• China lends Nigeria Dollars 2bn in exchange for oil talks. • Ft com site : China oils Nigeria talks with loan

Nigeria's President Umar Yar'Adua's official visit to Beijing in February has born significant fruit, in light of recent announcements that China's export credit guarantee agency, Sinosure, has pledged between US$40bn and US$50bn of investments for Nigeria's infrastructure. During the visit, China's President Hu Jintao and President Yar'Adua committed to strengthening the evolving strategic partnership between China and Nigeria. The two leaders said that Public Private Partnerships (PPP) for investments in infrastructure will have a key role to play in strengthening this bond. Although an investment of the scale pledged by Sinosure will be a blessing for Nigeria's crippled power sector and transport infrastructure, we maintain some reservations regarding the feasibility of establishing transparent and effective PPPs, given the rampant corruption plaguing the country, chronic institutional deficiency and recent accusations of missing funds in the Nigerian power sector.
During a press conference in Abuja on March 29, the Nigerian Finance Minister Shamsuddeen Usman said that a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) had been signed between the African Finance Corporation on behalf of Nigerian financial institutions, and Sinosure, committing the funds for financing projects in Nigerian infrastructure, according to an online report in AllAfrica. Although no specific details have been released regarding the direction of the investments, the Financial Times (FT) and Bloomberg report that the power and transport sectors are likely to receive the lion's share. Furthermore, according to the FT, the investments will take place over the next three years. Certainly, Sinosure's involvement facilitates the implementation of such large scale investments and further cements the strategic partnership between Africa's largest oil producer and world's second largest oil consumer.
Of Strategic Importance




Source: BMI


This development further highlights that China is still actively pursuing, perhaps more assertively than ever, its strategy of funding large scale infrastructure projects in return for lucrative oil deals. Africa has been the epicentre of China's strategy to enhance its energy security as the Asian giant is vying to diversify its supplies away from the Middle East. Thus far, this course of action has paid dividends for China, which has managed to gain access to most of Africa's oil states and oil blocks. It has also proved to be of major benefit for the infrastructure sectors of many states, which have sought to benefit from readily available Chinese government credit, in return for granting access to their oil and gas and mining sectors. Angola, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, Somalia and of course Nigeria, are but some of the African states where China is funding infrastructure projects (in transport, power and/or telecoms) in return for contracts. This coming week, according to Minister Usman, a delegation from the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will visit Nigeria to explore investment opportunities and contracts in Nigeria's oil industry, both in the upstream and downstream segments. AllAfrica quoted him as saying 'Their [China's] interest is in our oil, but they also have interest in putting their money where their mouth is.'
We have previously stated that we believe one of Nigeria's greatest priorities should be to develop its decaying power sector. A reliable power infrastructure is a key component of attracting foreign direct investment and the lack of it [reliable power infrastructure] in the country has impeded the flow of foreign investments in the non-oil sector. The new government of Yar'Adua has often stated its willingness to invest in the sector and add more capacity. PPPs are emerging as the modus operandi to finance infrastructure projects and the Nigerian government has repeatedly stated its eagerness to develop them. The Chinese investment may be the first trial to assess the viability of PPPs taking root in Nigeria. However, as more scandals surface it will make it harder for the government to persuade investors (other than the Chinese) to put their money in such an opaque sector. Bloomberg states that an official government investigation has been launched to investigate why the US$10bn spent during the time of the previous government failed to produce any meaningful results.
We believe Nigeria has the potential to become a powerhouse and drive African growth. According to BMI forecasts, between 2008 and 2012, the Nigerian economy will grow by an annual average of 8.6%. Investment into the country's infrastructure has the potential to (theoretically at least) produce multiple benefits from increasing levels of investment to boosting trade and rural development. However, institutional incapacity and rampant corruption underline the danger that the funds made available to the government and financial institutions may fall short due to limited absorptive and institutional capacity and, as in the case of the power sector, produce limited results.
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Document EMDN000020080403e44200006

