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President Buhari Asks Federal Universities To Be Prudent In Funds Management

buhari-in-morocco2

President Muhammadu Buhari has asked federal universities to be prudent in the management of funds allocated to them in view of current economic challenges.

President Buhari, who was represented by the minister of State for education, Professor Anthony Onwuka, spoke today, Saturday at the 30th Convocation of the University of Calabar.

The president said that his administration placed high premium on the funding of education as a way to improve teaching and learning, adding that in view of the present economic challenges, it is important for public universities to adopt prudent measures in spending the funds allocated to universities by the Federal Government.

“As we all know, Nigeria is facing some economic challenges presently; I wish to advise federal universities to make judicious use of the funds allocated to them from the federal government for the development of their campuses.

“The University of Calabar has fared very well in terms of infrastructural development and I must commend the university management for this,’’ he said.

The president congratulated the graduands on the award of degrees to them and asked them to be good ambassadors of the institution and Nigeria.

Earlier, the Vice-Chancellor of the university, Prof. Zana Akpagu, said that the institution graduated a total of 13,347 students in various fields of studies at the ceremony.

Akpagu explained that 1,437 students were awarded post-graduate certificates while 11,910 got first degrees in different classes.

He said that 22 students graduated with First Class degrees, adding that the University recorded a milestone in establishing the Faculty of Engineering which never existed since its establishment in 1978.

He assured that the university would continue to leave up to its expectations in delivering quality academic services to students.

On his part, the Pro-Chancellor of the University, Dr Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, thanked the Federal Government for improving infrastructure in the school through the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND).

Iwunayanwu said that the support had helped in the physical development of the university.

Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State, who was a guest at the occasion, donated the sum of N30 million as an educational support fund to the university’s Medical Centre, still under construction.

Tambuwal commended the school management for infrastructural development and urged the graduands not to depend solely on white-collar jobs “but rather, be determined to be entrepreneurs”.

Highlight of the occasion was the award of doctoral degrees “Honoris Causa” to retired Brigadier General Anthony Ukpo, Alhaji Ummarun Kwabo and Daniel Chukwudozie for their contributions to the socio-economic development of the country.

(NAN). [myad]

Group Defends Tourism Corporation Boss Over Alleged Certificate Forgery

Tourism DG Mariel Rae Omo

A civil society group known as Justice and Equity Alliance, has defended the Acting Director General of the Nigeria Tourism Development Corporation (NTDC),Mrs. Mariel RAE-Omoh against alleged certificate forgery , saying that such allegation amounts to character assassination”

In a statement the group’s Coordinator, Mallam Garba Imam, said that investigations confirmed that Mrs. Mariel attended a tertiary institution in Italy under a Federal Government scholarship in 1980 alongside other Nigerians where she bagged Higher National Diploma in Tourism and Hotel Administration.

“The translation of the certification was officially done and the Italian consulate attested to the genuineness of both the school and the certificate. The said school still exists in Italy and the records of scholarship approval are still available at the Lagos office of the Federal Ministry of Education.

“She proceeded to serve the nation under NYSC as well as bagging her Masters degree in the same field in Nigeria. It is false to allege that a graduate who studied  under federal scholarship  has no certificate.

“Are those peddling the rumour implying that the Federal Government sent so many Nigerians to an Italian school that does not exist? At the Italian consulate during our investigation, the consular officer also attended the same school while another lady said she enjoyed the scholarship in 1970.

“We call on the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture to get its facts right instead of acting on rumours and innuedoes. Mrs. Omoh is too cool and responsible to be involved in any unwholesome activities. Her appointment was done after due vetting and changing the decision of Mr President under false pretext is a threat to the change agenda.”

