NEWSFLASH: Abba Yusuf Remain Sacked As Kano Governor, Appeal Court Rules

November 17, 2023

The court of appeal in Abuja has affirmed the order of the Kano state governorship election petition tribunal which sacked Abba Yusuf, candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), as governor of the state.
In a judgment delivered today, November 17, a three-member panel of the appellate court held that the NNPP breached the constitution by sponsoring Yusuf who was not a member of the party.
Details later.

Senate Confirms Dr. Maida As Executive Vice Chairman Of NCC

Editorial staff

November 16, 2023

The Senate has confirmed the appointment of Dr. Aminu Maida as the substantive Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).

Dr. Maida was confirmed by the Senate during its plenary session today, November 16, after adopting a report of the Senate Committee on Communications that screened him on November 15.

The Chairman of the Committee on Communications, and former Minister of Communications, Senator Ikra Aliyu Bilbis, who submitted the report, asked the Senate to consider the request of President Bola Tinubu for the confirmation of Maida for appointment as the country’s Chief Telecom Regulator.

He said that the Committee had screened Maida, who had earlier passed all scrutiny by the relevant security agencies in the security governance sector.

Bilbis informed the Senate that Maida possesses the requisite qualifications, professional experience, competence, and regulatory capacity to ensure accelerated development of the nation’s telecommunications sector. He urged the Senate to approve the nomination of Maida by the President.

Consequently, the Senate proceeded to confirm the appointment of Dr. Aminu Maida, through a voice vote to serve a five-year term in office, subject to renewal by the President.

Earlier during the screening, Dr. Maida responded to questions related to his insights into the industry, qualifications, experience, suitability, and competence to manage the nation’s telecom regulatory sector, and was variously described by members as the round peg in a round hole.

He told the committee that his top priorities are to improve coverage and connectivity by bridging access gaps between rural and urban communities through increased broadband infrastructure as well as increasing the quality service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for the consumers to enable them to get value for money.

He said that under his stewardship, he would ensure that the Commission’s licensees numbering over 8,000 across different segments of the sector, are made to adhere strictly to their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with their consumers in terms of service delivery.

Dr Maida said that he would create a more conducive environment for investment in the sector and promised to work with the dynamic team at the NCC to “re-think” how the Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) would be better leveraged to bridge the extant digital divide in the country.

The new Chief Executive Officer of Nigeria’s telecom regulatory authority promised to prioritise inter-agency collaboration towards achieving the current blueprint for the digital economy sector, just as he said that the ongoing review of the NCA 2003 would lead to greater innovation for improving the performance of the sector and solicited the support of the National Assembly to succeed.

Maida emphasised his commitment towards aligning regulatory activities with the Strategic Plan of the Ministry of Communications, Innovations and Digital Economy, developed to accelerate the actualisation of the Renewed Hope Agenda of the Federal Government.

Appeal Court Sacks Zamfara Governor, Orders Rerun

Editorial staff

November 16, 2023

The Court of Appeal in Abuja has voided the election of Governor Dauda Lawal of Zamfara State.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had declared Lawal winner of the March 18 governorship election.

But the All Progressives Congress (APC) challenged the victory of Lawal.

The tribunal had upheld Lawal’s election, but the APC proceeded to the Appeal Court.

A three-member panel of justices today, November 16, annulled the victory of Lawal and ordered a rerun of the election in three local government areas.

The affected Local Governments are Maradun, Birnin Magaji and Bukuyun.

Details later….

Why We Deported Nigerian Passengers – Saudi Authorities

November 16, 2023

The Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Abuja has clarified the recent deportation of Nigerian passengers, stating that the individuals didn’t fulfill the entry conditions and requirements into the kingdom.

In a statement released on Wednesday, the embassy emphasized the importance of adhering to procedures and laws, noting that the passengers submitted incorrect information to obtain a visa category that didn’t apply to them.

Meanwhile, the Nigerian government has expressed its intention to investigate the matter to determine if any consular or aviation rules were violated.

Saudi Arabia Turns Back 177 Nigerian Passengers At Jeddah Airport, Cancels Their Visas

Labour Suspends Ongoing Strike Following Government Intervention

Editorial staff

November 15, 2023

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC) have jointly decided to suspend the ongoing strike.

The decision was announced today, October 15 shortly after the Joint National Executive Council (NEC) meeting, citing the intervention of the Federal Government through the Office of the National Security Adviser (NSA).

The strike, which was initiated in response to the assault on NLC President Joe Ajaero and other pending issues, has been temporarily halted to allow for dialogue and resolution of the matters at hand.

