adedayo: Oil palm is one of them.Tobi: All from Kano.LaughterAdedayo: Rice from Kano. So one of the experiences that has shaped my ideas about agriculture is the project I was on with CUSO International. We had to work with farmers in different sub-sectors of agriculture and what you find out is: the challenge is actually...it's a lot of challenges, really.When you go to the field you discover that it's not necessarily cheap money that is the problem of farmers. I had farmers in my project who had money but it was very difficult for them to source inputs. - ABThe farmers, for instance, one of the ways government approaches it is to say "let's pump more resources into agriculture". By more resources, basically more money - cheap money. But when you go to the field you discover that it's not necessarily cheap money that is the problem of farmers. I had farmers in my project who had money but it was very difficult for them to source inputs. They had to travel, you know, to the next town or the next city just to get fertilizer or to get inputs into what they were doing. So in my thinking about agriculture, what I would like to say is mainly Nigerian farmers are unproductive, yields are very very low and they've not improved for decades. Cereal, for instance, we say one of the most consumed things globally is cereal, right? And, so, I remember I was writing a report and I had to just go and look at how yields are trended over the years and I discovered that over the past four decades Nigeria has made no notable progress; in terms of expanding yields for cereal which is actually...which you could say is crucial to food security, right?Tobi: YeahAdedayo: Draw a chart of other countries - Asian countries - and you'll see the rapid kind of improvements they've made. And I feel like that is what we have to start looking at. Government has to start looking at "how can we drive productivity?" One of the things I've been exploring of late too is: we're giving money to all these people [to] go and start farms. What is the total arable land we have in Nigeria? With the level of productivity we have in this country, when the population doubles according to [the] UN by 2050; if we plant rice on all arable lands in Nigeria, will you be able to feed 400 million people with the level of youth you have currently?  So the question is - how do we do more using less land resources and getting more value per hectare? (And) that is one area I think the government needs to focus on that they've not been able to focus on, and to do that, really, you probably have to let go of most of the manpower you have [in agriculture]. Because it ties into what you're saying. When you start thinking [about it], agriculture is difficult but in Nigeria it is usually the last hope for someone who can't hack it in other fields. "I'll go back to the farm", right? Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They'll say they will go back to the farm as if agriculture is something that requires no intelligence, no form of knowledge or skill. "I'll go back to the farm or I'll plant this". And that is why a lot of them can't get out of the trap; because when you are involved in agriculture then you start thinking about "you want to start a farm"...a large [organisation like] PZ, for instance, which is doing a lot of backward integration. They want start a farm, they'll go and look for "okay, where are the best places in Nigeria to site this farm?" I want to plant rice, am I planting rice...the land I have, is it upland or lowland? Will I be able to irrigate the lands? The yields on irrigated lands are better [than] on non-irrigated lands for rice. [But] a lot of Nigerian farmers do not know this because they have no skill, they did not go to school, they have no knowledge. Fertilizer: what percentage of fertilizer should I apply? What size? What are the nutrients necessary for this type of crop? The average farmer cannot know this because they did not go to school, they did not have access to even informal education to learn this; then you start asking yourself, should agriculture really be for the people who have not been able to do anything in their life - without skill, without knowledge? It's not. Government is shouting food security. To achieve that, by boosting productivity, we actually need to evolve in the way our agriculture is structured in Nigeria. Smallholder farmers will eventually not take us to the destination we want because they are too unproductive, they're too unorganised and that's even when you're producing a lot, [then] aggregating it becomes very very difficult in terms of access to, maybe, improved seedlings. Government is not doing enough in investing in the research institutes we have. We have agricultural research institutes - I know for one that NIFOR [Nigerian Institute for Oil Palm Research] is in Benin and a lot of the palm oil farmers I monitored then usually travel to Benin to actually get seed for planting in the nursery and sell it to farmers.Tobi: There is a cocoa research institute in Ibadan.Adedayo: Exactly. They are not investing a lot for them to actually generate ideas that could unlock our productivity deficit in agriculture. So for me, I feel it is necessary for Nigeria to move beyond the current structure we have where we have a lot of smallholder farmers. Like I've said; they are not fit for the job. If our task is really to feed Nigerians by producing locally, and with full knowledge that eventually we're going to get to the stage where we won't be able to import all of our food needs and we will need to start investing locally in food value chains because if we're going to have 200 million more mouths to feed in the next 30 years.Tobi: That's scary.Adedayo: It's scary. And you want to ask "what are we doing?" I mean, I don't know what the government is going to do about it but the current structure - if we want economic prosperity, if we want food security - it can't stand. We need to go into ... When people say large-scale (large-scale) farming, it is because a large-scale farmer would probably be a bit more serious, [she] would apply more thought before going into farming than someone who believes - "Farming is my last resort. When I go to Lagos and it fails, I go back to the farm". A large-scale manufacturer will not think in terms of that. We are recently consulting for a giant in Nigerian consumer space now. [A] household name. So they are backward integrating and they want to start...they've actually started - oil palm plantations. And, do you know what their challenge is now? It's actually to estimate the size of the market. Because there is no reliable data on something as simple as oil palm consumption in Nigeria and that's basically what we're working with them on.Tobi: Wow.Adedayo: They want to commit a lot of resources into it and that is why they are thinking about it that - "oh, do these opportunities really exist?'' In terms of selecting the place to site their farms, we know we have more oil palm businesses in the Niger Delta - Benin and Cross-Rivers and all these places. The thought required in terms of the soil requirement, the seedlings requirement, the fertilizer requirement - you can't rely on the smallholder farmers to make those