UK to repatriate Ibori, 266 Nigerian prisoners

James Ibori, former Delta State governor and about 266 Nigerians serving in various prisons across the United Kingdom (UK) may be repatriatedto complete their sentences in Nigeria.

Talks are continuing into reaching a compulsory prisoner transfer agreement.

UKprisons minister Jeremy Wright told MailOnline how “more foreign prisoners must serve their sentences in their own countries”.

Ministers have been ordered to step up efforts to end the scandal of more than one in eight prisoners being from overseas.

David Cameron vowed to end the practice of the British taxpayer picking up the bill for criminals with no business in the UK.

The prime minister said in 2010 that he would “personally intervene” to send more foreign criminals home.

Britainhas even made clear it would pay to build new prisons in countries like Nigeria to speed up the process of sending foreign criminals home. Up to £1 million has been promised to upgrade Nigerian jails, including a new wing at Kirikiri Prison in Lagos.

But to date little progress has been made. When the coalition was formed there were 11,135 foreign prisoners in UK jails, and this figure has fallen by just three per cent since to 10,786.

Each felon costs an average of around £40,000 a year to keep inside.

Last week it was announced that notorious Liberian warlord Charles Taylor is to serve his 50-year sentence for war crimes in the UK.

A prisoner-transfer agreement was struck with Albania earlier this year to “free up space in prisons here and reduce the cost to the British taxpayer”.

It was the first major bilateral prisoner transfer agreement with a country outside the European Union.

There were around 250 Albanians in UK jails in June this year.

But securing an agreement with Nigeria would be seen as a much more significant breakthrough.

Latest figures show there were 534 Nigerian nationals in British jails, 485 men and 49 women.

Nigerians account for one in 20 of all foreign prisoners, putting the country fifth in the league table of nations whose citizens have been jailed in the UK.

Wright said: “I am clear that more foreign prisoners must serve their sentences in their own countries.

“That is why we are currently working with the Nigerian government on a compulsory prisoner transfer agreement to increase the number of prisoners who are transferred.

“Legislation allowing Nigeria to enter such an arrangement was passed earlier this year by the Nigerian parliament. We are now working with them on the text of a final agreement.”

- BDay

Lagos port to ban sub-standard trucks

Lagos port to ban sub-standard trucks

AS part of its efforts to tackle congestions and enhance cargo delivery at the Lagos Port Complex (LPC), the management of the port has taken a bold step to ban all dilapidated and sub-standard trucks from using the Lagos Port Complex facility as from the beginning of next year.                            

 The Port Manager, Mr Nasir Anas Mohammed, told the Nigerian Tribune, when he led his top management team to clean up the port environment as part of their Customers Service Week to mark their Customers 2013 Anniversay celebration, that  the clean up exercise, which lasted for over three hours, was part of the 2013 Customers Service Week.                     

 Also, he disclosed that the management of the Lagos Port was concerned about the irregular   parking of trucks on the port access roads.                           

Muhammed, while assuring that the private operator will be involved in offering a lasting solution to the perennial problems, declared; “We are engaging some private partners who are going to bring in brand new trucks and they would operate a consolidated trucks management system whereby only these new trucks will have access to the port. This will also bring about peace of mind to shippers concerning their cargoes, and it will erase the issue of traffic gridlock that usually arises due to bad and rickety trucks plying our territorial waters.”           

 According to him, “our safety department has been discussing with the truck drivers on minimum safety standard of the type of trucks that should come into the ports. We want to make them see that it is equally for their own good”, he added even as he further explained that the new trucks would become operational within the next one year.

 “We are trying to ensure that the various trucks associations come together and consolidate to form one or two or three strong consolidated holdings so that they can source those vehicles that are being provided by the private companies.

 “Because when they consolidate, it will be easier for them to get loans or supports from other agencies of government which help them to dispose the rickety and old trucks they are currently using and the clean up exercise was part of the port corporate social responsibility and a way of giving back to the community.

“We are looking beyond just observing this event on an annual basis and we want to see how we can add value to the community we operate. The Apapa Local Government is very disposed towards this arrangement and they are really encouraging in observing this year’s programme together”.                                                          

Anniversary marking the Customer Services Week 2013 will last for one week with different programmes to mark the week.

Tokunbo Oloke - Lagos Tribune

World Bank to assist Nigeria on power, infrastructure with $1.4m —Okonjo-Iweala

"All this good news must become a reality and not just promises. Nigerians have endured too long for un-interrupted power supply and it is every citizens right. And what will $1.4m cover, a new transformer?"

