Mexico is on course to see its first female president, as both the ruling coalition and the opposition have nominated women as candidates for the 2024 election.

The country’s ruling party named former mayor of Mexico City Claudia Sheinbaum as its candidate for the June 2 election, the three-party coalition National Regeneration Movement (Morena) announced on Thursday.

Last week, the centrist opposition alliance Frente Amplio por México (Broad Front for Mexico) elected a senator and computer engineer, Xóchitl Gálvez, as its candidate.

Sheinbaum prevailed over five rivals in her party for the nomination.

One of her competitors, former foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard, denounced irregularities in the process and spoke of an unfair procedure.

Sheinbaum is close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was not allowed to run again after six years in office.

dpa/NAN

The dollar steadied near six-month highs as lingering signs of inflation in the United States stoked lingering concerns about the hawkish Federal Reserve.

The naira weakened to N930 to 1 dollar on Thursday in the unofficial foreign exchange (FX) market, known as the parallel market. 

This decline was exacerbated by the inability of Nigerian banks to meet the growing demand for dollars, prompting buyers to turn to the parallel market. 

The Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) plan to clear foreign exchange debt in the next two weeks should restore confidence in the economy.

Folashodun Adebisi Shonubi,  acting governor of CBN, said on Monday that the central bank has been discussing reducing the foreign exchange backlog for some time, “and we hope that we will get there after a while.” or two weeks,” he said. 

The dollar remains at its highest since mid-March as the dollar index and dollar index futures have little movement in trading in London. Concerns about worsening global economic conditions also boosted safe-haven demand for the dollar. 

At the time of writing, the US dollar index was trading at 104.8. The U.S. Dollar Index measures the value of the dollar in relation to a basket of other important currencies, including the Euro, British pound sterling, Swedish krona, and the Japanese yen.  

The recent upsides on the index mean people wishing to fulfil foreign exchange payment commitments through dollar transfers to regions like Europe and Japan would have to fork over fewer dollars to do so. 

Treasury rates with shorter maturities, which are more susceptible to fluctuations in the Fed’s rate, were several basis points higher on Wednesday. After increasing by over 6 basis points to 5.02%, the two-year yield was around 5.01%. 

Data released overnight showed that activity in the US services sector increased more than expected in August, with the price index in the sector also continuing to rise.

These numbers have raised concerns about persistent inflation in the short term, prompting the Fed to maintain a hawkish stance. 

A slew of Fed officials is expected to speak this week, offering more guidance on monetary policy ahead of a rate decision at the end of the month.

While the Fed is widely expected to keep rates unchanged, it should also reiterate its stance on sustainable rate hikes. 

The strong U.S. labour market gives the U.S. Fed more ammunition to rein in inflation, continually adding pressure on frontier market currencies like the Nigerian naira as investors are increasingly flocking to safe-haven currencies. 

For now, the dollar remains at the heart of the global financial system and US Treasuries remain the haven of choice. 

In the SWIFT payment system, the share of dollar transactions exceeds 40%, giving it a dominant position.

The share of the euro is about 25%, while the share of the yuan is about 3%.  But the dollar’s share of foreign exchange reserves was at a record 58%  in early 2023, compared with 73% in 2001. 

But old habits are unlikely to die. In a recent report, JPMorgan economists concluded that while “marginal de-dollarization” is happening, it won’t happen quickly.

The dollar, despite all its flaws, is simply too entrenched in global transactions to be quickly converted to another currency.

Barr Nnadume Offorkansi, a constitution lawyer, Thursday, said Wednesday’s verdicts of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal succeeded in making the Independent National Electoral Commission ‘a saint’.

According to him, the failure of the five-man panel to blame INEC for not living to its promises casts doubts on the judgement, which upheld the election of President Ahmed Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress.

Speaking during an interview in Enugu, Offorkansi said the judges seemed biased because ‘from the onset of the judgement, they seemed to be attacking the petitioners instead of analysing the merits and demerits in the petitions’.

In his view, “It was more of technicalities, and not moralities. There was never a place that INEC was found to have performed below expectations. How can the presidential and National Assembly elections that held the same day transmitted electronically results of National Assembly but suffered glitches in that of the presidential results? And the tribunal didn’t mention it at all!