decisions. It is the large-scale farmers, the commercial farmers that would undertake that, even if later on they employee labourers on the fields. But from the strategy perspective and in terms of boosting yields and everything, they are going to apply more thought than the ordinary smallholder farmer. So the question is how does this end? On the part of government I'm really not optimistic that they would do more than just giving cheap loans or giving subsidized fertilizer. Which is another policy area that is challenging. Government will say "oh, we will ban the importation of fertilizer" but different farms, different crops need different fertilizer requirements. It's also a very complex decision for framers to make but you're selling the same type of fertilizer or you're trying to sell the same type of fertilizer for every farmer; for the person planting maize, for the person...laughsFor the farmer planting tomatoes and everything. So you start asking yourself "now, okay, how does this make any sense?" And to break out of this chain, I think what will just happen is a lot of Nigerian companies especially those listed [on the stock exchange] and which we talk to their management regularly, we've discovered that they are trying to backward integrate as much as possible. So maybe that would spur some form of commercial activity and maybe we will continue to have private interests, maybe beyond the requirements for them to process their goods. They are going to start looking to export markets and, you have, maybe, PZ for instance. [They] have an oil palm plantation which they do not use all of the output maybe they would now start exploring outside markets (market outside Nigeria) and that could cause a chain of continuous investment in the value chain. That is the way I see it currently, that those companies (private interests) can continue to expand and slowly we see... because think about it- if Olam continues to invest in rice for instance and we know Olam will prioritize yields and all those things and they will be a bit more productive, at least, than the smallholder farmer; we could get to a stage where Olam (even in the domestic market) become very competitive such that even the normal farmer won't be able to go to the market and say "oh, I want to go and sell my paddy" because there is an Olam who has a large farm with very very high yields and, maybe, probably cheaper prices, better quality rice output that would now make the smallholder very uncompetitive and as a result of that you'll see that the share of smallholder farmers in terms of planting some of these crops that are so vital to food security continues to fall and you continue to have a lot of a private interest in that area. Unfortunately data in Nigeria is actually very hard to gather and that is one of my issues also with development interventions in Nigeria because when you look at multilateral firms or NGOs. Once they embark on projects, there's usually a bit more thought into it; even in terms of monitoring and evaluating such projects.Tobi: Even if they sometimes invest in the wrong projects.Adedayo: Yes. Even if they sometimes invest in the wrong projects but to an extent, you can, at least, get data to analyse and see. Because we say "knowledge! knowledge!" Knowledge is compounding.Tobi: Yep.Adedayo: We just didn't start using laptops or iPhones. It was some people that started and we kept building on it, we kept accumulating that type of knowledge. So the questions for the Nigerian policy makers is: all the government interventions which is one of the reasons why... probably why all these bad ideas persist anyway because nobody actually tracks anything. You don't monitor it. The CBN does not issue a policy paper to explain their reasons for backing cassava [or] for backing oil palm or collect data on loans that were extended to farmers, repayment terms and everything. On productivity, monitoring those firms sort of productivity for their yields. I've never seen any report on that from the CBN or from the Federal Ministry of Agriculture. Yet they pump billions. Then it's now difficult for us to measure - did this program actually work? Did it not work? What are the lessons from the past that we can actually apply to recent policies? We don't. Because nobody is keeping the data. So it's one of the ways I think all these bad ideas persist because we're not collecting data on it. There is nothing to analyse. You're basically flying blind. So as analysts, we basically just say "oh, this is not likely to work" because this this this or because in other countries that have done it this is how they've gone about. But in Nigeria, we've been doing development intervention since when?Tobi: Yeah, a long time.Adedayo: For a very long time and you will discover that the same ideas continue till today.Tobi: Exactly.Adedayo: So you start to ask if it's not working then why do you think it's going to work now? What are we doing differently? Are we learning any lessons? I feel like if we've been learning a lot from those decades we should have had a body of knowledge that we should have discarded some ideas already that this is not working and we should continue to build on it even if it takes a long time. Currently, it seems like everything is the same. Which is the same thing. They closed the border in the 1980s, they are closing the border today. So, really, that is the way out, I think. We are going to have more private capital into agriculture, not deliberately or incentivised by government themselves but by the fact that as more companies see reasons to backward integrate, as they see reasons to even improve competitiveness even in terms of their sourcing because they need to protect their margins and to be competitive globally. We're going to see a bit more interest and that would maybe force us to explore export market and that is the way out, basically. I have no faith in the government to take us out of...Tobi: That's interesting. There are two things I'll just like to quickly pick up on from what you said. You talked about political crops...LaughsTobi: I don't know, I love that term so much and it's one of my challenges with the concept of comparative advantage...Adedayo: Okay.Tobi: I think that the problem with comparative advantage in our own context is that we naturally see our comparative advantages in our natural resources and when we try to do development that's where we...Adedayo: Focus on...Tobi: Funnel resources into, and historically you'll see that that actually causes deindustrialisation because some of your trading partners (they) then specialise and they will only deal or trade with you based on your identified comparative advantage which may just be primary products and then you make a lot of money when prices (international prices) are high but you have no industrial capacity whatsoever. So do we really need to rethink the concept of comparative advantage in our own context?And then secondly, maybe a bit of a push back on large-scale farming. One underexplored area is land rights for farmers. I don't work with farmers so I don't know much in that area but from a little bit of experience, I know that some of them work in farming collectives. Some of them do not even have