A little more than a year ago, Aisha Ibrahim was over the moon as she took her marriage vows with her childhood sweetheart Abdulai, in the town of Baga, in Borno state, northeastern Nigeria. That happiness was short-lived though; she is now in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Kuchigoro, Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
<blockquote>“It was just God that helped me. We had to flee for our lives. We went through Cameroon before we ended up here. I had no idea where my brothers and sisters were until we got here. I still have not seen my mother or my husband since that day,” says Ibrahim.</blockquote>
She is one of millions who have been displaced due to the violence unleashed by Islamic militant group Boko Haram on communities in Borno State, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
This year alone, more than 1,500 have died in the Boko Haram conflict, according to Amnesty International. For Ibrahim, the most difficult part is the nightmares.
<blockquote>“I still remember everything like it was yesterday. So many people lost their lives when they attacked. I saw friends get shot; I pray I will see my husband again. We have to live here now because we have no homes to go back to,” she says.</blockquote>
The conflict is also difficult for those that take in the refugees.
“We had to provide an answer quickly for the thousands of people who all of a sudden appeared in Abuja. This was not something we prepared for, the government had to respond very quickly to accommodate all these people,” says Ishaya Chonoko, Zonal Co-ordinator at the Abuja office of National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA).
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2016/12/01/good-news-little-progress/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Good News But Little Progress</a>
Life in the IDP camp is challenging. Ibrahim sells the food she receives through donations from a local church. Other women in the camp are not so lucky.
<blockquote>“Most of the girls here have to sleep with men in order to make ends meet. It is terrible but what can you do when everything has been taken away from you?” says Ibrahim.</blockquote>
The NEMA North East Zonal Office is responsible for feeding an estimated 1.6 million people in the resettlement camps across Borno. Combating malnutrition and a lack of food is a daily battle in these camps, says Chonoko.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2015/07/01/bloody-market-fear/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Bloody Market Of Fear</a>
At the IDP camp at the Saint Theresa’s Cathedral in Yola, the capital city of Adamawa state, Nigeria, about 1,500 people, mainly women and children, are cramped into a compound and living in a large hall which was previously a church building.
<blockquote>“Most of the men have died fighting to defend the communities. I lost two of my sons and my husband along with most of the other women here,” says Amina, one of the mothers at the camp.</blockquote>
She lives with her 10-year-old son who is extremely emaciated.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/focus/2015/03/01/people-hell-lurks-around-corner/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The People For Whom Hell Lurks Around The Corner</a>
In 2016, the United Nations International Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 75,000 children would die if they did not receive aid in these camps. Another 400,000 children were at risk of severe acute malnutrition in the areas worst hit by Boko Haram.
“We decided to take control of feeding 100% of IDPs to buttress the efforts of both the government and other humanitarian agencies. There are several challenges in feeding over two million people, most of which relate to scarcity of resources and an efficient distribution system and attempts to solve the food crisis requires a group effort,” says Mallam Mohammed Kanar, the North-East Coordinator of NEMA.
When elected, President Muhammadu Buhari promised to crush Boko Haram. Years later, despite many military raids and isolated victories, the militant group is still terrorizing those in the North east of the Nigeria. To add insult to injury, last year, Nigeria’s air force killed at least 52 people and injured another 120 in an air strike on an IDP camp. It mistook the camp for a Boko Haram base.
Although the militant’s stronghold has been dislodged, the lingering chaos and damage of the past years are still felt in the North East.
Life in the camp is a harrowing experience. For now, Ibrahim and Amina can do nothing but hope it will end soon.
<a href="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/2017/06/08/nigeria-boko-haram-attack-maiduguri-ahead-vps-visit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Boko Haram attack in Maiduguri ahead of VP’s visit</a>

The Pain Of The Women And Children Who Have Lost Everything

Maryam Ali Maiyanga is happy to be reunited with her family. It was a tearful reunion in October 2016. She was among the 276 girls that Boko Haram militants abducted from a government school in Chibok in northeastern Borno State, Nigeria, in April 2014, sparking a worldwide plea for their rescue and the social media movement and Twitter campaign #BringBackOurGirls.
Things have significantly changed for Maiyanga since that unfortunate night. As she holds her 10-month-old son, it is apparent that life will never be the same again for her.
“I am happy to be alive and reunited with my family. For the families of my sisters still missing, don’t lose hope, they will also be found,” says Maiyanga via a translator over the phone in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Her discovery comes after 21 of the abducted girls were freed following negotiations brokered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the government of Switzerland.
Boko Haram, colloquially translated to “Western education is forbidden”, has claimed over 15,000 people and displaced some two million over the past seven years as part of its bid to establish an Islamic state in the north, according to Reuters. Its eradication was one of the main cornerstones of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s election campaign in 2015.
“This is positive news for our missing girls but the battle is far from over. The world should not rest until this injustice is laid to rest and all our girls have been returned to their families,” says Sekina Abdulai, founder of the Chibok Community in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
The release of the 21 girls although positive, is a bitter reminder of the fate of the other missing girls, some of whom are presumed dead, according to Abdulai.
Speaking at a press conference in Abuja, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, disclosed to reporters that the release of the girls was due to the persistence to close this negative chapter in the nation’s history.
“The circumstances behind the release of the girls are still unclear but it is believed that some large sums of money was exchanged as well as the release of some Boko Haram fighters,” says a source in the Office of the National Security Advisor (ONSA).
Fatima Alhassan’s daughter, Aisha, is still missing. When she heard about the release of the 21 girls, she took a bus from her hometown in the northeast to Abuja in the hopes of finding her in the group.
“A friend of mine told me some girls had been released and even though they did not call me, I decided to come and see if my daughter was here. Unfortunately, she was not but I am hopeful that like these girls she will return to me,” says Alhassan.
That reunion might be more imminent than she thinks.
“We are currently in talks with members of the militant group who want to negotiate the release of the girls. They say they are ready to talk if the government is willing to negotiate and it is our intention to do whatever we can to get these girls back,” says Garba Shehu, official spokesperson to President Buhari.
According to Shehu, 83 more girls are expected to be released in the coming months if negotiations with the militants remain positive.
For now, the government is unwilling to disclose what the militants want in exchange although sources close to the government believe there is a financial incentive on the table.
The focus now is the rehabilitation of the released girls. That task falls on the shoulders of Eleanor Nwadinobi, the women and girls’ manager of the Nigeria Stability and Recognition Programme.
“These girls have suffered a terrible ordeal and our rehabilitation efforts need to take a focused individual treatment approach. We have to provide trauma-counseling sessions, health-screening tests as well as ensuring that these girls have the best tools to successfully reintegrate back into society,” says Nwadinobi.
A source close to the current negotiations of the 83 girls disclosed on condition of anonymity that “given the current plight of the Nigerian economy, it is in the government’s interest to at least deliver on President Buhari’s bold claims of eradicating Boko Haram which his whole campaign was built on. To this effect, they will pay whatever amount and negotiate with the terrorists to get this type of good PR”.
According to Reuters, the 83 girls were with the faction of Boko Haram under the control of figurehead Abubakar Shekau who has split from Boko Haram after disregarding new instructions from Iraq and Syria naming Abu Musab al-Barnawi as its new leader for West Africa.
“This infighting might be the best opportunity for these poor girls who have already lost two years. If Shekau remains defiant, he risks being alienated from the group and therefore he needs more allies. I would imagine negotiations will include returning some of his loyal fighters back to him to help him regain his command,” says Frank Adu, a security consultant working in Abuja.
No matter what the reasons are for this apparent divide, the return of the 21 girls is symbolic of hope and an end to the torment and pain endured by their families. For those still missing, the battle lingers on. For now, hope is the only thing they can hold on to.

