What About This? When Last did you see something like this?

Snake in Action

Tell me.

I'm tied up with something for the moment.

Storyline: What would you say when you are very busy with something and can't just put it aside even though your wife is calling you?
	Priscilla:	Rich, can you come downstairs for a minute right now?
	Richard:	I'm sorry I can't.  I'm tied up with something urgent at the moment.
	Priscilla:	Oh, are you on the stupid net again?  When are you going to get off?
	Richard:	Just a minute, Dear!  I'm looking at a new jewelry site.  I wanna make sure I get the right gift for your birthday, don't I?
	Priscilla:	Oh?  In that case, I'm sorry to bother you.  Take as much time as you need.
	Richard:	No problem.

JTF and Boko Haram. 4 dies

Four Boko Haram men have been killed by the Joint Task Force (JTF) in Maiduguri, the troubled Borno State capital where the sect’s members have been burning schools in a new approach to their increasingly violent insurgency.  
Borno State Commissioner for Education Musa Inuwa Kubo, said seven schools - including two yesterday - have been burnt down in the last few days.

Thousands of children have been left without schools in the middle of their term. 
“The destruction of schools in Maiduguri is a great setback to the state,” Inuwa told Reuters. “It is really a sad development because the schools belong to the people and the poor are suffering as a result of the destruction,” he lamented.
The JTF said it gunned down four Boko Haram members in Maiduguri on Wednesday.

JTF spokesman, Lt Col Hassan Mohammed, spoke while parading the body of one of the sect members at Bayan-Quarters area, where he was killed while driving in a Volkswagen Golf taxi car at about 6:30pm on Wednesday. He said the sect members might have been out for a deadly operation, given the heavy arms in their possession. 

Lt. Col Mohammed described the day’s operation as “a bad day for the sect”.
Their refusal to stop at check points, Lt Col Mohammed said, prompted soldiers in the JTF to trail them; “and as they made attempt to escape, our men did not waste chance to bring them down”.

As a result of Boko Haram activities and the reaction of the security agencies, at least 10,000 people have fled northern Nigeria for neighbouring Niger and Chad to escape a military sweep targeting Bokon Haram members, officials said yesterday.
Niger’s government said at least 10,000 of its citizens had returned from northern Nigeria over the past six months, and the International Organisation for Migration said more than 800 Chadians had returned in recent days.

The influx of people into Niger, a landlocked desert state that is also dealing with tens of thousands of refugees from Libya’s war and a rebellion in northern Mali, could worsen an expected food shortage there this year.

“According to statistics, we’ve seen from the police, we have 10,000 Nigeriens that have returned on their own since the start of violence in Nigeria,” said Boube Yaye, Niger’s permanent secretary in charge of Nigeriens abroad.
He added that at least 13 Nigeriens living in northern Nigeria had been falsely arrested in the sweep, and appealed to Nigerian security forces to show restraint.

Qasim Sufi, of the International Organization for Migration, said returnees to Chad, including many children who had been enrolled in Koranic schools in Nigeria, were fleeing soldiers targeting Boko Haram members in their villages.
“They’re all saying the same thing, that it is getting very bad in their villages,” he said.
The United States yesterday issued a travel warning on Nigeria following violent crime committed by armed gangs and militants wearing police uniforms, the U.S. State Department said.

The State Department’s travel advisory warning said: “Violent crime committed by individuals and gangs, as well as by persons wearing police and military uniforms, remain a problem throughout the country.”

The advisory noted that Boko Haram took responsibility for a series of attacks in February that killed dozens of people and left many more injured. The State Department said kidnapping remains a security concern as well. Five U.S. citizens were kidnapped in Nigeria last year and another was abducted from his vehicle in January.

The advisory said foreigners shouldn’t travel to areas designated as conflict areas by the government as Abuja may likely consider such activity illegal.
“The state of emergency gives the government sweeping powers to search and arrest without warrants,” the State Department warned.

