Nigeria’s Federal Legislator Earns More Than Obama-Prof. Itse Sagay

By Lanre Babalola & Kazeem Ugbodaga of PM News, Lagos

Constitutional lawyer, Prof. Itse Sagay has revealed that a legislator in the National Assembly, Abuja, Nigeria, earns far more than the United States President, Barack Obama.

This revelation was made by Sagay yesterday when he delivered a lecture to mark the 47th birthday celebration of the Lagos State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr. Opeyemi Bamidele held at the Eko FM Multi-Purpose Hall, Ikeja, Lagos.

In the lecture, Sagay lamented that a Nigerian Senator, in 2009 earned N240 million in salaries and allowances annually while his House of Representatives counterpart earned N203.8 million annually.

“In other words, a senator earned about $1.7 million and a member of the House of Representatives earned $1.45 million per annum,” he said.

He said this shows that a legislator in Nigeria earns more than the US President, Obama, who earns $400, 000 per annum and British Prime Minister, 190, 000 pounds, while a senator in Nigeria, one of the poorest countries in the world, earns $1.7 million.

Sagay added that a legislator in Nigeria also earns more than his counterpart in the US and the United Kingdom.

“By contrast, an American senator earns $174,000 and a U.K. Parliamentarian earns about $64, 000 per annum,” he said.

“In spite of the dismal standard of living, poverty in the country and low per capita income  of Nigeria, Nigerian legislators in Abuja have awarded themselves the highest salaries and allowances in the world. In other words, the Nigerian lawmakers in Abuja are the highest paid in the world,” lamented Sagay.

According to Sagay, “in 2009, the Federal legislators received a total of N102.8 billion comprising N11.8 billion as salaries and N90.96 billion as allowances.   Is the tax payer getting value for this colossal sum in the current democratic dispensation?  Should five percent of Nigeria’s annual budget be spent on 109 senators and 360 House of Representatives members?    “In other words, should 469 Nigerians gulp five percent of our budget, leaving the remaining 150 million of us to receive about N1, 000 each?”

“The Senate President is reported to be earning N250 million quarterly or N83.33 million per month, while his deputy earns N50 million per month.  The Senate has allocated N1.02 billion as quarterly allowance to its 10 principal officers, known collectively as Senate leadership.

“Each of the other principal officers earns N78 million every three months or N26 million per month.   This tragic state of affairs is clearly unsustainable.   Those engaged in this feeding frenzy are endangering our democracy,” he lamented.

The constitutional lawyer also faulted the proposed constitutional amendment by the National Assembly, saying that the body was not yet ready to truly amend the constitution.

He said that a proposed amendment of section 65 seeking to raise the minimum qualification for membership of the legislatures from school certificate to a diploma level was rejected by the State House of Assembly.

Also, Sagay said that section 66 (1) which disqualified persons with a history of crime, bankruptcy, among others from contesting elections was deleted, thus paving way in the future for people with criminal records to be elected into public office.

After pointing out the anomalies in the proposed amendment, he stated that “the real work on the amendment or alteration of the constitution is yet to be commenced.   From all indications, such work will not be undertaken by the present National Assembly; it will be the task of a future one.”

Sagay, however, contended that the greatest authority, which a legislature wielded in a democratic society, is not its legal powers as contained in the constitution, but its moral authority, as the conscience of the nation and protector of the sovereignty of the people.

“Thus, members of the legislature must be men and women of high moral authority and integrity.  The legislatures must suspend from their membership, anyone who by his conduct, past or present, tarnishes the image of that Assembly or puts its credibility in doubt.

“If the legislature is to hold the executive to a minimum standard of accountability, transparency and honesty, it must itself purify its own systems, processes and membership; otherwise, no one will take it seriously,” he said.
Also speaking, Oba of Lagos, Rilwan Akiolu warned President Goodluck Jonathan not to declare his intention to contest the 2011 poll yet, saying that he may live to regret it if he rushed into the race.

The oba, known for his frank talk, warned Jonathan that a hasty decision to vie for the presidency next year might ruin his career and that he should beware of the myriads of sycophants who surround  him.

