JOHANNESBURG/BENGALURU (Reuters) - Short-term volatility in emerging markets currencies will linger as the jury is still out on the timing of U.S. stimulus tapering...

The Lagos State government on 23 June 2021, threw its doors open to welcome delegates from different parts of the world. The goal of the conference was to facilitate the efficiency of the water sector in the state. But when asked, a typical Lagosian like Isaac Moses said that the last time he drank water supplied by the state’s water corporation was in 1999, when the public water works close to his old compound used to function. The pipes that connect this precious liquid to his compound have remained broken and rusty. Since then, his major source of drinking water has come from boreholes. Lagos is an island city surrounded by water yet, there is very little for the population to drink. At the water conference, the Governor of the State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu disclosed that less than 40 percent of the residents have access to potable water. The World Population Review estimates the population of Lagos at above 14 million. In other words, less than 7 million Lagosians have access to potable water. As of 2016, Lagosians needed as much as 724 million gallons to function efficiently, but the state could only manage to provide 317 million gallons, leaving a gap of 407 million gallons. At the conference, Sanwo-Olu said the state has yet to resolve its sufficiency problem. The Lagos State Water Supply Master Plan said that, current water demand stands at about 540 million gallons daily (MGD) but the Lagos Water Corporation (LSWC) can only produce 210 MGD. Read Also: A case for tackling challenge of potable water supply in Lagos Sadly, not all the 210 gallons of water reach households due to perennial fractures from dilapidated transmission pipes and old trunk lines. Also, the water supply is very erratic and frequently subject to prolonged outages. For the over 8 million Lagosians without access to potable water, it is a public health threat. It is also a threat to environmental sanitation, a challenge the state has failed to address. Apart from that, residents in the state are left with no choice but to provide water for themselves with boreholes. The LSWC estimates that there are up to 200,000 such boreholes across Lagos State. Interestingly, even when they use their money to provide themselves water to drink, some agencies of the state penalise them for it with illegal levies. We believe that with efficient management, Lagos easily can surpass its water target and even position itself as the primary market for supplying potable water to other states in the country. The solution can start from revisiting the Lagos Water Master Plan 2010-2020. One of the failures of that plan was the government’s fixation on funds to revamp water infrastructure. In the current economic climate raising $2.5 billion which is the target, from the state’s budget may not be visible. However, the government can take a different tack to water production, and positioning the sector in such a way that investors can see the value in investing capital, would be a way to address the poor infrastructure. While the proliferation of boreholes has provided some respite for residents, the state requires a permanent fix to the water crisis. This is especially given that borehole drilling is widely unregulated and most of the water that people get from them is contaminated. This is where we think the plan to licence borehole drilling has its merits. Nevertheless, it requires transparency and the goal must be to help Lagos residents get the best portable water. In that sense, licensing should not be an avenue to extort and make access to drinkable water difficult, rather it should be a way to monitor the quality of the water people will drink. It should also be a way to help people live a quality life. After all, as the late afro-beat crooner said, “Water does not have an enemy.”

