Economics, my dear Watson

Analogy of the Day: MBAs and EAWs

2012-01-24T13:25:00.000+01:00

I have read these bits of advice over and over again for development types - expat aid workers, academics, and all the rest. Maybe we should remind ourselves of the kind of company we're keeping the longer we keep these bad habits up:

Top 5 problem-solving mistakes by MBA's

“Avoid jargon” ...

“What about the organizational design?” ... A lot of papers identified a bad decision, and then suggested reversing it. But they neglected to address the issue of why the bad decision was made, and how to make sure the same mistakes wouldn’t be made in the future.

“Don’t define the problem as the lack of your solution.” For example, if the problem is “the lack of centralized purchasing,” then you are locked into a solution of “centralized purchasing.” Instead, define the problem as “high acquisition cost” and then examine “centralized purchasing” vs. “decentralized purchasing” (or some other alternative) as two solutions to the problem.

“What is the trade-off?” Every solution has costs as well as benefits. ...

“Which language is this?” I write this when I get gobbledygook written in the passive voice with big words that don't mean anything. ...

(HT: Newmark)

Create value. Make stuff if necessary

2012-01-24T13:07:00.002+01:00

I'm often confused why we celebrate manufacturing as much as we do. The goal is to "create value" for other people as I blogged about yesterday - to serve in meaningful ways. Some services are more urgent than others, some more luxurious, some more faddish, and some of them involve turning one thing into another thing someone wants more than what it used to be. I turn ingredients into restaurant meals, I'm classified as a service worker. I turn metal into injectors, I'm classified as a manufacturing worker. The point is still the same - create value for fellow human beings. Why do we love manufacturing?

An Atlantic article on manufacturing in America has some very intelligent discussion, some of which tries to help me answer this. From the 1940s to 1970s, manufacturing was a pathway forwards and that got embedded into the psyche:

All came to work unskilled, at first, and then slowly learned things, on the job, that made them more valuable. Especially in the mid-20th century, as manufacturing employment was rocketing toward its zenith, mistakes and disadvantages in childhood and adolescence did not foreclose adult opportunity.

But now a hefty part of the growing inequality in the US is from opposing forces:

Economists speak of the middle part of the 20th century as the “Great Compression,” the time when the income of the unskilled came closest to the income of the skilled. ... The double shock we’re experiencing now—globalization and computer-aided industrial productivity—happens to have the opposite impact: income inequality is growing, as the rewards for being skilled grow and the opportunities for unskilled Americans diminish.

And yet, Davidson manages to avoid overly-romanticising preserving manufacturing jobs for the sake of having jobs that very few people aspire to today:

Is there a crisis in manufacturing in America? Looking just at the dollar value of manufacturing output, the answer seems to be an emphatic no. Domestic manufacturers make and sell more goods than ever before. Their success has been grounded in incredible increases in productivity, which is a positive way of saying that factories produce more with fewer workers.
Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing. Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve. Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat. Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to work in factories to make the products we use. In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in a society. When one person can grow as much food or make as many car parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in that society more purchasing power; we all become a little richer. In the economic models, the benefits of productivity growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital. As workers become more productive, they should be able to demand higher salaries.

"Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve." Hence, Tabarrok arguing that India needs fewer farmers.

Create Value, Not Jobs? How about AND?

2012-01-23T16:35:00.002+01:00

Gurri makes a very good point (HT: Cafe Hayek), but one that wouldn't be immediately embraced by people the way it is regularly framed. (It's also not the only good point to be made on the subject, either, but that's another day's lecture.) The issue not "Create value. Not jobs." It is to create jobs of value. It is to enable people to create value and jobs will follow, sustainably. Partly this is semantics, but I think the semantics are important in terms of effecting policy.

It's easy enough to create make-work jobs. Keynes opted for digging holes and filling them up again. Germany (and many others) have expensive humans repave roads poorly that machines could do much better, much faster, and less expensively. While I do believe in the principal of having someone work for what they gain to avoid idleness and the evils of a dole, it ought to be work that makes at least one other person's life better off.

Slightly more tricky is creating make-work jobs that produce something more. India has a number of good programs that create jobs that also produce something of value, for instance.

