Business
Greeks Resign To €130bn Bailout Bond
Greeks resigned themselves yesterday to a 130-billion-euro EU/IMF bailout that won their country a last-minute reprieve from bankruptcy at the price of a decade of austerity and humiliating foreign scrutiny of national finances.
Agreements among euro zone ministers during all-night talks in Brussels secured a second rescue package since 2010 in return for a new round of spending cuts that have already cost thousands of jobs and eroded public services.
Relief mingled with a sense of shame on the streets of Athens as Greeks who in two months could be choosing a new government digested what the deal means for a country now being treated as the sick patient of the 17-nation currency union.
“We are like drug addicts who have just been given their next dose, this is what they’ve reduced our country to,” Ioulia Ioannou, 70, a retired nurse, said of the country’s politicians.
“I don’t know who I will vote for. I’d vote for a new party if someone had the courage to create one,” said the life-long voter for the ruling Socialist PASOK party, whose popularity has been hammered by the crisis.
“For the first time, I’m embarrassed to say I’m Greek.”
Fellow pensioner Vasia Angelou, born to Nazi occupation of Greece during World War Two and who saw harsh junta rule during the 1960s and 1970s, said the deal at least averted the risk for now of Greece leaving the euro and even the European Union.
“I’m relieved,” the retired advertising firm employee said, according to The Tide source.
“We have lived through worse times in Greece and many people don’t realise life would be much harder if we were kicked out of Europe. I have some hope at least my children’s lives will be better,” she said of two grown-up children studying in Britain.
But the Demokratia tabloid that has run computer-generated pictures of Chancellor Angela Merkel in a Nazi uniform splashed the front-page headline: “130 billion in chains.”
“Salvation under conditions,” ran the headline of the centre-left Ta Nea newspaper in a front-page editorial.
Austerity measures have already triggered mass street protests in Athens and street clashes between security forces and masked youths who this month torched dozens of buildings.
In a possible foretaste of tensions to come, dozens of fuel station owners and truck drivers blocked roads on Tuesday outside a finance ministry building with banners attacking international lenders to Greece as “thieves and smugglers.”
The country’s two main unions, GSEE and ADEDY, called for protests on Wednesday and leftist parties enjoying a rise in popularity said the price of avoiding default was too high.
“The other side of the coin is the disorderly default for the people,” Aleka Papariga, head of the communist KKE party, told a news conference. “A new hell awaits them.”
Lucas Papademos, Greece’s technocrat caretaker prime minister, had told lawmakers to back the deeply unpopular international financial rescue or condemn the country to “uncontrolled economic chaos and social explosion.”
Unemployment has leapt to 20 percent and street crime is up as the Greek economy has shrunk by over 16 percent since a 2008 peak, weighed down by spending cuts, the global downturn and the cost of servicing debt now at 160 percent of national output.
The Brussels deal was only secured after private holders of Greek bonds agreed to take deep losses on their investments and after northern states led by EU paymaster Germany demanded, and won, unprecedented rights to inspect Greece’s finances.
The EU’s executive European Commission arm said it would finalise arrangements this week to send in new officials from other European countries to monitor how Athens acts on agreed reforms, including in sensitive areas such as tax evasion.
“I am embarrassed as a Greek citizen to have a permanent surveillance committee,” said fruit vendor Raptis Michalis.
“It is as if we don’t have in Greece educated and able people to govern the country,” he said, forecasting that Greece would still default on its debt a few months down the line.
A government spokesman said foreign officials would merely offer technical assistance and played down an agreement with lenders to set up an escrow account to ringfence bailout funds for debt repayment. But others were of a different view.
“The escrow account suggests the country is not reliable,” said George Koumoutsakos, a European Parliament deputy for the New Democracy (ND) conservatives in the ruling coalition.
“But I would say that this is not the worst thing. The surveillance mechanism is much more degrading.”
In the lead-up to the vote Greece’s president accused German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble of insulting his nation, reflecting growing public resentment of almost daily lectures from Berlin on the dire state of the Greek economy.
“I cannot accept Mr Schaeuble insulting my country,” said Karolos Papoulias, an 82-year-old veteran of Greece’s resistance struggle against the Nazi occupation and who also played a part in the resistance to the junta.
“Who is Mr Schaeuble to insult Greece? Who are the Dutch? Who are the Finnish?” he said in a speech earlier this month that captured the depth of feeling about foreign intervention in Greek affairs.