Street Rapper, Oladips, Dies At 28 After Battling With Health For 2 Years

Greenbarge Reporters

November 15, 2023

Twenty eight years old Street rapper, Oladipupo Olabode Oladimeji, with stage name as Oladips, is dead . He died yesterday, November 14 at the age of 28.
A statement issued today, November 15, by his management via the artist’s official Instagram page, said that he died yesterday after battling with his health silently for two years.
The statement read:
“We are saddened to inform the general public that Oladipupo Olabode Oladimeji aka Oladips has passed away yesterday Nov’ 14, Tuesday evening at exactly 10:14pm. We are still in shock as we speak!
“For over 2 years, he has kept his battles within himself, his body is now with his family and funeral services will be announced as soon as it is concluded!
“The family asked that we respect their privacy in this trying time. May God give us all the fortitude to bear this great loss (Amen).”
The late rapper lost his father in February this year.

Oshiomhole Frowns At Ongoing Workers Strike Action Called By NLC, TUC: Says It’s Political

Greenbarge Reporters

November 15, 2023

Former President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), now a Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Adams Oshiomhole, is not happy with the ongoing workers strike action against the Federal Government, called by the NLC and Trade Union of Nigeria (TUC).
Senator Oshiomhole, who spoke to newsmen at the Presidential villa, Abuja, yesterday, November 13, said that the strike was not conceived on the basis of responsibility of leadership.
”Unfortunately, this strike is not about those issues affecting the Nigerian workers.
”And I think we have to be careful not to mix our political opinion with our responsibilities, because the issues confronting workers are so many that they should become the priority.
”Labour cannot be apolitical because politics is about the people. And I have argued when I was in NLC that nobody has a right to be partisan, much more than those who turn the will of our industrial progress.
”But in saying that, we must recognise that however how hard you try, when it comes to politics, people are going to have different reasons for supporting different candidates.”
The lawmaker also cautioned labour unions to be careful and avoid doing the bidding of a particular candidate or a political party.
”As a worker in the Senate, I don’t pretend over the fact that my first constituency, my permanent constituency, is labour.
”I can be removed as Chairman of APC as I was removed. But I couldn’t have been removed as a labourer. I remain labour in heart and labour in views, and labour in my aspirations.
”I will expect that even as we speak now that the issues that will appeal to me will be the fact that as we speak, we have states that are not paying N30,000. And those states are not being mobilised to go on strike.
”The Federal Government had granted N35,000 increase and those discussions were supposed to be for and on behalf of not only the federal government, but on behalf of all workers in Nigeria.
”Including those employed by the Local and State governments. And the additional revenue accruing from the withdrawal of subsidy trickles down to the state and to the local government.
”Now, I would have wished that the NLC recognise that the hunger in the stomach of federal employees is not any worse than the hunger in the stomach of those state employees, nor local government employees.
”If these are the issues on the table, even as a senator I will publicly support an action against any government that thinks that we should lament away our hunger and while the people do what they do. ”
He, however, declared that he doesn’t support the brutalisation of any Nigerian, including a journalist, the unemployed and a labour leader.
”But I’m saying in terms of what you might call the hierarchy of needs and challenges that we face.
”I think that NLC should robustly engage all the state governors or the state governments, who are not implementing the agreement that was midwived courtesy of a national strike, not a federal government’s employees strike.
”So if you mobilise private sector workers, state employees workers, local government workers, and now there is an agreement on N35,000 across the board.
”I want to see NLC saying there will be no sleep in any state where this is not being implemented. That is all I can say.”
The the Trade Union Congress and the Nigeria Labour Congress had, on November 13, directed all affiliates to embark on an indefinite nationwide strike.
The strike was called to press home their demands, especially the “non comment by the Federal Government over the brutalising of the NLC President, Joe Ajaero by security agents and hoodlums in Imo.”
Source: NAN.

2024 WAFCON: Asisat, Chiamaka, 21 Others Make Super-Falcons List

Greenbarge Reporters

November 15, 2023

Asisat Lamina Oshoala, Chiamaka Nnadozie, Uchenna Kanu Ifeoma and 20 others have been pencilled down for the 2024 Women’s African Cup of Nations (WAFCON).
Others, whose names have been submitted to the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) by the head coach of the Super Falcons, Randy Waldrum, are Rasheedat Ajibade, Toni Payne, Oluwatosin Demehin, Michelle Alozie, Rofiat Imuran and Christy Ucheibe.
Others are Tochukwu Oluehi, Oyono Monle Peace Efih, Omorinsola Omowunmi, Monday Gift, Onyenezide Esther, Folorunsho Comfort, Ajakaye Opeyemi and Payne Nicole.
The women football are being invited for the the second round of the 2024 WAFCON double-header against Cape Verde, which will be played at the Moshood Abiola National Stadium Abuja on November 30 and Estádio Nacional de Cabo Verde, Praia on December 5, 2023.
The head coach also recalled Halimat Ayinde, Osinachi Ohale, Deborah Abiodun who plays for him in Panthers team and Onyinye Echegini, a player of Florida State University (FSU) which eliminated his team in the semi final of 2023 Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) Championship in October.
Source: Prompt News Online