Among the great things the market does well is reward people for making other human beings better off. If you serve people well, they give you money to continue serving them. The greatest servants can become quite rich (though that is not the only pathway there).

To create lasting jobs, we need to get people in a place where they can create value - make other people better off. That might be through education and training as a private good; that might be through creating a public good (roads that improve market access or agricultural research that improves smallholder productivity); that might be through improving the set of property rights and contract enforcement so the labor market works better with reduced transaction costs so that it becomes more profitable for firms to hire more workers.

Most of the 80% "unemployed" in Nigeria work, but in jobs that create very little value. Gurri warns that in the initial stages, creating an environment that enables workers to create value may also lead to fewer non-jobs even as it creates more "real" jobs.

Certainly technology can and is disrupting human labor markets–but that isn’t going to “further weaken the global economy”. It is going to increase our productivity, make it easier to provide consumers value for cheaper. It will make it hard for people replaced by machines to figure out how they can create additional value, for a time.

But we need to get our priorities straight; what we want to do is help people create value. Unless giving someone a job will enable them to create more value than it costs, the existence of that job is counterproductive.

Conservatism: Cohort effects vs. Aging effects

2012-01-23T13:59:00.000+01:00

Preliminary research based on interviews suggests that people don't really get more conservative as they age overall (HT:MR). It may look that way because older people today are more conservative than younger people. The research argues that what matters is when you become an adult. During the Depression and WWII, the social environment promoted a lot of values today's conservatives value, and the changed environment promotes different values. What happens within the person?

Results, which are just starting to emerge, suggest that each belief follows its own complicated pattern. Seniors seem to have become more liberal about subordinate groups, for example, but more conservative about civil liberties. ... Late in life, [Pillemer of Cornell's] research shows, people often become more open, more tolerant, and more appreciative of compassion. Even if they started out conservative, they may become less extreme in their conservatism.

CBO on the Tobin Tax: "slightly" disastrous

2012-01-23T13:06:00.000+01:00

The Tobin tax would put a very teensy tiny tax on certain kinds of financial transactions. Miniscule really. Hardly worth mentioning. Right, Congressional Budget Office?

As foreign holders of U.S. securities moved their transactions abroad, more of the market could go with them, which could diminish the importance of the United States as a major global financial market ... In the short term, a decrease in investment would lower demand for goods and services and thus reduce output and employment ... The tax might discourage short-term speculation, which can destabilize markets and lead to disruptive events (such as the October 1987 stock market crash and the more recent “flash crash,” when the stock market temporarily plunged on May 6, 2010) The transaction tax would also affect the funding of state and local pension plans ($3 trillion as of June 2011). Besides initially reducing the value of their existing assets slightly, the tax would raise transaction costs for pension plans. Both of those effects would increase required contributions to the plans.

To sum up: recession, send jobs overseas, make Really Big stock market crashes more likely, make it harder for people to save for retirement and taxing the retirement savings of the elderly more than the young, AND mess up the US bond market. Ooh, where can I sign up? /snark (HT: Newmark)

Fuel Subsidy: Success or Failure? UPDATED

2012-01-20T15:04:00.004+01:00

The way Baobab tells the story, Pres. Jonathan caved. He "bowed to pressure" and "buckled." I'm not so sure.

Consider that previous governments have also tried to remove the fuel subsidy and had ~~no successes to show for it. Jonathan accomplished what his predecessors couldn't, a cut in the subsidy by 40-50% and an agreement that further cuts would be sought in the future.~~ UPDATE: yet it has persisted despite the decreases from previous governments. Jonathan's subsidy reduction is the largest in nominal terms, but is only the fourth largest in percentage terms. The very short-lived Shonekan presidency increased the price of fuel 614% compared to Jonathan's request for 110%. More information here.

In my first reaction and in many people's, the government ought to have done things little by little, gradually reducing the subsidy so people had time to react and respond, and could see that (if) he was genuine in channeling the money to health, education, roads, electricity, and other public goods.

But there is a real political economy argument to be made for asking for the full subsidy in the hopes of getting half. People are no doubt happier and more docile today about a price of N97 per liter than they would have been had the government simply announced N97 on January 1.