NIGERIA-UNREST-ISLAMISTS-CHIBOK

The Chibok 21

The dearth of peace in one corner of a nation usually brings economic disequilibrium and global scorn to the entire country. In Nigeria’s case, its lingering crises with the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram, is an investors’ nightmare, an additional dilemma for a nation struggling to climb out of an economic recession.
Boko Haram has reportedly killed over 10,000 Nigerians since 2009, snatched at least 20,000 people (mostly young women and children) from their homes, recruited hundreds of men into its fold and dislocated over 2 million people in the country’s north east.
The sect’s abduction of 276 girls from their Chibok town boarding school on April 14, 2014, however, opened a horrid chapter in the annals of Africa’s most populated nation. Initial reactions to the incident ranged from disbelief, official denial and disgust.
The opening lines of this sad chapter began with many questions: Are certain sacred cows responsible for the heist? Why is the Boko Haram menace predominantly a northern Nigeria phenomenon? Who are the silent sponsors of the militants? Is it a quasi-political movement or are they just a ragtag army of delinquent rogues and rebels? Who is leveraging the threat for economic and political gains?
Some of these questions still remain unanswered.
<div id="attachment_5506" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5506" class="size-medium wp-image-5506" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-614598810-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" />Some of the 21 Chibok school girls release gathered during a meeting with the Nigeria Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo in Abuja, Nigeria 13 October 2016 (Photo by next24online/NurPhoto via Getty Images)</div>
Protest marches in many capitals fueled by the #BringBackOurGirls campaign may have focused global attention on the plight of the kidnapped Chibok girls and their parents. They, however, have not galvanized freedom for the girls. Well over 900 days after the Chibok incident, most of the girls are still missing.
Treated as human loot and bargaining chips by Boko Haram, there is palpable fear many of the girls have either been sold as slaves, married off to Boko Haram chieftains and supporters across West and Central Africa, or lost their lives in the wilderness of the Sambisa Forest bordering Cameroon and the Lake Chad region. Boko Haram has become a nasty national migraine, compounding government’s laundry list of unfinished business.
On that dreadful night, some of the girls managed to escape within hours of their kidnapping, jumping off lorries and running into the bush. In total, records show that the insurgents made away with 219 girls.
In October, after several reported sightings of the teenage girls around Sambisa forests by locals, 21 of the remaining students in captivity were freed. The Nigerian authorities attributed their release to successful negotiations brokered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Swiss officials acting as intermediaries with Boko Haram.
For Nigerians and parents of the girls, this is good news but minor progress. Security experts say the multi-national effort to free the girls from captivity may gain momentum with this minuscule result. Was this a swap deal? Possibly. But no one is talking. The Abuja rumor mill has it that four or five Boko Haram commanders in government custody were freed as part of a swap. Government officials deny that any such “political transaction” took place. But Nigerians do not believe their government on this matter. Information Minister Lai Mohammed says the release of the 21 girls is “the first step” towards the liberation of all the remaining girls.
Recent military offensive against Boko Haram has achieved some success. In July 2015, the regional force tasked with obliterating the insurgents was boosted with 8,700 troops from Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Up until early 2016, Boko Haram was practically the de facto government controlling huge swathes of the northern Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states. Recently recovered territory across these states is now home to about 2.4 million internally displaced people (IDPs. Borno State alone has 13 official IDP camps, each with at least 10,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has reported incidences of camp leaders, vigilante groups, policemen and soldiers raping and sexually exploiting women and girls in the camps.
“It is bad enough that these women and girls are not getting much-needed support for the horrific trauma they suffered at the hands of Boko Haram,” said Mausi Segun, senior Nigeria researcher at HRW. “It is disgraceful and outrageous that people who should protect these women and girls are attacking and abusing them.”
President Muhammadu Buhari acknowledges the smoldering humanitarian issues, reportedly saying his government was taking the ‘IDP headache’ seriously. “About 60 percent of the children in the camps don’t know their parents, or where they come from,” he says.
Receiving the 21 girls, and their parents, at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, he promised to rehabilitate them, urging them to return to the normalcy of their respective communities. Government will provide comprehensive medical, nutritional and psychological care and support, and also “assume responsibility for their personal, educational and professional goals and ambitions in life.”
“These dear daughters of ours have seen the worst that the world has to offer. It is now time for them to experience the best that the world can do for them. The government and all Nigerians must encourage them to achieve their desired ambitions,” the president said.
The same presidential attention, medical and academic scholarships and special care obviously await the other 197 girls when and if they ever come out of captivity.
In a meeting with Peter Maurer, President of the ICRC, a few days after the release of the 21 girls, Buhari welcomed the support of the G7 group of nations in the rebuilding of the decrepit infrastructure of northern Nigeria. He told Maurer he would only continue negotiations with Boko Haram if “they agree to involve international agencies like the Red Cross.”
Maurer informed the Nigerian leader the ICRC operation in northern Nigeria and the Lake Chad region is the second largest in the world, after Syria.
Two weeks after the release of the ‘Chibok 21’, the Nigerian Senate passed a bill to establish the North-East Development Commission. It will rebuild the troubled and impoverished region. For the girls taken by Boko Haram, it might be too little, too late.