The group praised Mrs. Mariel Omoh for her reform efforts since she was appointed even as it accused those it called ‘agents of backwardness’ of flying false accusation. [myad]

Nigerian Nurse In Britain Bags Queen Elizabeth’s National Honour For Excellence

Queen Elizabeth honours Nigerian

An Igbo-Nigerian British-born retired Nurse, Dame Nneka Elizabeth Anionwu has been conferred with the Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for her services to nursng profession in the United Kingdom.
Dame Nneka Elizabeth Anionwu, a health expert, tutor, lecturer and medical professor of Irish contributed to opening the first sickle cell and thalassemia counselling centre in the UK. She also helped create the Mary Seacole Centre for Nursing Practice at the University of West London. She retired from her careers in 2007.
Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu,s born in United Kingdom,  was brilliant and excelled academically, obtaining a scholarship to Cambridge to study classics.

Furlong was in her second year when she became pregnant by Nigerian law student, Lawrence Odiatu Victor Anionwu. Furlong decided to leave Cambridge and look for a job in order to provide for her daughter, Elizabeth and herself.
Anionwu’s upbringing was heavily affected by moving between institutions and family. She spent just over two years living with her mother, a relationship that ended when her stepfather, who didn’t accept her and drank heavily, attacked her.
For much of her childhood, she was cared for by nuns, including several years in the Nazareth House convent in Birmingham. Often being harshly punished and humiliated for wetting the bed. She remembers being made to stand with a urine-soaked sheet over her head as a punishment for wetting the bed. In the book she recalls, that later in life when working as a health visitor: “I made sure to keep up-to-date with more humane treatments for bedwetting.”
She also remembers sobbing her heart out on the bus when she had to leave the convent to go and live with her mother. Every period of relative stability in childhood ended in sudden collapse. After an unsettled childhood and estrangement from her father Anionwu visited Nigeria. Her trip influenced her to take on her father’s name. Anionwu has credited her father, a barrister and diplomat, as a career inspiration.

Anionwu has one daughter, Azuka Oforka, who is an actress in the BBC TV series Casualty.
Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu has a PhD, a DBE, and a FRCN. She began her nursing career at a very young age after being inspired by a nun who cared for her eczema. At the age of 16, she started to work as a school nurse assistant in Wolverhampton.
Later on, she continued with her education to become a nurse, health visitor, and tutor. She is ultimately thankful that her father pushed her to pursue and progress more in her career. She also travelled to the US to study counselling for sickle cell and thalassemia centres and courses were not available in the UK.
In 1979 she worked with Dr Brozovic to create the first UK Sickle Cell and Thalassemia counselling centre in Brent. The opening of this counselling centre pioneered the opening of over 30 centers in the UK using the Brent location as a basis.
Anionwu is a member and patron of multiple committees:
Sickle Cell Society
Nigerian Nurses Charitable Association UK
Vice President of Unite/Community Practitioners and Health Visitors Association
Editorial Advisory Board of Nursing Standard
NHS Sickle Cell & Thalassemia Screening Program Steering Group
Honorary Advisor to the Chief Nursing Officer’s Black & Minority Ethnic Advisory Group
Life patron of The Mary Seacole Trust
Retiring in 2007, Anionwu, she remained active in the nursing community and overlooks many projects.
The development of caring for people with sickle cell disease and thalassemia syndromes: A framework for nursing staff.
Understanding the contribution of sickle cell and thalassemia specialist nurses. [myad]

Buhari: If Men Were God, By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Ozi Usman 3

The safe return, today, Friday, March 10, 2017, of President Muhammadu Buhari, by circumstances that defined his 50-day medical sojourn in London, is miraculous. To start with, it shamed the corruption-fighting-back army and their foot-soldiers and created hope for those who believe in the course he has taken to return the country to the path of sanity.

Indeed, for the toiling masses across Nigeria and those who had, for long, been devastated by the effect of gargantuan corruption, Buhari’s return is a big relief and it is a sign of hope for the manifestation of the great country they have long been dreaming of; a country where you earn what you work for and not on the basis of the class you belong to or the people you know upstairs or how smart you are to cut corners.