Baobab could have just as easily said that the opposition buckled because they had demanded removal of all the subsidy and gave up the strike with a 50% increase in the price of fuel. If Pres. Jonathan succeeds in obtaining further reductions, he will have done exactly what I and others asked, gradually phasing them out.

UPDATE: Having found the above source, I am much less impressed about a 50% increase since it is the smallest decrease on record. What I would like to know is what the non-subsidized prices were during those other regimes, though, which Sobowale does not report.

I, Cheeseburger

2012-01-20T13:33:00.000+01:00

As I look forward to possibly enjoying my first pizza of the newly renovated AUN Club kitchen tonight, let us pause in humble reflection on the miracle of markets:

I realized that my prior plan hadn’t been ambitious enough—that wasn’t really from scratch. In fact, to make the buns, I’d need to grind my own wheat, collect my own eggs, and make my own butter. And I’d really need to raise the cow myself ... mine or extract from seawater my own salt, grow my own mustard plant, etc. This past summer, revisiting the idea, I realized yet again that I was insufficiently ambitious. I’d really need to plant and harvest the wheat, raise a cow to produce the milk for the butter, raise another cow to slaughter for its rennet to make the cheese, and personally slaughter and process the cow or sheep. ...

Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.

Remarkably, Jaquith was unaware of the I, Pencil article of which this is one more example. UPDATE: I forgot to mention I, Pizza, the story of the 150 people it takes to take one shot of a slice of pizza being lifted for a commercial.

Analogy of the day: Immigration and cookies

2012-01-20T11:56:00.001+01:00

Wronging Rights has a thought-provoking analogy on immigration. The basic question is whether immigration is a zero-or-negative sum game or a positive sum game. Taub's analogy is that some people think of immigration like love (the more you share, the more you have - a positive sum game) while others think of immigration like a cookie (the more you share, the less everyone else has - a zero sum game). To put in an equation, which side do you think would be bigger:

Gains to immigrants OR losses to recipient country + losses to the families left behind (brain drain)

So the natural answer from an economist is to try to measure the gains and losses. Barro, Card, Clemens, and many others have a slew of literature showing that the gains to immigrants are really big, the losses to host countries are small, and there may even be a brain gain instead of a brain drain. Then we even have Taub and Yglesias arguing the recipient country gains too, so that EVERY term is a gain. Conclusion: immigration is really positive sum. If we're feeling particularly wonkish, we'll even write down a social welfare function to show that if every human deserves equal attention, the gains to poor immigrants are even bigger compared to any conceivable losses to the already-wealthy recipient countries.

Unfortunately, what most people don't tend to do is actually sit down to measure gains and losses and find out empirically whether immigration is like love or a cookie. They use a substitute question, such as how they feel about immigrants, or our burgeoning welfare state, or people getting out of poverty or something else, and from there develop a line of reasoning to justify their emotions*.

This is part of the reason it is so difficult for economists to convince people of the gains from immigration. If people have at heart an assumption that the world is zero-sum because of how they feel about the question, new numbers won't resolve the issue. Put another way, if people assume there is some accounting identity out there that says

Gains to immigrants = losses to recipient countries + brain drain

then new research showing the gains to immigrants are even larger won't convince anyone. They'll just assume that the losses must be larger too. New research on brain gain won't convince them either because it just means losses to the recipient country are even larger than they thought. Combine that with 1) the fact that Americans think there are twice as many foreigners already and 6-7 times as many illegal immigrants in the coutnry as there are and 2) new research showing that correcting that misperception doesn't change attitudes much, and we have a problem. This makes it all the more amazing that Clemens succeeded in convincing the US government to remove restrictions on Haitians coming to the US.

If the real issue is about how people feel, then what needs to change are hearts rather than minds. The research will provide evidence for them to hang their hats on once they've switched over to the Love camp, but by itself won't bring about the change we need.

* - I am not calling all people against immigration racists, though true racists would fall into that category.

A good week for religious thought by philosophers

2012-01-19T12:13:00.001+01:00

Platinga has some interesting things to say about religion in general. First, all of us must accept some things on faith -- logic cannot take us everywhere:

After all, one of the main lessons to be learned from the history of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume is that there don’t seem to be good arguments for the existence of other minds or selves, or the past, or an external world and much else besides; nevertheless belief in other minds, the past, and an external world is presumably not irrational or in any other way below epistemic par.