Atcon to Hold Summit On Local Content Devt
by Peter Ailuorio

669 words

2 April 2008

09:12 AM

All Africa

AFNWS

English

(c) 2008 AllAfrica, All Rights Reserved
Lagos, Apr 02, 2008 (Leadership/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- The Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) has said that the stakeholders' summit on Nigerian Content Development in the ICT Sector will hold on Friday, April 11, 2008. The event will take place in the Diamond Hall of the Golden Gate Chinese Restaurants, Ikoyi, Lagos.
Over the years, the Nigerian Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector has continued to grow in leaps and bounds. However, despite the high rate of ICT professionals in Nigeria, adequate attention has not been given to the issue of developing and building local contents. Nobody can safely deny the fact that attempts are being made by a few concerned professionals in the area of developing local content in the software aspect of ICT in Nigeria.
Arguably, not much progress could be said to have been made in the angle of local hardware components in ICT infrastructure.
ATCON strongly believes that for Nigeria to truly boast of technological advancements in the ICT sector, concerted efforts must be geared towards initiatives that would facilitate and enhance local content development both in the software and hardware aspects of ICT.
To ensure effective involvement of public policy makers in this very important summit, ATCON has enlisted the active participation of public institutions and private sector organisations such as Ministry of Information & Communication, Ministry of Science & Technology, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF), ICT professional Associations, ICT operating companies, banks and non-bank financial institutions, local and foreign development agencies, ICT solutions providers, Small & Medium Enterprise Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines & Agriculture (NACCIMA), the mass media, high networth individuals amongst many others.
ATCON is of the opinion that for the ICT sector in Nigeria to develop fast and catch up with that of leading ICT nations of the world, concerted efforts have to be geared towards developing some amount of local contents both in the software and hardware components of ICT infrastructure. It also feels strongly that our local ICT infrastructure providers should be granted some measure of protection against their multinational counterparts whose corporate strength and investment muscle could pose serious threats to the survival of the local players. The local hardware and software developers must be given adequate support to enable them grow, expand and continue to provide employment to millions of Nigerians, thus helping to eradicate poverty in the land.
ATCON believes that the establishment of an enabling environment will encourage existing and potential local investors to venture into the development of Nigerian content in our ICT sector. This will eventually register Nigeria in the league of global leaders in the ICT sector.
Dignitaries expected to attend and participate in the summit include the minister of state for communications, Alhaji Ibrahim Dasuki Nakande; minister of science & technology, Mrs. Grace Ekpiwhre; executive vice chairman, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Engr. (Dr.) Ernest Ndukwe; director-general, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), Prof. Cleopas Angaye; chairman, VisaFones Limited, Mr. Jim Ovia; chairman, Zinox Technologies Limited, Chief Leo Stan Ekeh; as well as chief executive officer, Omatek Computers Limited, Mrs. Florence Seriki.
Other industry experts billed to participate and contribute to discussions on the theme of the summit include Engr. Chris Uwaje, CEO, Connect Technologies; Engr. Titi Omo-Ettu, CEO, Telecom Answers Associates; Engr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman, Association of Licensed Telephone Operators of Nigerian (ALTON); Mr. Ogugua Chioke, chairman, GSM Association of Nigeria; Engr. Sam Adeleke, president, Internet Services Providers Association of Nigeria (ISPAN) and Prof. Charles Uwadia, president, Nigeria Computer Society (NCS). Others are Engr. Adebayo Banjo, CEO, Disc Communications; Mr. Simeon Agu, president, Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), Dr. Jimson Olufuye, president, Information Technology Association of Nigeria (ITAN); Mr. Lanre Ajayi, president, Nigerian Internet Group (NIG) and Mr. Ndukwe Kalu, chairman, Nigerian Internet Registration Association (NIRA).
Document AFNWS00020080402e442000sg
Salmagundi Conference
Lévy, Bernard-Henri; Schell, Jonathan; Barber, Benjamin; Elshtain, Jean; Lears, Jackson; Forché, Carolyn; Massing, Michael; Glotzbach, Philip; Boyers, Robert