These classes of Nigerians would always wish and pray that someday, they would enjoy a little out of the multitude of wealth which God endowed this country with, but which has been cornered by a tiny few powerful ones; those who amass the nation’s collective wealth to the point of madness; those who stole Dollars, Naira, Euros and several others, and tuck the currencies in every conceivable place, including soak-away just so that they and their offspring would continue to be our masters forever.

But the tiny few powerful, corrupt wreaking ones, using the ill gotten wealth, are the ones that are not comfortable with Buhari. The return of Buhari today, by all stretches of imagination, has turned them into miserable liars: the lie they manufactured that Buhari was dead and or that he would not return to Nigeria alive. They, together with social media they bought for a pot of porridge and some hungry and ungodly ‘men of God’ predicted what they were never in control of – life!. And they ordinarily should have covered their faces in shame for such lies, including predicting what they knew not. However, it is obvious that they even have no shame.

They had gone to town, shortly after President Buhari took off to London on January 19, 2017, for initial 10-day vacation, brandishing the news that he was dead as if by such pronouncement or evil news, Buhari would just collapse and die. Indeed, hardly had Buhari landed in London to a UK hospital for routine medical check-up than an online medium, Metro UK claimed that he had died on hospital bed.

From Buhari was dead, which made a lot of waves, the social media and their sponsors began to churn out other fearful medical complications, including the one that said that he had prostate cancer, which would take six months to treat; and that even if it was treated, Buhari would never be the same again in terms of mental, physical and psychological alertness. They told these lies with bold faces, as if they were in the world of their own.

The social media and their sponsors made it look as if, one: it was a sin for anyone, including Buhari to die. And two, that it was a sign of weakness for President Buhari to be sick, forgetting, as Professor Ishaq Akintola, the Director of the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC), said, that some past American Presidents had at one time or the other fell sick and even died while serving in office.

They included Woodrow Wilson, who was the US President from 1913 to 1921, and who suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated throughout his presidency but yet he remained in office till the end of his term in 1921.

Another US President from 1933 to 1945, Franklin D Roosevelt was diagnosed with polio in 1921 at the age of 39, still he served for twelve good years though he could not stand or walk without support. Using a wheelchair in private, he never disclosed the full extent of his health condition.
Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) suffered heart attack in 1955 as a result of which he was hospitalized for several weeks. He also did a surgery some months later to treat Crohn’s disease and in late 1957 suffered another stroke that made him temporarily unable to speak. Yet he went ahead to win a second term after that.
John F Kennedy (1961 – 1963) had a chronic bone disease and was hospitalized nine times in his short two and a half year presidency but this was never revealed to the American public. George Bush (1989 – 1993) vomited and then fainted in front of cameras in 1992 while on a visit in Japan and heaven did not fall in America.
Also in history, Presidents had died in office, starting with Umaru Musa Yaradua, to General Murtala Muhammad and Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa who all died in one way or the other while in office.
Of course, eight American presidents have died in office: Four died of natural causes: William Henry Harrison (1841), Zachary Taylor (1850), Warren Harding (1923) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1945). Four others were assassinated: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901) and John F. Kennedy (1963).
It is also on record that the present Queen of England has for long, been suffering from some kind of mental disruption, having been identified with being kleptomaniac, yet, no citizen of England ever made fuse about it.

The return of Buhari was a true manifestation of the struggle between the light and the darkness; between the good and the evil and between the rotten past (from the point where corruption and evil took over the psyche of the country) and the present that begs for release from the yoke of modern-day executive robbers. Buhari and his team as well as those who have faith in his ability to take the country through the dark tunnel, represents the light, the good and the present that portends hope.

Of course, it has been scientifically proved that it is only God, and perhaps some unseen powers that are not prone to sickness whereas the mortals do. Therefore, like any other leader or mortal, Buhari can and did get sick. To Buhari as a person, the few harbingers and errand boys of death predictions on him have not surpassed the millions of prayers from the masses of Nigeria, daily and minutely beseeching Almighty God for his good health and longer life.