Are things different with belief in God?
--Philosopher Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, on the faith all of us have

The .Plan also cites the restored Wikipedia on Platinga's arguments regarding the problem of evil and their general acceptance in the philosophical community

Plantinga's argument (in a truncated form) is that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures."
--Wikipedia on an example of progress in philosophy

Then Webb (who is not LDS) comes out with an impressive article on Mormonism. It is impressive partly because of some great one-liners, but more for giving me new and accurate insight into my own religion. First some one-liners:

Deriding Mormonism pulls off the neat trick of making the devout and the godless feel as if they are on the same side. ...
Mormons are more Christian than many mainstream Christians who do not take seriously the astounding claim that Jesus is the Son of God. Mormonism is obsessed with Christ ...
The Book of Mormon has to be one of the most lackluster of all the great works of literature that have inspired enduring religious movements. Yet it is dull precisely because it is all about Jesus. ...
Still, the Book of Mormon raises a question for Christians. Can you believe too much about Jesus? Can you go too far in conceiving his glory?
Mormon metaphysics is ... Christianity divorced from Plato.

The main point Webb draws out that I had not appreciated as much before now has to do with how we perceive matter:

Christianity has always affirmed the goodness of matter and the integrity of the human body, but Mormonism offers that Christian dogma gone mad. For [Joseph] Smith, Christ’s pre-existent form was as physically real as we are today. Christianity teaches that the incarnation happened in a particular place and time, but for Smith, taking Hebrews 13:8 (“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”) very literally, the Son has always been Jesus. The body of Jesus Christ is the eternal image of all bodies, spiritual and physical alike. The incarnation is a specification (or material intensification) of his body, not the first and only time that God and matter unite. Mormon metaphysics is Christian metaphysics minus Origen and Augustine—in other words, Christianity divorced from Plato.

This leads to the only point where I actually disagree with Webb about what my beliefs are:

They also deny the virgin birth, since their materialism leads them to speculate that Jesus is literally begotten by the immortal Father rather than conceived by the Holy Spirit.

We do not deny the virgin birth at all, even if as he says we believe he is the Only Begotten of the Father, and not the Only Begotten of the Holy Ghost. In 1980, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ezra Taft Benson, declared that the virgin birth is "the most fundamental doctrine of true Christianity," and he discusses it at some length.

Webb draws an interesting parallel between Latter-day Saint beliefs about Jesus -- such as that He visited His "other sheep" in the Americas after His resurrection -- with a family's reaction at a funeral, hearing other guests who are not "part of the family" discussing their loved one. The whole parallel is worth reading, but I'm quoting enough of his material as is, so I'll just give the flavor here:

As you eavesdrop on them, you realize they are talking about your grandfather as if they knew him well, yet you have never heard some of the stories they are telling. These new stories are not insulting to his memory, though some ring more true than others. ... The funny thing is, though, that this other group knows all of the stories your family likes to tell about the deceased, and the stories they add to the mix sound more like mythic embellishments of his character than outright lies. Clearly, the two groups have a lot to talk about!

Webb also mentions a debating point, and since he mentions it I thought I would add my version of the standard answer to it:

The Book of Mormon places the birth of Jesus in Jerusalem, much to the delight of biblical fundamentalists who use such discrepancies to score debating points.

The phrase used is the "land of Jerusalem" rather than the "city of Jerusalem." Bethlehem is what we would today call a suburb of Jerusalem, less than 5 miles away. Technically, I live in Jimeta, but I continually refer to it as Yola because that's the capital. There are 5 cities that were absorbed into Eisenhuettenstadt where I lived for a time, and some people were very insistent that they lived in the town that got absorbed rather than in Hutti. I tell people I come from Santa Barbara, not Goleta. Goleta would be more accurate but it is completely unknown. I wasn't born in Los Angeles, but in one of its suburbs, but I still regularly tell people LA.