rights to the land on which they plant and if you recall one of the big policy changes in Asia, for example, was to give farmers the rights to their land. Even smallholder farmers became productive. So is it really about farms sizes or is it about who owns the land, basically?Adedayo: Let me start [with] the first question. Yeah. I think in terms of comparative advantage, us looking at natural resources, I feel like...I really don't think it's a problem with comparative advantage. It's more of a problem with what we've decided to focus on, which is also connected to I think what you mentioned earlier about government organisations going into wrong projects. I think the starting point is trying to ask this question: how do we...in the case of Nigeria, for instance, how do we create millions of jobs, right? So I think what they look at is just - which sector employs...Tobi: Close to that?Adedayo: Close to that. Oh, Agriculture. Okay, let's invest in agriculture. So it's something of that sort because they would say... they'll say you have comparative advantage. Why? because a lot of them are in agriculture already. Like I said earlier, they are really not very knowledgeable people, so they're already in agriculture. I can't say Nigeria is even more productive in terms of maybe planting tomato than a comparable country. They [policy makers] can't also say that. So rather than say, maybe, explore other sectors or maybe even other sub-sectors even under agriculture that could kind of bring a lot of change, they keep focusing on the same thing. For me, I really don't think it's about comparative advantage. You see comparative advantage in what you can explore. If you don't believe human capital can be explored for development, for instance; it's hard for you to want to now say "oh" or for a development organisation you could say - oh, Nigeria has a lot of people - or we have a lot of young graduates and if we don't see them as capital to an extent, we might not much see them as comparative advantage...because basically some do not look at human capital as comparative advantage and it could actually be one of the things that could unlock maybe some of the progress we want to see. But you are fixated on agriculture. You start from the sector and you're now trying to find within the sector what Nigerians can do better. I really don't think development interventions is from the perspective of what people can do better. It's from what are people doing and how can we make them better at what they are doing? That's why if you read FAO, World Bank and all those research, they'll say "oh, we have a lot of people, we have women in farming". The question is should these women be in farming? Are they planting the right things? Should they be trained to go into other sectors where they could be better used as labourers? No. What they try to do is: they're already farming, why don't we make them better at what they're already doing? It's really not from the idea that... maybe we should...Tobi: What's the best to use...Adedayo: What's the best use of these...Tobi: Of their...Adedayo: Of their labour?Tobi: Of their capacity?Adedayo: Or their capacity. So it's basically around - let's just help them do what [they do]. It's just like the average Nigerian man and maybe you are a rich family man where people come and knock on your door and they come and meet you and you're like "okay, what are you doing now?" [The person responds] "Oh, I'm into furniture".Tobi: And you give them money.Adedayo: And you'll be like "so, what do you need to improve your business?" Oh, I need a loan. You give them the loan. You're not asking whether "should you be doing carpentry? Shouldn't you explore something that would be better for you? It's a very lazy approach, I agree with you. So in terms of comparative advantages, I think we've been... we've not been open-minded a lot about it and we're not ready for the kind of changes we're going to have to make to look past maybe the natural resources sector has comparative advantages for Nigeria. In terms of (also) natural resources that are very very easy to get, the oil and gas sector for instance; one could say is natural resources, right? And it's one of those sectors where overtime maybe we should have seen more industrialisation if we've had a lot of local content into the industry. But it was so easy for us because we just had the resources. We had no capital. We didn't even have the labour because we don't have skilled personnel to actually say "oh, we want to mine oil or anything". We just hired...Tobi: IOCs [International Oil Companies]Adedayo: IOCs. "Come and do this for us". It's like you're in your house...so I hire cooks, I hire cleaners. If I live in a rich man's house or my father is rich, I might not know how to do those things and they could be useful skills for you maybe in terms of application even if you don't want to become a cook or you don't want to become a cleaner. But nobody thinks about that and that is one of the things I've seen in that sector as well. Because if you think about oil and gas, it's very capital-intensive. You need a lot of knowledge. We need to be able to build things and apply things and yet we've not seen it (kind of) spur innovation in other sectors of the economy (that is, the knowledge we've learnt from building ships or building rigs or doing all those things), we've not been able to see it in other parts of the economy.Tobi: We can't even maintain refineries.LaughsAdedayo: Not talk of building new things. Even in natural resources, there are unexplored areas that could actually cause a chain of development in other sectors. We've not seen it, really and it's actually quite disappointing. I think also [that] it's on the part of [the] government to do most of these things. In terms of local content, they're celebrating this Egina field. They're saying they did a fabrication and whatever at Ladol here in Nigeria. But ain't we like four decades late or something? because imagine if we've had that from the start...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: A lot of those people would have...with the knowledge they've acquired in oil and gas they would have probably gone into other sectors maybe the one servicing the oil and gas industry then you'll see knowledge keeps, um..Tobi: Percolating.Adedayo: Exactly. All over the economy. So I think for us, it's not really just even about natural resources, [our] oil and gas experience, we've not taken advantage of some of the benefits it would have offered us in terms of building an industrialized economy or a knowledge economy. The second question was on, umm...Tobi: Farmers. Land rights.Adedayo: Land rights. Yeah. So let me give you a bit of perspective of what I've learnt. Okay, so I worked in Yala local government. It's very close to Ogoja. Ogoja is one of the popular places in Cross River and Obudu.Tobi: Okay.Adedayo: Yeah, very close to Obudu [in] northern Cross River and [in] one of the villages we worked in, one of the issues discovered was [that] it was very difficult to get land for women because women were not sort of entitled to lands. So even if the father dies and there is heritance, land inheritance...Tobi: YeahAdedayo: It goes to the men. It