Good News  But Little Progress

Yola and Jimeta are the twin metros that form the state capital of northeastern Nigeria’s Adamawa State. They are tense places of high temperatures, military checkpoints and curfew.
It was late at night on June 4 when shoppers were milling around a small market opposite the Jimeta Modern Market. It was just after 7:30PM, and the walled, open-air market was closing for the day.  Suddenly, a fight broke out. When customers and traders drew nearer to take a look, two bombs went off killing 37 people. The fight was staged by a suicide bomber.
“There were body parts lying all over the stalls, and parts of the street,” says Shareef Al Hasan, a reporter with TV Gotel who arrived minutes after the blast.
For many of the survivors, the unthinkable had happened; Boko Haram had struck at the heart of the Adamawa State capital.
The area has been relatively peaceful for more than a year, and seen thousands of refugees from Mubi, Madagali, Michika swell homes and camps. Some families sheltered up to 100 relatives, friends and strangers in their homes. They were fed by the people of Yola and Jimeta. The total number of displaced in Yola alone is estimated at 15,000.
In 2011 and 2012, attacks by Boko Haram in the town were common with gunmen shooting civilians from the back of motorcycles. The state government has since banned the okada, a two-wheeled transport popular in Nigeria.
Scores of people came to gawk at the scene, others fled. By 8PM, news of the bomb blast spread and panic gripped the city.
By the next morning, the area was cordoned off. I arrived at around 8:30AM to see for myself the destruction of the night before. The bodies were gone and the survivors taken to hospitals where they filled the wards. The dismembered head of the suicide bomber lay on the asphalt in a cardboard box.
The traditional leader, Barkindo Aliyu Mustapha, was among the first on the scene. He looked distressed, telling people to keep praying for peace and to be security conscious. The next to arrive was the commissioner of police in Adamawa State, Gabriel Adaji, with a call for information.
“Even if your suspicions are later proved baseless, we will thoroughly investigate every complaint,” he says.
The newly-elected governor, Jibrilla Bindo, announced a security cluster meeting with state security chiefs.
The incident comes at a time when pressure is mounting on President Muhammadu Buhari to fulfill a campaign promise of ridding Nigeria of insurgency. He announced the relocation of Nigeria’s military command center to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State.
The move to bring troops closerwas applauded by Nigerians. For the residents of Yola and Jimeta, it cannot come soon enough.