He described people around him as greedy and self centred leaders who were only interested in what they could gain and not the welfare of the citizens.
—Lanre Babalola, Kazeem Ugbodaga

Extensive Fraud: Global Fund May Stop Assistance to Nigeria

Former Nigerian head of state, Yakubu Gowon- Photo credit: Carter Center/ D. Hakes

SaharaReporters is in possession of the full report of the Country Audit of the Global Funds Grants to Nigeria which shows, in extensive detail, how several Nigerian organizations misused the funds they received, and put Nigeria in danger of missing out on the assistance in the future.  Some of the organizations, which are still being probed by the Global Fund, have already been asked to return vast sums of money in foreign exchange.


The existence of the report (GF-OIG-10-008), which was written by the Office of the Inspector-General (OIG) of the Global Fund, first came to light last June, when the ICPC announced that it had been informed of the concerns of the Global Fund, which was so unhappy with the situation it was threatening to terminate assistance to Nigeria. 


The OIG said it embarked on the audit, which covered grants that had been signed in Nigeria by March 31, 2010, in order to assess whether the grants of the Global Fund in the country “had been used wisely to save lives in the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”  Fifteen grants, amounting to $682,149,515 had been provided between 2003 and 2009, and $474,519,260 had been disbursed. 
Some of the organizations involved are as follows:
•    The Yakubu Gowon Centre for International Co-operation (YGC),
•    The National Action Committee on HIV/AIDS in Nigeria (NACA),
•    The Society for Family Health (SFH),
•    The National Malaria Control Program (NMCP),
•    The Association for Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH),
•    The Christian Health Association of Nigeria (CHAN) and

•    The CHAN-MEDIPHARM (MEDIPHARM).
Two of these programmes, NACA and the NMCP, belong to the federal government.  In February 2001, the federal government developed the HIV/AIDS Emergency Action Plan (HEAP) as a response to the ravaging epidemic.  With the Presidential Council on AIDS (PCA) and NACA, which was described as a multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary response, the Olusegun Obasanjo government declared its readiness to implement a “reasoned and realistic HIV/AIDS program of control and prevention.”


NACA, which was directly located in the Presidency, has not fulfilled any such expectations since then.  Instead, it has come under general notoriety for under-achievement and corruption.
 
Under Professor Osotimehin, whom the Goodluck Jonathan government sponsored to the leadership of the United Nations Population Fund last year, the work and commitment of NACA to the fight against HIV & AIDS was routinely questioned, as was its deployment of the resources it received.   In a letter to Prof. Osotimehin in February 2005, the Global Fund rebuked the Committee pointing out that "over one year into the implementation of the programs it is clear that programs are falling well short of achieving the projected targets."


The grants received by NACA and other programmes seemed to have been falling elsewhere, rather than into the programmes.  In the current report, the Global Fund said:


•    NACA incurred extra-budgetary expenditures of $71,000, as well as $679,000 in unretired expenditures. 


•    The YGC, which had received four grants totaling $172 million, illegally transferred funds to third party foreign bank accounts amounting to $15.8 million.  It is to refund to the Global Fund $5.2m which could not be properly accounted for, and its financial activities would be further investigated by the OIG. 


•    The SFH, at the end of 2009, had administrative charges of 5% of the budget, amounting to $861,000 that was not accounted for, as well as $68,000 unretired expenditures.


•    The NMCP had $711,000 unretired staff advances and $10,000 underfunded balance of rent grant. It is to refund $132,000 which could not be properly accounted for, or was not in the approved work plan and budget. 


•    The ARFH had $335,000 in management fees which it could not justify, and could provide no accountability for.  It is to refund $504,000 it could not account for, or which was not in the approved work plan and budget. 


•    The CHAN illegally transferred foreign currency amounting to $11.6m to non-programme-related bank accounts abroad; the funds were later refunded into the local Naira bank account.  CHAN grant Sub-Recipients (SRs) had not accounted for $1.4million at the time of the audit, and CHAN is to refund $2.9 million which could not be adequately accounted for or which was not in the approved work plan or budget. 
•    CHAN MEDIPHARM overcharged on distribution of products to the tune of $256,000; with $77,000 as unexpended amount on training.


The audit, which was completed in April 2010, revealed a pattern of mismanagement, procurement loopholes, inefficiency, financial recklessness, administrative lapses, lack of professionalism, poor commitment, bad accounting, or no accounting. 


The YGC, for instance, had a vision and mission, the audit said, but it did not have a strategic plan.  “Without this strategic plan,” the audit observed, “the Centre is unable to articulate the necessary strategies required to meet its vision and mission.”




Neither did a Centre of such magnitude have a manual to guide the operations of its Governing Council.  Indeed, in the seven-year period that was audited, the Council met only 10 times, and in one stretch of 18 months, did not meet at all. 


