Striking oil workers in Gabon stopped the African country’s estimated 240,000 barrels of daily crude oil production, a union official told Reuters on Saturday. “We can confirm tonight that all production has been halted,” said Arnaud Engandji, spokesman for the ONEP oil workers’ union, which wants more local workers in the sector. Gabon is Africa’s seventh largest oil producer. Gabon’s…

Anyone wanting to understand the interest generated by the harmonised version of the 2011 appropriation bill recently passed by both houses of the National Assembly will do well not to look too hard at the numbers. Until we comprehensively reform the framework for managing public expenditure in the country, budget numbers would not be worth the fancy paper on which…

Chidinma Okoro has been unemployed since she got laid off in September last year. Her husband's previously thriving business has struggled for a few years. This made Mrs Okoro's contribution all the more critical for the family. With school fees due, things had become quite desperate. She then heard about a friend who had sold some of her gold and…

Nigeria's expansive budget We run an economy today that is based on budgeting. But, to a large extent, our culture does not encourage budgeting. In advanced economies that we are copying, if one lives on a monthly salary, it is difficult to expect one to share with members of one's family, outside those in one's nuclear family. In some instances,…

The country appears set for another budget showdown as the executive and the legislature resume their long standing disagreement over budget figures. Finance minister, Olusegun Aganga said last week that the 2011 appropriation bill passed by the Senate is not "implementable" due to the alterations carried out by the lawmakers. The Senate last week passed a budget of N4.972 trillion,…

A few more banks have released their 2010 year end results, some of which have fallen below the expectation of industry watchers. However, the trend that was common among the institutions was the drop in earnings, due largely to the reduction in lending. Through a mixture of cost-cutting strategies and efficiency in deploying assets, most of the firms still posted…

Last week, the prevalent apprehension was with inflation rates. How could the rate of change in domestic prices, as measured by the official number crunching agency, be southbound, when the world is affrighted by both rising energy and commodity especially food prices? The answer to this question mattered for a variety of reasons, not least of which is its implication…