The President of the Africa Arise for Change Network  from Chicago, USA, Mr. Odoma did ask a million Naira question while the noise was penetrating the corners of Nigeria: what do the propagandists intend to achieve in their hallucination and hullaballoo about Buhari being dead?

He posited that no one with any leadership inclination or foresight would see the demise of President Buhari as solution to Nigeria’s huge problems.

Quite obviously, those who wished him dead were the enemies of Nigeria and the unscrupulous elements who have for years sapped this country dry. They are unhappy with Buhari because the profligacy which previously defined the hallmark of governance in the country has eased out for sanity, probity and accountability.

Most of the enemies of Nigeria and their cohorts are facing various charges of corruption in courts and feel that the demise of President Buhari would loosen the hangman’s noose on their necks.  They are those who delight in the perpetual enslavement of the masses, by doling out occasional handouts from stolen wealth, while the poor and suffering masses of Nigeria continue to gloomily sulk in hardships.

But while the few evil ones devout fruitless time for prayers wishing President Buhari dead, the majority and millions of Nigerians are countering their negative prayers in churches and mosques. They approached God Almighty with more sophistry in supplication, to bless and allow His own anointed leader of Nigeria to complete his constitutionally permissible eight years in Aso Villa to tidy up his reformations, cleanse the land and deliver to Nigerians a country of progress and prosperity.

These are the kind of prayers God listens to and answers, not the one men: the ordinary mortals wish for their fellow human being, pretending or claiming that they could be God and do what God does. Their own kind of evil prayers can only be answered by devil. And where God arises, devil kowtow.

Quite unfortunately, they are not, cannot be God and cannot play the role of God. They are confined to where they can only watch what God is doing and wants to do in the life of any of His creators, including even theirs. [myad]

President Buhari Formally Resumes Duty On Monday

President Muhammadu Buhari
President Muhammadu Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari will transmit a letter to the National Assembly on Monday, to announce his resumption of duty according to the provisions of the Nigerian constitution.

Special Adviser to the President on media and publicity, Fami Adesina, in a tweet today, confirmed that Buhari is ready to take full charge of governing the country but awaits National Assembly to be notified on Monday.

Femi Adesina also quoted the President as emphasizing the need for the government at all levels to pay special attention to the education of the children so as to make them relevant in a world driven by new technology.

He said that Buhari spoke today, Friday, when he met with some governors, members of the Federal Executive Council (FEC), service chiefs and senior government officials at the State House, shortly after his return from London.

President Buhari said that the world is fast changing, and that more efforts must be made to equip the younger generation with relevant skills to compete in the global economy.

“My single advice is that we must take education seriously, and we must do much more to educate our children.”

The President said that the government would continue to discourage Nigerians from self-medication, urging those with discomforts to ensure they get proper diagnosis and doctor’s prescription for drugs. He lauded the quality of treatment he got during his medical vacation.

The President said he had been conscious of the challenges faced in repositioning the economy of the country, noting that it would receive more attention. [myad]

You Impress Me, President Buhari Tells Osinbajo

Buhari and Osinbajo special

President Muhammadu Buhari has said that he is pleased with the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo for the the good leadership he provided while he was away in London for for medical attention.

The President, who addressed members of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) when he arrived on Friday from London, said that his initial plan was to take a vacation in January, 2017, after asking the Vice President to take a holiday in December, 2016.

Buhari said that the team spirit with the Vice President would be further strengthened in tackling the myriad challenges in the economy. [myad]

Osinbajo To Buhari: You Are Welcome Sir

PRESIDENT BUHARI RETURNS 000. R-L; President Muhammadu Buhari in a hand shake with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Chief of Staff, Mallam Abba Kyari on arrival at the Presidential Villa in Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. MAR 10 2017.

