E - Report! Davido - Skelewu ( Official Video)

HKN Music Presents the video to Davido's Global Monster Hit "Skelewu" Song produced by HKN's very own Shizzi.
#ff On Twitter @iam_Davido

Video Directed By Mr Moe Musa @mrmoemusa
Video Produced By Tunde Babalola @tundephoenix
Production Company: Phoenix Global Media @PhoenixmediaUK
Shot In London, UK.

E - Report! Bolt could face Olympic ban

Jamaica’s  athletes, including sprint star Usain Bolt, could be banned from major events like the Olympics due to the country’s  handling of recent drug scandals, according to Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph.

World Anti-Doping Agency President John Fahey, in an interview with the paper, accused Jamaica of “farcical” behaviour in its attempts to defer an extraordinary audit of its anti-doping programme until next year.

This followed an invitation to WADA by  the Jamaican  Prime Minister to investigate revelations from the former Executive Director of the Jamaican Anti-Doping Commission  that it conducted no drug tests in the five months leading up to last year’s London Olympics.

But JADCO’s suggestion that it  would talk to WADA next year infuriated anti-doping chiefs.

If Jamaica are  deemed to be non-compliant with the WADA code, their athletes could be banned from major competitions until the situation is resolved even though the likes of multiple Olympic champion Bolt have never failed a drugs test.

“The current position is unacceptable to WADA and we’re not going to take it lying down, their suggestion that they’ll talk to us next year,” said Fahey.

“To suggest to WADA they’re not ready to meet with us to talk about their problem until sometime next year is unsatisfactory, it’s totally unacceptable to me and we shall act appropriately within an appropriate time frame.”

Asked if Jamaica would be declared “non-compliant”, Fahey said, “There are a number of options.

“You can read into that exactly what those words are likely to mean but I don’t want to flag it up.”

WADA said in August it was standing by to help Jamaica resolve their problems in the wake of the doping scandal involving former 100m world record-holder Asafa Powell.

The global anti-doping agency had then called for urgent action on the concerns raised by former Jamaica anti-doping chief Renee Anne Shirley over flaws in the country’s drug testing programme.

JADCO chairman Herb Elliott responded to Shirley’s revelations by labelling her a “Judas” and a “bit demented”.

He insisted Jamaica’s drug-testing procedures were in line with international standards and said of the proposed WADA inspection.

The Hidden Indicators of a Failing Project

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, recounts a bit of a planning pickle he and his Israeli Ministry of Education colleagues encountered when estimating how long it would take to complete a high school textbook on judgment and decision making.

When the group estimated how long it would take to get the book done, the average wound up being two years. But when Kahneman pressed their curriculum leader to compare their team to other teams in similar situations, something a bit concerning happened: when the leader drew on his knowledge about similar teams and working on similarly big projects, he concluded that his team was slightly below average when it came to their skills and resources. He estimated that 40% of comparable projects failed, and for the teams that did finish, it took about seven years.

Even more concerning was the fact that until Kahneman prompted his colleague, “there was no connection in his mind between his knowledge of the history of other teams and his forecast of our future.” And even after the connection was made, the team didn’t alter their project plans in the slightest.

Eight long years later, the book was completed. It was never used by the Ministry of Education.

If big projects aren’t at the forefront of your mind due to coverage of HealthCare.Gov’s rampant problems, they probably are because you’re actually working on one. And while there’s ample debate about what went wrong with the former (consultants! government! code! all of these things!), Kahneman’s tale points to another factor that may have played just as big a role: misperceptions, insecurities, and communication difficulties that often take place on project teams.

Truth be told, no one wants to be the person to pipe up and proclaim, “this massive project we’re betting our business on isn’t working, and here’s why.” According to Matthew McWha, the practice manager at CEB, a member-based advisory company, the culture of project management often discourages the raising of important red flags that could turn problem projects around.