Similarly, the NMCP did not even maintain a bank account.  Consequently, and curiously, cheques for program activities were written in the names of NMCP staff.  


Not surprisingly, “The audit revealed an unreconciled difference of $711,793 between the amounts disbursed by the Centre and the amount acknowledged as received by the NMCP staff.”
NACA, which disbursed funds for some SRs to personal bank accounts that had yet to be accounted for at the time of the audit, failed to integrate the programmes being supported by the grants of the Global Fund into its existing structures.  Instead, it placed them under the resource mobilization unit. 


What this meant was that program staff reported to their respective functional heads, and also to the resource mobilization unit, a reporting maze that, the audit said, led to “distorted lines of authority and resulted in conflicts among staff, their functional heads, and the resource mobilization unit.” 


The implication of the behavior of Nigeria’s recipients of Global Fund grants is that, as the Inspector General has threatened, Nigeria may lose access to those funds altogether.  That would be a major blow to the millions of Nigerians who are depending on its interventions to manage the penetration of HIV & AIDS in their families and communities. 


Only last week, the Board of the Global Fund Board formally adopted the report of its High-Level Independent Review Panel on Fiduciary Controls and Oversight Mechanisms of the Global Fund.  At its special meeting on 26 September 2012, the Board said that it accepted the report's underlying analysis, and that the report presented “a compelling case for a rapid and urgent transformation of the Global Fund."


The Global Fund established the High-Level Panel following the extensive international media coverage that accompanied publication this year of the Fund's findings regarding misappropriation of Global Fund money by some recipients in certain African countries such as Nigeria. 


Following that development, Nigeria’s ICPC immediately announced it would commence probing seven of the non-governmental organizations involved.  


The Commission expressed concern over potential damage the audit posed to the reputation and image of Nigeria, and the indication by the Global Fund that it could terminate its funding of Nigerian organizations over the massive fraud scandal. 


The ICPC then swore to bring to justice all those involved, but since then, in a country where corrupt officials routinely walk free, nothing has been heard from the ICPC over the matter.  Just last week, even the President of the Senate, Mr. David Mark, complained at the launching of the Senate Committee on Communications about the government’s lack of resolve to do anything about corruption. 


“That is tax payers’ money that has gone down the drain and nobody is doing anything,” he said, reflecting on the telecommunications sector.  “Those who buried NITEL and M-TEL are walking free as if they have not done anything and if anything else, they expect that we should be clapping for them and paying them that they buried an organization that should be yielding billions into the economy."
The Global Fund is traceable to April 2001 when African leaders, in a meeting in Abuja, declared AIDS a continental emergency.  


Pledging to spend 15% of their annual budgets on health, they urged donors to create a $5 billion to $10 billion Global AIDS Fund.


Thereafter, then United Nations Secretary General Kofi called for an international “war chest” of $7 billion to $10 billion per year, to fight HIV/AIDS as well as tuberculosis and malaria.

The following month, in May 2001, President G. W. Bush, speaking at an appearance with Mr. Annan and President Obasanjo, at the White House, announced a “founding donation” by the United States” of $200 million.


That was followed by contributions by some other nations, and by August, the fund, which came to be known as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, had received up to $1.4 billion in one-time contributions.  Although progress slowed down considerably following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the Global Fund became a key part of Africa’s response to the threat of HIV & AIDS until the Office of the Inspector General issued its reports this year.


In the latest development, the Global Fund last week extended the deadline for submission of Round 11 applications from 15 December 2011 to at least 1 March 2012.  Its estimate of the funding that will be available for Round 11 has dropped by half, from $1.5 billion to $0.8 billion. 


This is as the Global Fund, determined to take significant changes in its work begins to implement the recommendations of the High-Level Independent Review Panel.
One of the casualties may be Nigeria’s already hapless battle against HIV & AIDS.

Political Change and The Funding of Education in Nigeria--Prof. Adewale Stephen

 It has been said that no nation can develop beyond the level of its education. In other words, education is the livewire of any serious nation which aspires to attain the highest level of development. In Nigeria, One might not be too wrong in saying that the policy of the successive government in the country is that the goose that lays the developmental golden egg must be killed so that it does not turn around to criticize the misappropriation and looting of its resources. Or how else does one explain the continuous neglect of the education sector whereby students, who are the nation’s assets and bridge to the future, are made to bear the brunt of our government’s insensitivity while the lecturers and other workers, who train the future wealth of the country, are made to wallow in abject poverty.