The Bloody Market  Of Fear

Aliko Dangote lives as you might expect, given he’s the richest person in Africa and resides in the same country being bullied by the insidious Boko Haram terrorist group, which finds something noble in kidnapping village girls. Located on Victoria Island, a wealthy Lagos enclave that has a moat in the form of a lagoon and the far eastern shores of the Atlantic Ocean, his mansion comes with all the trimmings: massive black gate, bulletproof windows, Big Brother video surveillance, guards and a secret entryway.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3526" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/cut-218-sugar_W9V1416-290x300.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="300" />
After I enter, a butler motions to a sitting room overlooking a patio and a blue-tiled pool. The three-story fortress is shielded from the 90-degree heat by powerful air-conditioners (themselves presumably shielded from Nigeria’s notoriously unreliable electric grid by diesel generators). Dangote, round-faced with a trimmed graying moustache, appears from upstairs dressed in khakis and a casual blue button-down. The 57-year-old can seem miscast in the role of industrial titan, often speaking so softly that he mumbles.
As breakfast arrives by the platterful, including plantains, smoked chicken in red sauce, diced sweet potatoes, whitefish and sausage, he sticks to coy conversation. Whether about his country’s fraught presidential election (“It’s going to be tough for both parties”) or his cement company’s long-delayed overseas listing (“Maybe next year”), he has little to say. On one subject, though, he is always articulate. “Nigeria is one of the best kept secrets,” Dangote says. “A lot of foreigners are not investing because they’re waiting for the right time. There is no right time.”
Nigeria does provide fertile opportunity for vast wealth. As evidence, look no further than Dangote’s No. 67 rank on the World’s Billionaires List and his $14.7 billion fortune – mostly from three majority stakes in publicly traded cement, sugar and four companies. And he doesn’t arrive here alone. In another dramatic sign of his country’s emergence, Nigeria has overtaken South Africa on FORBES’ 50 Richest in Africa ranking. Thirteen Nigerians earned spots in 2014, including a trio of new billionaires.
Dangote and these other Nigerians power Africa’s largest economy. The drop in crude prices prompted the oil rich country’s stock index to plunge 40% last year, taking Dangote’s net worth down in lockstep – no surprise, since his companies account for almost a third of the nation’s benchmark index (his $10.3 billion drop in net worth was the world’s largest last year). But the underlying fundamentals are strong. From 2010 to 2013, Nigerian GDP expanded by an average of 5% a year. (It now totals some $500 billion, or a third larger than South Africa.) Even with the oil glut, forecasters believe this year’s growth will top 5%. In fact, according to a widely cited Citigroup report, economists expect Nigeria to have among the fastest average annual GDP growth in the world between 2010 and 2050.
There are other reasons for international interest as well. In the shadow of rising Islamic militancy, which has destabilized the Middle East and now threatens to do the same to parts of Africa, President Obama recently issued an executive order tasking US business executives with strengthening trade ties to sub-Saharan Africa (the council includes heavy hitters from Wal-Mart, G.E. and McKinsey).
Prior to that, in May 2014, he dispatched Penny Pritzker to Nigeria, the first visit by a Commerce Secretary in two decades. America’s foreign direct investment in Nigeria reached a continent-leading $8.2 billion in 2012, the last year for which statistics are available. Overall US-Nigerian trade was $9.8 billion last year. Nigeria sells far less oil to America these days – it exported $2 billion of the black stuff last year as the US’ tenth-largest supplier – so most of that trade comes through other goods and services.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3524" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/cut-214-oil_W9V1072-300x296.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="296" />
Keeping Nigeria successful is critical. The country is already Africa’s most populous, with more than 170 million people, and that figure will swell to 210 million by 2020. By 2050, Nigeria is forecast to overtake the United States (440 million to 400 million). Yet a majority of the people subsist on less than $1.25 a day. About half are illiterate; most are very young (the country’s median age is 18.3). And 50% of rural Nigeria lacks access to clean drinking water. It’s hard to imagine the government coming to grips with it all, even if oil prices recover. Nigeria consistently ranks in the bottom quarter of the most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International, and is proving a feckless pursuer of the Boko Haram thugs terrorizing the northeast.
All of which makes Dangote – well connected, wildly wealthy and ready to do business – an increasingly important player on the world stage. “Anyone doing business in Africa,” says David Rubenstein, the cofounder of the Carlyle Group and a fellow billionaire, “knows Dangote.”
The roots of Dangote’s rise lie 150 miles south of the Sahara in his hometown of Kano, Nigeria’s second largest city. A dusty metropolis, Kano has been a trade center and commercial hub since its establishment in the 10th century, thanks to its strategic location on the edge of the vast desert. Egyptian perfumes, incense, inks and mirrors dominated at first, then leather goods. The camel caravans became lucrative enough to fight over; wars broke out with neighboring kingdoms. When the British arrived in the late 1800s, Kano was West Africa’s most important business center.
Under British rule, Sanusi Dantata, Dangote’s grandfather, grew rich trading commodities like grain oats and rice, and ranked as one of Kano’s wealthiest citizens. Dantata insisted on personally raising his grandson – not an unusual arrangement in northern Nigerian culture – and instilled a businessman’s mind-set in Dangote at a young age. At the age of eight, he turned allowance into startup capital. “I would use it to buy sweets, and I would give them to some people to sell, and they would bring me the profit,” Dangote says. “When you are raised by an entrepreneurial parent or grandparent you pick that aspiration. It makes you be much more aggressive – to think anything is possible.”
The country was growing up, too. Post-colonial instability, including countless coups and a civil war in the 1960s, was eclipsed by an oil boom in the 1970s. During that decade, the economy grew 18% annually, with many of the spoils going to well-connected elites. Despite the explosion of revenue, the World Bank still considered Nigeria – along with countries such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Chad and Mali – as “low income,” a candidate for international aid.
Dangote, a Muslim, attended Al-Azhar University in Cairo and studied business. After graduation, he asked his grandfather for permission to move to Lagos. A $500,000 loan from his uncle set up 21-year-old Dangote as a trader of rice, sugar and cement. He was well capitalized and a naturally talented trader. He imported sugar from Brazil and rice from Thailand and sold them locally at a huge mark-up. At his height, he says, he was pocketing $10,000 in profit a day. “Things were quite good,” he says. “It allowed us to create an awful lot of cash.”
He also worked the politicians. According to a State Department cable unearthed by WikiLeaks, Dangote “held exclusive import rights in sugar, cement, and rice, using such advantages to do volume business and undercut competitors.” Dangote flatly denies this.
Dangote’s success landed him firmly on America’s radar. A 1994 diplomatic cable singled him out as a businessman to know in Nigeria and drew attention to his clan’s homes in Kano, Lagos, London and Atlanta. The State Department report also highlighted the annual family vacation to the States.
A 1995 trip to Brazil convinced him to shift from trading to manufacturing. Why continue to play middleman when he could make the stuff in Nigeria instead and pocket even more profit? His resolve was strengthened in 1999, when Nigeria held its first democratic presidential election in six years, choosing a bespectacled former military ruler and chicken farmer named Olusegun Obasanjo, whom Dangote had known since 1981. As a key part of his platform, Obasanjo had pledged to protect and promote domestic industry.
