The recent commemoration on October 19 2009 of the death of Dele Giwa , the late editor-in-chief/co-founder of Newswatch Magazine, who was killed by a parcel bomb 23 years ago while at the heart of investigating one of the deeds of the then military regime of Ibrahim Babaginda, again brought back to life one of the many uncommon roles played by Gani Fawehinmi in the life of a nation before he was carted away after a protracted struggle with lung cancer on the 4th of September, 2009. The ceremony held at the auditorium of the Lagos Television (LTV8) was organised by a collection of individuals tagged the Friends of Fawehinmi (FoF). Gani was the late journalist’s lawyer and he was in the fore-front of the crusade to unravel who killed Dele Giwa; he had raised accusing fingers toward the direction of Gen Babaginda and those of his military intelligence aides: Cols. Akilu and Togun.

Introduction

Like a thief in the night, crisis in Nigerian financial sector entered when Nigerian bourgeois think-thanks least expected it. When the crisis first showed its naked faces, it was fiercely denied, being extremely superstitious set of people, the bourgeois economists refused to acknowledge and talked about it. They simply rejected it in Jesus name!

Unfortunately, truth is a stubborn thing; whether you acknowledge it or not, the truth will always catch up with you. Suddenly, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor, (Lamido Sanusi) publicly lamented the imminent collapse of the entire Financial Sector, immediately 420 Billion Naira was coughed out within seconds to bail-out five of the threatened banks, not long after, another 220 Billion Naira dolled out for another three banks. Recently, another $2 Billion (Over 300 Billion Naira) was injected to re-inflate the economy. Close to a trillion Naira already dropped, but instead of the situation improving, it is rather deteriorating. All the Bank directors and executives of the affected banks have been severally harassed and legally challenged, all the debtors prosecuted, but is this crisis caused by the misdeed of some individuals as its been advertised or it is a crisis of Capitalism? Is this crisis avoidable under capitalism or it is inevitable outcome of this barbaric, blood sucking, all for profit systems called Capitalism? These are few of the issues look into by this article.

INTRODUCTION

When president Umaru Yaradua assumed office in may 29^th 2007, one of his promises to the nation was to improve the electricity generation in the country, he even went as far as saying that he is going to declare a state of emergency in the power sector. But after more than 2years the situation is even worse than before.

The installed generating capacity in Nigeria is about 6000MW, presently the electric energy output for the whole country is less than 1000MW, a quantity that is insufficient for even a state like Lagos. Most generating plants are old; there was no new infrastructure for over a decade now despite rapid population growth and rising demand for power. One wonder how the government wants to actualize its vision 20:20:20 without power.

With a population of over 140million people, how much energy do we really need in Nigeria? To answer this questions, one will need to compare our per capital production of electrical energy with other nation like USA and South Africa. USA is producing almost 570billion KWH and South Africa is producing 200billion as at 2001, if Nigeria were to produce electricity at the USA rate of 12.7bilion KWH per million people, then with a population of 140million people , we should be generating 174,000MW of electricity. Whao! We still have a very long way to go.This situation has caused many factories to close down because of high cost of running generating plant leading to mass lay-off of workers and subsequently increasing the rate of unemployment and insecurity.Many people have equally lost their lives as a result of inhaling the fumes from the generating plant as each household, market etc has now turned to power generating unit to cope with the bad situation.