Good News Thursday

Lets do good news today.

Top of the list, the first coronary angioplasty and stenting procedure performed in Nigeria. This follow-up story has a picture of one of the recovering patients beside her understandably grinning husband.

Comment: Great news and best wishes to the patients as they start their recovery. The more we can handle procedures like this in Nigeria, the cheaper it will be for the ordinary citizen who cannot afford to fly abroad for surgery. We might even benefit from medical tourism to boot. Perhaps the Kanu Heart Foundation can get in touch with Reddington Hospital to do some joint fund raising (particularly for indigent patients) so heart procedures like this can become a regular, normal procedure and not a "man bites dog" event.

And here, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) has been ordered to go after federal ministries, agencies and parastatals that failed to remit tax and other fee collections to the Federation Account. In the same article it is noted that the House of Reps has threatened to ask the NNPC to bar oil companies that refuse to give full financial accounts before teh House committee on the oil industry. There is suspicion that the numbers being reported by oil firms are not entirely accurate, and that taxes, dividends, royalties and other revenue accruing to the government may be under-stated.

Comment: In a year of fiscal deficits, it is good to see the government aggresively enforcing tax laws. It is better to fully collect the taxes you are owed at the current rates from everyone who owes, rather than raise tax rates on the few who actually pay their taxes. With that said, is governance so weak that we need extraordinary measures to get government ministries, agencies and parastatals to remit tax and revenue receipts? Seriously, if the government cannot get itself to pay, how can it get the private sector (particularly the crafty and influential oil companies) to pay? We spent 8 years hearing the word "reform" bandied about, and we are still dealing with this petty mess?

In a story that is somewhat good and somewhat problematic, the Senate has named and shamed debtors of the 50 failed banks, in an attempt to compel them to repay their debts to the National Deposit Insurance Company (NDIC), the agency in charge of making sure depositors in the failed banks get their money back. The debtors include directors in 13 of the failed banks, who are suspected of using their position to take unethical advantage of bank credit.

Comment: In a country where everyone complains about everything, but specific persons are rarely if ever held to account for anything, it is refreshing to see VIPs publicly called out in a manner tha could force them to do the right thing. On the other hand, it seems clear the Senate jumped the gun and released the NDIC list without first checking to see if the people on the list had actually paid or not. Apparently a few of the VIPs had paid, and a few are involved in litigation challenging the legitimacy of the quoted debts. Much like the above case with the FIRS, one rather hopes we can avoid having to make these "extraordinary" moves to do simple things. Ideally they would contact the principals, or their lawyers, and threaten lawsuits, prosecutions and/or public revelation of their names if they do not repay (or produce proof of prior repayment) before a certain date. Alas, in the Nigerian context, such a softly-softly initial approach would probably be met with behind the scenes manvouvering (what they call "lobbying" in the First World) by the debtors to avoid paying the debt. Indeed, this may already have happened, as the article quotes unnamed NDIC sources hinting at political bias in the selection of names revealed by the Senate -- according to thesource(s), certain names on the NDIC list were omitted from the Senate's list because the bearers of those names were "very much in the corridors of power".