doesn't go to...Tobi: To the women.Adedayo: To the women. And one of the things we were trying to do then is try to talk to the communities to actually relax some of those rules. So using that as an example, I would say to an extent, yeah, it affects because they pay rent on the land. And [for] some, the cost of acquiring some of the land can be bad. So for women farmers even if they're very productive on their farmlands, when you account for the cost of acquiring the land or even securing the land you will discover that they are not getting quite much in terms of their output. Yeah, I absolutely agree that land rights are critical to farmers but I don't believe it's the major thing holding farmers back.I feel like knowledge; you can have land and not have knowledge and you'll still be unproductive without knowledge. So maybe the farmers we had in Asia (it's maybe something I have to read up on)...farmers have access to land, right? It's a good thing for farmers in Asia but I believe that was not the single most important determinant of their productivity.Tobi: Definitely. Definitely. Adedayo: Exactly. There is still a bit of knowledge gap with an average Asian farmer compared with a Nigerian farmer. But I feel like, from the experience I had on the ground, land is absolutely crucial; because it gave us a lot of headache. You know when we've invested a lot of people - technical training, giving them grants, train them, sponsoring them, feeding them, and at a point where they're supposed to start engaging in that activity they weren't able to secure lands or the lands they were able to get which men were able to get very easily, women had a challenge getting it or they had to pay a high price for it and you discover in most cases most of the lands they eventually get are those lands that are not quite as good and that would take them to walk long hours before you get to... you know when you have to walk 1 hour 30 minutes. You want to go and farm, you have to walk for 1 hour 30 minutes...Tobi: Wow.Adedayo: To get to your land before you... you can imagine the energy you've lost by walking 1 hour 30 minutes...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Just before you get to your farm then you start asking, you know... and that is one of the challenges most of these people have in terms of securing access to land. So I feel it's crucial for us to figure out a way to encourage farmers to have access to lands, especially for women. Women are at a particular advantage but I feel like it's still not going to (kind of) release the kind of impact we want in that sector we still need knowledge, really.Tobi: I agree and a quick side note on that point. I think one of the least appreciated things about development in Asia is the Incredible amount of human capital that went into some of the reforms, you know... like, when you see people, they say "oh, Asia did this and hence we should do it too". We usually don't think about the state capacity for one, that is, the human capital that is within the government bureaucracy itself. These are incredibly knowledgeable guys who read a lot, who researched a lot, who actually were on ground and know what is going on in their countries and they could actually push through those reforms and they could see where things are going wrong and tweak and change course if necessary. You think about Korea -  sometimes we think of that history begins at the inflection point but usually, it doesn't, you know...Adedayo: Exactly.Tobi: Because I've read multiple papers about even the incredible amount of human capital even in terms of industrial capabilities that Korea acquired under Japanese colonization. But we look at an independent Korea and what they did and we say "oh, yeah, they did so and so policy and we should try and replicate that".Adedayo: Neglecting the knowledge transfer.Tobi: Exactly. So I agree with you about human capital, it's extremely important and I'm quite big on that as well. Let's talk about private capital now which you mentioned earlier. Now, shouldn't capital [also] be going to processing? I remember in one of your articles you talked about the processing gap in agriculture in Nigeria. Should private capital really be going into the same things that we've been doing which is production? Because you read things like Ivory Coast, for example, only gets about one point something billion [dollars] from cocoa exports whereas Germany processes the same cocoa into coffee and other products and gets three, four times the value. So shouldn't private capital be exploring processing? Wouldn't that be a bit more... trails off Adedayo: Yeah, yeah, I believe so. And one of the things I explored in that article was to say one of the things holding processing back (agricultural processing back) for most of the companies we have in Nigeria is because, most times, in terms of the inputs they want, in terms of quality of the inputs, in terms of the quantity of the inputs, they can't get it locally because of the way Agric is done currently. We have a lot of smallholder farmers spread across [a] vast geography. Sometimes unorganised, even in their organised state, sometimes they're still very very tiny. And as a company, you want a reliable source...Tobi: For your supply.Adedayo: Of supply because you don't want disruptions to productions, you have commitments to meet as well...Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: For your business. So one of the ways Nigerian companies are trying to overcome that is actually what they now say backward integration where they have to do everything on their own. So rather than rely on the farmers to give me the quality and the quantity I have, why don't I invest in the primary bit? And most of the challenges Nigerian farmers have, I am able to leapfrog in because, maybe, I build a warehouse, I build storage facilities and all those things. But to come to the point about shouldn't private capital be going into processing? Yes. Absolutely. I believe private capital should go into processing, not just [in] terms of raw materials. If Dufil Prima or...(that's the makers of indomie)... or PZ... If they're able to get a lot of land and they're able to improve processing, of course, a lot has to do (also) with the business environment in Nigeria for you to now say processing is competitive for other the market. Because in a situation where there's a lot of protection of industries, how do you know you're truly competitive?Tobi: Yeah Adedayo: When all you do is sell to Nigerians? So when you now start looking at processing and you discover that we're only just 200 million people and you need to export outside the country, then the protection you've enjoyed from government might actually now put you at a disadvantage in terms of being able to compete with someone from Ghana or someone from Cote d'Ivoire. The initial stage is what we're seeing currently in terms of companies themselves going into primary agriculture. Like I've said, knowledge is going to be accumulated - with the progress we are able to see over time, if they are able to not just improve the way they do their business and if they're able to really maybe fine-tune whatever models they are using because many backward integration