A rebel with a cause

The late Chukwumeka Ojukwu did not just call out his people for war. He was a rebel with a cause, writes Prof. Wole Soyinka in this tribute

"Having mandated me to proclaim on your behalf, and in your name, that Eastern Nigeria be a sovereign independent Republic, now, therefore I, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Oj4kwu, Military Governor of Eastern Nigeria, by virtue of the authority, and pursuant to the principles recited above, do hereby solemnly proclaim that the territory and region known as and called Eastern Nigeria together with her continental shelf and territorial waters, shall, henceforth, be an independent sovereign state of the name and title of The Republic of Biafra.”

With these words, on May 30 of the year 1967, a young, bearded man, thirty-four years of age in a fledgling nation that was barely seven years old, plunged that nation into hitherto uncharted waters, and inserted a battalion of question marks into the presumptions of nation-being on more levels than one. That declaration was not merely historic, it re-wrote the more familiar trajectories of colonialism even as it implicitly served notice on the sacrosanct order of imperial givens. It moved the unarticulated question: “When is a nation?” away from simplistic political parameters - away from mere nomenclature and habitude - to the more critical arena of morality and internal obligations. It served notice on the conscience of the world, ripped apart the hollow claims of inheritance and replaced them with the hitherto subordinate, yet logical assertiveness of a ‘people’s will’. Young and old, the literate and the uneducated, urban sophisticates and rural dwellers, citizen and soldier - all were compelled to re-examine their own situating in a world of close inter-relations and distant ideological blocs, bringing many back to that basic question: Just when is a nation?
 Throughout world history, many have died for, but without an awareness of the existential centrality of that question. The Biafran act of secession was one that could claim that its people had direct and absolute intimacy with the negative corollary of that question. Their brutal, immediately antecedent circumstances ensured that they could provide one or more truthful and urgent answers to the obverse of the question, which would then read: When is a nation not?
 Chukuwemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, thrown by Destiny onto that critical moment of truth as a leader, became the voice, the actualising agent of their overwhelming recognition. He heard the answers given to an interrogatory that proceeded from gross human violation, and he responded as a leader. In so doing, he challenged the pietisms of former colonial masters and the sanctimoniousness of much of the world. He challenged an opportunist construct of nationhood, mostly externally imposed, and sought to replace it, under the most harrowing circumstances, with a vital proposition that answered the purpose of humanity ­which is not merely to survive, but to exist in dignity. The world might cavil, the ideologues of undialectical unity might shake their head in dubious appraisal and denounce it as reckless adventurism. This, however was his reading, and even the most implacable enemy would hardly deny that his position transcended individual judgment, that it rested firmly on the collective will of a people who only awaited, and demanded the decisiveness of responsive leadership. 

Even today, many will admit that, in this very nation, that question remains unresolved, that more and more voices are probing that question, that all over the world, certainly within our own continent, multitudes are braving impossible odds, conceding immense sacrifices to contest the facile and complacent answer which proposes that whatever is, is divinely ordered, thus conferring the mantle of divinity on those whose spatial contrivances, called nations, continue to creak at the seams and consume human lives in their millions. Their mission is to preserve a sacrosanct order that was never accorded human legitimacy, as if it is not the very humanity that grants authority to the cohesion of any inert piece of real estate and thus, only such humanity contains, and can exercise a moral will, in designating it a habitable and productive entity that truly deserves the designation of - nation-being.

 Humanity must be allowed to make its errors. Indeed, errors are the unregistered provisions in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There are however degrees and qualities of errors, and the most lamentable of these are those that proceed from the lack of courage to interrogate whatever humanity has merely happened upon, or has been imposed upon us as thinking humans, failure to accept the resultant clamour, and the antecedents, of this clamour for change. This is what constitutes a primal error, a deficiency in responsive capabilities, a condition of mental enslavement. 