“In law, you don’t start passing judgements from the onset. Ordinarily, judges start by analysing evidences from the petitioners, but it was not the case of yesterday. That judgement doesn’t seem to have been written by a judge. They did not mention the difficulties encountered by the petitioners in getting facts from INEC.

“INEC made it difficult for them, including ensuring that the stipulated time was allowed to almost elapse before allowing the petitioners to have access to some vital documents. Even the INEC IREV, as we are talking, is still not with all the results of the elections.

“INEC was never implicated in the judgement. INEC gave the impression that they were going electronic. People were happy, and they kept harping on it. The judgement didn’t talk about it. INEC has been exonerated, which is a pass on them to replicate same next time. My fear is that subsequent elections will be marred by irregularities because INEC can determine how to conduct them and nothing will happen.”

Recall that petitions challenging Tinubu’s election in the Feb 25 presidential election were quashed by the tribunal for lacking in merit. They were filed by APM, LP and PDP and their respective candidates.

It is one of the great ironies of modern times that an idea first floated by Jim O’Neill, a British economist then working for Goldman Sachs (and now sitting in the House of Lords), has morphed into an organisation that according to some accounts is about to knock the G7 and the advanced liberal-democratic economies off their economic perch. 

This particular narrative is certainly a dramatic and, in some circles at least, a persuasive one too. Indeed, who after the recent 15th BRICS summit hosted in Johannesburg can any longer doubt that the BRICS are set to run the world by displacing the United States (US) dollar with a shared currency, rendering the G7 irrelevant, and realising a dream harboured by many of building a more equitable world with more countries sitting around the high table of international affairs? Moreover, with over 40 countries now queuing up to join – six will do so by the beginning of 2024 – there can be little question the international system is undergoing a profound change. The future order, it seems, is going to look a lot different to that of the past few decades. 

Enter O’Neill

Yet, there is at least one rather important individual who seems less than convinced: the individual who came up with the idea of the BRICs in the first place. Indeed, in a recent piece published with the revealing title, ‘Does an expanded BRICS mean anything?’, O’Neill pours a fair amount of cold water on the notion that BRICS as an organisation represents anything more than a ‘symbolic gesture’.

O’Neill is clear. It is quite misleading, he argues, to suggest that the five current BRICS nations are about to overtake the G7 economically. In fact, when measured in current nominal US dollars, the group ‘remains significantly smaller than its advanced-economy counterpart’. Nor are all the original BRIC countries doing as well as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or even India. Brazil and Russia, for example, have in relative terms stood still over the past ten years. It is true South Africa was added to the original group in 2010. But as O’Neill points out, it is by no means the largest economy in Africa today. That privilege now falls to Nigeria. 

Furthermore, why choose the countries the organisation has hit upon to join the BRICS in a few months time? As O’Neill notes, the decision to admit the six is rather odd. Hence why ask indebted Argentina with its US$610 billion (£475 billion) economy, and not Mexico, whose economy is over two times as large? Why, moreover, invite poor Ethiopia and not oil-rich Nigeria? And what about Indonesia, an economy which over the past few years has done extremely well? From an economic point of view the proposed expansion of the group makes little sense. 

No doubt if somebody else had been raising all these points, then they would be accused of sour grapes. But O’Neill has never been a stout defender of the old economic order. It was he after all who made the case for the new big emerging economies in the first place. It was O’Neill too who then added the important rider that the leading economies should at some point have to make the necessary adjustments and give the original BRIC countries more voice and space at the top table. 

Nor is he any great fan of the G7 either. As he has remarked, ‘what the world really needs is not the G7 but a resurrected G20’, the best forum in his view ‘for addressing truly global issues such as economic growth, international trade, climate change and pandemic prevention’.  After all, the G20 he feels did a fine job in pulling the world economy out of the 2008 crisis and is much better suited than any other organisation – including either the BRICS or the G7 – in managing the international economic order. 

Beyond economics 

So what, then, has happened to make O’Neill talk of the new BRICS today as if it has lost its way? At least two things might be suggested, neither of which have very much to do with economics. 

The first is what has been happening to the PRC since he first wrote about the country with such enthusiasm. When O’Neill invented the BRIC idea, the PRC still looked as if it was attempting to rise within the existing international order. But those days are long gone. The PRC has moved on under the leadership of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, a strong-minded leader by any account who rarely misses an opportunity these days to berate liberalism and the various ills visited upon the world by the US. 

