I don’t think the confraternities in Nigeria are the same. At least they don’t share hostel bed spaces to students and aren’t recognized by school administrations. In most Nigerian schools, you’d actually be expelled if evidence of your membership of any of these secret organizations surface.
Why are all the commentaries in the article claiming an information vacuum coming from people in the West. They all claim an information vacuum of some sort around Xi while people with ties to China claim otherwise. Why no comment from anyone from Taiwan. Personally, I have observed that US has been arming Taiwan with so many senior US politicians visiting a supposedly breakaway province of China frequently.
I think that if the Taiwanese declare independence, there will definitely be a war. Whether or not it’s the US who pushes them to it, I don’t think it would matter.
We buy used recent Corollas (4-5 years) at around $25-30k in my country. If it’s cheaper than that, it’s probably a salvaged vehicle or it a stolen vehicle from Canada or something. New Corollas cost around $40-50k.
The Chinese vehicles are now replacing those used cars. They cost $20-25k new and come with all the bells and whistles you wouldn’t get from Toyota.
They are also assembled locally so, supports and parts are not a problem.
The arbitrary partitioning of Africa still has long lasting negative consequences… for the Africans till date.
I still don’t understand how the Article is myopic. It seems to capture contemporary history of the cause and effect of the US “War on Terror”.
Incidentally, US is mostly immune from the effects of their actions halfway around the world.
On Libya, the whole of the Sahel in Africa is still suffering from the effects of the arms proliferation that arose from the sudden removal of Gaddafi.
It seems, either the leaders over there are not thinking through the longer term effects of their actions or it’s by design and working as intended.
Not to excuse incompetent leadership, of which we have a lot in Nigeria. However, for more context, Nigeria allows its citizens to have domiciliary (foreign currency - USD, EUR, GBP, etc.) accounts locally. You can/could walk up to the numerous bureau de change operators (approximately 5000 licensed ones until last week - reduced to around 1000) and buy USD with your naira at whatever the real market rate was (not the official rate) and go deposit it in your dollar account. These accounts are part of the SWIFT banking network, and you can send and receive FCY globally. The crypto issue arose from P2P trading platforms manipulating the rates through ads on said platforms without any intention to honour those prices but typically set up to drive the market towards a particular price point. This began a cycle, and within a few weeks, the currency lost 40% of its value. There was a local news article about this manipulation. I don’t think any government would fold its hands in such circumstances.
Maybe I was too quick to jump to conclusions, but honestly I am extremely skeptical of that explanation. Governments always want to blame speculators (see also CEOs and share price drops) but nine times out of ten it's because the price was too high in the first place (see also Soros and GBP in 1992).
Speculative attacks are the result of not charging for liquidity. It's kind of like renting out an apartment for free. Why complain about squatters if you are letting them in for free? If you charged for liquidity all the squatters would be gone and you wouldn't be surprised by sudden changes in vacancy rates as squatters move to a different city.
But "logic" dictates that no such fee must be allowed to be charged. After all, think of all the poor poor people who would no longer be in debt, they might have to pay a miniscule portion of it! Can't have that.
Was the government not manipulating the price of the currency to be artificially high? It sounded like the crypto allowed the price of the currency to fall to its actual value.