This situation which began in 1978 under Obasanjo’s military regime has taken a very critical turn with detrimental implications on the lives of workers, youths and peasants as well as the quality of education. Right since 1978 when the tuition and feeding fees were introduced and government got ensnared in crippling IMF/World Bank loans, the lots of education have gone from bad to worse. As a result of non-funding, all the Nigerian schools lack adequate and well-equipped facilities like modern libraries, laboratories, classrooms, hostels, portable water, constant power supply, etc. Schools are understaffed while morale is low among the existing staff due to poor welfare package and lack of necessary working tools.

In their bid to reverse this, the ASUU, SSANU, NASU and NAAT succeeded in forcing the federal government to sign an agreement with them in October 2009. The agreement basically centres on funding, the allocation of a minimum of 26% of the annual budget to education. But unfortunately since that time, the federal government has not deemed it fit to implement the agreement. It was this government’s blatant refusal to implement the agreement that led ASUU into declaring a one-week lecture boycott last week. As I write, other staff unions are also on strike. And if care is not taken, the crisis may soon degenerate into a full blown industrial strike.

I call on the governments at all level to accede to the demands of the striking universities workers and honour the agreement it willingly reached with the Unions in 2009. The government’s refusal to adequately fund education has created basis for the authorities of institutions to impose various obnoxious charges and fees of the students. This has been making education the exclusive preserve of children of the few rich, the privileged and treasury looters. Moreover, the decrying state of our institutions, from the primary to tertiary, is not a concern to the governments since members of the capitalist ruling class can afford to send their wards to private schools or abroad to acquire sound education.

This is further buttressed by the fact that while government claims there is no money and the universities are left to decay, public officials (elected/unelected) live fabulous ostentatious lifestyles with fat salaries and allowances with a coterie of aides, special advisers, special assistants, and hangers-on, while billions of naira are daily looted, squandered and wasted on frivolous activities that do not fundamentally affect on the living conditions of the working people for the better. Apparently, it is not a case of non-affordability but lack of sincerity, political wil,l charismatic drives and sensitivity to the welfare of the people.

However, as ASUU and other staff unions along with the students are fighting for the proper funding of education, the sight must not lost on the fact that corruption and mismanagement is another phenomenon that compounded the crisis of the education sector. Therefore, we must equally demand for democratic management of our institutions with the elected representatives of the students and academic and non-academic staff.

And while it is instructive to state that the struggle of ASUU is necessary and commendable, the task of revamping of education must be shouldered by the every staff union in the sector (i.e. ASUU, ASUP, COEASU, SSANU, NASU, SSATHURAI, NUT, NAAT, etc.) along with the Nigerian students. There should be joint action among the staff unions and the students. This will lead to the formation of a formidable force that can give the required strength to the struggle. In the meantime, ASUU and other unions should take the struggle beyond the four walls of campuses by organizing public rallies and symposiums in order to enlist physical participation of the working people and to mount pressure on the government.

The need to form a united front is highlighted in the fact that university workers and students have become victims of state repression as a result of their genuine campaigning and demands for better wages and enabling academic environment. In fact, most institutions have not only found it difficult to increase their school fees astronomically but have also elected to suspend and victimize those students activist who make any meaningful attempt to criticize them. This prevalence among others is not accidental but a historically premeditated and calculated attempt at breaking the defenses of any vibrant structure that can possibly protect the interest of the working class. This experience is not limited to the schools alone. The governments at all level of the public service have refused to implement the #18,000 minimum wage which only amount to a meager #600 per day while the disconcerted workers are being threatened with massive retrenchment!

The only lesson inherent in these present quagmires is the need for all working class to unite under a common ground and with the knowledge that nothing can be given freely by the state. It has to be fought for. That is how the capitalist state has always been and that is the way it will remain. History has made it so and there appears to be nothing any mortal can arguably do about that. The state will remain the state just as a leopard cannot change its spot.

As the University workers continue their campaign for adequate funding of education, I maintain that students and workers must not just realize in theory the need to fight for political change as a basis of improving the condition of education and better living condition, they must realize this necessity in practice by taking the bold steps of creating, joining, and building a pro-masses’ political party alongside with the labour and civil society with the sole aim of chasing away these anti-education capitalist government and putting in their place a political party and government that recognizes the principle of provision of functional education not just as a fashionable phrase but a cardinal principle of governance which can be realized on the basis of radical re-arrangement of the economy to suit the majority and not the minority.