Nor did Xi deviate from this particular narrative at the South African summit. Xi may not have delivered his own speech on the first day. That task was left to Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister. But the words were Xi’s. As Wang (or Xi)  put it, there was ‘some’ (unnamed) ‘country obsessed with maintaining its hegemony’ by going out ‘of its way to cripple the emerging markets and developing countries.’ And just to make sure the message got home, Wang continued to attack the said ‘country’ by insisting that in pursuit of its own power it was doing everything it could to thwart the legitimate ambitions of those seeking a place in the sun. ‘Whoever is catching up’ soon ‘becomes a target of obstruction’ he went on. 

‘Best and bosom friends’ 

The second big change has been Xi’s determination to maintain and even extend the PRC’s very close partnership with another BRICS member, Russia. Once dismissed by some writers as being little more than an ‘axis of convenience’, over the last dozen years or so the two countries, not to mention the two leaders, have got ever closer, a process which reached a diplomatic climax just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine when they announced a partnership with ‘no limits’. Indeed, long before the meeting in South Africa, Xi and Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, had not only become ‘best and bosom friends’ but had for some time been talking quite openly of challenging the existing international order by making a direct appeal to the developing countries or what they prefer to call the ‘Global South’.  

Some may have hoped that the war against Ukraine would weaken the Russia-PRC relationship. But if anything it has become more entrenched. In fact, since the beginning of the conflict Xi and Putin have continued to speak from the same script about the deeper ‘cause’ of the conflict (NATO expansion) while at the same time attacking the European Union (EU) and the US for imposing sanctions on Russia and ‘pouring oil on the flames’ by arming Ukraine. Nor has the relationship between the two countries cooled since. Indeed, only a short while before the South African summit, officials from both sides met yet again to work out how to, as said by Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, ‘continue expanding and intensifying [their] partnership.’

As is known, Putin himself was unable to attend the summit in Johannesburg. But nobody who was there (Xi least of all one suspects) was prepared to criticise him or his war. In fact, one of the more significant aspects of the meeting was Putin’s speech close to the beginning of proceedings where he defended his ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine by claiming that Russia had been forced to take action because of the aggressive policies of the US. And as if to cock a further snook at what he liked to call ‘the collective West’, it was then decided that the next summit would be held in Russia – where Putin would be able to attend in person. 

Reform 

Which brings us back to the BRICS and how to judge its position in international affairs. Those doubtful about its claim to represent the future might take comfort from the fact that at least two of its key members – India and the PRC – are potential rivals, and that many of the BRICS countries (including many of those about to join the organisation) can hardly be described as paragons of political virtue. Indeed, at least three of the new members – the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Iran – come well down the list of countries upholding the rule of law and press freedom, while Ethiopia is still mired in a bloody war that has claimed up to 600,000 civilian lives.

Some will also be reassured by another set of facts; namely that the US remains the biggest economy in the world by a serious margin, that 7 of the top 10 economies in the international system are non-BRIC, and that the majority of the biggest corporations are still to be found in the United Kingdom, US, EU and Japan.

Yet the ‘West’ should not be complacent. Again, as O’Neill reminded us, the BRICS group has ‘been able to tap into the broader Global South’s suspicion that the post-Second World War global arrangements are too Western.’ Moreover, as others have pointed out, resentment in developing countries where memories of colonial rule still remain raw and life’s chances for millions look decidedly limited is on the rise. Viewed from this perspective, the growing appeal of the BRICS has to be recognised for what it is: less a serious threat perhaps and more a protest against the current economic order and the distribution of power within it. Reform therefore might not just be a choice but a necessity if the ‘Global South’ is not to drift apart from the ‘West’. As one of the main characters from the great Italian novel, The Leopard, put it: ‘if we want things to stay as they are, then things will have to change.’ Those shaping the future of an increasingly unsettled world might want to take note.

Prof. Michael Cox is a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS and was Director of LSE IDEAS between 2008 and 2019.

Ali Bongo has been released from house arrest by the military junta in Gabon, eight days after he was deposed as president. 

The new military leaders in the Central African nation said Bongo is free to leave the country for medical treatment.

Bongo was toppled on the morning the electoral umpire announced that he had been re-elected to a third term in office.

