The honorable Minister of communications and Digital Economy, Sheik Isa Ali Ibrahim Patami who also doubles as a Muslim Cleric was a awarded the post of professor of cyber security in the Federal University of Technology Owerri  (FUTO) by the school management.

This academic appointment since it was made public  has been a very controversial one as many Nigerians, pressmen, writers, analysts, academicians, commentators etc have been clamoring that Sheik Isa Ali Pantami is not qualified to be appointed to occupy  the position of a professor in any Nigerian University and that the appointment is illegal as it offends the government’s rule that you cannot occupy double position in two federal government parastatals, you will  have to give up one; if the honorable minister wants a job of a lecturer in a federal university, he will have to first resign his current Ministerial job but he is only qualified to be appointed as a senior lecturer and not a professor; the award was a cause of money changing hands and his political influence.

The management of the awarding university in a series of press releases have defended the award of professorship to the honorable Minister, claiming that he  is very much qualified to take up the job as a professor of cyber security in the institution. 

The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) after executive council meeting held on Monday, the 14th of February, 2022 declared that the promotion of the Minister to the role of professorship is illegal and the the minister has no academic qualifications or certifications to be promoted to such a high cadre of academic position and cannot occupy different positions in two different federal government parastatals.

This position of ASUU was made known by the president of the body, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke at the press conference on Monday. He is quoted to have said, “You cannot be a minister and a lecturer in a university. It is an encouragement of illegality. Pantami has to quit as a minister and be tried for doing double jobs within the same federal system. He is not qualified to be a professor in any Nigeria’s higher institution of learning. Isa Ali Pantami should never be treated as a professor.”

The body also resolved to place sanctions on the Vice Chancellor and the entire management of Federal University of Technology (FUTO) that awarded the job of a professor to a man that is fully unqualified to occupy such a role and that he was only appointed because of his political influence.

The Vice Chancellor of the University, Prof. Nnenna Oti, in response to the press release of the Academic Staff Union of University (ASUU)  on Monday, says the management has gone to court over the rejection of Sheik Isah Ali Ibrahim Pantami’s promotion to the rank as a professor of Cyber Security by the institution and that ASUU has no power and right to fault their appointment of any individual to occupy any position in the school. She claimed that the school is an independent body and has the power to appoint, fire or retire any individual in the institution.

Be it an individual or a corporate body, no doubt, at some points in your existence, borrowing becomes a consequential and inevitable approach.

For the umpteenth time, I have categorically made it clear that borrowing becomes necessary if the funds to be assessed would be utilized judiciously; if the funds would be channeled only to the needful.

We must acknowledge that if a certain borrowed fund is utilized judiciously, it would enable the borrower to become financially independent in the nearest future, thereby making him/it to steer clear of borrowing in subsequent time.

The last time I checked, unequivocally, the best way a borrowed fund could be utilized is by investing it, or using it for capital expenditure. This implies that recurrent expenditure shouldn’t in any way warrant borrowing.

One of the basic examples of recurrent expenditure in any society or nation remains payment of salaries or pensions. You can’t borrow in order to pay others or to enable you service some debts; such a step is ridiculous and illogical. Read my lips!

If you borrow in order to settle a certain debt, how do you intend to refund? Obviously, indulging yourself in suchlike practice significantly means you will constantly continue to borrow, come rain come shine.

Aside from the economic implication of borrowing, the social implications are enormous. If you are reckoned to be a borrower, your colleagues or counterparts, as the case may be, would invariably stigmatize you; you might be treated like one who has leprosy. Of course, we are not unaware of the consequences that await someone who suffers from stigma.

Meanwhile, this critique was necessitated by the recent gesture displayed by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) in respect of its apparent soft spot for the various state governments within the shores of the country.

Just a few years back, the President Muhammadu Buhari-led FGN graciously lent more funds to the states, in addition to the ones received in the previous years by the prospective beneficiaries.

According to the said benefactor, the kind move was targeted to salvage the state governments that have been colossally ravaged by the crisis occasioned by the economic turmoil the country was faced with.

It would be recalled that previously, the state governments received a total of #713.7 billion bailout funds from the FGN to enable them pay the backlog of salaries owed their respective workers. It’s noteworthy that the said fund was deducted from the nation’s Excess Crude Account (ECA) otherwise known as National Wealth Fund.

Unfortunately, merely a few months after, the various state governments were still grappling with the same challenges, perhaps owing to the poor monthly federal allocation they were receiving, which was informed by Nigeria’s dwindling oil revenue.

To this end, the FGN decided to release another #90 billion fund, which was believed would immensely assist the states in their bid to be less-dependent on the monthly handout from the federation account.

It’s worthy of note that the fund in question was given in form of a loan, hence fully repayable, although it had a secured tie against future dividends, revenues, or what have you the FG might have owed the states.

At that juncture, any rational being that meant well for Nigeria didn’t hesitate to inquire if these states would continue to receive bailout funds in order to pay their workers and pensioners, because such a step was not unlike robbing Peter to pay Paul.

However, the fascinating side of the FG’s gesture is that, apart from the fact that the loan was given over a period of one year, the states were meant to agree on a good number of conditions before they could assess it.

It might interest you to note that among the total of #90 billion of the second phase of the bailout, #50 billion was shared across the 36 states, coupled with FCT, for the first three months, and then #40 billion for the remaining nine months, which is an average of about #1.4 billion per state for the former and #1.1 billion for the latter. The then Finance Minister, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun disclosed that the idea was to tie states over for a year, so they could rebalance.

Most other uncompromising and laudable conditions meant to be reached by the state governments were, but not limited to, they are to individually: publish their audited annual financial statements within nine months of financial year end, comply with the International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS), and annually publish state budget alongside its implementation performance report online.