models have failed as well.Tobi: Hmm...Adedayo: Dangote Tomato, for instance, I think they've opened it since 2016, they've not produced anything. Tobi: Is it really closed? I hear it's closed.Adedayo: It's closed; because people just think things are easy to do [simply] because you see tomato waste in some place. So I think what he did was he had a contract with the farmers that, oh, don't worry, I'll give you seedlings, I'll give you maybe fertilizers, I'll give you a bit of capital. Plant this thing for me and come and sell to me. The model failed because some of these farms...it's still the same farmers, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They're still not knowledgeable enough or anything. Then some would say, oh, they didn't get the inputs on time before the planting season or the capital on time. Some would say the agreement they had with Dangote Tomato (maybe) at the point of planting...markets change rapidly, prices change rapidly. If I signed a contract to give one ton of tomato to Dangote at five thousand naira per ton or something, for an example...Tobi: And you lock that in.Adedayo: And I lock that in and...Tobi: And then...Adedayo: And upon harvest, I discovered that the market price is seven thousand [naira]. The Nigerian farmer doesn't... Tobi: Wahala ti de [there is trouble].Adedayo: There is obviously conflict then...then how do I maximize the output? So in most cases you'll see them, (they'll go and sell to the...) they will go and sell at the open market to get... which of course I can't blame the farmer but it's one of the things you have to start thinking about even when you say, oh, I want to contract farmers to do all kinds of businesses for me. So that has actually also failed. Some companies also, [as a result of] lessons from what they've done before, they are trying to use it to start new programs or new backward integration schemes that would actually, maybe, be more favorable to them and support their type of business. For me I believe if we are able to get to an extent where a lot of these firms...a lot of them are able to do this or keep doing this, it could even force a lot of investment into processing. If I know that Olam, for instance, can supply these raw materials rather than exporting it out of Nigeria, you could have maybe private capital come into Nigeria. Even maybe local capital [would] want to go into processing because, at least, it's easier to...I mean, I can source locally from competitive producers - Olam or even if it is PZ that wants to later do that, even if they don't intend to expand processing to that scale.I feel like the developments we see could spur some interest in processing locally because you've had a lot of private interests that would come into the market and be like "okay, if there is not a reliable stream of supply for this product, do I want to commit? I don't have the capital to commit to doing primary agriculture, even the resources in terms of both money and personnel to now continue to go into that. Of course, I can't quantify the number of businesses that would likely go into that but I feel like that is one of the advantages we could derive from people who are truly interested in one of those segments but do not want to do the rest of those segments. And [if] we have private capital into primary production, it could spur a lot of more industrial processors. And I feel like in every country, someone has to do the primary production anyway...Tobi: Definitely.Adedayo: Exactly. So, even if, before you have processing or whatever in the US and everything, someone still does the primary production but I feel like we can do it to an extent that it could now generate a lot of interest from processors in Nigeria.Tobi: Okay. So let's look at the role of infrastructure in all this because...and I think you've also written about this so I'll be leaning on that a bit.Adedayo: Yeah.Tobi: I heard that line multiple times even from our chief economic officer or is it the Central Bank governor...LaughsWho say things like "oh, I asked textile manufacturers what is the problem? They said power". And then CBN is going to fix that. "Oh, I talked to toothpick manufacturers and they said power or roads or"... So what exactly are the infrastructure bottlenecks around industrialisation in Nigeria? Because what you see is that a lot of policy even around infrastructure still mimic are structural problems. For one, we know that after the colonialists left we stopped investing in railways, for example. That's a colonial infrastructure for some reasons, and even around things like road repairs or road construction, you'll still see things like ethnic fractionalization. Depending on who is financing the road, you'll see a lot more inter-state projects if it's the Federal Government and at local level you don't really see big infrastructure projects, you just see water pumps and um...Adedayo: Toilets. Tobi: And toilets. So what are the infrastructure bottlenecks and what can break the logjam?Adedayo: I like what you said around the CBN governor - [the] minister of everything - going to meet this person "what do you need?" Oh, meet that person "what do you need?" I feel like it's a bad way to go about policy because it shows that we don't even have... like a vision towards the kind of country we want or like a coherent strategy. I feel like if we have maybe our economic priorities figured out, then our infrastructure should kind of be tailored. The kind of infrastructure we build should be tailored to the kind of vision we have for the economy. So the challenge is this: we have a lot of young unemployed people, in fact, we have... one in two Nigerians...they are either unemployed or underemployed. Now this is at the moment...Tobi: One in two, is that right?Adedayo: Yeah. Underemployment and unemployment is almost 50%.Tobi: Wow!Adedayo: If I remember correctly. Okay, maybe a little over 40% anyway. But I know for youth...it's worst for youth.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: Yeah. So the challenge is going to become even more achening in the next 20-30 years when we have a lot of people in the country. So the question is, is policy really thinking about all these things? I don't think they are thinking about it. But what should they be doing? I think they should be thinking about it and to come up with a strategy. I've seen a lot of debates around so what is really the vision for economic prosperity in Nigeria? Do we have a vision to say oh, we want to industrialize or we want a knowledge economy or we want to do anything we want to? There is no vision for that. Even when we see the economic programs that [the] government brings out, they basically want to do everything and everything they want to do still mirrors what we have currently on ground. We invest in agriculture, we invest in agriculture, we do this, we do that. We don't know what we're trying to achieve by investing in agriculture. We don't know what we're trying to achieve by investing in human capital. We're just doing everything, and, for me I think, um, prioritising... because there's a shortage of resources. And in economics we say, oh...it's essentially the study of opportunity costs because you can only have so much