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The International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) managing director Christine Lagarde met with President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday as part of a four-day visit to Nigeria. Lagarde dismissed suggestions that she was visiting Nigeria to agree a new IMF loan for the country, which has been hit hard by the global slump in oil prices. Her visit comes at a time of economic scrutiny in Nigeria. It is only a few weeks after Buhari’s first budget, in which he announced huge increases in capital expenditure and foreign borrowing as Nigeria tries to move away from its dependency on oil. As well as her discussions with Buhari, Lagarde is due to meet with Nigeria’s Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun and address the National Assembly on Wednesday afternoon. Newsweek spoke with experts to look at what the Nigerian government and Lagarde might discuss. Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now 1. Lifting foreign exchange restrictions In a bid to deal with falling oil prices—which had hit as low as $39 a barrel in December 2015—the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has taken several steps to reduce access to foreign currency and retain the value of the naira. These include restrictions on the importing of 41 categories of items—which covers hundreds of arbitrary items, from soap to toothpicks—that could leave Nigerian companies without adequate raw materials to make their products. “This is obviously not what the IMF, or any free market-oriented economist, would advise the Nigerian government to do,” says Malte Liewerscheidt, senior analyst on Nigeria at U.K.-based risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. Indeed, the IMF has been openly critical of measures the CBN has taken in recent months and Lagarde is likely to ram this point home in her meetings with government officials and stakeholders. 2. Scrutinizing the budget In his maiden budget announced on December 22, 2015, Buhari announced plans to raise spending by 20 percent in 2016, with $31 billion going towards improving infrastructure and the economy. The Nigerian president said he would seek 900 billion naira ($4.5 billion) of overseas funding and claimed that oil would make up just 820 billion naira ($4.1 billion) of the 3.9 trillion naira ($19.6 billion) forecast for 2016. “Everyone agrees that the revenue assumptions are a little bit optimistic,” says Manji Cheto, vice president of political risk analysts Teneo Intelligence. “Nigeria has not particularly had a great history in non-oil revenue accumulation so obviously that’s a major downside risk.” Following her meeting with Buhari on Tuesday, Lagarde tweeted that she was “impressed” with the government’s response to low oil prices, but the challenge, according to Cheto, will be whether the budget can actually be implemented. 3. Ending corruption in the government Buhari was elected on a pledge to stamp out corruption in the Nigerian government and recover billions of dollars allegedly misused or stolen by previous government officials. He has taken a number of steps in this direction, notably the arrest of Sambo Dasuki, Nigeria’s former national security advisor, on charges of allegedly stealing $2 billion of government funds earmarked for arms to fight the militant group Boko Haram. A December 2015 report by corruption watchdog Transparency International, however, found that 75 percent of Nigerians believed that corruption in the government had increased over the past 12 months. Lagarde praised Buhari’s “very important” fight against corruption and encouraged the president to deliver upon his ambitious agenda. 4. Boko Haram’s impact on the economy As well as its human cost, Boko Haram’s six-year insurgency in northeast Nigeria has had a devastating economic impact on the country. Kashim Shettima, the governor of the militants’ home state of Borno, estimated in September 2015 that the cost of rebuilding infrastructure destroyed by the group would exceed $1 billion. Boko Haram’s attacks have internally displaced more than two million people, whom Buhari pledged would start returning to their homes in 2016. But as long as Boko Haram is still active and capable of carrying out attacks, the issue of rebuilding the northeast will remain unresolved. “Unless they can get a degree of stability in the north, the question of economic development is not a question at all,” says Cheto. |
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In 1998, if Congress hadn’t extended copyrights by 20 years, George Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue," Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind would all be in the public domain. This year, the comic book characters Superman and Batman would be free to use by anyone. Meanwhile, movies from 1940–like Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath–would have been slated to enter the public domain at the end of 2015. Instead, all of these works–and tens of thousands more–remain firmly under copyright at least until 2019. Surely, we’ll see another effort by those in the copyright extension camp to lengthen the term yet again. Why does this matter? Well, how would you feel if you needed to obtain a license from a copyright owner in order to read a passage from the Bible to your church group? Or if before you could ride your bicycle you needed a license from descendants of the inventor of the wheel? Keep up with this story and more by subscribing now We all take for granted the right to use certain pieces of our cultural heritage, like the Bible. And we’re able to freely use these products because property rights for information–such as patents and copyrights–are constitutionally required to exist for a only limited amount of time. Then they enter the public domain, which means that no one has exclusive rights to control their copying, performance, use, sale, or modification. Ultimately, extending copyrights prioritizes the desires of special interests (usually corporations or distant descendants of creative authors) over the value to the general public, which could otherwise access materials for lower prices, while