It is only when these programmes are executed and accomplished that we can boldly peep back into this dark moment in history of our nation and say that after all “the struggles and campaign for the better funding of education were never in vain”.

Adewale Stephen, Department of History, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State

Apple's Steve Jobs Is Dead: Farewell to the Genius

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

Steven P. Jobs, the Apple Inc. chairman and co-founder who pioneered the personal computer industry and changed the way people think about technology, died Wednesday at the age of 56.

Enlarge Image

Associated Press

Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco, in this Jan. 9, 2007 file photo.

"Steve's brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives," Apple's board said in a statement. "The world is immeasurably better because of Steve."

His family, in a separate statement, said Mr. Jobs "died peacefully today surrounded by his family...We know many of you will mourn with us, and we ask that you respect our privacy during our time of grief."

The company didn't specify the cause of his death. Mr. Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and several years ago received a liver transplant.In August, Mr. Jobs stepped down as CEO, handing the reins to Tim Cook.

During his more than three decade-long career, Mr. Jobs transformed Silicon Valley as he helped turn the once sleepy expanse of fruit orchards into the technology industry's innovation center. In addition to laying the groundwork for the modern high-tech industry alongside other pioneers like Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, Mr. Jobs proved the appeal of well-designed intuitive products over the sheer power of technology itself and shifted the way consumers interact with technology in an increasingly digital world.

Unlike those men, however, the most productive chapter in Mr. Jobs' career occurred near the end of his life, when a nearly unbroken string of innovative and wildly successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad fundamentally changed the PC, electronics and digital media industries. The way he marketed and sold those products through savvy advertising campaigns and its retail stores, in the meanwhile, helped turn the company into a pop culture icon.

At the beginning of that phase, Mr. Jobs once described his philosophy as trying to make products that were at "the intersection of art and technology." In doing so, he turned Apple into the world's most valuable company.

After exhibiting significant weight loss in mid-2008, Mr. Jobs took a nearly six month medical leave of absence in 2009, during which he received a liver transplant. He took another medical leave of absence in mid-January without explanation before stepping down as chief executive in August.

Mr. Jobs is survived by his wife, Laurene, and four children.

Although his achievements in technology alone were immense, Mr. Jobs played an equally groundbreaking role in entertainment. He turned Apple into the largest retailer of music and helped popularize computer-animated films as the financier and CEO of Pixar Animation Studios, which he later sold to Walt Disney Co. He was a key figure in changing the way people used the Internet and how they consumed music, TV shows, movies, books, disrupting industries in the process.

Mr. Jobs also pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern business history, returning to Apple after an 11-year absence during which he was largely written off as a has-been and then reviving the then-struggling company by introducing products such as the iMac all-in-one computer, iPod music player and iTunes digital music store.

The company produces $65.2 billion a year in revenue compared with $7.1 billion in its business year ending September 1997. Apple has become one of the world's premier designers of consumer-electronics devices, dropping the "computer" in its name in January 2007 to underscore its expansion beyond PCs.

Although Mr. Jobs officially handed over the reins of the company to long-time deputy Tim Cookin August, his death nevertheless raises a high-stakes question for Apple of how the company—which has been in the vanguard of technological creativity for most of the past decade—will sustain its success without his vision and guidance. Other icons of American capitalism, including Walt Disney, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Business Machines Corp., experienced some transitional woes but eventually managed to thrive after their charismatic founders passed on.

But few companies of that stature have shown such an acute dependence on their founder, or lost the founder at the peak of his career. Several years after Mr. Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, the company began a steady decline that saw it drift to the margins of the computer industry. That slide was reversed only after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.

Mr. Jobs also leaves behind innumerable tales about his mercurial management style, such as his habit of calling employees or their ideas "dumb" when he didn't like something. He was even more combative against foes like Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Amazon.com Inc. WhenAdobe Systems Inc. waged a campaign against Apple for not supporting Adobe's Flash video format on its iPhones and iPads in April 2010, Mr. Jobs wrote a 1,600 word essay about why the software was outdated and inadequate for mobile devices.

The CEO maintained uncompromising standards about the company's hardware and software, demanding "insanely great" aesthetics and ease of use from the moment a consumer walked into one of Apple's stylish stores. His attention to the smallest details in the development and design process were instrumental in shaping some of the most distinctive features of Apple's products, while his meticulously planned onstage demonstrations helped fuel excitement that was unmatched by his peers.

