Geoff Iyatse

✍️Journalist || Economist || GuardianNigeria || CNN African Journalist of the Yr Awardee || NMMA Business Reporter of the Yr

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

general wage floor in the medium-run. But in all, we must keep our eye on the general price.

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

The conversation about PMS subsidy is tardy. I will be more interested in how to make production energy, diesel for instance, more affordable to thousands of manufacturers and logistics operators. But getting that discussion on track won't be easier neither.

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

The first possibility is more academic in a country where rent-seeking thrives. Employers may pocket all the profits and leave workers to their fate. But the second options offers more social prospect. Lower unemployment increases the bargaining power of workers and raises...

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

You pay for an economy but want to enjoy the benefit of business class? We'd be smarter

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

Who do you trust when it comes to movement of value? @Visa

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

Most Nigerian investors invest strictly for today. Otherwise, why should anybody ignore a leading bank by assets and earnings whose P/E is less 2.0 just because there is no money to share this year?

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

Africa can't achieve greatness until it truly appreciates its potential. Whoever recommended @ProfOsinbajo for this role should knows little or nothing about him and his credentials. Besides, why not legal governance roles?

[Tolu Ogunlesi @toluogunlesi]

“Addis Ababa, 6 April 2026 — The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention @AfricaCDC has appointed H.E. Prof. Yemi Osinbajo @ProfOsinbajo, former Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as Senior Strategic Advisor to the Africa CDC Director General, H.E. Dr. Jean Kaseya @Dr_JeanKaseya.”

“In his new role, Prof. Osinbajo will advise on Africa’s positioning in global health architecture reform, sustainable and sovereign health financing, local manufacturing, strategic partnerships, and policy leadership for Africa CDC and the African Union.”

https://t.co/BNhcYTFfWY

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

A message for @officialABAT from a birthday mate! @UnlimitedEniola @followlasg

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

would have happened if the bang in the ICT been replicated, say in power, agriculture or insurance in the intervening decades?

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

As at 1999, Nigeria's telecoms penetration was a mere 0.4%, In less than three decades, the coin has flipped. Telecoms, a sector that merely existed in official documents, has grown to become the most essential catalyst of the economy -- powering fintech, banking, retail and...

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

in the intervening decades?

Insurance penetration is currently at about 0.3%, just like the telecoms of the old. Imagine pushing up the figure to 70%? That single industry we only relate with when renewing our vehicle docs would create an enormous value chain that...

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

more than the government's neglect. And if the programme was suspended, how was the stipend reduced from $500 to $220? Inconsistencies!

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

It is ok for ordinary folks to lament. But statesmen like @atiku should give direction and articulate the way forward with clarity even if they can't force the authorities to act. That is lacking here, sadly. The complaint does inspire the victim more..

[Atiku Abubakar @atiku]

I have been well briefed on how Nigerian students under the Bilateral Education Agreement (BEA) have been abandoned abroad.

The BEA is a scholarship scheme that began in 1993 and was revitalised in 1999. It allows Nigerian students to pursue undergraduate and postgraduate studies in various countries through agreements between Nigeria and those nations.

However, under the @officialABAT administration, the BEA scholarship programme, a bridge between Nigeria and the world, has been quietly discontinued without notice to the parents/wards of the students and without any consideration for their education.

I am informed that what was initially described as a temporary five-year suspension soon metamorphosed into outright abandonment, leaving about 1,600 young Nigerians stranded abroad with empty pockets and fading hope.

Their pleas are simple and desperate: pay the stipends owed, now more than $6,000 per student. Yet from the corridors of power came a cold, technocratic explanation: scarce public funds must be managed “responsibly,” and money meant to keep these students alive abroad should instead be redirected home. In that reasoning, the humans behind the figures dissolved into abstractions, and duty was sacrificed on the altar of convenience.

The cruelty of the moment was sharpened by timing and tone. After months of cries from students and parents over unpaid allowances, the authorities announced the suspension with a levity that stunned those already on the brink. Between September and December 2023, the students were not paid, and in 2024, stipends were slashed by 56 per cent, from $500 to $220 a month, before stopping altogether. There was no payment throughout the whole of 2025.

I gathered that hunger, rent arrears, and shame have become the daily companions of the beneficiary students. In Morocco, one student did not survive the ordeal, dying in November last year and turning quiet suffering into public grief. Parents and scholars poured into the streets of Abuja, protesting before the Ministries of Education and Finance, their placards heavy with sorrow and rage, their questions unanswered.

Then came the final wound: defiance dressed as policy. In a press statement, the minister declared that any student “fed up” could be financed to return home, as though abandoning years of study and shattered dreams were a minor administrative detail. To anxious parents, it sounded like expulsion by neglect, Nigeria casting off its brightest children and leaving them to become objects of pity among peers from African countries that honour their obligations.

The BEA scheme was never a charity; it was a diplomatic agreement rooted in shared progress, revitalised in 1999 to build Nigeria’s future workforce through partnerships with nations such as China, Russia, Morocco, and Hungary. Today, that pact lies broken, and across distant campuses, Nigerian scholars wait, not just for stipends, but for a sign that their country still remembers them. -AA

[Nury Vittachi @NuryVittachi]

BREAKING NEWS: The U.S. will withdraw from 66 organizations, isolating the country from the wider world, the White House announced today.

[Geoff Iyatse @geoffIyatse]

https://t.co/e72SI3e9Hk