“There’s a lot of perceived personal risk in saying, ‘I’m managing a failing project,’” he told me. “Or people actually think they can turn it around, so they don’t bring it up. They think they’re better off trying like the dickens to recover it in the meantime.”

McWha calls this a “watermelon project”: nice on the outside and one big mess once you cut through the surface. And if you think you can identify these projects in your company, forget it. “We think, based on our research, that a significant percentage of a portfolio that consist of watermelon projects don’t actually show up as troubled by conventional definitions,” he says.

Aside from human tendencies to self-protect and see themselves as the exception to the rule, the wrong project metrics are often being tracked — and they’re being tracked in the rear-view mirror. Too many projects measure success based on two metrics: time and budget. While these are important factors — research from Bent Flyvbjerg, author of Megaprojects: An Anatomy of Ambition, and his Oxford colleague Alexander Budzier identified time as the “the biggest factor and largest constraint” for tech projects in particular — they may not actually add up to what McWha defines as success: realizing your business outcomes.

The rub is that it’s easy to measure time and budget quantitatively; it’s not always so easy to measure business outcomes or whether you’re on the right track to meet them.

So how should you approach big projects differently? McWha offered a few suggestions based on research he’s conducted for the CEB PMO Leadership Council, analyzing over 100 large organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenues:

Check and Revise Your Business Case Regularly. Because markets and competitive environments change, you should always revisit what, exactly, you’re doing, and more importantly, why you’re doing it. This is not only critical for uncovering hidden stumbling blocks, but can help guide your project toward accomplishing its business outcomes, which can shift over the course of your project.

Pay Attention to What Really Happens at Meetings. Gathering lots of data isn’t the be all and end all of project management. How people behave is just as important, if not more so. “If you have a project review meeting and no challenges or conflicts get raised, that’s a potential red flag,” he says. “The same is true if people walk away from a meeting with different perspectives of what’s happening.”

Cast a Wide Knowledge Net. It’s not just the core project team that needs to be part of the conversation. Educate your project sponsors on how to spot signs of trouble, and help people who aren’t involved in the day-to-day running of the project understand its goals and potential pitfalls. Often, when you’re in the midst of that Big Important Thing, it could take someone with an outside perspective to notice a problem everyone else missed.

Monitor What’s Not Being Spent. “If you’re not spending the money you should be spending, either you haven’t identified the right things to be spending it on, or people are hesitating to make decisions because the project objectives aren’t clear,” explains McWha.

Have an Entrepreneurial Project Manager. The number one driver of successful projects is agreat manager. This doesn’t just mean someone needs to be good at conducting the trains; the person you pick should be an ‘entrepreneur’ — someone able to manage stakeholders and risk, and be comfortable adapting and changing course if necessary. “Nothing stays constant,” says McWha. “You have to find and develop project managers  who can exercise judgment instead of slavishly following the process.”

In the end, even the drivers of even successful projects aren’t actually technical, Flyvbjerg and Budzier explained: they largely involve the project’s environment, whether there’s organizational resistance, and how risk is being managed. All of these internal indicators, combined with our own human perceptions about what we can and can’t do or say, play into whether projects are headed for a head-in-your-hands kind of moment.

by Gretchen Gavett  HBR

Does Bigger Data Lead to Better Decisions?

Many scholars, from decision scientists to organizational theorists, have addressed this question from different perspectives, and the answer, as for most complex questions, is “it depends.” Big Data can lead to Big Mistakes. After all, the financial sector has been flooded with big data for decades.

A large body of research shows that decision-makers selectively use data for self-enhancement or to confirm their beliefs or simply to pursue personal goals not necessarily congruent with organizational ones. Not surprisingly, any interpretation of the data becomes as much an evaluation of oneself as much as of the data.

How can organizations avoid such pitfalls and turn “Big Data” into a safe opportunity? Decade-old research provides some pointers. It is not Big that matters, it is Diversity that matters. Big is old – retailers and financial institutions have had big data for decades.