Change is not an absolute however, but is acknowledged to be the product of human curiosity, observation, creativity and transformative intelligence. Nor should change imply, of necessity, the destruction of what is viable, what amplifies the virtues that already make us human, or bind us together in a common pursuit of the amelioration of existence. Where stagnation, retrogression, or diminution of those very virtues, those very progressive qualities that make even self-fulfillment possible, stare a people in the face however, then, surely, the imperative of Change becomes irresistible, and its horizons exert the pressure of inevitability. That immense call fell upon the shoulders of our comrade Chukwuemeka, and he responded in the manner we all know, for better or ill, but he was not found wanting in the hour of decision.

The errors of Biafra are what we hear plenty of. Only rarely, with dismissive condescension, are rightly attributed those achievements against overwhelming odds that gave rise to that ancient adage: Necessity is the mother of invention, or even - Sweet are the uses of adversity. There were indeed cruelties here also, on. Biafran soil, as on her opposing side, and there was needless prolongation of human suffering. Biafra became a byword for paranoia. There were policies that pushed Biafra deeper and deeper into a self-dug bunker, from where the world became a blank surrounding, closing in, despite apertures that were clearly visible to many, even from within. A leader must accept responsibility for all such failings, with perhaps the meager consolation that, throughout the history of conflicts, and especially of conflicts based on a righteous perception of wrongs, such has been the fate of the beleaguered. But it would be a greater injustice from us if we fail in the apportionment of the positive, such as a rare inspirational leadership that held a people together and aroused an unprecedented level of creative adjustments, of practical inventiveness, the like of which has yet to be recorded on our continent. What a pity that policy and suspicion have led to the squandering of such bequests!

The regrets, individual and collective, the triumph of the dominance of human spirit, no longer matter to the man whose passage among us we are gathered here to commemorate, any more than the very questioning of structures of human co­-habitation. He who lived to embrace, to share bread implacable enemies, is no longer with us, yet he remains among us. We celebrate the fact that, in his lifetime, bitterness did turn several pages towards the chapter of reconciliation but - has it truly brought mutual understanding? Let us reflect on that question carefully today yes, a full half-century later - as we bid goodbye to one who did not flinch from the burden of choice, but boldly answered the summons of history. As the saying goes, the rest is also - history.

Finally, CBN Forex Policies Are Yielding Fruits As Naira Strengthens

Last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) churned out many policies geared at stabilising the naira, which, even up till this year looked untameable.

But judging from the increasing strengthening of the local currency, the central bank appears to have more than succeeded in its job of ensuring a stable currency investors can plan with.

The apex bank first showed signs that it was disturbed when it became clear that the old corridor of plus or minus three per cent of N150 to the dollar was no longer attainable. It was however moved to a maximum of N160 to give investors an encouraging band to plan with.

But as it were, the central bank has apparently surpassed its goal of ensuring price stability to the extent of narrowing the gap between the inter-bank or parallel markets and the official market. This has consequently reduced the lure for speculators.

During the last CBN Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) meeting, it expressed worry that the foreign exchange reserves had amounted to $32.64 billion as at the end of  December 2011, more or less flat relative to the $32.34 billion as at the end of December 2010, despite the higher oil price in 2011.

Notwithstanding the high prices of Nigeria’s reference crude oil (Bonny Light) which averaged $106.32 per barrel for the year, there has been little or no accretion to external reserves which was due to the high demand for foreign exchange in the market.

The committee noted that pressure on the exchange rate emanating from the high demand reflected the import-dependent nature of the economy, probably compounded by the activities of speculators.

But then, lately, the reduction in arbitrage opportunities in the oil marketing sectors combined with stronger controls in foreign exchange practices led to a mild moderation in foreign exchange net demand.

The official Wholesale Dutch Auction System (WDAS) rate (inclusive of one per cent commission) moved up from N151.62 per dollar in January 2011 to N154.45/$ in June and further to N158.21/US$1 in December 2011. The volatility in the official rates, however, was limited by the coefficient of variation being 1.28 per cent for the year as a whole compared to 0.32 per cent in 2010.