At event after event to introduce new Apple products, Mr. Jobs often puckishly proclaimed "There is one more thing" before revealing the most significant news at the very end of a speech. He enforced strict secrecy among Apple employees, a strategy that he believed heightened anticipation for upcoming Apple products.

Mr. Jobs, the adopted son of a family in Palo Alto, Calif., was born on Feb. 24, 1955. A college dropout, he established his reputation early on as a tech innovator when at 21 years old, he and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Inc. in the Jobs family garage in 1976. Mr. Jobs chose the name, in part, because he was a Beatles fan and admired the group's Apple records label, according to the book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders" by Wall Street Journal reporter Jim Carlton.

The pair came out with the Apple II in 1977, a groundbreaking computer that was relatively affordable and designed for the mass market consumer rather than for hobbyists. The product went on to become one of the first commercially successful personal computers, making the company $117 million in annual sales by the time of Apple's initial public offering in 1980. The IPO instantly made Mr. Jobs a multimillionaire.

Not all of Mr. Jobs's early ideas paid off. Apple's Apple III and Lisa computers that debuted in 1980 and 1983 were flops. But the distinctive all-in-one Macintosh--foreshadowed in a ground-breaking TV ad inspired by George Orwell's novel "1984" that famously only aired once -- would set the standard for the design of modern computer operating systems, in which users point and click on icons with a mouse rather than typing in commands.

Even then, Mr. Jobs was a stickler about design details. Bruce Tognazzini, a former user-interface expert at Apple who joined the company in 1978, once said that Mr. Jobs was adamant than the keyboard not include "up", "down," "right" and "left" keys that allow users to move the cursor around their computer screens.

Mr. Jobs's pursuit for aesthetic beauty sometimes bordered on the extreme. George Crow, an Apple engineer in the 1980s and again from 1998 to 2005, recalls how Mr. Jobs wanted to make even the inside of computers beautiful. On the original Macintosh PC, Mr. Crow says Mr. Jobs wanted the internal wiring to be in the colors of Apple's early rainbow logo. Mr. Crow says he eventually convinced Mr. Jobs it was an unnecessary expense.

Many ideas in the Macintosh came from a visit in 1979 to Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research, where Mr. Jobs saw a machine called the Xerox Alto that had a crude graphical user interface and a mouse. The episode underscored his recurring role as a refiner and popularizer of existing inventions.

"Picasso had a saying, 'Good artists copy. Great artists steal,'" Mr. Jobs said in a PBS documentary on the computer industry from the mid-1990s. "I've been shameless about stealing great ideas."

Even in his appearance, Mr. Jobs seemed to cultivate an image more like that of an artist than a corporate executive. In public, he rarely deviated from an outfit consisting of Levis jeans, a black mock turtleneck and New Balance running shoes.

As Apple expanded, Mr. Jobs decided to bring in a more experienced manager to lead the company. He recruited John Sculley from Pepsi Co. to be Apple CEO in 1983, famously overcoming Mr. Sculley's initial reluctance by asking the executive if he just wanted to sell "sugar water to kids" or help change the world.

After Apple fell into a subsequent slump, a leadership struggle led its board's decision to back Mr. Sculley and fire Mr. Jobs two years later at the age of 30. "What can I say – I hired the wrong guy," Mr. Jobs brooded in the same PBS documentary. "He destroyed everything I had spent ten years working for."

Mr. Jobs then created NeXT Inc., a closely watched startup that in 1988 introduced a distinctive black desktop computer with advanced software that was initially targeted at the academic computing market. But the machine was hobbled by its exorbitant price tag and some key design decisions, including its use of an optical disk drive and a Motorola Inc. microprocessor at a time when Intel Corp. chips and floppy drives had become the norm.

NeXT eventually stopped selling hardware and failed to make money as a software company. But its operating system would become a foundation for OS X, the software backbone of today's Macs, after Apple purchased NeXT for $400 million in December 1996.

In 1986, using part of his fortune from Apple, Mr. Jobs paid filmmaker George Lucas $10 million to acquire the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm Ltd. The company he formed out of those assets, Pixar Animation Studios, first sold hardware, then software, and later turned to feature films. Pixar went on to create a string of computer-animated hits, from "Toy Story" to 2008's "Wall-E." Mr. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in January 2006 in a $7.4 billion deal that gave him a Disney board seat and made him the entertainment company's largest shareholder.