World Bank to assist Nigeria on power, infrastructure with $1.4m —Okonjo-Iweala

The World Bank has pledged to support Nigeria’s  power sector and infrastructure development with about 1.4 million dollars, the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala announced  in Washington

The minister  said  this  when she  briefed  newsmen on Nigeria’s  delegation meeting with the bank at the Annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

She said the World Bank was planning to set up a global infrastructure facility and Nigeria would be among the first countries to benefit considering its population and infrastructure needs.

“The World Bank Group, that is the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), through the World Bank president has made  it  known that they want Nigeria to be one of the focus countries in sub- Saharan Africa.

“This means that they are willing to work with Nigeria to invest hundreds of millions of dollars.

“They have a lending programme of about a billion dollars a year but they are willing to use that and pull in more resources from the U.S. through the Power Africa Initiative, using the offices of IFC,  to help us address infrastructure problems.

“They want to concentrate on power, and they are already actively working with several private companies that want to work in Nigeria.

“They are also promising to give us another  700 million dollars guarantees from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for the power sector as well as expressing willingness to invest 700 million dollars in the transmission sector,’’ she said.

She added that the meeting also discussed  on how to improve the bank’s social safety network programme in Nigeria .

Okonjo-Iweala said  that the bank and the  Federal Government would collaborate on a 400 million-dollar social safety net programme which would key into the existing  programmes already running in the country.

The programmes, she said, include, saving one million lives; instant cash transfers, improving nutrition for children, immunisation, HIV/Aids and anti- malaria programmes, among others.

She said the programme under conditional cash transfer would be used to scale up the project on cash transfer in education in Kano state to improve the number of out-of-school children, especially the girls.

According to Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria also got pledges from  the bank to help improve statistics.

The minister reiterated that the  2013 budget was on course describing some speculations on the budget in the media as false.

“We have spoken to the National Assembly on the amendments and they have done something and we have decided to continue  with the implementation.

“Please, 2013 budget is being implemented, what is being perpetrated by some sections of the press, that somehow the 2013 budget has fallen apart and not implemented, is false.

“This budget is being implemented, it still has some issues here and there but we’ve decided to go ahead to find a solution and take care of the missing money to pay people involved under the SURE-P programme”, she said.

The Values Proposition: Do Small Things with Great Love

The world confronts vast uncertainty, from unrest in the social climate to accelerating shifts in the climate itself. The economy faces huge challenges, from public-debt crises in Europe to the overhang of mortgage debt in the U.S. The business community faces an ongoing series of stops and starts, from the loss of an icon like Steve Jobs to the rise of new-economy giants like Amazon and Facebook.

There is a temptation, amidst the turmoil, for pundits to conclude that the only sensible response is to make bold bets — new business models that challenge the logic of an industry, products that aim to be “category killers” and obsolete the competition. But I’ve come to believe that a better way to respond to uncertainty is with small gestures that send big signals about what you care about and stand for. In a world defined by crisis, acts of generosity and reassurance take on outsized importance.

I’ve written before about not-so-random acts of kindness that humanize companies and offer an uplifting alternative to a demoralizing status quo. Earlier this year, for example, a Southwest Airlines pilot delayed a flight from Los Angeles to Tucson to accommodate the needs of a distraught grandfather who was racing to the hospital bedside of his toddler grandson, the victim of criminal abuse. Despite the obvious security concerns and schedule pressures, the pilot, who had gotten wind of this late-arriving passenger’s urgent situation, refused to budge until he made it to the plane.

“They can’t go anywhere without me,” the pilot told the grandfather, “and I wasn’t going anywhere without you.” The story immediately went viral, with travel writers and bloggers celebrating the stubborn pilot and his values. His genuine kindness was a welcome change of pace in an industry known for lousy service, surly passengers, and miserable conditions.

I experienced something similar myself not so long ago, and found it a striking enough to devote an entire HBR blog post to the experience. In an entry called “Why Is it So Hard to Be Kind?” I told the story of my father, his search for a new car, a health emergency that took place in the middle of that search — and a couple of extraordinary (and truly human) gestures by an auto dealer that put him at ease and won his loyalty.

“Nobody is opposed to a good bottom-line deal,” I concluded at the time. “But what we remember and what we prize are small gestures of connection and compassion that introduce a touch of humanity into the dollars-and-cents world in which we spend most of our time.”

We remember the lack of connection as well. A month or so ago, I visited my optometrist, who was troubled about something she saw in my routine eye exam and sent me to a renowned retinal specialist for a more in-depth look. This doctor did an utterly competent exam, explained my situation, and offered a sound course of action. So I’m fine.