The committee had urged the CBN to strive to eliminate speculative demand for foreign exchange. The Committee also noted that as at January 24, 2012, the exchange rate was N158.57/$, while the foreign exchange reserves amounted to $34.18 billion on January 27, 2012, which could finance over six months of imports of goods and services. The outlook for oil prices in the short-term as well as the forecast demand/supply balance, suggested that the current exchange rate band should be retained while still achieving moderate continuous accretion to reserves.

Since then, the nation’s foreign reserves have continued to rise, though hesitantly. For instance, Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves rose to $34.93 billion as at February 16 this year from $34.67 billion on February 1, the highest level in more than four and a half months, raising hopes of a more stable exchange rate of the naira.

The figure had risen from $32.98 billion at the start of January, which was also higher than the $33.16 billion a year ago.

The reserves, at their current level, could finance more than six months of imports of goods and services, CBN said.

In a bid to boost reserves, CBN, had in the past called on businesses in the country to ensure that their activities and operations were geared towards generating foreign exchange, which they will in turn, use for their import needs.

According to it, the rising demand for foreign exchange would be curtailed if businesses were concerned about generating foreign exchange for the country and for their own use.

The CBN promised to continually ensure that it churns out policies that would lead to increased foreign exchange.

Thus, the naira has continuously firmed, a confirmation that central bank policies and advice to businesses are beginning to impact on the foreign exchange market.

At the inception of this week, the naira firmed marginally against the U.S dollar on the interbank on Monday, spurred by dollar sales by a unit of Royal Dutch Shell and declining demand for foreign exchange at the official window.

Somehow, the oil firms have decided to be part of the local foreign exchange (forex) market by selling dollars to the banks directly, thus reducing the pressure on the official market, thus the foreign exchange reserves.

The naira on Monday closed at N157.60 to the dollar on the interbank market, stronger than the N157.65 it closed on Friday.

Traders said the market reacted to the dollar inflows from Shell petroleum and signs of declining demand at the official window where the central bank sold fewer dollars than it initially offered for the third consecutive time in a row.

The central bank sold $138.70 million at N155.90 to the dollar, compared with $113.53 million sold at N155.90 to the dollar at the last auction on Wednesday. The regulator had initially offered $150 million at the bi-weekly forex auction.

Traders said more importers now buy dollars at the interbank because of the improved liquidity in the market and short turn-around time for transactions.

"We hope to see the naira appreciating further after the confirmation of the winning bids for the Shell petroleum dollar," one dealer said.

Dealers also said more oil multinationals were expected to sell dollars in the coming days as part of the monthly cyclical sales to obtain naira for their local obligations.

Who am I to question Mugabe's health – PM

Johannesburg - Zimbabwe's prime ministerMorgan Tsvangirai was reticent on Thursday about President Robert Mugabe's claim that he was fit enough to still be president at 88.

"Is President Mugabe fit enough to lead?" said Tsvangirai in response to a question at a news conference in Johannesburg.

"Well, he says so himself [that] he's fit enough to lead, so who am I to question his state of health," said Tsvangirai, who entered a government of national unity with Mugabe in 2009.

"Of course he is of an advanced age, but he has stated publicly that he is fit, so we will go by his assessment of his own health," Tsvangirai said on the sidelines of a conference to encourage investment in Zimbabwe.

At a birthday rally on Wednesday Mugabe, who has been in power since 1980, reportedly described himself as "fit as a fiddle".

Tsvangirai told the media that the inclusive government had been a frustrating experience that nobody could brush aside, but it had lasted.

"There were some sceptics who thought this was not going to last for six months, and we are three years. The government of national unity is holding. The government of national unity is discharging its mandate."

The former trade union and opposition leader, and organiser of stayaways and marches to oppose Mugabe's rule, denied he had "gone soft", believing instead there was a "phase for everything".

"How can I as prime minister throw stones when I have to negotiate with Mugabe? We are in a new phase and I hoped that people would understand me from that perspective."

Zimbabwe is in the process of writing a new constitution ahead of an election.