Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said he will soon be replaced in his role as the CEO of the social media company, shifting his focus on his electric vehicle company Tesla.

Musk is making organizational changes that he believes will transform the social media platform. Since he completed the company’s acquisition late last month, the world richest man has sacked more than half of Twitter’s 7,000 workforce, raising questions about the sustainability of the country.

But Musk said on Wednesday he expected to reduce his time at Twitter and eventually find a new leader to run the social media company. He added that he hoped to complete an organizational restructuring this week.

Musk made the remarks while testifying in a Delaware court to defend against claims that his $56 billion pay package at Tesla was based on easy to achieve performance targets and was approved by a compliant board of directors, per Reuters.

Twitter has been greeted with a lot of controversies following the changes introduced to the company by Musk. The changes, which include the controversial introduction of the $8 verification check, have questioned Musk’s ability to run the company.

But Musk said in a tweet that he will continue to run Twitter until it is in a strong place, though it will “take some time.” His tweet came after former CEO Jack Dorsey said that he will not accept the role of Twitter CEO, in a response to a Twitter user who asked if he would take the position of CEO.

Musk earlier admitted that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months but promised that “we will keep what works & change what doesn’t.”

Musk is spending a lot of time on Twitter trying to implement the changes that will make the platform what he wants it to be. Earlier this week, he sent a late-night internal email to Twitter employees, demanding that they sign up to “extremely hardcore” work, which will keep them at the office most of the time, or walk away with their three months’ severance package.

“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore,” Musk wrote in the memo. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

However, his commitment to Twitter’s success is increasingly becoming a challenge to Tesla and the electric vehicle’s investors are getting worried that it will affect the growth of the company.

Tesla has been a big victim of Musk’s Twitter adventure. The leading EV company lost more than $400 billion following the controversy that rocked Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter. He said he will cut his time at the social media company as soon as the initial workload reduces.

“There’s an initial burst of activity needed post-acquisition to reorganize the company,” Musk said in his testimony. “But then I expect to reduce my time at Twitter.”

Amidst Nigeria’s increasing public debt profile, the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, has once again decried the country’s fuel subsidy.

The Minister, describing the government’s borrowing to pay for fuel subsidy as ‘double jeopardy’, said the federal government is determined to end it this time. She said this on Tuesday during a press conference to mark the end of the 28th National Economic Summit in Abuja.

The federal government had earlier this year announced that it plans to end the subsidy by June 2023, which will run into the coming government.

The debate around the removal of the subsidy has lingered for so long due to lack of political will by the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to do it.

The more it lingers, the more it consumes scarce resources, resulting in huge deficits in budget implementation and more public debt. The fuel subsidy gulped N2.565 trillion between January and August 2022. It also is expected to consume a large sum from the budget until mid-next year. According to the Medium-Term Expenditure Framework, the Federal Government proposed to spend N3.3 trillion on fuel subsidies between January and June 2023.

The federal government’s lack of political will to remove the petroleum subsidy is masterminded by factors headed by opposition from labor unions and civil rights groups. This is because the government doesn’t have a clear-cut plan on how to cushion the effect of economic hardship the subsidy removal will unleash on the masses.

Though she said the removal of fuel subsidy is part of the FG’s medium-term plan in the budget, Ahmed also acknowledged that how to go about it poses a big challenge.

“First, we have to engage. We have already engaged with the states and the public before it was approved as part of the medium-term plan.

“We have to do it by systematically informing the citizens about the size and the quantum of the fuel subsidy. We also have to educate them about the opportunity cost of what we are unable to do because of the fuel subsidy,” she said.

Nigeria’s total public debt profile stood at N42.8 trillion as of June 2022, according to the latest report from the Debt Management Office. This does not include the N22 trillion from the central bank’s Ways and Means lending to the federal government. The minister said the fuel subsidy, in addition to the budget deficit, is putting enormous pressure on the “fiscals”, forcing the federal government to borrow more.