Yet I keep thinking back to the experience, not because of the quality of the medical care I received, which was superb, but because of how uncaring the experience felt. As I sat in the waiting room, it seemed more like the offices of a payday lender or a bail bondsman than that of a highly credentialed surgeon. “If you arrive late, your appointment may be rescheduled,” one sign warned. “Copay is due upon arrival,” another signed explained. “We accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express.” However, a different sign warned, “If you do not have your copay, your appointment may be rescheduled.” Finally, blared another sign, “If you have an overdue balance, your appointment may be rescheduled.”

Since I had to wait an hour past my appointment time to see the doctor (there was no sign about what happens when the doctor is late), I spent a lot of time thinking about the surroundings, and the bizarre messages all these signs were sending. My fellow patients and I were nervous, anxious, worried about our eyesight. Yet it felt like the doctor thought of us as a collection of truants, tightwads, and general layabouts. Were we visiting a healer, or the ocular equivalent of the “Soup Nazi” from Seinfeld, for whom one wrong move means “No appointment for you!”?

Two weeks later, by the way, I got a call from the doctor’s office. “Does the doctor want an update on how I’m doing?” I asked the staffer who placed the call. “No,” she said. “Insurance did not cover the full cost of the exam, and we need to know if you want us to charge the credit card we have on file or use a different card.”

Oh, right.

It’s always risky to look to great humanitarians for lessons about business, but something Mother Teresa said long ago strikes me as a pretty good epitaph for our disruptive times — and for dispiriting experiences of the sort I had with this doctor. “We cannot do great things,” she famously told her followers, “only small things with great love.”

Yes, success today is about price, features, quality — pure economic value of the sort that requires you to rethink your strategy and business models. But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, about passion, emotion, identity — sharing your values. And all that requires is a way of doing business, a strategy for connecting with customers, that communicates who you are and what you care about.

As the value proposition gets rewritten in industry after industry, it’s organizations with an authenticvalues proposition that rise above the chaos and connect with customers. Few of us will ever do “great things” that remake companies and reshape industries. But all of us can do small things with great feeling and an authentic sense of emotion.

What’s your values proposition?

by Bill Taylor

Always, Always, Always Show Up

Three years ago, as I was putting the finishing touches on my book Dare, Dream, Do, a friend sent me a link to a contest sponsored by Oprah. The prize was your own talk show.  Immediately, I was thrilled by the giddy fear I feel when I know I’ve got to take something on.

Almost simultaneously, I began to explain to myself why this audition was a no-go: I would have to take a day off of work, drive from Boston to New Jersey, fill out a lengthy application, get up long before dawn to be one of the first 500 people in line, and subject myself to the humiliation of a cattle call in a Kohl’s parking lot.  As I told all of this to my friend Liz, she gently observed, “I find it ironic that you are writing a book daring people to dream, but you won’t.”

That was all I needed.  I pride myself on not giving up.  So I went.  As you may have surmised, I didn’t win my own talk show.  I didn’t even make it past the first cut. After all the work of getting to the audition, waking up early, thinking about what I was going to say, and carefully selecting my most Oprah-worthy outfit (!), I stumbled. While I gave my elevator pitch, my nervousness made me note-dependent, my affect flat, and my voice monotone: there was nothing about my thirty seconds that would inspire people to dream and disrupt.  Afterward I was deflated.  Disappointed. I’d suited up and shown up (at 3 o’clock in the morning, no less) to my dream, but some small part of me held back. I made myself go, but I didn’t pour my whole soul into it.  I hadn’t given up, but I hadn’t really shown up, either.

I’ve always repeated the mantra “never, never, never, never give up.”  These words of Winston Churchill’s have rallied me for years; they are a core tenet of our family motto, and hang, framed, on the wall just inside the front door of our home.  But I’ve started to wonder if not giving up is sufficient.  Of course persistence is essential. But I wonder if the pluck of true grit embodied by the words “never give up” has morphed into a euphemism for something more fatalistic: I won’t give up… but I’m still sort of waiting to get picked by life’s lottery.

Last year, for example, I was approached about a senior management role at a fast-growing Boston start-up, but ultimately they didn’t offer me the job.  There are likely a variety of reasons why things didn’t work out, but I have since learned that my not “showing up” was a contributing factor.  There was nothing in my behavior that would indicate that I passionately wanted in. As with my Oprah audition, I’d really, really wanted it – so much that my instinct was to hide just how much.