That’s all Dangote needed to hear. Dangote Sugar started in 2000 and quickly expanded the annual production capacity of its refinery at Lagos’ Apapa Port to 1.44 million tons, enough to satisfy 90% of national demand. By the time Dangote Sugar debuted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in 2007, sales had quadrupled to $450 million. The four firms, which began in 1999 and also produces pasta and noodles, followed a similar trajectory. It began with a single mill, tripled revenue to $270 million, increased capacity eightfold to 1.5 million tons – then joined Dangote Sugar on the NSE in 2008, the same year Dangote became the first Nigerian on FORBES’  World’s Billionaires list, at No. 334. In 2005, Dangote secured a $480 million loan led by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation – Nigerian banks didn’t have the ability, or the stomach, to put up the cash alone – and agreed to plunk down $320 million of his own money to build a cement factory. Dangote Cement listed on the NSE in 2010 as a $1.3 billion-in-sales company. The three companies today do a combined $3 billion in revenue; while Dangote Flour operates at a loss and Dangote Sugar’s net margin falls in line with Brazilian peer Cosan, the cement company is wildly profitable, with a margin of 52% – about double that of close competitor LaFarge Africa.
Obasanjo, re-elected in 2003, worked overtime to ensure that any Dangote challenger who entered the market did so with a significant handicap. At the time Dangote’s sugar and four companies went public, raw sugar was taxed 12 times less than refined sugar, wheat six times less than flour. Dangote Cement prospered from restrictive licenses. The companies retain a vice-like grip on their industries today, controlling at least half of the cement and sugar markets and about 25% of four.
“When Obasanjo took over, he took guys with him,” says a Nigerian belonging to the country’s overlapping circle of business and political elites. “He gave them a leg up.”
Last August, as the Islamic State overran northern Iraq and Boko Haram was declaring its own caliphate in Nigeria, the White House held a US-Africa trade summit in Washington, DC. A highlight was the announcement of a $5 billion fund backed by Wall Street billionaire Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group – and Dangote. They plan to invest in infrastructure companies throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
“We can do well as investors, and the countries will do well,” Schwarzman says. “We’re aware that operating in Africa isn’t as easy as many other places. You have to have a very strong local partner, and we were lucky enough to find Aliko. He’s done a remarkable job.”
Rubenstein, of the Carlyle Group, sought out Dangote as well when raising money for his firm’s first sub-Sahara-focused fund in 2012. Dangote ultimately invested in the $700 million fund.
“His name carries a great deal of weight,” Rubenstein says. “If you say he’s an investor with you that carries a lot of weight. He’s helped us.”
The Carlyle fund has so far invested in five companies, including a $147 million deal last November for Nigeria-based Diamond Bank, a retail lender.
It’s all part of Dangote’s fast-rising international profile. He’s a Davos regular, and appeared with Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s current president, on a panel about investment potential in Africa at the 2014 World Economic Forum. Even four years ago, he was there making a familiar pitch: “Don’t give any more aid to Africa,” he said. Invest with local partners instead. “You will make money, and we’ll make money, and it’s better for everyone.”
But it is not in Dangote’s nature to rely on others to prosper. Mostly, he relies on himself.
He trusts few others with real power at his companies, often making decisions with little more than gut feeling, says a former top executive.
“Ultimately all the decisions sit with the boss, Dangote, rather than the senior management,” the executive says.
Self-reliance and a supremely healthy ego blend seamlessly into a cult of personality at Dangote’s firms. Portraits of him hang on the walls. The average Dangote employee seems to virtually worship him.
“I’m going to be a big man, I’m going to be the next Dangote,” a lab technician at the one of the cement plants says over and over again until his sentiment is recorded on paper. A lieutenant warns that Dangote will walk out of a meeting if it starts even a minute late.
But Dangote is hardly the hermetic workaholic (“I don’t think I’ll ever retire”) he puts on. “He attends more parties than anyone I know,” says Jim Ovia, a banker and close friend. One Sunday last month found Dangote on his yacht – christened Mariya after his mother – and then flying to Geneva on Monday to see his grandchildren. Later that week, he met first with the French general counsel and then with Davido, Nigeria’s biggest pop star.
Another recent social call: breakfast with former president Obasanjo, then onto Abuja to meet the current president. Dangote has good reason to keep up with Jonathan, whose government still enforces Obasanjo-era high tariffs on imports that compete with Dangote’s key products. Indeed, the State Department has come to see Dangote as completely inseparable from the Nigerian government.
“But without him a lot of people wouldn’t have jobs,” says a former US diplomat in Africa. “And Nigeria would be weaker.”
Jonathan’s reign may soon end: He faces a surprisingly strong challenger in this March’s presidential election, and Boko Haram’s unchecked bloodshed is at least partly to blame. The insurgents have killed an estimated 20,000 people, displaced more than a million and now control some 20,000 square miles within Nigeria. Jonathan’s opponent – a retired army general – is seen by his supporters as the best man to finally defeat the terrorists. For Dangote, the upheaval has meant lower demand for his cement (“There are places in the north where no one is thinking of building a home,” one Dangote executive says), and he cut cement prices twice last year, most recently by 14% in November. But whether it’s Jonathan or someone else ruling Nigeria, observers find it difficult to believe that anyone would shut him out of the presidential palace. He’s simply too important to the economy.
Oil represents another big play. He is busy building a refinery some 40 minutes by car outside central Lagos. He explains with uncharacteristic glee that the recent drop in prices will actually make construction easier. His suppliers will be desperate… and easy pickings. “We will be the only ones around,” he says. “We will carry a big knife and cut them on prices.”
The refinery, Dangote says, can be profitable even at $50 to $70 a barrel. Raw crude for the refinery will come from multiple suppliers. If all goes according to plan, it’ll produce 650,000 barrels a day – a variety of gas, diesel and jet fuel. Dangote would basically walk away with a monopoly on refined oil in the country: The four Nigerian National Petroleum refineries are viewed as corrupt to the point of non-functioning.
To make it happen, Dangote plans to invest some $10 billion to $11 billion in the project and an adjacent petrochemical plant, with at least $6.75 billion in debt financing. Dangote threw a big celebration the day he signed the loan terms at the Hilton in Abuja. Guests included state governors, bank executives and, naturally, the president.
Terraforming is almost complete on the refinery’s 10-square-mile site – a jungle swamp now turned into a sandy expanse. A drive-through reveals a few stick huts, the last remnants of native villages that were there before Dangote arrived. Dangote executives promise the government has compensated the displaced natives well. As a stream of black Dangote trucks pass – one with a full bed of armed guards – a woman scurries inside a hut and shoots back a dark look.
The convoy pulls to a halt on a palm-tree-lined beach, a tropical paradise more suited to multimillion-dollar condos than refining petrochemicals. It’s a goner, though, the future home of another Dangote empire.
“The refinery will start in 2018 if we finish on time,” Dangote says, optimistic as always. “By that time all the dead bodies will have been removed from the street. All the trouble will be gone.”