and you have so many things to do. So I have this farmer coming, I have textile coming, I have Nollywood coming, I have these people coming to... I mean, to come and meet me and I am trying to do different kinds of things for them. I'm not thinking in terms of what should the economy really be focusing on for the future? What will be the biggest driver of jobs or productivity gains in the economy and let me invest or build infrastructure around that for people? I think one of the reasons why Emefiele is doing that is because they've not thought about that in terms of having a coherent strategy or a vision for the Nigeria of the future, or how the economy is going to be or how we're going to create jobs for people. But in terms of infrastructure imperatives, for me, I always tend to think in terms of...I'm very very... I'm really not keen on industrialisation so to say...Tobi: Hmm.Adedayo:: 'cause l feel like... I just feel like that has passed for Nigeria. I don't know why. I keep reading a lot about industrialisation and [how] it was the biggest driver of growth in Asia. It lifted millions of people out of poverty, right?Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: And even in terms of countries that are leaning more towards services like India, we've seen that they have also been struggling economically. They've not done enough in terms of lifting a lot of people out of poverty or creating economic prosperity or the kind of growth they had in China, sort of. But in Nigeria there are just too many competing factors. For manufacturing, we say, oh, we need road infrastructure. We know road infrastructure is terrible in Nigeria. Ordinary moving goods...Tobi: Hellish.Adedayo: Hellish, right? I was seeing something... I was reading an article and it's cheaper to import from outside the country (from China) than to move goods from one end of Nigeria to another end.Tobi: It's cheaper to lay an intercontinental fibre optic cable than to take it from Lagos Island to mainland.Adedayo: Exactly. So... and I start thinking what is really the way out for businesses? Does it make any sense for businesses to go to that extent? Of course we have our ports infrastructure issue, which is also crucial to industrialisation, because I can't start a manufacturing plant in Borno and decide that Lagos is the port I'm going to be importing materials from.Tobi: Yeah. Adedayo: I don't see how that makes any sense for the country to have.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: It makes no sense for your business to say, oh, I have a manufacturing plant in this place and I want to import through this same port in Lagos. In terms of roads too, the roads are not just bad, then you have human actors (state actors) on the road who are on the roads for safety but who are encumbrance to doing business, because they'll be asking you for money; and If you speak to businessmen they will tell you if you're moving goods - interstate in Nigeria - the kind of bribes you'll pay before you get your goods down to where you're taking them to. So, obviously, I feel like roads are also absolutely critical. In Nigeria, my major idea is, I won't say I know all the kind of infrastructure we need to build... my own is we should agree on what we really want to do. If we think industrialisation is the way to go to accommodate a lot of Nigerians into the labour force, then let's say this is what we are pursuing and let's try to build infrastructure that will make it happen. You know you need roads, you need ports, you need rail, you need those things. You need power. If it's service economy you want to build, then you start thinking differently again. You mentioned laying fibre and if you want to have a service economy you might want to start thinking about communications and having to invest in broadband and all those things. So it's basically a decision between what you want to do - you don't need to privatise everything... build rail, build...we don't even have the capacity to do it. The government doesn't have the capacity to do it and we don't have a lot of private capital to pursue that. So I think if government comes out with a coherent strategy then we'll know the kind of infrastructure that is actually critical. If you say you want a service economy, you need human capital. Even in industrialisation too, you need human capital, but the level will obviously be different. Knowledge economies will have... you can't compare service workers in the US to factory workers in Vietnam or in Bangladesh. Even if they're educated and you need human capital in manufacturing. I don't want to call it, maybe, low skilled... obviously within human capital there are different strands, some are low-skilled, some are higher-skilled in what they're doing.   So for Nigeria, I think it's something that we need to come out and decide and build the required infrastructure. Maybe we then really need to build a lot of rail. Maybe we need to just build (expand) our broadband or something and invest in more schools and in more health clinics rather than building a lot of roads going to nowhere. So I feel like in my thinking about infrastructure, and that was really the idea around the article - to say we are resources starved and we really need to prioritise. We really need to say this is what we want to do and invest in the infrastructure to make it happen. In a case where we have that, then all these distractions of the committee of Nollywood people coming to my office...Tobi: LaughsAdedayo: Or committee of cow farmers coming to my office to say, oh, this is infrastructure we need, this is infrastructure we need. Because that acts as a signal to private enterprise, to people in the economy, that this is government's focus and they will also start to explore opportunities along that line and you're not bothered about all these distractions about people doing rice farming or tomato farming or how you can help them build their own infrastructure. We can't do everything. We really need to prioritise.Tobi: Do we need more private initiatives? Because I don't know...I get squeamish a bit when big things that could really really move the lever of the economy relies a bit too much on government. Because we all know some of the problems in that area, and the slow decision-making process and everything. For example, Tolaram is building a port in Lagos, I think with Lagos state government and a few other partners. So should policy really be about making such initiatives easier and then letting private capital just do some of these things?Adedayo: For me, I think, the role of government is absolutely crucial even for whatever you want to do. I was reading about when US wanted to go to space and the kind of investment they made and how that sort of created knowledge for other industries and how they were able to build capacities along that line. And you want to think that was state-led to an extent. It's very easy to not credit some of the inventions you see to government even if it was as a result of a government grant or government-funded projects (on behalf of government). So I believe, absolutely, we really need high-quality people in power, to be honest. I think that's probably one of the challenges we have in