Jules Pieri, who was recently named one of 2013’s Most Powerful Woman Entrepreneurs by Fortune Magazine, is a woman who is now reaping the rewards of standing up. Pieri is the Co-founder and CEO of The Grommet, a retail site devoted to promoting innovative, undiscovered products and the stories behind their makers.  In 2012, Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten invested in The Grommet and the company has been soaring ever since. But her path has not been scattered with rose petals – for years the site survived on a slender budget, living from one desperately needed cash-infusion to the next when no VCs would invest major capital during the 2008-9 recession. Pieri made many personal sacrifices to keep her dream alive: she did not take a vacation for three years, she was unable to regularly visit her mother in Detroit who was battling cancer, and her son had to get emergency financial aid to stay in college. Jules never gave up—but she also  fully showed up, day after day.

A look at some of the research has convinced me that maybe Woody Allen was right, and 80% of success really is just showing up. According to Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at UC Davis, the odds of a scientist writing a groundbreaking paper (defined as the number of citations in other works) is directly correlated to the number of papers that the scientist has written — not to how smart the scientist is.

Rob Wiltbank, professor of strategic management at Willamette University, tracked the returns of the Angel Oregon Fund and found no material difference in the returns of the winners and the finalists in various pitch competitions over a 10-year period.

We all dream about winning, but it’s the showing up that counts.

Even though we can’t necessarily control the outcome.  Sarah Ban Breathnach said, “When you use expectations to measure a dream’s success, you tie stones around your soul.  Dreams may call for a leap of faith, but they set the soul soaring.” There are no regrets when we invest ourselves fully and show up to ourselves. Happily, we get lots of chances.

I’ve recently had one of those chances.  Another opportunity has come up that I’m well qualified for, and I recently learned that I made the short-list, largely because I raised my hand and said, “I want this.”

Dreaming is at the heart of disruption.  Whether we want to disrupt an industry or our personal status quo, in order to make that terrifying leap from one learning curve to the next, we must dream.  The good news is that the causal mechanism for achieving our dreams is always, always, always showing up:  and as we show up, our future will too.

by Whitney Johnson HBR

The Five Rules Every New CEO Should Follow

"This is a must read for every entrepreneur and business owner"

The Five Rules Every New CEO Should Follow

Last week, an executive who was on the verge of being promoted to head his large global publicly traded company asked for my advice on how to be effective as a brand new CEO.  I gave him a list and he was so appreciative that I was motivated to write a blog about it.   There were five recommendations on my list:

1)    Grow the Pie

The most fractious and difficult thing to do in an organization is to take resources away from someone who is used to receiving them.  For this reason, growing the revenue pie is critically important to the success of a CEO’s reign.  If a CEO attempts to reallocate the existing resources in order to improve the organization’s prospects, endless fights and a firestorm of protests will ensue.

If instead, the focus is on increasing revenues, investment capacity will increase and new resources can be funneled to growth priorities without needing to cut absolute resources to non-priority areas. Over time, as the revenues grow, the non-priority areas will become an ever-smaller piece of the puzzle and when the success of the priority areas has been made manifest, the CEO can shut down the non-priority areas without much hassle or fuss.

2)    Follow Due Process

CEOs really don’t have to follow due process.  For example, they have the power to sack anyone they want.  However, it is critically important not to do that because everybody watches with a keen eye and wonders whether they will be objects of arbitrary decisions as well.  Suck it up and suffer until such time as a manager who you would rather remove immediately can be given feedback and a fair chance to improve.  That is a lesser evil than to establish in your team’s mind that you make up your own rules.

3)    Consult Whenever Possible

Consult wherever and whenever possible with your team before making decisions, even if it drags out the decision-making.  This is because your team needs to feel and function genuinely like a team.  As CEO, there will be times when you have to make a decision without any support from your team because from your CEO perspective you can see that it is the right decision and your team can’t.  You can get away with these decisions without destroying the team dynamics, but only if you save it for very rare occasions.

4)    Set High Strategy Standards

The easiest thing for managers to do is to avoid making the explicit choices that are essential for quality strategy. But mediocre strategy results in lots of work for little reward. So it is critical for a new CEO to establish that direct reports have the responsibility for making logically consistent and unique strategy choices in their areas of responsibility. You need to signal that you won’t create their strategy for them but will help if asked — because nothing is more important than having a high bar for strategy.

5)    Maintain a Big Tent

The new CEO needs to signal from inception that the organization will be a big tent that welcomes diversity, not a monoculture with only people who resemble the CEO. It is much harder to find the requisite personnel for a monoculture and the reward if you do find them is that they are less effective!