Voters’ disenchantment with politicians they blame for years of economic mis-management has sent ratings for PASOK and ND, which have dominated politics since junta rule, to record lows.
A survey by pollster GPO carried out days after parliament’s Feb 13 backing for 3.3 billion euros of new austerity measures, showed the two mustering less than a third of votes between them as small left-wing rivals gained ground.
But separate poll findings that consistently show most Greeks want to stay in the euro zone, together with laws aimed at ensuring that elections create solid coalitions, could still favor the two big parties in elections slated for April.
Two universities in the Niger Delta zone (University of Port Harcourt and University of Benin) have emerged winners of the South-South region in the Nigerian Engineering Olympiad (NEO) competition.
The NEO competition which took place at the Nigerian Content Tower(NCT), headquarters of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board(NCDMB) in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State is a nationwide engineering, innovation and entrepreneurship competition launched in 2025 by a non-profit organization, ‘Enactus Nigeria’, in partnership with NCDMB, Renaissance Africa Energy Company Limited, First Exploration & Petroleum Development Company and the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE).
The two Universities teams represented differently by ‘Inovation team PROTRONICS’ and ‘Innovation team VHORDE’, won their counterparts from the Igbinedion University, Okada, Edo State, Federal University of Petroleum Resources (FUPRE), Effurun, Delta State, and the University of Uyo, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, in the competition showcasing hardware and software prototypes developed to serve as innovative solutions to real-world challenges with specific reference to Nigeria and Africa.
From UNIPORT’s ‘team PROTRONICS’ was an innovation called ‘KEYTRIC’ which the competitors presented as a ‘SMART POWER CONTROL’ that makes electricity usage effortless and automating with the use of an intelligent locking systems.
Team PROTRONICS highlighted high electricity bills, electricity fire risk and expensive smart home and gaps in existing solutions, including costly installation, lack of integration between security and energy, and dependence on the Internet as the reason for their innovative invention.
“Our innovative solution is a smart energy door lock that switches off a user’s electricity supply when they lock to leave the house.
“Our solution saves money on electricity bill, reduces the risk of electric fire accident, and is affordable to everyone”, the Uniport’s team said.
On the other hand, Team VHORDE of the University of Benin presented what it terms Intelligent Real-time Interface(IRIS) which enables visually impaired individuals to gain sight.
They pointed out that there are 4.5 million visually impaired Nigerians who are in some way incapacitated and unable to live life to the fullest.
The students displayed an IRIS pack, consisting sensors, wearable glasses, microphone, camera and Haptic feedback.
On how the IRIS works, the UNIBEN students said the smart glasses, which consist, a camera, depth sensor, and edge Artificial Intelligence(AI) processor, enables a visually impaired person to see and understand the world in real time.
“There’s an AI Compute Unit to be worn at the waist, which runs Convolutional neutral network (CNN) object detection, face recognition, and voice processing on-device”, the team said.
In a section on Business Model and Revenue Streams, the University of Benin competitors indicated production-scale pricing for IRIS Standard as N699,000 one-time purchase.
According to the team, the IRIS standard has the following functions, real-time object and scene identification, familiar face recognition, obstacle and hazard detection (haptic wristbands), natural voice interaction, Edge AI – fully offline core functions, and OTA software updates via Wi-Fi.
In an assessment of the prototypes and demonstrations made, one of the key judges of the competition, Engr. Dokubo Obongo, Manager, Institutional Strengthening, at the NCDMB, described all the presentations as “top-notch”.
He noted that there are solutions that are viable marketwise, relevant to the society and the challenges humans face, explaining that the Engineering Olympiad is a competition targeted at developing home-grown solutions from research and development from Nigerian universities.
“The idea is to see how we can proffer solutions to our own problems which means creating business opportunities”, he said.
Speaking for Enactus Nigeria, the group’s Country Director, Mr. Michael Ajayi, said the two top finalists from the six geopolitical zones would move to a boot camp for further preparation towards the main national championship, and that the best three teams would share N100 million.
He also disclosed that each of the 30 teams that displayed prototype technology in the regional competition would receive N3 million.