But Diversity is new. Take large retailers. Sure, they have had enormous databases for long time now. But marketers are only now connecting data from loyalty programs in physical stores with data not only about how the same customers behave on the company’s website, but also how the same or similar customers anywhere in the world behave on other websites – ranging from news sites to car sites to movies sites – all tracked using cookies. They can then link this data with in-depth market research as well as social media data from Twitter or Facebook.

This kind of linkage is reaping rich rewards.  A leading Telco company we have worked with was able to increase market share by more than 20% in some countries without increasing the marketing budget by leveraging behavioural and transactional data from social and general media.

Some innovative companies are connecting data traditionally used by banks to assess the credit score of loan applicants with information ranging from mobile phone usage data to online social media relations data, in order to better and faster assess the creditworthiness of a micro-loan applicant. What can a phone bill tell us about the chances that someone will repay a loan?  Or even about the creditworthiness of the people that the applicant is connected to online?

Of course, management scholars and practitioners have long recognized the benefits of diversity.  It’s widely accepted that heterogeneous teams are more creative than homogeneous ones. Diversity, if managed well, yields divergent thinking and the pooling of a broader base of knowledge results often in better strategic choices.

The point we stress here is that diverse data confers similar benefits. And it’s worth noting in this context that in statistics and data science as well the key quality measures in data are not the size of the dataset but metrics like variance and entropy, which effectively capture the data’s diversity.

So perhaps we shouldn’t be talking about Big Data making decisions better, but about Diverse Data connecting the dots using new technologies, processes, and skills. We need to connect the dots or we risk drowning in Big Data.

by Theos Evgeniou, Vibha Gaba and Joerg Niessing HBR

Ghana looks to develop own gas resources, says supply from Nigeria insufficient

Apparently as a result of the inability of the West African Gas Pipeline to supply sufficient gas to the country, Ghana is looking to develop its own gas resources to help drive thermal power generation in the country.

It would be recalled that the $1 billion transnational gas pipeline, the first sub-regional natural gas project in sub-Saharan Africa, was initiated by the governments of Nigeria, Benin, Ghana and Togo to supply gas from the Escravos region of the Niger Delta to feed the gas-fired generating plants of the three participating countries.

But Kirk Koffi, a deputy chief executive of the Volta River Authority (VRA), Ghana, said the country could not rely on Nigeria for stable and adequate supply of gas for thermal power generation, according to GhanaWeb.

“The West African Gas Pipeline as designed today can only give us 170 million cubic feet. We need extra investment to be able to move from 170 to 240 in order to realise the full potential of that pipeline,” he said.

“The gas is there. The problem with getting enough supply from Nigeria is the investment to bring the gas from the ground; we are influencing that, but it’s not happening.”

Current gas supply of 70 million cubic feet per day from Nigeria via the West African Gas Pipeline for thermal power generation is 50 million cubic feet short of the contractual volume of 120 million cubic feet per day.

This has meant that only the 200 megawatts (MW) gas-reliant Asogli thermal plant and just one other plant in VRA’s portfolio run on gas.

“The future for us is to depend on our own gas. We cannot 100 percent depend on them [Nigeria]. The future is to get this gas from Ghana and to have Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and invest in LNG infrastructure; that’s what we are looking at. The future is to get that massive infrastructure in this country to help drive thermal generation to drive the economy. The levels [of gas from the fields in the country] are high,” Koffi said.

Nigeria, which has abundant gas reserves, is estimated to export 3 billion cubic feet of gas per day and also flares about 1 billion cubic feet every day.

Electricity demand in Ghana currently stands at about 1,800MW per day. The VRA, with a total installed capacity of 2,100MW, generates about 1,600MW of electricity – both hydro and thermal – daily. Bui, CENIT, and Sunon Asogli power plants together produce about 400MW of electricity to supplement what the VRA produces.

The Ghana National Gas Company (GNGC) is currently constructing a pipeline to transport gas from the Jubilee Field to the gas processing plant at Atuabo in the Western Region. The company is also constructing a transmission line from the processing plant to Takoradi to transport processed gas to the thermal power plants at Aboadze.