On Monday, Brice Nguema, an army general who led the coup, was sworn in as interim president.

Nguema who is Bongo’s cousin, served as a bodyguard to Bongo’s late father and also headed the country’s republican guard, an elite military unit.

The statement announcing Bongo’s release from house arrest was signed by Nguema.

“Given his state of health, the former President of the Republic Ali Bongo Ondimba is free to move about,” Ulrich Manfoumbi, the military spokesperson, said in the statement read on national television on Wednesday evening.

“He may, if he wishes, travel abroad for medical checkups.”

Bongo became president when Omar, his father, died after ruling from 1967 to 2009.

The military is yet to announce a transition to civilian rule programme.

[TheCable]

It’s more than one year to the next governorship election in Edo State, which prides itself on being the “heartbeat of the nation”. But in a maelstrom that has forced the state’s heart to beat faster than is good for it, you would be forgiven to think the election is tomorrow.

The bad blood between Governor Godwin Obaseki and his deputy, Philip Shaibu, is so bitter and so strong it has spilled beyond Osadebe House in Benin, splattering as far as Abuja courts, and daily smearing the front pages of newspapers. 

Reports last week said the governor, fed up of seeing his deputy’s face, is preparing an isolation centre for him in the precincts of the Government House, but far enough to keep him out of sight.

One cynical way to look at it is to say Shaibu is getting what he deserves for trying to do what Napoleon could not do. In Nigeria’s 24 years of unbroken civilian rule there are few examples of deputy governors who have succeeded their bosses by election, and only two of them – Mahmud Shinkafi (Zamfara); and Abdullahi Ganduje (Kano) – did so by mutual consent. The others, whether in Bayelsa, Kaduna, Sokoto, Ebonyi, Yobe or Oyo, were either by default or defiance. 

Except Shaibu intends to make his luck, which will not only include raiding the vote bank in Edo South, but also subverting the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) structure in the state, and overthrowing Obaseki’s ego, history is not on his side. 

Making his luck? 

How can Shaibu make his luck when he is throwing everything into battle at once, the very opposite of Napoleon’s famous manoeuvre sur les derrie ‘res or the strategy of inferiority? He doesn’t even enjoy support in his Edo North home base, where the rival All Progressives Congress (APC) could have thrown him a lifeline.

Senator Adams Oshiomhole, APC leader in Edo and Shaibu’s former staunch backer, has told him that APC has no room for internally displaced politicians (IDP) in search of a rehabilitation camp. That may sound harsh, but I’m sure that Shaibu knows he deserves his current misery. Loyalty is not a virtue in politics, sadly. But if Oshiomhole is dressing Shaibu down, he has earned the right to do so. 

Of course, Oshiomhole’s snake may have its hand buried in its womb, but it was this man, for all his hubris, that extended a helping hand to Shaibu, a former Prisons Service officer, after an electoral defeat in his early political career in 2003 nearly left him for dead. 

That helping hand, which he would later turn round to bite, was the hand that paved the way for him not only to later become the majority leader in the Edo House of Assembly, but also to represent Estako Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives in 2015. 

According to one account, in the good old days of comradery conviviality, the infernal idea of inaugurating a minority House of Assembly of 10 members in 2019 after which the majority of 14 (APC) were locked out for entire four years was suggested by Shaibu, who was House Leader between 2009 and 2015. It was a coup that benefited all the plotters.

Yet, however deserving he may be of his current misery, it would be unfair to ignore the circumstances under which Shaibu parted ways with Oshiomhole in 2020. Oshiomhole who was then party chairman of the APC had supervised shambolic primaries in a number of states. 

Things fall apart 

The primaries in Edo were obviously meant to settle scores with his protegee, Obaseki, who had developed a mind of his own. Shaibu joined the train of “conscientious objectors,” ostensibly led by Obaseki, who were obliged to part ways with the APC, taking refuge under PDP’s umbrella provided by the former Governor Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike. 

But Obaseki, the other significant party in this pathetic drama playing out in Edo, is a man of infinite contradictions, whose chameleonic gifts are matched only by his ruthless deployment of power. Against the run of fair play, Oshiomhole imposed him as his successor in 2016, in a self-aggrandising bid to copy the Tinubu-Fashola model in Lagos; he being the Tinubu of Edo, and Obaseki, the former stockbroker from Afrivest, Edo’s Fashola.