Nigeria.Tobi: Yeah. I take that point but it's interesting you mentioned the Apollo project. Because, really, even for a big economy like the US undertaking such a huge project, what you see is that behind the veil of everything there are lots of private contractors, private companies and government just acts basically as the coordinator. So should we just let government coordinate rather than looking for money to invest and saying that "oh, because tax-to-GDP ratio is low, we can't have good roads; and because you can't raise VAT, the second Niger bridge will be slow" and things like that.Adedayo: Exactly. I absolutely agree with... I agree with that. But you know, the thing is coordination too...Tobi: Takes knowledge.Adedayo: Takes knowledge. And you need Trust. For instance, you talk about PP projects and in some cases government will take it over again, right?Tobi: Yeah, and sometimes...Adedayo: But they will not meet their commitment Tobi: Yeah. Yep.Adedayo:  So imagine you...Tobi: There is actually lots of that in oil and gas...er [industry]Adedayo: So imagine when you are now saying...you come out with a very bold policy proposal and they're saying "oh, don't worry we're just going to coordinate everything" and... I mean I'm even assuming you have the quality human capital to actually create strategies and to probably coordinate such systems and you invite private capital to "oh, let's come and do this". I feel like for Nigeria to do that, a lot of private interests will be reluctant because of the kind of history we've had. So it's not just about even knowledge, it's about trust in the ability of the government to do some of the things they want to do. So yeah, I absolutely agree with you that government can lead a lot of things and they do not necessarily have to do it themselves.Tobi: Yeah.Adedayo: They do not need to provide the capital themselves, private interests will do that on their behalf but they need to get coordination right. They need to get the strategy right initially and you need people in government to do that. Private contractors are not the people that decide what the US government should do. It's people, knowledgeable people within...Tobi: The government itself.Adedayo: The government that come up with it and now say "oh, invite private capital to pursue some of these things". It's something we need to think of. I feel like government needs to completely eradicate this mindset that they are going to fix everything because that the idea we're seeing with this loan they want to go and get. That oh, we refurbished this, we refurbished that. You want 30 billion dollars that you can't even pay for, you can't even pay for the existing level of debt.Tobi: That you probably cannot even raise.Adedayo: Exactly. Because I don't know who will give you 30 billion dollars.Tobi: I was talking to my partner on that and my first reaction was there is no way the Nigerian government can raise 30 billion dollars. This particular government.Adedayo: Exactly. I feel like it's something we're ... we really need more quality people in government. Unfortunately, we don't have enough quality human capital...maybe the few people who want to do it (they) get frustrated out of the system because of bureaucracy and all kinds of challenges we have. But I believe the starting point is getting hiring right in the public sector. To have people who would then say "private capital, come and do this or come and do that...this is what we want to do but we want you guys to lead the effort".Tobi: There's an interesting story in the news around that area recently. Adedayo: Of course.Tobi: So yeah. Getting hiring right. It's absolutely crucial even in public service. People usually think that you don't need smart minds to work in government but it's probably even a lot more important. P

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Pastor Wale is a highly sought after conference speaker in churches, business, political and educational arenas. He has preached the gospel in over 25 countries including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Liberia, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, USA, Jamaica, Turkey, Holland, Kenya, United Arab Emirates, Wales and Scotland. For more info visit www.worldharvest.org.uk

Nigeria will lose more revenues from energy exports once the Niger Republic starts generating her own electricity.Aside from the Niger Republic, the country, according to the Federal Ministry of Power, exports electricity valued at between $582 million and $665 million annually to countries such as Togo, Chad, and the Benin Republic.Speaking on the side of a stakeholder’s forum in Lagos, the Technical Director, Consistent Energy Limited, Mr. Mohammed Etti, said Nigeria’s export earnings would dip further once the Niger Republic starts generating electricity.He said: “If Nigeria allows the Niger Republic to dam River Niger at Fouta Djullion for her own electricity needs, the country would not be able to export electricity to the Niger Republic and that would go a long way to reduce Nigeria’s earnings.”The Ministry of Power had quoted the Managing Director, Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Mr. Usman Mohammed, as saying the country exports 80% of her electricity to other countries in West Africa to improve power supply to the sub-region.He was quoted to have said the issue is inhibiting the growth of the economy, as well as making it difficult for Nigeria to realize her potentials. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/newscast-africa/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Republics of Benin and Niger have failed to meet the conditions for the reopening of Nigeria’s land borders. This was stated by Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture when he led a government delegation to the Seme border yesterday. Judging from the rate at which goods were smuggled and the number of illegal immigrants arrested over the last two weeks, the Minister noted that nothing was done by the neighboring countries to address the issues. The Federal Government announced five conditions that would make it reopen the borders after the closure. One of those conditions is that Nigeria would turn down imported goods repackaged by neighboring countries and bring to Nigeria. Another condition requires immigrants to identify themselves by providing a passport. These agreements were reached during a meeting of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on the Temporary Partial Closure of Land Borders in Abuja. Giving an account of the events that occurred during the border closure, the Information Minister said, “ Local consumption of fuel had dropped by 30% apparently due to the reduction in smuggling of petroleum products to neighboring countries. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/newscast-africa/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Nigeria's borders with neighboring country Benin Republic and Niger were shut from August 20, 2019, it is imperative to close the borders in other to stop the smuggling of goods and illegal commercial activities" Stay tune and listen to our Guests Mr Gambo Haruna and Mr Kleisant Akor as the share their Synonymous opinions on this issue.