So far, both the onshore and offshore pipelines from the Jubilee Oilfield to Atuabo through to Aboadze Thermal Plant had been laid. Two LPG storage tanks are also nearing completion. The entire project, according to the GNGC, is about 72 percent completed.

The GNGC said that the project would hopefully be completed by the first quarter of next year.

The completion of the gas project is expected to significantly reduce the amount the VRA spends on the purchase of crude oil for thermal power generation.

By: FEMI ASU, with agency report

The struggle to tame Lagos

A walk along the two kilometers of light rail that Lagos authorities have managed to build in three years gives a sense of how hard it is to impose order on one of Africa’s most chaotic cities.

From either side of the concrete structure – no track has yet been laid – the crowded slums and highways of Nigeria’s lagoon-side commercial hub teem with activity.

Its trademark yellow buses overtake, undertake and force their way down impossibly narrow side streets, where women stir pots next to canals clogged with rubbish.

With between 15 million and 21 million people – the upper estimate is the official one, though no one really knows – and generating a third of GDP for Africa’s second biggest economy, Lagos has become almost as alluring to yield-hungry investors as it is to the 4,000 or so economic migrants who turn up each day.

Violent crime, mushrooming slums, police extortion and widespread fraud have often held investment back, but in the past decade, authorities have started trying to tackle some of the obstacles, especially maddening traffic bottlenecks.

“Just keeping Lagos roads moving without rail, pushing that kind of tonnage just through our road network, now that’s the eighth wonder of the world,” says Governor Babtunde Fashola.

Fashola and his predecessor, Bola Tinubu, have tried to turn the city from a byword for squalor into a glitzy business hub. Their success will rest on projects like the light rail, which has involved massive and controversial slum clearance.

If they manage, it could become an investment hub in Africa and a model for fast-urbanizing African nations. If not, it might face a dystopian crime-ridden future not unlike its past.

“WE CAN’T STOP THEM COMING”

If Lagos were a country its GDP would make it Africa’s seventh biggest economy – more than twice the size of Kenya’s. Its large consumer market is already well established for firms like Unilever, Heineken and Nestle.

One of Africa’s biggest stock markets sits here, as does its second biggest market in government bonds. Industry is hampered by poor power generation, but the service sector is booming.

Lagos accounts for more than half the non-oil economy of Africa’s leading energy producer, says economist Paul Collier, who sees it as key to breaking the country’s dependence on oil.

“Lagos is Africa’s best chance of a productive megacity,” he wrote in The Plundered Planet. “As oil runs down and is replaced by a new economy … Nigeria’s economic future lies in Lagos.”

But it faces a daily challenge just trying to keep up with the pace of population growth, much of it on the edge of water.

Nigeria, already pushing 170 million people, will be home to 400 million by 2050, making it the world’s fourth most populous country, according to the global Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Lagos will have roughly doubled in size by then, Fashola and demographers agree.

On top of Nigeria’s high birth rate, there is migration.

“The more successful Lagos is, the more people it attracts. That’s the Catch-22,” said Kayode Akindele, partner in a Lagos-based consultancy. “Social services can’t keep up.”

Fashola’s planning commissioner Ben Akabueze thinks Lagos could have 35 million people by 2025 on current growth rates. In 1970, authorities say, there were just 1.4 million Lagosians.

“We can’t stop them from coming,” Akabueze told Reuters from his office in mainland Lagos’s noisy, heaving Ikeja district. “There’s been a net positive migration almost on a daily basis.”

To try to cope better, the government is rolling out a compulsory residents’ registration. “Everybody is welcome,” Akabueze says. “But we want to document the people who stay.”

VEHICLES FOR CHANGE

The influx puts pressure on inadequate housing, and spawns unemployed youths with few options for making a living outside the street gangs – the infamous ‘area boys’ who informally control territory and extort money from passers by.