The experiment turned out to be a catastrophic fiasco. Barely two years after take-off, the falcon began to defy the falconer and the monster created in the process now threatens not only the creator but also the supplicant who has dared to challenge it.

Birds of a feather

Obaseki and Shaibu deserve each other. And Oshiomhole, the father of this incorrigible pair and high priest of their shenanigans, must be sorry at what his experiment has brought upon the people of Edo. In all of this, my heart goes out to the people who must now endure 12 months of a government in disarray, hampered by in-fighting and back-stabbing.

The deputy governor has been stripped of his responsibilities of monitoring and reporting the collection of Internally Generated Revenue and also benched from supervising the Sports Ministry.

But it gets even pettier. Shaibu’s sister-in-law, Sabina Chikere, who was until recently permanent secretary of the Sports Ministry, has been redeployed to “Central Administration”, an administrative wasteland. She was lucky not to have been lynched by a politically motivated mob as she tried to retrieve her personal effects from her former office.

And to asphyxiate his deputy, Obaseki sacked media aides attached to that office in a vendetta straight out of former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s playbook during his face-off with Atiku Abubakar.

A resident, Edosa Okunbo, described the fight as “selfish, shameful and diversionary at a time when the state is bedeviled by bad roads and daily killings by rival cult gangs.” Another resident, Isaac Olamikan, said, “The people will be the worse for this in-fighting.”

Even as videos of the governor’s convoy stranded in flooded Benin roads trend, there is still something he manages to do well: calling out the Federal Government’s profligacy. How a governor can superintend over a shambles at home, call out Abuja with a straight face, and also win local elections overwhelmingly at the height of his hubris are part of the inexplicable alchemy of Nigeria’s politics. I don’t get it.

But it doesn’t matter. The emergence of Obaseki in 2016 propped by political heavyweights and supported by some of Nigeria’s high and mighty, including Aliko Dangote, must feel like an investment in junk bonds now. And the governor’s union with Shaibu, must feel like a marriage made in hell. 

I can imagine that folks in Edo Central who have been hard done by over the years must be fancying the clash between Obaseki who is from the South, and Shaibu who is from the North, with extraordinary amusement. It may well be the argument that advances their case for a shot at power in 2024.

I hope, however, for the sake of the long-suffering people of the state that the governor and his deputy will sheathe the sword, let common sense prevail and serve the people they have sworn to serve for their remaining time in office. 

I have seen what appears to be a letter of rapprochement by the deputy governor addressed to the DSS, the governor and the chief judge, on official letterhead and was pleased that Shaibu still has access to his letterhead. I hope the truce holds. As things are now, apart from the two contenders, the only people profiting from this ego-fest are political opportunists and assorted jobbers.

Edo people deserve far, far better than being spectators in a pointless, diversionary ego war.

The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) has just delivered its excoriating judgement on the petitions flowing from the Presidential Elections of February 25th 2023.

Majority of the followers of the Labour Party (LP) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), including their candidates who have often tacitly expressed their lack of confidence that the Tribunal would deliver justice are not surprised at the judgment because they never truly believed they would get a fair the courts in the long run.

They accused the judiciary of rapacious interference of hire wired corruption and a highly influential establishment that is against them in a game where they are no match. Yet they played on thinking that the Almighty God would touch the hearts of the Justices to be patriotic by the awakening of a new populist consciousness driven by the campaign of “All Eyes on the Judiciary“.

The “All Eyes….” campaign did not only fail with sleepy eyes on the bar but it availed nothing but additional misery when the Learned Justices of the Court of Appeal decided to validate the election of President Bola Tinubu in such a stoic judgment that has stunned the legal teams of the petitioners, making them to wonder if the law they thought they understood was written in the English language.

To the chagrin of the LP and PDP supporters who had really hoped otherwise against their singsong of utter lack of confidence in the courts, yet in their fatalism, they thought the Tribunal would rule in their favour but lawyers understand that when a court has decided to follow a particular course, it would employ every relevant Supreme Court authority to support its position just to make it very difficult to fault its judgment and nearly impossible to overturn it on appeal. Thus it is not the fault of those brilliant lawyers who represented PDP and LP. And becomes ridiculous to suggest to Peter Obi to demand a refund of the legal fees he paid to them.