Meanwhile, Apple began foundering. Computers using Intel chips and Microsoft software grew to dominate the market, a trend that accelerated after Microsoft's Windows emulated many elements of the Mac's visual interface.

Apple, by contrast, had to finance both hardware and software development internally. Fewer developers of application programs created products to make the Macintosh more useful. Apple would eventually decide to license its operating system to other hardware companies, but it was too late to reverse the swing to Windows-based machines.

By 1997, Apple had racked up nearly $2 billion in losses in two years, its shares were at record lows and it was on its third CEO--Gil Amelio--in four years. Eight months after the deal to buy NeXT in December 1996, Mr. Amelio was ousted and Mr. Jobs appointed interim CEO, a title that became permanent in January 2000. One former Apple employee recalls Mr. Jobs joking soon after he returned that "the lunatics have taken over the asylum and we can do anything we want."

Mr. Jobs, who was given a salary of $1 a year along with options to Apple stock, made a series of changes that started paying off quickly. He ended the nascent software licensing program that created Mac clones, killed the struggling Newton handheld computer and trimmed a confusing array of Mac models to a handful of systems focused on the consumer market.

In May 1998, he introduced the iMac, an unusual one-piece computer that sported a colorful casing in translucent turquoise and gray. The popular machine--which sent competitors scrambling to improve their own designs—was embodied by a bold ad campaign that featured the phrase "Think Different," with the picture of one of Mr. Jobs's heroes, such as Albert Einstein and Muppets creator Jim Henson.

While shareholders cheered the changes, Mr. Jobs flexed his power on Apple's Cupertino, Calif., campus. Within months of taking over, he had replaced four of the five top executive positions with former NeXT underlings. He issued emails forbidding employees on the famously laid-back campus to bring pets to the office, smoke even in parking lots, and threatening to fire anyone caught leaking company documents.

One personal assistant became a target when he failed to arrange the installation of a high-speed digital data line to Mr. Jobs's office fast enough to suit the interim CEO. The worker said Mr. Jobs fired him for the delay, but rescinded the firing the next day after he had cooled down. (The worker ended up resigning soon afterwards).

Apple had some stumbles during Mr. Jobs's second coming, including a cube-shaped Macintosh that failed to catch on and was scrapped in 2001. The failure was one reason that Apple posted a quarterly loss and warned it would miss estimates several times in 2000 and 2001.

But big hits followed. In 2001, Apple introduced a PowerBook laptop made from titanium, a metal more frequently found in fighter airplanes. The same year, it introduced the iPod, which transformed digital music players with features such as its smooth shape and DJ-like wheel for navigating through songs. As of Sept. 2010, Apple had sold more than 275 million iPod devices since its introduction, and it has more than 70% market share in the market for digital music players.

A key differentiator was the iTunes Music Store, opened in 2003. At the time, the music industry was largely sitting on the sidelines of the digital revolution, badly wounded by illegal downloads but unable to agree on an easy, inexpensive way to sell songs online. But Mr. Jobs helped convince major record labels to sell recordings for 99 cents each, along with antipiracy restrictions that most consumers found acceptable.

The store, which has sold more than ten billion songs, became the largest music retailer in the U.S. in 2008. It also became an incentive for consumers to buy iPods because, for much of its history, songs from the iTunes store could only be downloaded to Apple's music player and not devices made by other companies.

At the same time, Mr. Jobs was building a deep bench of executives. He recruited former Compaq Computer Corp. executive Tim Cook in the late 1990s to straighten Apple's operations and promoted him over time to chief operating officer. Ron Johnson, senior vice president of Apple retail, was hired from Target Corp. in 2000 to launch Apple's stores worldwide. Apple's lead industrial designer Jonathan Ive took charge of the physical look-and-feel of the company's products and is said to share in Mr. Jobs's sensibilities about design.

In 2004, Mr. Jobs had to lean on this bench when he disclosed that he had had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his pancreas. Apple revealed the procedure in early August 2004, but a person familiar with the situation said Mr. Jobs first learned of the tumor during a routine abdominal scan nine months earlier. The board and Mr. Jobs said nothing to Apple shareholders as the Apple executive, during that time, dealt with the tumor through changes to his diet, the person said.

In June 2007, Mr. Jobs made another splash when Apple introduced the iPhone. The cellphone pushed the envelope in the mobile phone market with features that included a touch-screen interface, allowing tricks such as blowing up images by spreading a thumb and finger on the phone's surface.