While I was on a mission in 1998, a group of Baptists came to save the Mormons in Utah. My dad wrote to me about one person's experience. Someone knocked on the door and told the LDS family behind it about this "land of Jerusalem" stuff and that therefore the Book of Mormon was wrong. The family asked their guests where they were right now. "Salt Lake City, of course." "No," came the reply, "You're in Murray." A suburb is a suburb is a suburb. Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which is in the land of Jersualem. The Bible is true and we are "obsessed" about the fact that Jesus is the Christ.

Best of 2011

2012-01-17T14:51:00.004+01:00

Time for some intense naval-gazing. I wasn't going to do one of these, but then I enjoyed others' so much for the posts I missed that it seemed much more interesting.

Top Ten Posts of 2011
1. Google's statement on AUN's amazing internet usage, got a lot of doubting comments and a few defending and very plausible explanations.
2. Nutrition Labeling, describing the new requirement that meat include information on calories from fat.
3. Unemployment: Leads and Lags - Breaking unemployment into separate decisions to hire or fire will give us a better indicator of where the economy is going (has been) than total unemployment.
4. AEA session on agricultural export bans during the 07/08 food price crisis.
5. Microinsurance in Kenya via cellphone
6. My first visit to AUN. Classes will resume Thursday the 24th
7. Low saturated fat diet vs. low simple carbohydrate diet
8. QE2 and food prices - debunking the idea that the Fed is causing global food price inflation
9. Food safety, food movements, and paternalism
10. Lit in Review: Food Demand -- Ethiopia and Speculators
Honorable Mention (because I thought it was fun): The socially acceptable price of fried chicken, also known as the political economy of fast food markets in South Korea.

Top Ten Posts of 2010 (in 2011)

1. My pictures of the Thorvaldsen's Christus and apostles statues, mentioned in a Church lesson this year.
2. Lit in Review: Grossman and Helpman, there has been steady interest in summaries and other papers that make use of the "Pay to Play" model of lobbyists.
3. Food in Africa: Too much and too little discussing the problem of getting food from food-surplus states to food-deficit states. There was never a large spike, but a steady stream of interest throughout the year.
4. High Hopes for Rwandan Agricultural Development
5. Food Security in Nepal which has been of increasing interest lately
6. Cutting Costs Through ... Fonts?? Some fonts go easier on the printer's ink
7. Population Health vs. Individual Health - commentary on macro vs. micro in economics and health
8. Ethiopian Monetary Policy - combines monetary policy, food prices, Ethiopia's development goals (food self-sufficiency), and growth prospects
8. Five from vacation: education, hyperinflation, and Chinese food safety.
10. Fed governor: if we could guarantee 5% NGDP growth, it would be great - I'm glad this made the list because I think it was my most significant post, interviewing Governor Dudley about what they are targeting and Sumner's policy.

Where did my visitors come from in 2011?

Well, mostly the US of course. The Top 10 US States:
New York
California
Texas
Florida
Massachusettes
Georgia
Utah
Washington
Illinois
Virginia and Pennsylvania tie

The Top 10 International States/Districts/Provinces
Ontario (#4 globally after NY, CA, and TX)
London
Adamawa (my new home sweet home)
Ile-de-France
New South Wales
Dorset
Quebec
Delhi
T'ai-Pei
Singapore
with Lagos, Maharashtra, and Nairobi showing strong numbers also

Top 10 Cities (data comes from a different source)
Ithaca (my old home sweet home)
New York City
Jimeta (my new home sweet home)
London
Washington
Lockport
Nairobi
Lagos
Abuja
New Delhi
with strong showings by Los Angeles, Sydney, and Singapore

Understanding Isaiah in South Sudan

2012-01-17T12:01:00.001+01:00

* - This was originally posted January 9, 2011. That post had too many visits from spam engines, so I have reposted it hoping to clear my cache a little.

The referendum on Southern Sudanese independence is today. It is a good day to pray, for all sides.