My favorite ‘CEO’ of all time is former Baltimore Orioles baseball manager Earl Weaver, who won four American League Championships and one World Series with rag-tag assortments of personalities that were arguably the most diverse that baseball has ever seen.  He could always sign or trade for players to fit in his tent because of the breadth and inclusiveness of his definition of ‘fit’. My least favorite is Pete Rose who insisted that every player manifested the ‘Charlie Hustle’ persona for which he was famous in his former life as a superstar player.  Rose traded away players who ‘didn’t fit’ and built monoculture teams that hustled their way to persistent mediocrity.

I encouraged the new CEO to act immediately on these five recommendations because in the rough-and-tumble world of the modern CEO, second chances are rarely given.  And if a CEO starts off reallocating the existing pie, declaring force majeure, acting unilaterally, accepting mediocre strategy and closing ranks to only the comfortable colleagues, the die gets cast pretty quickly.  So make those first few moves deliberately — and in accordance with this list.

by Roger Martin HBR

Hundreds dead in Nigeria detention, Amnesty says

Hundreds dead in Nigeria detention, Amnesty says

Hundreds of people have died in detention facilities in north-east Nigeria as the army tries to crush an Islamist militant rebellion there, according to Amnesty International.

                             Most of the dead are thought to be connected to the militant group Boko Haram

The human rights group said some detainees died from suffocation in overcrowded cells, others from starvation and extra-judicial killings.

In the report, it calls for an urgent investigation into the deaths.

Nigeria's Interior Minister Abba Moro has dismissed the report as "not true".

"I want to assure you - this government will not take the lives of any of its citizens... including those who have taken up arms against the government," he told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

A senior Nigerian army officer told Amnesty that at least 950 people had died in military custody during the first half of this year.

Most had been accused of having links to the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, Amnesty said.

Boko Haram is fighting to overthrow Nigeria's government to create an Islamic state, and has launched a number of attacks on schools.

About 50 students were shot dead earlier this month in their hostel, in an attack blamed on Boko Haram.

A state of emergency was declared in three northern states in May - Yobe, Borno and Adamawa - in response to thousands of deaths in militant attacks.

                           Many schools have been attacked by suspected Boko Haram militants

But while most of the recent news from has been about these civilian killings, BBC Nigeria correspondent Will Ross says this latest Amnesty report shines a light on another grim side of life in northern Nigeria.

At times, the number of people killed in these detention centres was so high that there were regular mass burials, Amnesty said.

The BBC has seen photos of bodies reportedly dumped outside the mortuary in the city of Maiduguri by the military.

The bodies showed no obvious signs of having been killed in combat.

Amnesty has called for an urgent investigation, but those who follow events closely in Nigeria will know that such an investigation is highly unlikely to happen, our correspondent says.

- BBC

E - Report! Video: Eedris Abdulkareem ft. Femi Kuti - Fela [Official Video]

Eedris Abdulkareem ft. Femi Kuti - Fela [Official Video]

Kennis Music Presents Eedris Abdulkareem, music video for song titled "Fela" alongside Femi Kuti, this is a tribute paid to an African music legend Fela Kuti.

Dir. Director Frames

E - Report! Axed 'X Factor' Contestant Lorna Simpson Says The Show Is A 'Set Up'

"We've heard it before and it doesn't change a thing missy"

Axed 'X Factor' Contestant Lorna Simpson Says The Show Is A 'Set Up'

After becoming the first 'X Factor' contestant to be voted off this year's series, Lorna Simpson has wasted no time in blasting the show - even claiming that it's fixed.

The singer has accused show bosses of manipulating viewers by editing certain acts favourably.

                                                                             Lorna Simpson

The 26-year-old says she believes she was the first to go because she was given no airtime, was turned into a 'Whitney clone' and made to dress like an old lady.

She told The Sun: It’s unfair. X Factor set me up to go out in the first week. They underplayed me... it was set up.

“They know the outcome of the whole competition. It’s prepared. It’s TV and they have to be ahead.”

"I had some middle-aged woman’s wardrobe. I’m 26! Why are you trying to hide me? You’ve hidden me enough.

"With my styling and being cloned as a Whitney. I’ve done other songs, I’m versatile, but I wasn't able to show the public who I am."

Lorna - who lost out to Shelley Smith in Sunday night's sing-off - is also upset that her arena audition was not televised and the fact she hardly featured in the Boot Camp or Judges’ Houses episodes.

“It was like I jumped from the audition room to Boot Camp," she said. "Of course I sat there with my family ready to watch episodes but my arena audition wasn’t ever shown."

During Sunday night's exit interview, Lorna had remained upbeat, telling Dermot O'Leary: “When you really believe in your dreams they do happen.”

- Huffington Post.