51,281 words

1 April 2008

Salmagundi

SLMG

138

Issue 158/159; ISSN: 00363529

English

© 2008 Salmagundi. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All Rights Reserved.
War, Evil, the End of History, and America Now*
Session 1: Pointing The Way
Robert Boyers: Some of those in this audience will remember the Salmagundi conference which asked whether there is a clash of civilizations and generated a special Salmagundi issue (containing the edited transcript of that meeting). There, Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, and others did their best to answer the question with a resounding "no," while at the same time saying many things that effectively called their own confident answer into question. Here, we find ourselves again, and with a vengeance, in the precincts of doubt and misgiving. The book we have chosen as the very ground of our discussion* offers little prospect of certainty or stability. Its author, Bernard Henri-Lévy, a thinker rightly celebrated for his passion and his lucidity, is a relentless inquisitor who likes to ask questions for which there are many, often contradictory, answers. He is moreover a thinker with an appetite for the kinds of issues that many Americans find outsized, uncomfortable. Not, for Levy, simply, what is the meaning of this war, but is it any longer possible to think of war and meaning as if these were compatible? Not, for Levy, simply, what is intended by those who speak of the end of history, when a concept like the end of history cannot hope to describe a reality that, in Paris or Rome or Prague, seems so drastically removed from "reality" in places like Sri Lanka or Burundi.
But in some ways the most challenging and intractable questions posed by Lévy have to do with the idea of evil, an idea often repudiated by thinkers who regard it as an essentially metaphysical concept and prefer to think about the world in practical and political terms. My guess is that we'll have a great deal to say about the subject of evil over the next few days and that we will not be deterred by the cautionary admonitions of those who counsel us to steer clear of such notions. After all, Lévy insists that we consider whether the devil's greatest trick is to make us think that he doesn't exist, and he insists as well, again and again, that we address the most intractable problems and ask if need be very distasteful questions.
What is a distasteful question? There are many in Levy's book, so it's hard to know just where to begin. But consider for beginners Lévy's suggestion that people like us - students, academics, intellectuals, readers - like to think of ourselves as people with clean hands who will do whatever we can to think well of ourselves, ostentatiously proclaiming our virtue and routinely pretending that we are concerned, committed, even going so far as to speak loudly on behalf of the wretched of the earth with whom we have little or no familiarity. Distasteful, to be sure. But surely no more distasteful than the comparable reflection of Hannah Arendt, who wrote half a century ago, in a book called On Revolution, that "by virtue of being a sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will automatically lead to glorification of its cause, which is the suffering of others." Much to think about there, in Lévy as in Arendt, and in the deeply sobering works of the others who are with us to take on these and many other related issues. But let us turn now to Bernard-Henri Lévy, who will point the way for our initial exchanges.
Bernard-Henri Lévy: Thank you for this opportunity, and let me begin by apologizing for my sometimes broken and pitiful English, and declare nonetheless that, though I have come here to listen and learn, I am someone who relishes controversy. I like debate and welcome opposition, and will do my best here to stir up what I can, so that we can have a worthy and important discussion. That being said, I have to tell you that the question of war proposed in my book has always been absolutely central in my life and in my work. The beating heart of my work is this question of war, which is central to our century, to the past century, and-I say mod-estly-to my own vision of the world. I belong to a family of French Jews. My father was born in 1920. He happened to be a volunteer in the Spanish war in '38 when was not yet 18 years old. And he was also a volunteer in the anti-Nazi war one year after that, in the Free French resistance to the Nazis after the French defeat. One of the first lessons I received when I was a child was that war is the most horrible thing in the world, but that sometimes war is necessary. My beloved father, who is dead now, was not only a volunteer and a freedom fighter, but he also was in the famous battle of Monte Casino in 1943. This was one of the bloodiest that the freedom fighters fought in the war. He volunteered not to fight, but to go between the lines and take the wounded back behind the lines. He always told me that he did that because he lived under the double idea that war was sometimes necessary, certainly against the fascists of Spain, and certainly against the Nazis of Germany and the fascists of France, but it was also horrible; and so I learned the double bind, learned to think of the horror and the necessity. This is my own "primal" background.
Later, when I was twenty-three years old, I had my first political experience. It was just after May of '68,1 was a leftist and at this time I was close to Maoist groups, who pretended to make a revolution in France. These groups were convinced that France was living under a new fascism, and that we were new partisans fighting this fascism, and that was the moment when I began to think that this posture was crazy. It was crazy to feel that France was a fascist country, crazy to think that we were partisans, crazy to wage this fake war against an imaginary enemy with imaginary weapons. And so in 1971, I made the first real political decision in my life, one that would become the source of my first book. I decided to go outside of France, to have a look at what is a real war. What is the real tragedy of suffering, I wanted to know. What is real fascism? I went to a country at this time still called Pakistan, but about to become Bangladesh. I took part there in the liberation war, which was the origin of my first book, Red Indias.