The Gatekeeper  To Growth

It is 16 years since Nigeria drew back from the abyss in the former colonial town of Kaduna. In February 1999, 5,000 Christians took to the streets in an anti-Sharia march to protest the introduction of the strict Islamic penal code. Their contention was that Nigeria’s constitution did not allow federation, or state, to adopt any religion.
The march sparked a deadly confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Three days of street fighting left at least 2,000 dead. President Olusegun Obasanjo dispatched troops as conflict threatened to spread. He managed to head off more fighting, but the rumpus around Sharia law did not go away.
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Obasanjo tried to persuade northern governors to hold off on Sharia law; days before, Kano in the north west, signed a Sharia bill. Weeks later, Zamfara State amputated the right hand of Buba Jangebe after a Sharia court convicted him of stealing a cow. Four northern states: Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Kano have adopted Sharia law since 1999 and Obasanjo’s negotiations.
Many northern politicians felt marginalized by the new republic under Obasanjo. They complained of a southern and Christian bias and latched onto the rigors of Sharia law to boost waning support.
Fast forward to 2015, as the six-year Boko Haram insurgency rages. Boko Haram has condemned northern governors who have adopted Sharia law. The militants believe the brand of Sharia law practiced in the country is not true Islam and have vowed to wage war until the entire country falls under their brand of Sharia. In this struggle, Boko Haram has captured around 20 small towns along Nigeria’s border with Chad and Cameroon. Militants have also taken larger towns like Mubi in the north eastern state of Adamawa.
Boko Haram renamed Mubi ‘Madinatul Islam’ or the City of Islam. Tens of thousands fled as the invaders hoisted their flag in the deserted emir’s palace and warned that ‘true’ Sharia law was now in force. A market thief was convicted by a Sharia court and his hand amputated to make the point.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha Ibrahim recalls the day Boko Haram rolled into town in with armored cars, trucks and motorcycles. She was still in school when the town reverberated to the sound of gunfire. She ran home to find her parents had fled, leaving her grandmother behind. In the fraught weeks that followed, she says, her best friend, Umma, was forced into marriage with one of the militants. She feared the same fate and fled to Yola in the hope of finding her parents and four siblings. Her father has not been found. She is now back in Mubi after the Nigerian army took back the second-largest commercial center in Adamawa State, after Yola.
Mubi is also the largest cattle trading center in Nigeria. The cattle rearing northerners use the Mubi cattle market as an important trading post to sell to traders from as far as Lagos.
These days the southern businessmen fear the trip north and the insurgency appears to be killing the meat trade, which has yet to recover from a recent truck drivers’ strike.
On the other side of the city, Pastor Titi Adewumi, leader of one of the many churches that dot the landscape of the Adamawa State capital, says residents are depressed by all the security checks. All movement between 12AM and 5AM is prohibited as part of a state of emergency. Interestingly, worshippers are searched before they enter their local mosque or church. But while Yola residents complain, they know things could be worse; Boko Haram, at the time of writing, were engaged in a fight to the death for the control of the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, where a total ban on all movement has been imposed.
In Mubi, there is hope. Retired Colonel, Taboyi Elam Dong, says the recapture of Mubi shows that the Nigerian military is winning the war against Boko Haram. Other towns recaptured include Gwoza in Borno State and Potiskum in Yobe State.
Most people here feel the government is not doing enough as hell lurks around the corner.

The People For Whom  Hell Lurks  Around The Corner

Boko Haram’s latest victim may have been Nigeria’s national elections.
Citing security concerns as reason for postponing the nation’s February general elections by six weeks, the Nigerian authorities have once again succumbed to the bogey of insurgency and insecurity bedeviling Africa’s largest and most populous economy.
The elections will now be held between March 28 and April 11 this year. National Security Adviser, Sambo Mohammed Dasuki, says the government will flush out the terrorists in six weeks. It was a shaky excuse. Nigerians are watching; waiting to see what security magic government will weave in six weeks.
The postponement has near and far reaching implications for the nation and the rest of Africa.
Professor Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had previously maintained the commission’s readiness to conduct free and fair polls. Now INEC’s independence and neutrality is being questioned. According to media reports, government may even be shopping for a new, more compliant chairman for the commission.
If this happens, it will translate to political chicanery and serious credibility worries for INEC and the incumbent administration, which funds the commission. The fear that even the new election dates may not be sacrosanct is palpable. Constitutionally, federal and state-wide swearing-in of elected officials must be held on May 29. Observers have called this unfolding scenario a looming coup against democracy in Nigeria.
A prolonged political crisis in Nigeria would further harm efforts at national harmony and stall trade and investment in West Africa, already hit by the Ebola crisis, insurgencies in northern Nigeria and Mali, a democratic interregnum in Burkina Faso, poor external trade balances, fiscal deficits, weakening currencies and mass unemployment.
For most of 2014, Africa’s global image was defined by the Ebola epidemic, despite the scourge being confined to a few countries in West Africa.
Ignoring Africa’s rising middle class, the epidemic revealed the specter of a failing continent,  with poor sanitation, poor health budgets, poor health education, poor medical inventories, poor infrastructure, an entrenched culture of graft and official disregard for society’s commonwealth.
Nigeria’s democratic debacle will therefore be an ignoble chapter in the history of Africa.
For the last 30 months or so, the rest of the world struggled to empathize with Nigeria over its inability to curb the despicable rein of the Islamist fundamentalist group. Boko Haram has made the Sahel forest region around the Lake Chad basin its homestead, launching sporadic attacks into northern Nigerian cities and towns at will; making a mockery of Nigeria’s national security and defense systems. Huge sections of north eastern Nigeria have thus been rendered comatose and ungovernable.
A regional diplomatic initiative involving the governments of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria failed to plug the onslaught. Indeed the group has become bolder. Last month, Boko Haram threatened to ‘deal with and defeat’ an African Union anti-Boko Haram special force. The group has unleashed more mayhem on northern Nigerian towns even after it kidnapped over 200 teenage girls from their Chibok village school in April 2014.
The political season began last autumn and soon, it would seem that the world had moved on from the sad case of the Chibok girls and the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. The conscience of the nation was on the chopping block. Also on the chopping block were investor sentiment and market forces. Agriculture and the automobile industry welcomed new investments in 2014; in the same period, the Nigerian Stock Exchange saw its market cap decline by $8.5 billion, a 13% drop.
Slumping oil prices forced the finance ministry to lower its economic projections for 2015. This year’s national budget was consequently slashed by $3 billion. Nigeria has never saved for the rainy day, largely due to politicians who earn stupendous salaries and allowances and insist on appropriating proceeds from the reserve Excess Crude Account (ECA). Nigeria’s four petroleum refineries operated at less than 50% of their installed capacity between 1985 and 1999 and have remained dormant since then. Parochial politics and economic perfidy has ensured that no new refineries were built in over 30 years.
If business is a natural extension of politics, then it is easy to see why Nigeria Inc. will continue to underperform. The consistent heating of the polity and absence of truth in practically all spheres of Nigerian life is a key hindrance to progress. The system resists reforms. Governance is driven by regional and religious sentiments. The current political class offers little hope. With little or no ideological difference between political parties, defections across party lines is the order of the day. It would therefore seem that principles have no place in Nigerian politics.
With a raft of political parties, presidential and governorship candidates vying for office, this will be the country’s most hotly contested and most expensive elections ever – complete with rented crowds, political hubris and multi-million-dollar media blitz. Nigeria’s cash-and-carry political culture was fully at work.
The late Chinua Achebe once quipped that the problem with Nigeria was Nigeria. The master storyteller would be turning in his grave now, as his beloved nation treks further away from established democratic ethos.
The protracted survival of Boko Haram is a national embarrassment and a scandalous testimonial for leadership in Nigeria. It reflects the failure of the social contract between government and the governed. And as the world prepares to replace the Millennium Development Goals with a new set of goals and priorities this year, Nigerians will also be desperately seeking to replace the mirage of hope with tangible political and economic achievement.