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The hospitality industry in Akwa Ibom State is experiencing a phenomenal growth that is fast assuming the nature of a revolution. This growth is in tandem with the fact that the state is emerging as a tourism and hospitality destination not only in Nigeria, but also in the West African sub-region. Over 2,000 hotels have so far been registered in the state, to ensure standardization of operations, in order to make them function in line with international best practices. The changing hospitality landscape in the state has come about as a result of the very conducive economic environment the government has created, which has attracted investors from within and outside the state, and in turn spurred massive investments in the hospitality industry. The government’s thinking is that as the state’s private sector investment increases, more and more people will continue to come into the state to take advantage of the opportunities that are available for investment in all sectors of the economy, hence the need to expand the hospitality industry to cope with the expect influx. The impact of the booming hospitality sector in Akwa Ibom is already being felt in the area of job creation, as hundreds of young men and women have been employed to cater to the needs of the growing number of visitors to the state on business and leisure. The development has spurred hospitality operators to embark on training and retraining of staff to enable them to acquire skills that are needed to provide the manpower that is expected in running a specialized industry that operates with the highest standards. Read Also: How Akwa Ibom is leading Nigeria’s agro-industrialisation One of such training organized recently by Tojum Hospitality, an industry expert, involved managers drawn from different hotels in the state, who were taken through all the ingredients that are necessary to ensure efficient management of hospitality outfits, meet international standards and guarantee sustainability, under the theme, “Hotel Sales, Service and Standards”. Leading the effort to develop the specialized manpower that is needed to run the hospitality industry in Akwa Ibom is IBOM ICON Hotel and Golf Resort, the industry flagship in the state. The hotel is currently running an intensive one-year capital development programme that is aimed at converting semi-skilled employees to experts with skills that would enable them to operate at high level anywhere in the world. This is expected to equip them with the knowledge and skill that are required to run the hotel whose partner, the Kenya-based ICON Hotel Group Africa, is a household name in the African hospitality industry. The major benefit of these training programmes is that the participants are indigenes who would be expected to man key positions in an industry that is expanding very rapidly. The state would not find itself in a position in which it would need to look for expertise from outside to run the industry. A middle-level employee who works in a strategic department of the hotel, who is participating in the training programme, is full of praises for the new managers for embarking on transfer of skills to the people of the state. “The knowledge and skills we are acquiring in this programme is going to help us to see our service delivery from a global perspective”, he said. “We are going to see our clientele base as not being the people of Akwa Ibom, not the people of Nigeria, but people from around the world”. The effort to make Ibom Icon Hotel and Resorts a world-class hospitality outfit is going to raise the standard of service delivery in the industry in the state and spur more competition, which is needed to make the industry thrive. This is healthy for the growth of the sector. It would contribute to making the state the hospitality destination of choice, not just for Nigerians from other parts of the country, but for foreigners as well. I cannot rule out the possibility that in the near future, other hospitality operators may look in the direction of IBOM ICON Hotel and Resort as a poaching ground for skilled staff. This would make the hospitality industry in the state to be at par with what obtains in other parts of the world. As the Akwa Ibom hospitality industry expands and becomes more sophisticated, so also will it guarantee employment generation for the youths of the state that come out every year from institutions of higher learning, with the certainty of improving standard of living. It is helping to achieve the job creation goal of the government. A managerial staff at Watbridge Hotel & Suites in Uyo is quite excited about the opportunity the hospitality industry offered her to get a job almost immediately after her national youth service programme, upon graduation with a degree in Geography and Urban Planning from the University of Uyo. “If I didn’t get this job I would probably be in a place like Lagos searching for jobs that are not there, because I have a relative there; or I would be at home thinking of what to do with my life”, she said. With the job, she is able to contribute to the education of a younger sibling who is also in the University of Uyo. She sees the rising number of hotels in the state, especially Uyo, the capital, as healthy for the growth of the industry, because it would make everybody to sit up. “In this industry you must be interested in knowing what other competitors are doing, because nobody wants to be left behind in the competition”, she said. “The patronage is quite high these days, with events taking place in the state almost on a daily basis. People come into the state for conferences, seminars, meetings, weddings, or just visits because of the stories they have heard about the state. There is hardly a time this hotel is not filled up”. At the weekend she spoke, the hotel was fully booked for visitors who came in from outside the state for the wedding of the daughter of a well-known advertising practitioner who hails from the state. Many prospective guests found themselves being turned away. Shola Oyeyemi, a Lagos-based tourism consultant with deep knowledge of the African hospitality landscape and a regular visitor to Akwa Ibom, says the rapid growth of the hospitality industry in the state is an indication of the positive response of investors to the economically friendly environment that has obtained in the state in the last four years. “Those who are investing in the hospitality sector in the state have recognized early the changing economic fortunes of the state, especially with the fast emerging strong private sector which is evident in the rate at which the government is setting up industries”, he says. “It’s like laying the foundation on which other sectors are going to stand. Potential investors coming into the state from other parts of the country and outside the country will need to rely on a strong hospitality sector for the period it would take them to settle down finally to live and do business in the state, or even when on visits”. With what is happening in the industry in the state, Akwa Ibom is certainly on the path to becoming a major hospitality destination in Nigeria, if not in Africa. Ndifreke writes from Uyo

India’s Supreme Court will on Thursday hear journalists’ petitions for an independent, court-supervised investigation into allegations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government misused spyware to surveil opposition politicians, journalists and officials.Traces of NSO Group’s Pegasus software were found on the smartphones of Prashant Kishor, an opposition political strategist, and seven Indian journalists during a recent global investigation by a media consortium into the use of the Israeli-made surveillance tool.The phone numbers of dozens of other prominent Indian public figures, including Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, other opposition politicians, a former election commissioner and officials, and a well-connected businessman, also appeared on a global list of 50,000 people who had allegedly been targeted for potential surveillance by NSO Group’s clients since 2016.The allegations of widespread snooping on high-profile Indian citizens have unleashed a political storm that some commentators have compared to the 1970s Watergate scandal that cost Richard Nixon his job as US president.Pegasus’s maker claims that it sells its military spyware only to “vetted governments” for national security, counter-terrorism and law enforcement. In the weeks since the revelations, Indian journalists and media organisations have filed a number of petitions appealing to the Supreme Court to set up an independent investigation to establish the truth — and determine who authorised any snooping. “It’s not just a matter of my privacy. It’s not just a question of my freedom of expression,” said one of the petitioners, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a veteran journalist whose phone was allegedly compromised by Pegasus. “It raises fundamental questions of the future of the democratic system — not only in India but across the world.”The Editors Guild of India this week filed public litigation. It argued that the alleged use of Pegasus to spy on journalists raised “grave concerns of abuse of office, dismantling of separation of power, infringement of fundamental right to privacy, freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of the press, subversion of the democratic process, and commission of serious criminal offences”.Modi’s government has refused to either confirm or deny whether it is using the Israeli software, although cabinet ministers have insisted that no illegal surveillance has taken place.Government officials and members of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party have boycotted a hearing into the use of Pegasus by parliament’s standing committee on IT, which is led by Congress lawmaker Shashi Tharoor, in a move which in effect stalled that line of inquiry. “It is clear what has occurred was a crime, but you have seen absolutely no attempts by the central government to investigate it,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia-Pacific policy director of Access Now, a global digital rights organisation. “They are seeking to use any tool they can to frustrate inquiries into the Pegasus Project revelations.”Privacy activists and digital rights groups have become concerned by New Delhi’s surveillance of its citizens. In late 2019, WhatsApp notified two dozen Indian activists, scholars and politicians that their phones had been hacked by commercial Israeli spyware. The only entity New Delhi blamed was WhatsApp.“Of all the democracies that we are tracking globally, we are most concerned by the surveillance impunity problem in India,” Chima said. “It’s happening on a massive scale, with even less pretence of conducting an independent inquiry or ensuring this does not happen again.”