Others were: set realistic and achievable targets to improve independently generated revenue and ratio of capital to recurrent expenditure, implement a centralized Treasury Single Account (TSA), as well as establish a biometric capture of all the state’s civil servants to eliminate payroll fraud.

Additionally, the states were to comply with the existing Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) and reporting obligations of the country, to include: no commercial bank loans to be undertaken by them (the states) and routine submission of updated debt profile report to the Debt Management Office (DMO).

Hence, the FGN barred all the commercial banks in the country from giving loans to any state government regardless of the circumstance; the decision was taken in accordance to the Fiscal Sustainability Plan (FSP) of the former.

Undoubtedly, if the above guidelines were to be strictly upheld by the government via the effort of the Ministry of Finance, Nigeria would have been a better place. Suffice it to say that the additional bailout funds would have caused more good than harm in the long run contrary to the ongoing case or situation whereby it is observed the funds ended up constituting greater quagmire in the various states.

Ab initio, the plight with the Nigerian government has been the ability to proclaim a sound policy but failing to implement it as requested. Hence, this very measure was also expected to suffer same fate if the lingered political will the country had been known for wasn’t changed by the present administration.

If the above conditions were fiercely safeguarded, it must have deterred most of the states from assessing the bailout funds, thereby persuading them to concentrate on the needful.

In addition to the conditions, the various governors deserved to unequivocally be thoroughly investigated since it’s apparent the previous bailout funds received by them weren’t judiciously utilized. It’s not anymore news that workers and pensioners in most of these states are still owed till date for several months, if not years.

This is where the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) needs to come in toward ascertaining if the funds were truly used for what they were meant for. We can’t continue to live in the past amid an administration reckoned to be anti-graft.

The most appropriate step the states are individually required to take at this point is embarking on a massive Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) drive. In most of the states, the policies guiding the traffic sector that is meant to serve as a major revenue source are so porous for anyone’s liking.

Similarly, many of them are tourism-oriented, but the governments have refused to look inwards toward revamping the sector; rather, they chose to rely solely on the federal allocation, which is currently wearing a pitiable physiognomy.

So, rather than depending on bailout funds from the FG or keep seeking for loans from the banks, they are enjoined to generate the funds by themselves. They possess all it takes to do so, thus must learn to walk the talk.

We must always take into cognizance that it pays to be a creditor instead of the reverse. The truth is that, if the various governors concentrate only on the needful, they would in no distant time see the ongoing economic meltdown as a blessing in disguise.

Egypt and U.S.-based MoneyHash has raised $3 million in pre-seed funds to integrate payment systems. The company, which describes itself as the Middle East and Africa’s “first super-API for payment orchestration and revenue operations,” just emerged from beta to clinch the deal.

MoneyHash was founded in 2020 by Nader Abdelrazik, Mustafa Eid and Anisha Sekar to take on the gap created by unintegrated payment systems in industries, especially e-commerce.

The startup had previously in June, raised an undisclosed six-figure backed by investors such as Kepple Africa Ventures, LoftyInc Capital and lead COTU Ventures. The Middle Eastern early-stage fund also led this extension, with participation from previous backers in the initial pre-seed round and others like VentureSouq, VentureFriends, The Continent Venture Partners and First Check Africa. Angel investors include NerdWallet’s Tim Chen, Jake Gibson and Belvo’s Oriol Tintore.

MoneyHash said in a statement that it will use the funds to turbocharge its growth in the Middle East and Africa. The company’s plan includes expanding its team, currently 15 across the U.S., Egypt, the UAE, Nigeria and some parts of Europe, and hiring mid-level and senior software engineers.

The goal is to leverage its relationship with companies in providing a simpler payment method that will compress the multiple payment channels into one. Per TechCrunch, MoneyHash sits on top of payment providers and offers its infrastructure as an extension of companies’ product backend. This extension becomes their connection to the entire payment ecosystem in the markets they operate.

“The idea of the super-API is that you consolidate the different payment accounts and build all of these features on top of it. MoneyHash becomes this one-stop-shop product, or payments stack that you put in your product and manage all of these different integrations and checkout experience in each of the African and Middle Eastern countries and have all your information on one dashboard,” CEO Abdelrazik said on a call with TechCrunch.

While MoneyHash was founded in late 2020, the startup started operation in early 2021, in Egypt, when it began allowing 17 companies to use its sandbox environment to connect with its API and access payments gateways such as Fawry, Paymob and PayTabs.

Abdelrazik told TechCrunch that MoneyHash will plug into different payment gateways and processors active in the Middle East and North Africa post-beta. Some include Checkout, Stripe, Ayden, Amazon Pay, Tap and ValU. He said integration with payment providers in sub-Saharan Africa (mainly serving Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa) like Yoco, Paystack and Flutterwave will follow suit.

MoneyHash clients cut across different industries: e-commerce, travel and tourism, and remittances, among others. They can integrate payment providers with a few clicks, embed a unified checkout system, and access micro-services such as transaction routing, subscription management and invoicing on the platform.

Already the startup has five paying customers from the 17 companies testing its sandbox for free. MoneyHash generates revenue by charging companies between $150 and $1,000 per month, depending on the number of payment providers they connect to. The platform also takes transaction fees that start at 10 cents and go down as payments volume increases.

Abdelrazik said MoneyHash plans to become the AWS of payments in the Middle East and Africa. “What AWS did to the cloud, where it made it easy for companies to build as many services on top of the infrastructure, we think the payment industry, especially in emerging markets, is very fragmented and needs an AWS for money, which MoneyHash is doing when you connect with it and build as much as you need without needing to change anything,” he said.