For those who are unfamiliar with Biblical geography (as I was until I did some searching) when Isaiah was speaking about the land of Cush, he really was thinking about the same neighborhood - Eastern Africa, south of Egypt, Ethiopia in particular which is next door in our modern maps. Chapter 18, which the video cites, speaks mostly of the woe on the "land ... beyond the rivers of Ethiopia" until the last verse, which speaks of their suffering and finally being gathered "to mount Zion." Chapter 11, which references Cush more explicitly, speaks of a second, Millennial gathering of God's people out of Cush and assorted lands to Zion. Zephaniah 3 similarly speaks of people beyond the rivers of Ethiopia being gathered (vs. 10) and bringing offerings to God (vs. 12) in the last days. Any other reference to Ethiopia I find is about it being smitten by Assyria or getting ready to join Egypt in afflicting Israel. So I see a lot more about a gathering out of the area, rather than divinely ordained political independence, but it can't be denied that it's a regular theme of the Old Testament prophets for God's people. [Quick bias check: do you think of them as 'God's people' because the south is mostly Christian or because they could have intermingled with Ethiopian Jews, or can you see the Muslim north as also part of God's people who accept Isaiah as a prophet and are living in the same area?]

Hat tip: Poverty News Blog

Thankful for small favors

2012-01-17T09:50:00.003+01:00

I was introduced to a new term today: Idiocracy (n) - government of the least capable, elected by the least capable of getting a job.

I wondered how to reconcile its pith with the notion of a government of the least capable, elected by the most capable of using public processes for private gains.

Then I saw this comic and smiled at what is missing. Note that the White House, the Congress, and state legislatures are shown packed full of money. "The buck stops here and here and here" indeed. But what is missing?

The Supreme Court. In all the complaints I have heard of that august body, I have never heard anyone claim that it has been or can be bought. Filled with ideologues, all of whom legislate from the bench on the basis of their political leanings, I've heard. Up for sale, no. Today I am thankful for one branch of government that can't be bought.

Drop and give me 20

2012-01-14T16:06:00.000+01:00

I mentioned that there was a police checkpoint with a fairly long line. They checked every car and had the motorcyclists get off their bikes to walk them in. If you weren't holding onto a bike, you had to keep your hands in the air.

I also got some videos of some people who somehow annoyed the guards. Pity the iPad camera can't zoom worth 8 bits of beans. The guards made them frog hop across the road and back again with their hands on their heads. As usual, some of the police stood around with some pretty mean guns, fingers always near the trigger.

We passed through without incident.

One guard threatened to flog a guy with a long, thick looking whip. With our windows rolled up, we couldn't tell what the provocation was, but the guard's intent was pretty clear. The fellow finally complied and frog hopped for a bit, then was allowed to return to his bike without other punishment.

I sit back wondering at the comparative situation. I've complained at the TSA checkpoints before for violating my civil rights. I think that's what it constitutes and I don't believe the US government has the authority to do what they are doing. In both cases there are guys with machine guns staring at me like I'm wearing a shirt from Target because someone else did something heinously wrong. One government lets strangers with minimal qualifications grope me, the other lets strangers with minimal qualifications force me to frog hop. Frankly, I think I'd rather frog hop. On the other hand, TSA isn't allowed to beat me without some pretty serious provocation - I have the protection of at least some law to sue the government back if things get out of hand.

AUN spearheads Adamawa Peace Council

2012-01-13T14:29:00.002+01:00

I am copying an email sent me by the school about a Community Peace Council that brought together Islamic and Christian leaders with government, security, and academic representatives to condemn the recent violence. Among the initiatives they are putting forward is a "Yola Day" celebration, originally scheduled for tomorrow but now postponed for the governorship election. Alhaji Joda, quoted therein, is the Chairman of AUN Board of Directors, among many other notable positions and achievements. The email follows:

A peace-building council, a fresh initiative of the American University of Nigeria to restore communal harmony in Adamawa State, was unfolded in Yola on Tuesday, January 10. Tagged Community Peace Council, the government-backed body comprises the leadership of various interest groups.

The path-breaking meeting was convened at the instance of the AUN board chair Ahmed Joda and the University’s President Margee Ensign following last week’s unprecedented marring of the Adamawa State capital’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of peace in Nigeria’s northeast.

In attendance were religious leaders, business men and government representatives from across the state, including representatives of the Lamido Adamawa, Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) as well as those of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Others are representatives of the Nigeria Police Force, State Security Service, Muslim-Christian Forum, the Muslim Council and the traders’ associations.