But the biggest headache is travel. The transport authority says there are 9 million road trips a day in the city. Some Lagosians get up at 4.30 a.m. to make the office by nine.

Things are improving; highways were widened and police stationed at bottlenecks. New ferry services now beat traffic by crossing the lagoon in a state one fifth of which is water.

Tutu Adewale, an assistant to a financial professional, used to spend three or four hours each way commuting by bus along a tangle of bridges. Now it takes her 45 minutes by boat.

“I made do with it, but it’s such a relief now,” she said.

The $2.5 billion light rail project will take more time. China’s state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) began work in 2010, but there are still 25 km left to build on the $1.3 billion east-west line, and no work has started on the 35 km north-south one.

The project is behind schedule because there is barely a stretch of land on which someone isn’t living or trading.

Thousands of illegal settlements erected by slum dwellers have been destroyed this year. No one has been compensated, because they were never supposed to be there to begin with.

Amnesty International in August condemned the eviction of 9,000 residents of Badia East and the razing of their homes in February, leaving many to sleep in mosquito-infested streets.

In one incident, 72 traders from the Igbo ethnic group were deported to their ancestral lands after their houses were bulldozed. That appeared to give slum clearance an ugly ethnic dimension, and Fashola made a reluctant public apology.

“My shop was just right in front of that bridge,” said Igbo trader Uche Okonkwo, 43, surveying the wreckage of a market trashed to make way for the rail. “They demolished the warehouse, the shops, the offices, the showroom, everything.”

FUTURE FOR THE POOR?

Fashola’s defenders say slums have to be removed if projects like the light rail are to happen, but critics say the heavy-handed approach shows a lack of sensitivity to the poor.

The governor is fixing the city for the besuited business types, they say, but has been slow on things like low-cost housing to help those sleeping under bridges or on rubbish tips.

“Much as I admire Fashola, I don’t see enough being done to help those at the bottom,” blogger Tolu Ogunlesi told Reuters in a chic art cafe in the prestigious Victoria Island, an area housing one the world’s highest concentrations of millionaires.

“They’re talking about building 1,000 low-cost housing units a year, but we need hundreds of thousands a year,” he said.

There’s no shortage of housing projects for the rich. Moss-dusted colonial-era houses in leafy Ikoyi district are becoming rare as they get torn down and swapped for luxury flats.

At Bar Beach on the Atlantic Coast, tonnes of sand is being poured into the ocean to reclaim it for the proposed Eko Atlantic city, a Dubai-style gated community that will have chrome skyscrapers, business parks, palm trees and a marina.

Being on water is the only thing it will have in common with the Makoko slum a few miles away, where 100,000 fishing people live in houses on stilts with no sanitation.

“MORE ACCOUNTABLE”

At his desk piled high with papers, Fashola resents the notion he has neglected the poor. He points to projects like massive mains water provision, which will when finished provide 10-20 liters a day to Lagosians, even if the city swells to 35 million, he says.

But the state’s message is: if you leave the poverty of your village to live on the streets in Lagos, that’s your lookout.

“If you have nowhere to stay, then stay in your village. You can’t simply jump on a bus and come live under a bridge,” Akabueze says.

The governor has won praise for dealing with crime. Many area boys have been co-opted – some as yellow-shirted traffic cops, while others keep order in bus terminals.

Violent crime has steadily fallen since he took office in 2007, though there was been a spike in kidnapping this year.

“There was a time security was a big problem, especially robbery, but you have to hand it to them, things got a lot better,” said Lagos tycoon Tony Elumelu.

Many fret about what will happen when the governor steps down in 2015.

“Everything Fashola’s done can easily be reversed. You’d just have to do nothing, it would be reversed,” said Akindele.

Yet a growing number of business people feel the state’s efforts to bring some kind of order to Lagos may be becoming irreversible. Corruption is rife, but institutions function; rubbish is collected, streets are swept, hedges trimmed.

“Lagos is depersonalizing politics,” United Bank for Africa CEO Philips Oduoza said. “Institutions are becoming more important than people, and that could outlast the governor.”