Therefore the Labour Party and the People’s Democratic Party will be inviting more misery and disappointment on their supporters if they choose to go on appeal to a Supreme Court that they don’t trust or consider able to engender any confidence to deliver justice.

A better course would be to consider the future of Nigeria with a better strategy of unity. The LP and PDP lost the 2023 presidential elections when they failed to realize that only a coalition of true unity of their political parties could have defeated the All Progressives Congress that was in charge of government at that time.

LP and PDP must simply wake up to the reality!

The World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Mr Shubham Chaudhuri, has said that public spending in the country is among the lowest globally.

He said this while making his keynote address at the annual banking and finance conference in Abuja on Tuesday.

His presentation noted that “Nigeria’s government expenditures are the lowest globally.”

According to Chaudhuri, “Public spending by the Nigerian government, both the federal and subnational levels, have been very low.”

He added that government spending is insufficient to close the infrastructure gap.

His presentation document read, “At the current rate of capital spending, it would take 300 years to close Nigeria’s infrastructure gap.”

The World Bank leader for Nigeria also noted that public investment spending in Nigeria lags those in other countries like Indonesia, Ghana, Egypt, and Kenya, and this has led to poor quality of and access to infrastructure.

Chaudhuri also said that government revenues are one of the lowest in the world between 2015 and 2021, and low revenues are the key risk to fiscal and debt sustainability.

He further noted that access to finance is abysmally low, which further restricts the private sector’s ability to invest, grow, and generate jobs.

In his keynote address, Chaudhuri emphasised that for Nigeria to achieve steady growth and prosperity, both federal and state governments must take critical steps to ensure the country’s security, political stability, and the rule of law.

The bank also called on authorities to invest in human capital, particularly in children, unleash the potential of private investment, promote job creation, and ensure access to finance.

Also, at the conference, some stakeholders reiterated the need for the financial sector to make deliberate efforts towards increasing its contribution to the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

The Minister of Budget and Economic Planning, Abubakar Bagudu, challenged the financial sector to move from 3.6 to about nine per cent growth of GDP.

Bagudu said, “To grow Nigeria’s economy, we must empower our youthful population and this can only be achieved by having an inclusive and sustainable financial services industry, adding that the biggest threat to retaining our best brains today is emigration and our country’s talent is being sought after in the more developed countries in Europe and North America.

‘’Emigration is a personal choice for the person and his family, our country cannot and will not forcefully stop anyone from legally pursuing their dreams and ambitions. If they choose to leave Nigeria, all we can ask is for them to be good ambassadors for our country in their adopted homes’’.

Also, the acting Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Folashodun Shonubi, said the sector’s economic contribution to the nation was low and needed improvement.

“Can we promise them that instead of 3.6 per cent, we will be contributing a lot more than that. And we will sit down and find what the drivers are that we can influence and do.

“I don’t want to put a number in front of us but it is what I will like to see at the end of the conference.  I don’t think we contribute a lot of ourselves , we as bankers need to be more conscious, a bit more active on advocacies that are actionable,” he said.

Similarly, the Chairman, Body of Banks’ CEOs, Mr Ebenezer Onyeagwu, urged for a deliberate effort by the stakeholders towards growing the country’s economy.

He said, “We have enormous potential, the biggest potential we have is in our market. Our market is depleted by the number of people we have.

In his remarks, the President of the Chattered Institute of Bankers, Mr Ken Opara said the event which has grown to become the largest gathering of banking and finance professionals in Africa, provides the platform for professionals to come together to drive conversation on topical issues that are critical to the growth of the Nigerian economy.

He praised the reform initiatives of President Bola Tinubu, noting that “the reform initiatives such as subsidy removal, unifying the foreign exchange regime, investing in infrastructure, promoting agriculture, supporting SMEs and tax reforms, among others, if well implemented will unlock the economic potentials of the country.”

[Punch]

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has ended its two-day warning strike, directing its members to resume work today.

The congress described the participation of its affiliate unions in the warning strike as a “show of undaunted and resilient commitment to defend Nigerian workers and citizens against man-made economic hardship”.

It urged the affiliate unions to stand by for the indefinite strike, should the Federal Government refuse to take effective action to ameliorate the suffering of workers occasioned by the removal of fuel subsidy.