A few years after, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and the Red Army behaved there as the American army behaved in Vietnam, waging a dirty war, I tried again to involve myself in the struggle. I had a feeling then-this was twenty-five years ago-that there was a clash of civilizations taking place, not the one which Samuel Huntington speaks about, of course, not the clash between the west and the rest, not the clash between the Christians and Muslims, none of that bullshit. But I had the conviction that there was a real war going on in Afghanistan, a real war of civilization inside the Islamic world itself, between the ordinary moderates, democrats, and secularists on one side, and the fundamentalists, fanatics, and anti-democrats on the other. It was a time when Americans especially tended to embrace the principle that all the enemies of my enemies are my friends, so that it was necessary to support in several ways all the movements of resistance in Afghanistan against the Soviet Army. At this time, I belonged to a group of Europeans who said collectively no-we have to see there is, of course, a war between the Soviets and Afghanis, but we have to see an equally important war going on inside the people who are fighting against the Red Army. There is another frontline, we felt, inside Islam, dividing the moderates and the fundamentalists. And I went there with others under the umbrella of an NGO to deliver to the moderate groups among the Muslims, not weapons, but rather, some radios that would allow the commanders to communicate with each other in the field. A small thing. For me, this war in Afghanistan was so important, first of all because of the Soviet involvement, as I was an anti-totalitarian activist.
Some years later I felt compelled to become involved in the Bosnian conflict, in 1992, at the beginning of this terrible bloodbath which was going to last three years. And so I took advantage of a humanitarian caravan to cross Serbia and Croatia, and enter Sarajevo, then already in flames and under bomb attack. In May 1992 there was no airport and so I came there by road. And I devoted three years of my life to this war. Devoted meaning what? Meaning that I wrote a book and I shot two movies: "A Day in the Death of Sarajevo" and, more important, "Bosnia," which was shot partly on the frontlines of this war with the Bosnian army. I did a thing which I thought I could never do in my life and which I would not have done in my own country: for three years I put myself at the service of a foreign president, a foreign government, a Bosnian president for whom I did crazy things, for a man who became a friend and embodied for me the definition of a warrior which my father transmitted to me. He was a man who made war because he was obliged to, but without liking it, finding it at the same time disgusting and necessary. This was, again, a very important moment of my existence, and forced me to think again and again about the question of just and unjust wars. What is a just war? Are there some circumstances when pacifism-the idea that peace is preferable to anything else-feeds the war? I discovered in Bosnia that pacifism is sometimes the best ally to aggression. At the same time, I hated this necessary war against Serbian aggression. I hated to witness some of the things I saw and filmed, but I thought that the reluctance of the Europeans and the Americans to become involved-I'm speaking of those who said "No war at all. Let's bring some sandwiches for the living and some sheets for the dead"-that, I thought, was the real fuel for the continuing war. And with those thoughts in mind I completed my book on war and evil on the very day of the attack on the Twin Towers. Strange, no? The story of this book is very simple. I was approached by our great French newspaper, Le Monde, to go and write a series of reports, and I said okay, why not, but I asked why should I do what other journalists already do? And they said because you have a name that will maybe create interest in this thing. So I agreed to do reportage, or reporting, but insisted I must be able to do it on topics which are supposed not to interest a large audience, on what I called wars which are black holes, which are rarely reported at all.
Then with the editors of Le Monde, I went into the archives of the newspapers and looked for all the recent wars which were the least covered for the last ten years or so, and we established a list of six, of which I was able eventually to cover five. One was in South Sudan, and took me to one of the most desolate places on earth. Another was Colombia, a place Americans thought of only as a place where people fought over drugs, and I found there, of course, another kind of war, which required me to spend time with the Marxist guerillas, who have a sort of state inside the state, and then with the other side, of the paramilitaries, the fascists, where I found a way to get through to the mystery man whose face was not known even to the reporters who knew of his influence. For this book, I also went into the country which first invented the kamikaze, the suicide bomber, which is not an Arab country, not Gaza or Palestine, but Sri Lanka, south of India, where you have one of the most ignored and ancient wars in the world. And studying the techniques used there you see that the Muslim fundamentalists are merely copycats. In Sri Lanka, I went to kamikaze training camps, and spoke with hardened terrorists. I also had one of the most moving encounters of my life, with a young woman who was a former trained kamikaze, and explained to me on the logistical, technical, spiritual level how you build a kamikaze, how Sri Lanka was the fatherland for this training, though at the very last moment, this young woman, after years of training, did what very seldom happens: she withdrew.
So I was lucky enough to begin to enter at least the border of the mind of a suicide bomber. And so you see what my book deals with, with places like Colombia, Sri Lanka, South Sudan, Burundi, the twin state of Rwanda, places where we did not meet any Europeans and Americans who might have made some difference in these places, might have done something to stop or prevent genocide. In this book, in these five stories, or