In 1990, Benin Republic was facing an economic and ideological and political crisis, after 27 years of a brutal dictatorship by Président Mathieu Kerekou. When the risk of civil war at a peak, the Benin people, despite the tension, arranged a national inclusive consultation that led to the negotiations of a peaceful resolution and transition. Benin then invented the principle of a national conference that would be replicated in multiple countries in the francophone region, with more or less success. Learn more about a conference which changed the destiny of the country and set a historical example of diplomatic finesse of Africans. 

Oluwaseyi Ashiru, also called LSA, reads his poem - You Pursuit. LSA is a University Head of Student Affairs in Benin Republic, Cotonou and the immediate past National President of FECA Nigeria 2016-2018. You can reach him on Facebook at "Oluwaseyi Ashiru" and his Facebook show @eChatShow Class. His website link and every other information is on the Facebook page. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/franc-poetry-with-favour/support

Writing in his 2006 work titled, Yoruba Culture: A Philosophical Account, Dr. Kola Abimbola argues that Yoruba sociopolitical religious practices—( Òrìṣa tradition and culture) were expanded and intensified throughout the Americas due to the Transatlantic human trade which saw the enslaved millions of Africans. He writes: “Today, the Òrìṣa tradition and culture is practices by about 100 million people in Argentina, Australia, Benin Republic, Brazil, Cuba, France, Germany, Ghana, Haiti, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, Spain, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, the US, Venezuela, and other places. In all of these places, Yorùbá religious practices play a significant role in, music, dance, the arts, and many facets of day-to-day living.” (24) Kola Abimbola goes on to suggest that while there is a significant amount of good material available on various aspects of Yorùbá and Òrìṣa culture in different parts of the world, no one has yet fully explained its philosophical underpinnings. What philosophical affinities do Candomblé and Batuque (Ba—Tooque) in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, Vodun in Benin Republic, Vodou in Haiti, and Òrìṣa worship in Nigeria all share in common? (24) To date, many scholars have been content with explaining the details of the rituals, the arts, the music, and even the languages that all these different manifestations of Yorùbá culture share. But no good account of what unifies these traditions, that is, their philosophy, exists. Simply put, the philosophical and theological ideas that unify all these traditions under the rubric Yorùbá have not been adequately explained. (24) For Dr. Abimbola, the widespread inadequacy of the treatment of Yorùbá culture can be traced to three separate but interdependent erroneous assumptions implicit in the writing of some scholars. He captures these inadequacies, conceptually as: tribal fetishism, methodological straitjacketing; and hierarchical dogmatism. (24) Toady. We will hear a recent conversation I had Dr. Kola Abimbola on Ifa's Anceint Future…meditations on the deep tradition of African thought and its relationship to the physical and non-physical world… Dr. Kọ́lá Abímbọ́lá studied the Ifá Literary Corpus as an apprentice under Wándé Abímbọ́lá and Babalọ́lá Adébóyè Ifátóògùn. He received his PhD studies in Philosophy of Science under John Worrall at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a second PhD in the Law of Evidence and Criminal Justice under C. John Miller at the University of Birmingham. He has taught at Seattle University, Haverford College, Temple University, and at the University of Leicester (Lester) School of Law. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Howard University in Washington DC. Kọ́lá is the Editor of Journal of Journal of Forensic Research and Criminology. He was President of the International Society for African Philosophy and Studies from 2006 to 2010, and a British Council Commonwealth Academic Scholar from 1989 to 1992. Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples! Enjoy the program!

Sit back and enjoy some of the best bits of the francophone TOUT AFRO, TOUT BUSINESS show. In this episode, you will hear from Venicia Guinot (Multi Awards-Winning Editor-in-Chief at TROPICS MAGAZINE) and Onesiphore NEMBE (Editor-in-Chief at AFRIQUE PROGRES MAGAZINE). Fidégnon Adé AGBOWAI is an IT (Information Technologies) professional who passionate about promoting knowledge democratization in his home-country, Benin Republic, through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in view to fight discrimination and lack of knowledge. He's a former GIZ Global Campus21 Expert in E-Learning Development and Implementation in Cotonou. This past year(s), he has successfully developed a "barter" oriented mobile app to boost Intra African exchanges. In this episode we talk to him about Intra African exchanges through barter transactions in the digital age initiated by IPAARO mobile app. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tout-afro-tout-business/support