A statement yesterday in Abuja by NLC President Joe Ajaero reads: “We write to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all our dedicated affiliates, state councils, and esteemed members for their unwavering support and active participation in the recent two-day nationwide warning strike.

“This collective effort was undertaken to emphasise our strong conviction that the government should prioritise the welfare of our citizens and adhere to our established statutes.

“We are pleased to report that, thanks to your resolute commitment, we have made significant strides in achieving the goals set during our National Executive Council (NEC) meeting, which prompted the initiation of this warning strike. It is abundantly clear that our united message has resonated loudly with the government, and it would take a truly inattentive ear not to hear it.

“As we mark the end of the two-day nationwide warning strike today, at the stroke of midnight, we earnestly call upon you all to gracefully conclude the strike and return to work tomorrow (today), in accordance with our initial agreement…”

Our correspondents report that the warning strike was successful in some states but flopped in others.

In Sokoto State, the NLC hailed its members for complying with the two-day warning strike.

Addressing reporters yesterday in Sokoto, the State NLC Chairman Abdullahi Aliyu said: “Our workers and other affiliates of the NLC have shown dedication and commitment toward ensuring the success of our struggle for better living condition for all.

“We will continue to remain on our oath to support the government to achieve the desired economy that will provide food on the table of the poor and the general public.”

In Enugu State, the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company PLC (EEDC) said the warning strike caused the loss of supply in parts of its network.

The distribution company said this resulted in the shutdown of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) dtations feeding its injection substations.

EEDC’s Head of Corporate Communications, Mr. Emeka Ezeh, announced this yesterday in Enugu.

He said the affected TCN stations are: New Haven, Ohiya, and Egbu transmission stations.

According to him, the development affected power supply to EEDC’s customers under Ogui, Abakpa, Umuahia, Owerri, New Owerri, Orlu, and Mbaise districts, feeding from the affected TCN stations.

In Ogun State, the warning strike prevented the National Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal sitting in Abeokuta, the state capital, from delivering its judgment on the senatorial election petition for Ogun West.

The state’s judicial workers locked out the tribunal members.

In Lagos State, most workers ignored the warning strike as they went about their businesses.

Banks, schools and other business concerns opened fully to customers and the state secretariat in Ikeja was fully open for work.

The Ikeja Under-Bridge axis to the House of Assembly, the usual starting and terminal spots for protests, did not have the usual large crowd.

Traffic was smooth except for the usually “go-slow” in some areas across the state.

Also, the Plateau State NLC Chairman Eugene Manji said the warning strike achieved its aim.

Manji, who spoke with The Nation yesterday in Jos, the state capital, said: “Every arm of the labour force complied: the state and federal secretariats’ workers complied. Banks and corporate organisations across the state also complied. We went round to enforce compliance, where necessary. So, it was successful in the state.”

In Adamawa State, a task force set up by the state chapter of the NLC shut down many offices that opened yesterday, mostly in Yola, the state capital.

The task force, which was led by NLC State Vice Chairman Usman Babbada, also had leaders of some affiliates of the umbrella union.

They ensured that members of the Judicial Staff Union of Nigeria (JUSUN) did not work at their offices.

The task force locked up the two High Court complexes in the town, forcing the Election Petitions Tribunal in the state to suspend activities.

The enforcement team also stormed the state secretariat complex where the few workers on duty were chased out.

Members of the team parleyed with some permanent secretaries on why they too should comply with the warning strike.

In Abia State, government offices and public institutions across the 17 local government areas shut down operations.

Our correspondent, who monitored compliance in Aba and Umuahia, reports that affiliate members of the NLC as well as some financial institutions closed down their services.

Residents who needed money used the Automated Teller Machines (ATM).

Commercial bus drivers had low patronage as government workers, especially, did not come out to report for work.

This led to lower number of commuters during the period of the warning strike.

In Kwara State, there was partial compliance with the warning strike.

Banks, which opened in the morning, shut their gates, while junior civil servants joined the strike action.

The State NLC Chairman Muritala Olayinka did not answer his calls or reply to messages sent to his mobile phone for comments.

But the state Chairman of National Union of Agriculture and Allied Employees, Kayode Ehindero, said his union supported the action.

[Nation]