Africa

Youth unemployment across the world has climbed to a new high and is likely to climb further this year, a United Nations agency said Thursday, while warning of a “lost generation” as more young people give up the search for work, The New York Times reported. The agency, the International Labor Organization, said in a report that of some 620 million young people ages 15 to 24 in the work force, about 81 million were unemployed at the end of 2009 — the highest level in two decades of record-keeping by the organization, which is based in Geneva.

Two top Nigerian stock-exchange officials were removed and a fugitive former bank executive surrendered, as efforts to clean up the financial sector accelerate, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Thursday, Nigeria's Securities Exchange Commission named Emmanuel Ikazoboh, a former chief executive of accounting firm Deloitte in West and Central Africa, as interim stock-exchange head. The appointment comes a day after a shakeout at Nigeria's Stock Exchange, Africa's second largest.

Nigeria’s Security and Exchange Commission has instructed the nation’s bourse to remove Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke as director general and chief executive officer, Bloomberg reported. The move is among measures to address “inadequate oversight of the exchange, ongoing litigation, allegations of financial mismanagement, governance challenges, and the inordinate delays in the implementation of the succession plan,” the SEC said in an e-mailed statement.

Widescale corruption and fraud perpetuated by former Nigerian leaders has driven the state oil company into insolvency, local media Thursday reported the head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp saying, Platts reported. Austen Oniwon, NNPC group managing director, told lawmakers from the Senate on Wednesday in Abuja that some of the country's past leaders caused to be withdrawn the sum of Naira 1.5 trillion ($10 billion) from the NNPC treasury for various uses other than oil and gas projects, Punch newspaper reported.

Nigeria took a step closer to resolving its financial crisis on Monday when Goodluck Jonathan, president, approved the creation of a “bad bank” to soak up some of the estimated $10bn of bad loans that brought the banking system to the brink of collapse last year, the Financial Times reported. Almost a year after Nigeria’s once-booming banking sector was rocked by revelations of reckless lending gone awry, Mr Jonathan backed a public asset management company similar to those employed by Ireland and other crisis-hit rich countries.

Kenyans should use the recently launched credit information sharing system to negotiate favourable terms and lending rates with commercial banks, the financial services sector regulator, the Central Bank of Kenya, has said. The bank fears that the system is beginning to look like an additional weapon in the hands of lenders to tighten the rules for individual and household borrowers to the exclusion of potential benefits.

Uchumi Supermarkets’ 12,0000 owners have agreed to convert the chain’s debts into equity in a bid to win back firm’s trading rights at the Nairobi Stock Exchange, Business Daily Africa reported. Uchumi’s shares were suspended from trading on the stock exchange in 2006 after it closed its stores following an aggressive but failed expansion plan that led to a Sh1.2 billion loss and left the firm reeling in a Sh2 billion debt owed to suppliers, Kenya Commercial Bank and PTA bank. At the time of delisting from the bourse, Uchumi shares were trading at Sh14.50.

Nigerian banks are extremely risky, despite a N620bn bailout of the sector in 2009, a global rating agency, Standard & Poor, has said. “The Nigerian banking system is still highly risky. The ratings we have for the banks are in the single ‘B’ category, it‘s a very very low level compared to most banks in the world,” Mr. John Gibling, Managing Director (financial institutions) at S&P, said in London on Monday, Punch reported.

Plans by the Government to set up a contributory pension scheme for civil servants has stalled, leaving the retirement benefits time bomb that forced the government to push the retirement age to 60 years nearing explosion, Business Daily Africa reported. Treasury officials said the scheme, which was to come into force on Thursday next week, could not take off for lack of an appropriate law to support it. It will now await the outcome of the vote on the Draft Constitution, according to Anne Mugo, the Director of Pensions.

The payroll crisis at City Hall could be deeper than initially thought after it emerged that more than a third of its 12,000 workers are either dead, inexistent or serving on forged papers, Business Daily Africa reported. In the first hint of the findings of a PricewaterhouseCoopers staff audit carried out in February, Town Clerk Philip Kisia said on Thursday there were 4.215 illegal workers who would be cut off from the payroll. The move would save the council some Sh2.5 billion annually, bringing it closure to financial independence.