Acting President Yemi Osinbajo was on hand to welcome President Muhammadu Buhari from his medical vacation in London, to Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja, today, Friday, March 10, 2017, with a hand shake. The Chief of Staff to the President, Abba Kyari (in red cap) watches with interest. Photo by Sunday Aghaeze. [myad]

Ex Governor Of Midwestern State, Samuel Ogbemudia Dies At 84

Sam Ogbemudia

Former military governor of the defunct Midwestern State, Brigadier General Samuel Ogbemudia is dead. He died in Benin yesterday, Thursday night at about 11.00 pm at the age of 84.

Ogbemudia had a very successful military career that was translated into his appointment as military governor of the defunct Midwestern State at the beginning of the civil war.

The legacy he built in governance attracted the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) to lure him into politics in 1982 upon which he emerged as the party’s candidate for the 1983 governorship election. He won the election and served for three months before the coup that sacked the Second Republic.

One of his legacies was the University of Benin, which he established at the beginning of the seventies and which honoured him with a doctorate degree. [myad]

I Feel Better, Ready To Rededicate Myself To Serve Nigerians – Buhari

Osinbajo welcomes Buhari

President Muhammadu Buhari returned to Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja, today, confirming that he is now feeling better even as he said: “the best way for me to repay you is to rededicate myself to serving you, protecting your interest and keeping your trust. I thank you very much.

President Buhar, who spoke shortly after conferring with acting President Yemi Osinbajo and other top Presidential aides, Buhari expressed gratitude to Nigerians for all the prayers and show of goodwill.

President Buhari made it clear that he is fully committed to serving the nation and protecting the right of all Nigerians.

“I am deeply grateful to all Nigerians, Muslims and Christians alike who have prayed and have continued to pray for my good health.

‘‘This is a testimony that in spite of the hardship being experienced, Nigerians support the government in its effort to tackle our country’s challenges,’’ the President said.

He said his health had improved significantly, following the medical attention he received during his vacation in London.

“I am feeling much better now. There may, however be need for further follow up within some weeks,” he stated.

The President said that he deliberately came towards the weekend tot enable him rest for the weekend as Professor Osinbajo continues to act as President.

He requested those who are planning to come and see him in the Villa, to stay back and continue to pray for the country.

In his remark, Professor Osinbajo said it was satisfying for Nigerians and the Federal Executive Council to receive the President back in the country “hail and hearty.

“It is a day of joy not only for us but for the whole country, Africa and the world. Your arrival has vindicated our position that you will return safely.”

The Vice President thanked the President for respecting the constitution and entrusting power to him before travelling, noting that it was a tough job ‘‘going around in borrowed robes’’.

The Chairman of Nigeria’s Governors Forum, Abdulaziz Yari, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, and the Chief of Defence Staff, Abayomi Gabriel Olonishakin, also made remarks to welcome the President. [myad]

Communal Violence In Ife: Acting President Osinbajo Orders Police Boss To Investigate

Kebbi communities at war on land

Acting President Yemi Osinbajo has ordered the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris to promptly investigate and ensure the prosecution of the  culprits in the recent communal clashes in Ile-Ife, where several lives were reportedly lost.

A statement by the senior special assistant to Osinbajo on media and publicity, Laolu Akande, quoted the acting President as calling on the different groups of people in Ile-Ife to live in harmony, remain calm and keep the peace while police investigation is in progress.

Professor Osinbajo assured that perpetrators of the acts of violence will be identified and brought to book according to law.

The acting President strongly condemned the killings and other acts of violence that have been perpetuated in the town, adding that resorting to acts of violence as a form of redress over grievances by any group of people anywhere in the country will not be tolerated or condoned by the Federal Government.

“Such unlawful pursuit of redress and despicable expression of grievances shall be firmly punished in line with extant laws.”

He condoled with those who lost their loved ones in the violence and commiserated with the people and government of the State of Osun over the unfortunate incident.

He prayed that the Almighty God will comfort those who have become mourners in such tragic circumstances. [myad]

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