NNPCL: Tinubu Rewards Performance, Not Blackmail, By Tajudeen Suleiman

Editorial staff

November 15, 2023

If there’s any organization in Nigeria that has become a soft target for slothful critics, it is most certainly the Nigeria National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd). The reasons are obvious. It is in charge of harnessing Nigeria’s oil and gas reserves, which provides 95% of the country’s foreign exchange earnings and 80% of its budgetary revenues. Whenever anything goes wrong with the economy or any semblance of it, it must be due to mismanagement at the NNPC!

One Titi Omodube who wrote an article on NNPC Ltd published in the Businessday of Monday, 12/11/23, fits into this category. The article captioned, “NNPC wreck Nigeria’s economy, Tinubu rewards its managers with longer tenures” was a drab commentary by an indolent writer. If only the writer had done a little research, he would have been better informed to make more reasonable, objective assessment of the impact of the management of the NNPCL under its Group Managing Director, Malam Mele Kyari.

But instead of making insightful arguments about the economic realities of the country, he chose to make the NNPCL the weeping boy by pushing the well-known subversive narrative that the problem of the company is the management He attributes his jaundiced opinion of NNPCL Management to Nigerians in order to hide his true motives, which can be deduced from the article—someone wants Mele Kyari out of the way.

The writer accuses the state oil company of ineptitude due to corruption, lack of transparency, rising debt profile and delay in making Final Investment Decisions without making any distinction in the management of the corporation that was established since 1977. To make such sweeping generalizations about the management of any organization that had existed for decades is abstract and unintelligent and shows the writer had no regard for evidence.

For instance, he writes that “Nigerians believe that decades of mismanagement of the oil and gas industry by NNPC and the failings of its senior management contributed significantly to stalling Nigeria’s economic growth and in particular, the recent woes both in foreign exchange terms and the country’s fiscal crisis,” yet wonders why President Tinubu has not sacked Mele Kyari!

Why would any rational, objective commentator demand the sacking of a management that was inaugurated in 2019 for the failures of over five decades? It only showed that the writer had not researched his subject to know what has been going on with Nigeria’s oil giant. It’s unfortunate that in this age of search engines, a writer is making comments on a public institution without availing himself of recent developments in that institution.

He also said that corruption is “a big problem” at NNPC but could only refer to a 2011 audit by KPMG which found that the NNPC got an excess of about N28.5 billion on subsidy-related claims and the amount was unaccounted for. But in order to link Mele Kyari to it, he shamelessly states that “A testament to the corruption at NNPC was the admittance by the NNPC Group Managing Director (GMD), Mela Kyari, after his appointment in 2019 that he will work with the EFCC to fight corruption in the NNPC.”

The only part of his writeup where he makes direct reference to the Mele Kyari management is the issue of fuel subsidy payments. He writes that “NNPC’s new year present in 2022 was to announce to the world that it would no longer be able to make the usual remittances to the federation account, the primary mainstay of the three tiers of government in Nigeria.”

He said that NNPC told the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) on Tuesday, March 21, 2022, that it had at the time exceeded its subsidy budget by N356.3 billion, with the subsidy bill rising to N430.165 billion in January and February 2022. And that for the entire 12 months of 2021, the NNPC disbursed just N542 billion to FAAC as against the budgeted N2.511 trillion, translating into a monthly contribution forecast of N209.3 billion.

It’s baffling why a supposed commentator on Nigeria’s economy does not understand the damage that corrupt fuel subsidy payments had done to the economy.

In 2011 when Nigeria was producing approximately 2.5 million barrels of crude oil per day, then Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had revealed in an argument for removal of fuel subsidy that the government would pay over N1.3trillion as subsidy payment for that year, which was higher than the capital budget. She predicted that it would get higher.

By 2022, the NNPC said it spent 4.39 trillion naira ($9.7 billion) on petrol subsidy, which it blamed for dwindling public finances. Okonjo-Iweala had advised in 2011 that “we must rethink our approach to managing our scarce resources to provide services to Nigerians. We will be better off using the amount spent on subsidy to target poorer groups and big infrastructure projects.”

