When I say Nigeria’s cement policy has been a complete failure, this is exactly what I mean. The Goverment is tweeting this out without irony

Cement is an input. You can’t eat or drink it. On its own it’s useless. So as a government, if you decide to have a cement policy, the biggest mistake you can make is to set your success benchmark simply as increasing the amount of cement produced. But this is what Nigeria did
If you’re going to have a policy supporting the production of an input, the only sensible way to measure the success of that policy is to measure the things that that input goes into.
So you say - we want to have a cement policy to support the construction of x number of houses over x number of years. Or to build x amount of infrastructure. That is how you measure the success of a cement policy
But what did Nigeria do? The only measure of success has been we were producing x amount of cement in 19xx and now we are producing xx amount of cement in 20xx. Clap for yourselves, everyone go home. We even have a cement billionaire!
Now *after* the comprehensive failure of the cement policy, the government is now congratulating itself for negotiating a discount with cement producers to - you won’t believe this - build houses.
Imagine visiting a country and you see 90% of the people trekking as their means of transport. But a tiny minority of people are going about in cars. You then ask who is the richest man in that country and they tell you it’s the guy selling car tyres
You don’t have anywhere near enough of the things for which cement is an input - housing, infrastructure - but the guy selling that input is a billionaire anyway.

Systems, systems, systems.
What is most painful about this Low Quality Billionaire is that he is no more than a technology middleman in all of this. ALL the technology used to manufacture cement in Nigeria is simply imported from China. This is all he’s done to become a multi billionaire
No local innovation or anything of the sort. No research or development. Nothing added to the body of cement knowledge that has been in existence for more than 2,000 years. Just manipulate the govt to shamelessly fleece his own countrymen. Disgusting

More from World

A few thoughts on this sad development 👇👇

20 academics criticizing an paper is fine; good science, really

10000+ hate mail for studying schools in Sweden is insane

Anonymous docs/ prof (hiding in faceless accts) on twitter smearing researchers is insane
[thread] https://t.co/QYldLD3WO0


In April 2020, @jflier and I saw this coming

We saw increasingly heated and personal attacks against scientists merely for having a range of views on COVID19 (PS there is no playbook/ right ans)

Tying science to naked politics was also bad idea, we

Yet, repeatedly that is what happened. Twitter 'experts' displayed an absolute intolerance to other views

Folks who disagreed weren't just wrong, they were malicious actors spreading "disinformation"

Really? Someone worked for 25 years as faculty to suddenly spread lies?

Disinformation has been so misused that it has lost meaning.

I recently saw an ID doc & lab researcher in the UK be accused of spreading "disinformation"

hahah, get outta here, you are trying to say "i disagree" but your keyboard is broken

Personal attacks have become so bad that I have seen a lab researcher accuse a doctor of wanting to engage in inappropriate relationships with patients due to diverging views on vaccine messaging

Seriously? It was a low point even for twitter

You May Also Like

Tip from the Monkey
Pangolins, September 2019 and PLA are the key to this mystery
Stay Tuned!


1. Yang


2. A jacobin capuchin dangling a flagellin pangolin on a javelin while playing a mandolin and strangling a mannequin on a paladin's palanquin, said Saladin
More to come tomorrow!


3. Yigang Tong
https://t.co/CYtqYorhzH
Archived: https://t.co/ncz5ruwE2W


4. YT Interview
Some bats & pangolins carry viruses related with SARS-CoV-2, found in SE Asia and in Yunnan, & the pangolins carrying SARS-CoV-2 related viruses were smuggled from SE Asia, so there is a possibility that SARS-CoV-2 were coming from