Team PROTRONICS of the University of Port Harcourt had as Team Lead Dr. Victor Jinn (Faculty Adviser), while the contestants were Chukwuma Sunday-Odu, Fubara David Otokini, and Ekemini Godwin Akpan, while Team VHORDE of the University of Benin had Anoint Oritsetimeyin Igorki, Oghosa Derick Osarobo, Uti Henry Eworitsewarami, Jada O. Godfrey-Ariavie, Richard O.Enegbuna, Momodu O. Olayemi, and Asemota G. Ayevbosa.
By: Ariwera Ibibo-Howells, Yenagoa
The Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has officially unveiled the Simplified Customs Advanced Declaration System (SCADS) at the international wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja.
The move is aimed at improving passenger clearance, compliance and customs operations.
This was contained in a statement by the NCS spokesperson, Abdullahi Maiwada, and made available to Newsmen in Abuja.
Maiwada explained that the platform, designed to simplify baggage declaration for inbound international passengers, aims to reduce manual bottlenecks, improve transparency in revenue assessment and enhance operational efficiency at Nigeria’s international airports.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony, Deputy Comptroller-General of Customs in charge of ICT/Modernisation, Oluyomi Adebakin, said the deployment of SCADS marked another major step in the service’s digital transformation agenda.
Adebakin said the initiative became necessary to address operational challenges encountered on the service’s previous passenger declaration platform earlier this year.
She explained that rather than allowing the setbacks to slow operations, the service chose to develop a stronger and more efficient alternative.
“When the earlier platform experienced operational challenges, we chose not to see it as a setback.
“We saw it as an opportunity to build something better, stronger and more efficient,” she said.
According to her, the newly introduced SCADS platform allows passengers to declare items before arrival, thereby reducing clearance time while improving compliance and operational integrity.
“For passengers, this system creates the opportunity for advance declaration before arrival. It means faster clearance, easier compliance and smoother movement through our airports,” she added.
Adebakin said that the system would eliminate subjective revenue assessment by ensuring that duties were being automatically generated based on declared items, their quantities and actual values.
“When we talk about revenue collection, it is not about collecting more or less. It is about collecting the right revenue. With this system, assessment will now be more objective, accurate and driven by data,” she said.
Earlier Comptroller Customs Area Controller, FCT Area Command, Victoria Alibo,described the selection of the command for the pilot phase as a vote of confidence in its operational capacity.
Alibo said the new platform integrates passenger baggage and e-commerce declarations into a single digital framework designed to support global Customs best practices.
“SCADS is designed to simplify declarations, reduce clearance time, eliminate manual bottlenecks and align our operations with international standards,” Alibo said.
She said that the pilot phase would run for five days, from May 18 to May 22, during which officers would evaluate the system in a live environment ahead of nationwide deployment.
The event was attended by senior Customs officers, officials of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, partner government agencies, technical teams, and other key stakeholders in Nigeria’s aviation and border management ecosystem.
By: CHINEDU WOSU
Olubiyo, said this in an interview with Newsmen to Monday in Abuja.
He said energy theft occurs at both the consumer and institutional levels across the electricity value chain from generation to transmission and distribution.
According to Olubiyo, at the consumer level electricity theft includes metre bypass, illegal connections and unauthorised access to power without proper billing.
According to him, some customers would dig underground cables directly to their homes or businesses without being metered, while others exploit estimated billing systems to consume electricity without payment.
“Whether through metre bypass or illegal connection, many customers are using electricity for free. That is energy theft,” he said.
He also alleged that institutional energy theft exists within the power sector, particularly through defective, obsolete, or wrongly installed metres used in monitoring electricity generation and distribution.
He said that wholesale metres installed at critical interfaces among generation companies (GenCos), transmission companies, and distribution companies (DisCos) were often out-dated or improperly configured.
He said those could lead to inaccurate readings and inflated subsidy claims.
“If 4,000 megawatts is generated and 7,000 megawatts is recorded, that is energy theft because the excess energy does not get to consumers,” he stated.
The expert further said some operators in the sector allegedly exploit maintenance and repair contracts through inflated contract sums and possible collaboration with vandals.
He also cited the deployment of secure pole-mounted metres in military barracks as an example of how technology can curb metre tampering and unauthorised access.
He, therefore said the sector had to urgently address infrastructure decay, weak regulation, poor investment, and corruption within the value chain.
Otherwise, according to him, Nigeria’s electricity industry will continue to face liquidity challenges, revenue losses and unstable power supply.
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