Mr. Jobs was typically hands on in the creation of the iPhone. People familiar with the matter say the CEO was the one that made a decision to change the screen of the iPhone from plastic to glass after he unveiled the product at the Macworld trade show in 2007. The iPhone team scrambled to procure glass that would meet his exacting standards, so the devices could be manufactured in time for the launch, which took place just seven months later.

Despite skepticism about Apple's ability to enter an already-competitive market dominated by the likes of Research in Motion Ltd.'s Blackberry devices, Apple quickly became a force in the mobile phone market, selling 92 million iPhones as of December 2010. The product kicked into a higher gear earlier this year when Apple said it would begin selling iPhones through Verizon Wireless in addition to carrier AT&T.

Last year, Mr. Jobs also unveiled the iPad tablet computer to great fanfare, billing it as "magical and revolutionary". In the first nine months of the product's release, Apple sold 14.8 million iPads as consumers snapped them up to use as a casual multimedia device for activities such as emailing, watching video and reading. People who work closely with Mr. Jobs said the project was so important to him that he was intimately involved in its planning even while recovering from his 2009 liver transplant.

A major selling point for both the iPhone and iPad has been the App Store, which allows developers to easily make application programs that users can download for free or for a small fee; the store meanwhile has seen more than seven billion downloads as of the end of 2010.

One cloud to Mr. Jobs's reign came in 2006 when Apple also disclosed that an internal investigation had discovered that stock option grants to Apple executives between 1997 and 2002-- including to Mr. Jobs-- were improperly dated. Apple became the most high-profile technology company caught up in a broad series of options backdating scandals that helped inflate the profits executives made from their stock awards.

Apple later disclosed that Mr. Jobs helped select the favorable option dates, but denied that he did anything wrong since he didn't understand the accounting implications of his actions. Apple's investigation ended up blaming two ex-Apple executives – former general counsel Nancy Heinen and former chief financial officer Fred Anderson – for their role in the backdating. Both were later charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. They ended up settling the charges. Mr. Jobs was never charged with any wrongdoing.

Those who knew Mr. Jobs say that one reason why he was able to keep innovating was because he didn't dwell on past accomplishments or legacy but kept looking ahead and demanded that employees do the same. Hitoshi Hokamura, a former Apple employee, recalls how an old Apple I that was displayed by the company cafeteria quietly disappeared after Mr. Jobs returned in the late 1990s.

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," Mr. Jobs said in a commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005, almost a year after he was diagnosed with cancer.

Adesina laments tribulations faced by Nigerian farmers

Adewunmi Adesina, the minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, has the lamented various tribulations faced by Nigerian farmers saying “they sow in hope and reap in tears.”

Mr Adesina made the statement on Tuesday in Abuja at a meeting of stakeholders on ‘Action Plan for Cassava Transformation in Nigeria’. He said the aim of the action plan was to increase the income of 1.8 million farming families to $450 dollars per annum and add 1.2 million jobs to the cassava sub-sector.

The minister said that Nigerian farmers were not even sure who to sell their produce to because they did not have access to the technology that could help them to increase the value of their produce, noting that the average Nigerian farmer had no access to most of the fundamental inputs of farming, including fertiliser.

“There are no institutions to link farmers to finance, right to market to guarantee his price as well as institutions to put the right policies in place, Adesina said, describing Nigeria as the largest producer of cassava in the world.

He said that although the country produced 40 million metric tones of cassava tubers per annum, there were no value added to the large quantity of tuber crop produced annually in the country.

Adesina pointed out that for federal government’s transformation agenda in the agriculture sector to be meaningful, government should not run the sector alone, pointing out that implementation of the value-added chain activities in the cassava sub-sector, would be driven by the private sector with support from the public sector.

“We will rapidly set up an organised cassava market that will be run by the private sector and government will only facilitate, promote and regulate it,” he said.

Adesina said that government would place more emphasis on value-addition by focusing on the production of high-quality cassava, saying: “In order to boost cassava production in the country, there will be easy access to finance for farmers, agro-millers, seed processors and food manufacturers.”

He said that the government also planned to establish staple crops processing zones for farmers to process their produce, adding that the federal government was determined to bring to an end to the era of companies leaving Nigeria for Ghana to invest.

He called on stakeholders to rise to the challenges of feeding the nation by linking farmers to the right markets and also creating wealth for farmers.