NIGERIAN NOTCH

The federal government says its revolution in agriculture, especially in the rice sub-sector, has cut down the country’s unemployment rate by 12 million jobs in just two years. In a scorecard he presented yesterday in Abuja, in agriculture alone, President Muhammadu Buhari said that through massive rice production in the last two years, 12 million Nigerians have been gainfully employed. Buhari disclosed this at the 4th Nigeria Rice Investment Forum, in a paper titled: “Effective Linkage of Actor and Effort in the Value Chain for Sustained Self-Sufficiency in Rice Production.” Represented by the minister of agriculture and rural development, Chief Audu Ogbeh, the president said that for Nigeria to attain self-sufficiency in rice production, more people should be encouraged to go into farming. He said that the present administration’s intervention in rice production had led to wealth distribution and a drastic reduction in rural-urban migration. Most of the new en

......Denies saying ‘stealing isn’t corruption’  …says his statement twisted out of context by critics for political reasons    Former President Goodluck Jonathan as formally responded to the infamous claim that he tended to downplay raging corruption in his administration by boldly claiming that ‘stealing is not corruption’. Jonathan Jonathan But in dispelling the claim, Jonathan claimed that corruption was more prevalent under the President Muhammadu Buhari administration than under him and dismissed the current anti-corruption fight as mere media show. The former president boasted: “It is important to note that despite the many sensational stories, dramatic arrests, seizures and accusations, many of them false, since I left office, the fact remains that Nigeria has not made any improvement on TI Corruption Perception Index since 2014. “In fact, the 2017 CPI released in 2018 by TI places Nigeria as number 148, a retrogression in which the nation went 12 place b

Contrary to analysts’ projections of a third consecutive month rise in inflation rate, Nigeria’s headline inflation rate fell to 11.26 per cent, year-on-year, YoY in October 2018, down from 11.28 percent YoY in September. National Bureau of Statistics, NBS, disclosed this in its October 2018 inflation report released yesterday. After 18 months of steady decline, the inflation rate rose steadily for two months from 11.14 percent in July to 11.23 percent in August and to 11.28 percent in September. Most analysts projected that the rising trend will persist in October. While analysts at FSDH Merchant Bank projected that the inflation rate will rise further to 11.34 percent in October, analysts at Financial Derivatives Company Limited project 11.35 percent inflation rate for October. These projections were however nullified by the October inflation rate of 11.26 percent reported by NBS yesterday. NBS October Inflation report The NBS stated: “The Consumer Price Index, (CPI) which