Reinforcing this are rocketing tax receipts; 65 percent of state revenues are now non-oil.

The governor, who gets up at 7 a.m. and works until 3 a.m., says his to-do list isn’t getting any shorter.

“In a football match, the last 15 minutes can be the most decisive,” he says, creaking back in his leather chair. “So I intend to finish with as much pace as we started.”

BlackBerry resumes BBM rollout for iPhone, Android users

Following the delay caused by a software leak, BlackBerry has officially resumed the release of its BlackBerry Messenger app for Android and iPhones.

Samsung customers in Nigeria and other sub-Sahara African countries can now download the BBM app from the Samsung Apps Store, while iPhone and other Android-based smartphone users will be able to download the app in three days’ time, a release from BlackBerry on Tuesday indicated.

The deployment was halted last month when an unauthorised copy of the app was leaked for Android smartphones and caused problems with the BlackBerry Messenger platform.

When that leaked, the company said around a million people downloaded it for their Android smartphones. What they have now revealed is that more than one million people also found creative ways to “side load” BBM onto their iPhone.

In order to avoid the problems and manage server loads, the company is phasing the rollout of the BBM app for other devices.

The six million people who registered to be told about the launch will be able to use the app immediately. Other users will have to download the app and register, and then will be sent a message when their account has been activated.

The app is now available on Google Play and iTunes.

The BBM has more than 60 million active customers monthly on BlackBerry alone, and the overwhelming majority use it an average of 90 minutes per day.

BBM customers collectively send and receive more than 10 billion messages each day, nearly twice as many messages per user per day compared to other mobile messaging apps. Messages on BBM are typically read within seconds, reflecting how truly engaged the BBM customers are.

The Executive Vice-President for BBM at BlackBerry, Mr. Andrew Bocking, said, “BBM is a very engaging messaging service that is simple to use, easy to personalise and has an immediacy that is necessary for mobile communications.

“With more than a billion Android, iOS and BlackBerry smartphones in the market, and no dominant mobile messaging platform, this is absolutely the right time to bring BBM to Android and iPhone customers.”

According to BlackBerry, the BBM will continue to evolve quickly, as later this year, BBM channels will provide a forum for active, real conversations between people, brands, celebrities, artists, service providers, communities and more.

 By creating a channel, the firm said individuals and brands could engage their friends and communities in conversations sparked off by their thoughts, ideas and passions.

“Subscribing to a channel will let you join conversations with people who share your interests. In addition, BBM video calling and BBM voice calling are planned for availability for Android and iPhone in a future version,” it added.

BY STANLEY OPARA

Nigerian presidency spends an average of $58.57m (N9.08bn ) annually on maintaining its’ 10 aircraft.

Nigerian presidency spends an average of $58.57m (N9.08bn ) annually on maintaining its’ 10 aircraft.

The declining fortunes of the domestic airlines have made President Goodluck Jonathan’s 10-aircraft Presidential Air Fleet larger   than the fleets of three domestic airlines combined, investigations by punch correspondent revealed on Tuesday.

The three carriers are Chanchangi, MedView, and FirstNation airlines. Chanchangi has one aircraft; Medview Airlines, three; while FirstNation has  two.

IRS Airlines, with five aircraft in its fleet, has only one that is currently operational. The four others have been sent overseas for routine maintenance for a long time now.

It can be technically assumed that the PAF is bigger than the four domestic airlines, according to industry experts.

Aerocontractors, the second largest domestic airline, which currently has about 12 aircraft in its fleet, is struggling under sundry debts like every other domestic airline.

Indications have also emerged that the 10-aircraft PAF may emerge the second largest domestic airline in the country after Arik Air, which currently has about 23 aircraft.

Aviation sources revealed, however, that unless the plan to turn Aerocontractors Airlines into a national carrier worked out, the declining fortunes of the debt-ridden airline might force it lose some of its planes to foreign aircraft leasing companies as it happened to Air Nigeria some years ago.