A Coup Against Democracy?

It is 16 years since Nigeria drew back from the abyss in the former colonial town of Kaduna. In February 1999, 5,000 Christians took to the streets in an anti-Sharia march to protest the introduction of the strict Islamic penal code. Their contention was that Nigeria’s constitution did not allow federation, or state, to adopt any religion.
The march sparked a deadly confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Three days of street fighting left at least 2,000 dead. President Olusegun Obasanjo dispatched troops to restore order as conflict threatened to spread. He managed to head off conflict, but the rumpus around Sharia law did not go away.
Obasanjo tried to persuade northern governors to hold off on Sharia law; days before, Kano in the north west, signed a Sharia bill. Weeks later, Zamfara State amputated the right hand of Buba Jangebe after a Sharia court convicted him of stealing a cow. Four northern states: Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Kano have adopted Sharia law since 1999.
Many northern politicians felt marginalized by the new republic under Obasanjo. They complained of a southern and Christian bias and latched onto the rigors of Sharia law to boost waning support. It was seen by the rest of the country as a political compromise.
Fast forward to 2015, as the six-year Boko Haram insurgency continues to rage. Boko Haram has condemned northern governors who have adopted Sharia law. The militants believe the brand of Sharia law practiced in the country is not true Islam and have vowed to wage war until the entire country falls under their brand of Sharia. In this struggle, Boko Haram has captured around 20 small towns along Nigeria’s border with Chad and Cameroon. Militants have also taken larger towns like Mubi in the north eastern state of Adamawa.
Boko Haram renamed Mubi ‘Madinatul Islam’ or the City of Islam. Tens of thousands fled as the invaders hoisted their flag in the deserted emir’s palace and warned that ‘true’ Sharia law was now in force. A market thief was convicted by a Sharia court and his hand amputated to make the point.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha Ibrahim recalls the day Boko Haram rolled into town in with armored cars, trucks and motorcycles. She was still in school when the town was rocked by the sound of gunfire. She ran home to find her parents had fled, leaving her grandmother behind. In the fraught weeks that followed, she says, her best friend, Umma, was forced into a marriage with one of the militants. She feared the same fate and fled to Yola in the hope of finding her parents and four siblings. Her father has not been found, his whereabouts unknown. She is now back in Mubi after the Nigerian army took back the second-largest commercial center in Adamawa State after Yola.
Mubi is also the largest cattle trading center in Nigeria. The cattle rearing northerners use the Mubi cattle market as an important trade post to sell livestock to traders from as far as Lagos.
These days the southern businessmen fear to travel north and the insurgency appears to be killing the meat trade, which has yet to recover from a recent truck drivers’ strike.
On the other side of the city, Pastor Titi Adewumi, leader of one of the many churches that dot the landscape of the Adamawa State capital, says residents are depressed by all the security checks. All movement between 12AM and 5AM is prohibited as part of a state of emergency. Interestingly, worshippers are searched before they enter their local mosque or church. But while Yola residents complain about the quality of life, they know things could be worse; Boko Haram at the time of writing were engaged in a fight to the death for the control of the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, where a total ban on all movement has been imposed.
In Mubi, there is hope. Retired Colonel, Taboyi Elam Dong, says the recapture of Mubi shows that the Nigerian military is winning the war against Boko Haram. Other towns recaptured include Gwoza in Borno State and Potiskum in Yobe State.
Most people here feel the government is not doing enough as hell lurks around the corner.

