Who will save us from PHCN’s extortion?

PHCN workers

By Paul Arhewe

It is one annoying and disingenuous engagement. Staffers of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) are unrelenting in the extortion game. They subject the hapless consumers of the product that comes in trickles to pay outrageous bills. The merciless staffers of this government agency whose services are usually epileptic and scarcely available have taken it as their right to distribute falsified bills even when officials of the corporation have stopped reading electric meters. Let them tell Nigerians what it is if their management allocates targets to them without care whether their consumers get services or not?

In past I have paid many of these exorbitant bills even when there is no commensurate power supply, sometimes less than eight hours provision of power in a month. I have heard several complaints from Nigerians saddled with similar burden of exploitations.

Brazil’s miracle worker

Brazillian ex-president, Lula da Silva

By Paul Arhewe

In my last week’s piece titled, ‘Between Nigeria and Brazil’, I narrated the positive strides Brazil has attained in the last two decades to become the world’s sixth largest economy. It is interesting to note that while this tall achievement is laudable, it would not have come easily without the immense contributions of two outstanding leaders’ resounding legacies. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 34th President (1995-2003) laid the solid economic foundation that took Brazil into the BRICS status, and for this he was named the ‘miracle worker’. His successor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, completed and consolidated the economic transformation of Brazil.

The exploits of these two well focused leaders have again established the positive correlation between quality leadership and fortunes and health of a nation. Before the rise of Cardoso, Brazil was enmeshed in enervating debt burden, she was then the world’s third most indebted country. Amidst this sorry state of affairs Cardoso as a foreign minister in 1993, brought about transformational changes by slashing the country’s average import tariffs from 80 percent to 14 percent.

Between Nigeria and Brazil

Brasilia, Federal capital city of Brazil

By Paul Arhewe

Brazil, it has been reported, has overtaken United Kingdom (UK) to become the sixth-largest economy in the world! Brazil's economy is now worth $2.52 trillion compared to UK's $2.48 trillion. Also stunningly, the forecast is that Brazil's economy would overtake the fifth biggest economy by the end of this year. As Nigerian I feel depressed by the underperforming capability of my dear country. Brazil does not only share similar characteristics with Nigeria, in the 1980s they were ranked together as developing countries. Like China and India with large human populations, Brazil was able to fight poverty through programs of market-oriented economic reforms which its government adequately and sincerely implemented. Among these former developing countries, China was the first to embark oneconomic reforms in the late 1970s, after 25 years of operating a controlled economy.

FG’s unsure SURE-P policy

President Goodluck JOnathan

By Paul Arhewe

The imbroglio that greeted Federal Government's petrol subsidy removal in January coerced it to quickly embark on transformational campaigns. The Goodluck Jonathan administration used every available media and forums to propagate what Nigerians stand to benefit if the total subsidy on the produce is discarded. Palliatives to cushion the foretold suffering the common masses would experience when the full policy implementations began were hurriedly both announced and promise.

No sooner the representatives of Federal Government and Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) met to broker partial removal of subsidy than the government put on a new garb and changed its transformational campaigns into a transitional paradigm. To me, that overt departure was the initial signs signifying that the surety in this Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment (SURE) Programme (SURE-P) is really uncertain.