These groups jointly denounced the violent attacks in the Adamawa towns of Mubi and Jimeta, especially as the capital Yola has been reputed for peaceful coexistence from time immemorial. They also called for the culprits to be brought to book.

The Community Peace Council will meet again on Saturday, January 14, to discuss further on ways to broker peace among the people in the community. They will emerge at this gathering with youth in their communities to express love, and share in each other’s concern.

Alhaji Joda said the dialogue was set up by the AUN whose duty as a Development University is to help to solve the problems of the host community. “We conceived this idea less than 24 hours ago,” he said and added that the University consulted with the key sectors of the immediate society and found acceptance to form a meeting to discuss the circumstance in which this society has found itself.”

He said unlike AUN, most universities in Nigeria were isolated from the communities by reason of location, and observed that AUN was deeply concerned about the goings on in the state.

“Most universities in Nigeria have been isolated and set up in virgin lands away from the communities,” he said. “This university (AUN) was set up to be a part of the community; this is why we are deeply concerned when certain things disrupt the community.”

AUN President said she received the news of the Adamawa violence with shock while in the United States. “I care deeply about this community and so we’re here at this table to contribute in any way that we can to this important country.”

She identified poor communication gap as one of the huge challenges that must be overcome in order to achieve peace among the people. “When there is this huge gap, rumours rule the day.”

She urged the parties to confront key challenges with purpose even as the American University of Nigeria is willing to partner in making Yola a safe place. “One of the ways we can contribute is by being a broker,” she said. “We are here to ensure that Yola is a safe place where people can find peace, and have respect for one another.”

Some of the factors the parties present blamed for communal clashes were unemployment, poverty, inadequate security, depletion of cultural values, unchecked movement of persons via the border posts, political divisions and lack of information.

Mallam Gambo Jika of Jama'atu Nasril Islam was of the opinion that the perpetrators of the crime were neither Christians nor Muslims within the Adamawa region. “No religion in Nigeria accepts this. We have been living together and even inter-marry.”

Chief Paul Ogbonna urged Nigerians to unite, adding, “the more we come together to know ourselves, the better.”

Bishop Stephen Mamza of Yola Dioscese said the sheer size of Nigeria was no reason to complain about the difficulties and problems facing the nation. “Our country is large but we cannot say because it’s large, we cannot solve our problems.”

Concerned, the groups called on the police and other security agencies to urgently dig deep into the remote cause(s) of the violence that may have sent wrong signals about the people in the state.

Mr. R.M. Haladu of the NPF said the force was concerned within telligence gathered from the community but lamented the attitude of the people toward giving vital information to enable them to act decisively.

At the end of the meeting, the groups agreed on a joint statement condemning the killings in the state and elsewhere in the federation, pledging to work together to build a more peaceful community based on trust and understanding.

Toward the success of the emerging partnership for the sustenance, AUN will contribute literacy and enlightenment programs, scholarships as well as research programs on conflict resolution through development.

One week later in Jimeta

2012-01-13T14:00:00.002+01:00

One week after the shooting in Yola and on the 4th day of the fuel subsidy strike, the Yola-Jimeta area is remarkably quiet. My family went shopping and saw that there were far fewer vehicles on the road, many shops were closed - in some cases whole streets of shops gated and locked up - and the main market itself was quieter than usual, though there still a decent amount of traffic around the stalls. It was very strange to see so little activity.

I carefully wrote down the prices of everything we bought and noted that nothing had gone up significantly. The small pouch of water that in other cities had doubled or trebled in price was still the same N5 as ever. Our huge block of mozzarella cheese was even down N500 since last time.

There were two big differences. Faro Water, the local bottling plant owned by AUN Founder Atiku Abubakar, has joined the strike, so there were no refill water jugs. One shop did still have cartons of water bottles we could buy.

Second, a couple key intersections now sport dedicated police searching every car. Each motorcyclist had to stop, dismount, and walk their bike through. Pedestrians passed with their hands in the air. Each car had to show what was in the trunk and sometimes answer questions. I may post some of it later. Most of the travellers, and our driver, laughed at most of it.

The road to the church where the shooting took place is blocked to all traffic.