Aisha-Ibrahim1

The shocking abduction, and no return, of the 300 Nigerian schoolgirls has entered its fourth month. Fears for the fate of the girls have been escalating since they were the stars of a viral video released by their captors, the extremist group Boko Haram, just a few weeks after they were taken. The minute-long clip panned in, then out, of a dry field in an undisclosed location. The girls sat fearfully, huddled together in long grey burkas which covered their hair, but not their faces. It remains the only proof the girls may still be alive.
Thus began the social media-driven ‘#BringBackOurGirls’ campaign. Despite its many controversies and false starts, it offered some international solidarity for not just the girls taken from Chibok but for other trafficked women around world. The global outrage highlighted the urgent need to fight for the rights of countless women lured from their homes, hideously exploited – and never returned.
Worries have begun to mount, especially after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s admission that he was going to sell his female captives, that the girls may have been separated, pooled into smaller groups, then trafficked as sex slaves to Europe, Asia or other African destinations. This, of course, is one of the many working theories on what might have happened to the girls. Nothing is confirmed.
Several weeks ago, unconfirmed reports from Associated Press flooded international news cycles claiming Boko Haram had struck once more. Allegedly the group kidnapped another 60 girls from villages close to Chibok along with a host of young boys.
All these incidents have turned the global attention to human trafficking – a multi-billion dollar international industry which operates in a hidden network of alleys and dimly-lit apartments, where women’s lives are traded alongside money, illegal drugs and weapons.
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Going Undercover To Report
Tobore Ovuorie, an investigative journalist with Nigeria’s Premium Times, says six out of 10 people trafficked to the West are Nigerian. She has spent the bulk of her career studying the human trafficking trade and even lost a friend because of the industry. Last year, with support from an Amsterdam newspaper, Ovuorie went undercover for seven months to find out how the African trafficking syndicates worked.
Posing as a sex worker, Ovuorie saw, first hand, the terrible realities of the trafficking world. There were the orgies, a seemingly endless supply of controlled drugs and bags full of hard currency. First Ovuorie was taken to a ‘boot camp’, which all the girls had to endure before being moved to Italy. It was there that she saw an even darker side of the business. Two of the women she was with were beheaded in front her. Ovuorie claims that the group that owned them also sold human organs on the black market.
“It was the worst moment of my investigation,” she says.
Eventually, Ovuorie escaped the syndicate at the Nigeria-Benin border. She says that she walked away from the experience, “bruised and beaten, but still alive”. She has since written about her time with the traffickers although some passionate skeptics have questioned the credibility of her account.
But that was the least of her worries.
“When I returned to write the story, I feared reprisal from the syndicates and I fear I will have to watch my back for the rest of my life. Forgive and forget isn’t written in the dictionaries of these monsters,” she wrote in an email.
Despite the controversy around it, Ovuorie says she does not regret telling her story.
“It was worth it. Human trafficking is increasing in Nigeria.”
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Lured For Work, Food, Even Love
A majority of human trafficking activity is far more insidious and calculated than the tactics of Boko Haram. In South Africa, the Durban-based anti-trafficking group, Umgeni Community Empowerment Centre (UCEC), understands this well. Their counselors have rescued scores of underaged girls soliciting on city streets especially within the local red light strip, Mahatma Gandhi Street. The girls come from a mix of backgrounds, some born in Durban while some were brought in from cities further afield like Harare, Dar es Salaam and Maputo.
It may be a different context from northern Nigeria but the impact is just as devastating. Far removed from the higher echelons of piling statistical reports and complicated legislation, counselors, like the ones at UCEC, deal with the gritty, often terrifying realities of the trafficking netherworld. The women they help are mostly drug addicts and emotionally-scarred. Trust is a rare commodity amongst these women and going home, full of shame, is never an option.
Joy Conradie, a UCEC counsellor, says these women are unwittingly drawn into the trafficking world by promises of work, money, food, clothing and, in some cases, love.
“The targeted victim is spotted, be it in a club or simply getting onto a taxi,” she says, “the traffickers will make contact and they are very charming and highly manipulative.”
Conradie says the women are usually force-fed drugs and once they become addicts, the “free party ends and the nightmare begins”. The traffickers then demand payment for the drugs. The trafficked women, now addicts and destitute, are trapped by the debt. Left with little choice, they are forced into prostitution to pay their dues. Often, refusing to sell their bodies leads to them being “beaten, raped, threatened and isolated until she gives in”. This, unfortunately, is only a single scenario. Trafficked women across the world face a diversity of abuses.
“The girls are often moved from city to city and even across borders,” Conradie claims, adding the youngest victim they have helped was just 12 years old. The irony of this kind of sexual slavery is that it is largely driven by a desperation to escape poverty which traffickers exploit with offers of jobs that don’t exist.
Conradie says it is not just poverty that allows trafficking syndicates to flourish. A lack of education and awareness within the communities where victims are sourced also contributes to the trafficking cycle. But the lack of economic options also exacerbates the situation.
“We also come across sheer desperation in child-headed households, where an older teenage girl will prostitute herself in order to feed her younger siblings,” says Conradie.
To combat human trafficking, she says, more safe houses need to be provided for victims, as well as far stricter border controls, skilled rapid response teams to investigate human trafficking cases, and comprehensive intelligence gathering to understand where and how trafficking outfits operate.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) said in May that forced labor in the private economy draws in around $150 billion in illegal profits each year. Two thirds of this figure comes directly from the sex trade.
The organization’s Director-General, Guy Ryder, said that this added “a new urgency [for] efforts to eradicate [this] fundamentally evil, but hugely profitable practice, as soon as possible”. The report also claimed that there are approximately 21 million people bound by forced labor and trafficking around the world.
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Legislation to fight trafficking syndicates has been, slowly but surely, implemented across Africa and the world. In South Africa, every province has an assigned Anti-Human Trafficking Task Force. However, their power is limited. The global nature of human trafficking implies not a local, but international solution.

Tag: Boko Haram

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The Pain Of The Women And Children Who Have Lost Everything

The Chibok 21

Good News But Little Progress

The Bloody Market Of Fear

The Gatekeeper To Growth

The People For Whom Hell Lurks Around The Corner

A Coup Against Democracy?

The People For Whom Hell Lurks Around The Corner

She’s Not For Sale