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A Colorful Union in Abuja: Abdulmajeed Abdulganiyu Akogun and Miss Fareedah Abubakar Gunu Tie the Knot

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The solemn Nikkah ceremony was imbued with spirituality and tradition as families and friends witnessed the unification of two illustrious lineages. The reception that followed was nothing short of spectacular. Guests were treated to an opulent spread of food, drinks, and snacks that left no taste bud unsatisfied.

The New Couple

By Abdulrahman Aliagan,  Abuja

The serene atmosphere of the National Mosque, Abuja, provided a perfect backdrop for the solemnization of Nikkah between Abdulmajeed Abdulganiyu Akogun, the pride of Akogun Oke-Ode in Kwara State, and Miss Fareedah Abubakar Gunu Zikki, the esteemed Yeriima Bakaru of Kaiama, Kwara State. The event, held on a blessed Friday, marked the beginning of a joyous celebration that would extend to Aldenco Estate in Galadimawa area of Abuja for Mither’s Day event to the Suncity Event Center, Abuja, where a grand reception awaited guests.

The solemn Nikkah ceremony was imbued with spirituality and tradition as families and friends witnessed the unification of two illustrious lineages. The reception that followed was nothing short of spectacular. Guests were treated to an opulent spread of food, drinks, and snacks that left no taste bud unsatisfied.

The event was further enlivened by cultural displays, featuring traditional music and dances from both Kaiama and the Yoruba heritage, creating a harmonious blend of the couple’s rich cultural backgrounds.

In a heartfelt address, the groom’s father, Alhaji Abdulganiyu Akogun, expressed immense joy and gratitude. He offered prayers for the couple, asking Almighty Allah to bless their union and make it a significant turning point in the history of both families. His words reflected the shared happiness and hope that defined the day’s proceedings.

Alhaji Bolaji Abdullahi, a former Minister of Youth and Sports Development, delivered a stirring goodwill message, emphasizing the importance of faith and mutual understanding. He advised the couple to anchor their union on patience and to avoid interference from third parties. “See Almighty God as the beginning, the middle, and the end of your journey together,” he urged, while praying for divine guidance and protection over their new life.

The ceremony attracted an array of distinguished personalities from across Nigeria. Among the eminent guests were Professor Ishaq Oloyede, Registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB); Professor Abubakar Olanrewaju Sulaiman, Director General of the National Institute of Legislative and Democratic Studies; Professor Mahfouz Adedimeji, former Vice-Chancellor of Ahman Patigi University; and Malam Abdulrahman Aliagan, President of the Nigerian Guild of Investigative Journalists. Alhaji Raheem Adedoyin, a former Commissioner of Information in Kwara State, was also present, adding to the event’s prestige.

As the celebrations drew to a close, it was evident that the union of Abdulmajeed and Fareedah was not just a marriage of two individuals but a beautiful convergence of culture, faith, and community. It was a day to remember, a day when love, tradition, and joy intertwined to create memories that would last a lifetime.

   

About author
Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
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The Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: Why Capital Still Fails to Become Infrastructure

6 Mins read
  By Chidi Nwafor  In October 2023, a Gulf sovereign wealth fund quietly closed a $2 billion allocation to global infrastructure, earmarked in part for emerging-market energy and transport assets. The announcement drew the usual applause: another sign, commentators said, that institutional capital was finally waking up to the infrastructure opportunity in the Global South. Eighteen months later, less than a tenth of that allocation had actually left the fund’s balance sheet. Not because the mandate had changed. Not because the fund had lost appetite. According to two people familiar with the portfolio, the constraint was simpler and more uncomfortable: there were not enough investable projects to put the money into. This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. The Comfortable Explanation  The explanation on offer at every major infrastructure summit is a familiar one. Global infrastructure investment needs run into the tens of trillions of dollars over the coming decade; committed capital falls well short; therefore, the problem is one of insufficient funding, and the solution is more of it: more pledges, more blended-finance facilities, more climate funds, more multilateral capital increases. It is a comfortable explanation because it assigns responsibility clearly to governments who under-fund, institutions who under-commit, and it offers a clean remedy: raise more. It is also, on close inspection, not what the evidence shows. Pension funds globally hold trillions in assets under management with explicit infrastructure allocations that remain structurally underweight, not because trustees have rejected the asset class but because deal flow meeting their risk and governance thresholds has not materialised at the pace their mandates assume. Sovereign wealth funds report the same pattern. Commercial banks with dedicated project finance desks describe pipelines that look full at the term-sheet stage and thin dramatically by financial close. Development finance institutions, whose entire purpose is to absorb risk that commercial capital will not, routinely report that their binding constraint is not capital adequacy but the volume of bankable transactions their teams can originate and structure in a given year. None of this fits the scarcity narrative. All of it fits a different one. Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. The first condition is met, overwhelmingly, across nearly every category of capital that matters to infrastructure. The second is met by only a small fraction of the projects competing for it. The result is a market that looks, from the outside, like a financing gap, and functions, from the inside, like a conversion problem: an abundance of capital on one side, an abundance of infrastructure need on the other, and an underbuilt set of mechanisms in between capable of turning one into the other at any meaningful scale. Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. The Missing Middle  This is the Missing Middle of Infrastructure Finance: the institutional architecture that sits between capital that wants to move and infrastructure that needs building, and whose incompleteness explains far more of the global infrastructure gap than any shortfall in committed funds. It consists of project preparation facilities able to fund feasibility and structuring work before commercial viability has been proven. Transaction advisers capable of building deals that satisfy development mandates and commercial return thresholds at once, rather than treating the two as separate constituencies to be managed sequentially. Risk-sharing and guarantee instruments that convert political, regulatory and currency risk into something a commercial balance sheet can underwrite. Aggregation platforms that bundle smaller, individually sub-scale projects into portfolios large enough to justify institutional transaction costs. Standardised documentation that reduces the bespoke legal cost of every new deal. And coordination across ministries, regulators and financiers robust enough that a technically sound project does not die in bureaucratic sequencing after the money has already been found. None of these are new ideas in isolation. What is missing is their assembly into a coherent system, deliberately funded and institutionally accountable, rather than scattered across donor-funded pilots that end when the grant does. The African Dimension  Africa makes this dynamic unusually visible, and consequently offers an unusually clear opportunity to correct it. The continent’s infrastructure financing need, by any measure, is vast. Less understood is that the shortfall is disproportionately one of preparation rather than capital. Nigerian gas-to-power, off-grid solar and mini-grid developers have each demonstrated that individual projects can clear the bankability bar; what has not emerged is systemic pipeline scale, a steady stream of comparably prepared projects large enough to absorb the capital already circling the sector. The pattern repeats, with local variation, from grid infrastructure in East Africa to transport corridors in West Africa. Interested capital is rarely the scarce input. Investment-ready projects are. The Global Comparison  Mature markets solved this problem gradually and mostly invisibly, through decades of institution-building that predates the current infrastructure conversation: specialist project finance units inside banks, standardised PPP frameworks, established regulatory playbooks, deep benches of transaction lawyers and engineers who move between deals rather than between one-off assignments. Emerging and frontier markets are not being asked to meet a lower standard. They are being asked to meet the same standard without having built the same machinery, and then being told, when deals fail to close, that the problem is insufficient funding….
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