being offered a wide range of derivative works. What’s lost by extending the length of copyright? Look at the wheel. A great invention, it has served for millennia as the foundation for an abundance of subsequent products. A perpetual property right in the wheel inventor’s name (had there been a patent system back then) would mean that some distant descendant would still control its use and sale. That would obviously be ridiculous, but many have called for perpetual copyright rights. Of course, it’s important to provide an incentive for creative people to invent things like the wheel–and an exclusive right to exploit serves as that incentive: The inventor reaps his or her reward during a period of time, and thereafter anyone is free to use it and to improve upon it. But tying up the ability of others to use it inevitably hampers further development–all for the sake of benefiting the owner of the exclusive rights. The same is true for works of authorship protected by copyright. We recognize exclusive rights for authors to give them an opportunity to reap economic rewards from their creative contributions to our culture. When the copyright expires, the work then becomes available for anyone to republish or reshape. That can mean lifting characters to use as a premise for a new work; just last month it was reported that former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would be publishing a book with Mycroft Holmes, the older brother of Sherlock Holmes, as the protagonist. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen and Mark Twain may be rolling in their graves over some of the recent derivative works that have been based on their books (such as PD James's “sequel” to Pride and Prejudice, Death Comes to Pemberley). But this is how both our technology and our culture progress. The free market and current writers and inventors–rather than distant descendants of earlier authors–are better determinants of what kinds of new works based on our cultural heritage are made and distributed. Sure, this will inevitably lead to cheap knock-offs; but it also allows for the addition of some outstanding new derivative works. The entrance of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden into the public domain resulted in an explosion of new book, film, and stage versions–even cookbooks. Although Disney strongly pushed the term extension to protect its copyright on Mickey Mouse, the mega media corporation’s reliance on public domain stories is well known. What if Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame were still under copyright when Disney made its movie? Hugo’s heirs denounced the film as a “commercial pillage of heritage.” Would those heirs have licensed without also demanding editorial control? No one can say, but Disney was able to produce the film for public consumption without any interference, because no license was necessary. If the public loses, who wins? Nearly everyone sees the need to allow improvement on creative technological inventions, so the term of patent protection is relatively short (now 20 years from the date an application is filed). The term of copyright, however, is another story. While in 1790 it was only 14 years (renewable for another 14 years if the author was still alive), this span has steadily increased. An additional 20 years were added to the term in 1998, making it 95 years for works created before 1978 and all works “authored” by corporations. For works of human authorship created after 1977, the copyright was extended to 70 years after the death of the author. Copyright is a creature of statute, so Congress–through legislation–establishes the rules, subject only to constitutional constraints. When Congress increased the term from 56 years to life-plus-50 years in 1978, it argued that this would allow the U.S. to join the Berne Convention–-the major international treaty on copyright. But why did Congress increase the term again just 20 years later? It had nothing to do with current or aspiring authors (had that been the case we would have given the extended term only to new works). Instead, corporate owners of valuable copyrights, such as Disney’s interest in Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, and descendants of authors, like the Gershwin Family Trust, saw the imminent possibility that some of their royalty stream would dry up. They could afford to lobby heavily and they did, successfully keeping the congressional proceedings under the radar until the legislation passed. This is far from a zero sum game: The general public lost vastly more than the special interests gained. But the politics are such that concentrated interests have the lobbying power. Those in favor of extension argued that it was necessary to “harmonize” our term with the European Union’s. In reality, old works like Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue" and characters like Mickey Mouse slated to enter the public domain were the only works supporters were interested in. Plus, how can Gershwin’s work be harmonized if it’s already in the public domain almost everywhere in the world except the United States? Some other (bogus) reasons cited: a desire to provide for “two generations of descendants” (which fails to explain why a corporation like Disney needed an extension), and a means to further incentivize authors (would John Grisham stop writing books if the copyright would expire 50 years after his death, rather than 70?). Supporters also cited longer life spans as a reason for extending. But as Justice Breyer pointed out in his dissent, longer life spans automatically increase the span of the copyright under a life-plus-50-year term. Not surprisingly, greed is a factor. If George Gershwin’s grand-nephews and other distant descendants want a continuing stream of royalty income, they ought to write some music themselves. I, for one, would gladly recognize that copyright. (Listening to their music, however, would be another matter.) Dennis Karjala is Jack E. Brown Professor of Law at Arizona State University. This article first appeared on The Conversation. Tags:m2m-iot, smart-vending-, touchscreen-vending, cloud-vms, telemeter, vending-telemetry, cashless-vending, light-industrial- |