Top aviation officials admitted that the large size of the PAF could not be justified amid the dearth of aircraft among the domestic airlines, which lack adequate finance to buy more planes to meet up with the soaring passenger capacity.

Apart from Arik and Aerocontractors, each of the remaining domestic airlines does not possess half of the number of aircraft in the PAF, according to findings by our correspondent.

IRS Airlines has only one operational aircraft in its fleet; while Dana Air has five aircraft, in addition to those owned by Chanchangi, Medview and FirstNation, according to figures obtained from the industry.

According to findings, the PAF include two Falcon 7X jets, two Falcon 900 jets, a Gulfstream 550, one Boeing 737 BBJ (Nigerian Air Force 001 or Eagle One), and a Gulfstream IVSP.

Others are one Gulfstream V, Cessna Citation 2 aircraft and Hawker Siddley 125-800 jet.

Each of the Falcon 7X jets was purchased in 2010 at a cost of $51.1m, while the Gulfstream 550 costs $53.3m.

The factory price of the other aircraft in the fleet could not be obtained online. However, airline CEOs put the average price of the Falcon 900 at $35m; Gulfstream IVSP, $40m; Gulfstream V, $45m; Boeing 737 BBJ, $58m; Cessna Citation, $7m; and Hawker Siddley 125-800, $15m.

This brings a combined estimated value of the PAF to $390.5m (N60.53bn).

Nigeria happens to be one of the few countries in the world with a large PAF.

Most major countries in Europe and Asia maintain two aircraft in their PAF, according to Wikipedia.

According to the online portal, Japan maintains only two Boeing 747-400 planes in its PAF.

The two aircraft, mostly for the prime minister, the emperor and his wife, and other members of the Imperial Family, is operated by the Japan Air Self-Defence Force.

The aircraft were constructed at the Boeing factory at the same time as the United States’ Air Force One. Both Japanese aircraft were delivered in 1990.

Wikipedia also states that the Netherlands government operates only two aircraft, a Fokker 70 and Gulfstream IV to transport the Dutch Royal family and government officials such as the prime minister and other ministers.

They are also used for international conferences and for private trips by the Queen and the Prince of Orange. For long haul trips, the Royal Dutch Airline is used. Often the upper deck of a Boeing 747 is used.

The Queen of England and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, often go on British Airways chartered flights for long trips. Cameron was recently criticised by the UK media for chartering a foreign plane instead of a British.

According to Wikipedia, the Royal Squadron of the Royal Air Force maintains a fleet of Agusta A109 helicopters, BAE-125 mid-sized business jet and BAE-146 regional airliner to support short travel by the Royal Family, the Prime Minister and senior members of the British Government.

Countries like Ghana, Algeria and a host of others in Europe maintain only one aircraft in their PAF.

According to industry experts, airlines spend between 15 and 20 per cent of the cost of an aircraft on its operation yearly. They say that averagely, a little less than one-fifth of the cost of the plane is spent every year on insurance, flight and cabin crew, maintenance, fuelling, catering and training.

Going by the fact that at least 15 per cent of this amount is spent annually on operating the PAF, it means about $58.57m (N9.08bn ) is being spent annually on running the planes in the Nigerian PAF.

Some airline CEOs, who pleaded anonymity, had raised concerns over the economic sense behind the large mix of brands of aircraft in the PAF. They said although the fleet size was large, the cost of operation would have been cheaper if the Presidency had maintained only two brands.

According to the Nigerian Air Force’s website, the PAF’s current staff strength consists of 47 NAF officers, 173 airmen/airwomen and 96 technical and administrative civilians.

“The operational headquarters of the Fleet is located at the Presidential Wing of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja, while the administrative personnel are at the Federal Secretariat. The fleet has a liaison office at the Presidential Villa. Flight operations, training, aircraft maintenance and general running of the fleet are funded by the Presidency,” according to the website.

BY OYETUNJI ABIOYE