“It is not money that we have; it is money that we have to borrow to maintain the fuel subsidy.

“Some countries introduced subsidy during the COVID-19, and because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but they are using their money to fund such subsidy.

“In our case, we are borrowing to pay the subsidy; that is double jeopardy. It is something that has to stop. We are glad that majority of people in decision-making positions, including the political parties, have agreed that subsidy is not sustainable.”

Lao Tzu was first introduced to me by my mentor, Professor Oka Martins Obono of the department of Sociology at the University of Ibadan. That was several years ago when I was about to graduate from the said university.

That particular moment with Prof. in his bookish house was his personal way of sending me off to the world.

After a lengthy conversation with Prof. about my bourgeoning book which I’d shared with him, he went to his inner room and returned in a jiffy with a couple of books in his right hand. One was Lao Tzu and the other was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. Then he said to me, I want you to read these books with the fullness of your heart.

“You seem to write like this guy” he said to me, pointing at the word Lao Tzu engraved in a scanty, handy book he held in his left hand. “Your idea is similar to his Tao” he remarked. Then I got curious.

Shortly after that encounter, I briefly read Tao te Ching and I never went back to Lao Tzu again until three years after when an avalanche of conflicts forced me to go to the bookshop and fetch the Art of war by Sun Tzu, an excellent dissection of life from both symmetric and asymmetric lens as well as dialectic and systematic point of views.

Life indeed is warfare. Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a legacy of the ancient wisdom that gives meaning to life and its diverse phases of conflicts or warfares as the case may be. Read by millions of knowledge seekers and translated from its original Chinese text to thousands of languages across the world, the masterpiece by Sun Tzu has inspired several modern thinkers.

The Art of war generally talks about the importance of seeking knowledge and the advantage that emanates from a careful and systematic appraisal of one-self and one’s circumstances in relation to the individual’s conflict(s). Sun  Tzu proposed knowledge of the self and of the environment including life’s pattern of events as fundamental skills one requires to adapt in life. He contextualized this in the military life.

The general who leads the army must be able to understand himself and the condition of his army from the perspective of the whole which is the interconnection of all the elements, forces or details that make up the war situation.

The five rules of success

First is the Tao. This is universal or collective knowledge attained by virtue of putting all things related to one’s situation in perspective. This helps the individual to attain a broad and wholesome view of the situation. According to the writer, Tao, is the collective goal that brings the people in sync with their leader. It is also what brings the individual in consonance with the universal plan or the natural order of things.

The second and the third rules are intertwined. They include the ability to recognize external forces that could impact one’s condition, the patterns of these forces and how they can be used to one’s advantage. The material and the non-material existence, external to the self, can be used to one’s advantage and against the enemy. Thus, the external facts can be seen as either a means or an obstacle.

The fourth is about the leader himself who must characterize knowledge, trustworthiness, courage, and strictness. Apart from having knowledge of the self and his circumstances, the general or leader must be able to demonstrate this awareness in his day-today life through discipline. This brings about trustworthiness in him. Then he must have the courage to always act his words and be strict in upholding the laws and consequences of his action.

The fifth is having mastery over the method or approach being used to influence one’s survival in one’s environment or situation. A keen observation of and familiarity with the pattern of life as well as one’s disposition enables the general to know the right methods or approach to take in dealing with similar situation or event. This is what enables one to develop expertise in a particular field.

The general or leader must be able to take cognizance of all the aforementioned in order to emerge victorious during crisis.

Key questions to ask to attain enlightenment and victory include the following:

What is the situation? What is the broad view? What is the individual role within the broad view? Are we at advantage or disadvantage? How can we utilize the situation to our advantage?

After critical examination of one’s situation, one must act in accordance with it, and develop them into a powerful force that invariably influences positive results when deployed. This is reaching Shi, which is like rolling a rock downward from thousands of meters of height away.