Thus, it was not surprising that President Tinubu announced to the nation during his inaugural speech on May 29 that the previous administration of ex-President Muhammadu Buhari had removed fuel subsidy payments from the budget, and he added that it was “gone forever.”

The writer tries to be too clever by half when he admits that the woes of the NNPC “predates the current defining crisis” but unashamedly argued that in the past “only the best were employed into NNPC” but now “NNPC has been destroyed by tribalism and ineptitude.”

If his argument was true, President Tinubu would have swept off the management of NNPC long before now, and hacks like him would have no need to be paid to castigate them.

He accuses NNPC of lack of transparency, yet it’s under Kyari that Nigerians saw the first glimpse of transparency and financial prudence when in September 2021, the 2020 NNPC Group Audited Financial Statement was published and it declared a profit after tax of N287bn for the first time in its 44 years.

Mele is the only GMD of NNPC who made opening the books of the Corporation a cardinal aspect of its Management under its Transparency, Accountability and Performance Excellence (TAPE) Initiative which he launched on assumption of office in July, 2019. TAPE was conceived as a strategic roadmap for NNPC to attain efficiency and global excellence with a view to placing it on the path of profitability.

Mele Kyari’s drive for efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability within the NNPC yielded immediate results with the organization posting profit for the first time in 44 years in 2021. It was tangible evidence of his management’s cost-effectiveness.

It was one of the major reasons why the corporation was able to transmute seamlessly in a limited liability company in July 2022. It’s a testament to Mele Kyari’s vision and patriotism that he promoted the culture of financial and operational transparency long before the NNPC’s transformation into a profit-driven company.

Mele Kyari leads a post-PIA NNPC Limited, which has embraced the opportunities to attract investments to the sector in order to increase profitability. It had successfully wrapped projects such as : the Final Investment Decision (FID) on $3.6 billion methanol plant in Bayelsa; execution of a $260 million funding agreement for ANOH Gas Processing Company Limited (AGPC) among the NNPC, Seplat and a consortium of seven banks; launch of Nigerian Upstream Cost Optimization Programme (NUCOP); award of $1.5 billion contract for rehabilitation of Port Harcourt refinery; commercialization of OML 143 gas; and execution of OML 118 (Bonga) Agreements between NNPC and partners.

Others include shareholder agreement for Brass Petroleum Product Terminal (BPPT); EPC contract to build Maiduguri Emergency Power Project where NNPC partnered China Machinery Engineering Company (CMEC) and General Electric (GE) to execute Engineering, Procurement Construction (EPC) contract for the procurement of equipment for a 50 MW emergency power project in Maiduguri, Borno State.

The $3.6 billion methanol plant in Bayelsa, would be the largest methanol plant in Africa and the first in Nigeria, and is expected to create 35,000 direct and indirect jobs and additional 5,000 permanent jobs during the operations phase in 2024. It is expected to produce 10,000 tons of methanol daily when it becomes fully operational in 2024.

One could list several other projects that are currently ongoing, but the above suffices for any objective critic assessing Kyari’s impact in just the last four years he’s been in the saddle. It’s easy for a critic with aphantasia to destroy reputations and undermine achievements for fleeting gains. But the true critic gives content and context. They criticize to build, not to harm. It’s more rewarding to be later.

Sulaiman wrote in from Abuja.

African Catholic Bishops Converge In Lagos November 18 For 50th Anniversary Of CEPACS

Editorial staff

November 14, 2023

The Catholic Bishops across Africa, who represent the regions of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) will gather in Lagos for the 50th anniversary of the Pan African Committee for Social Communications (CEPACS) slated for November 18 – 21.

CEPACS, the Pan African Episcopal Committee for Social Communications was founded in 1973 by SECAM in Ibadan. It is geared towards the management and operations of the communications apostolate in Africa.

It is also African region’s arm of the Catholic Church that handles all matters concerning the activities in the realm of media in Africa and Madagascar – press, radio, television, video, traditional, social media, and a host of other new forms of media.

Speaking on the epochal event, the President of CEPACS and Bishop of Oyo Diocese, Most Rev. Emmanuel Badejo, said that the forthcoming 50th anniversary of the body would help promote the synodal Church in Africa through social Communications.

The theme of the assembly is, “CEPACS at 50: Towards promoting a Synodal Church in Africa through Social Communications.”

The 50th anniversary with an assembly of communication experts and Catholic Bishops across Africa will feature Paolo Ruffini, Prefect for the Dicastery for Communications, Vatican as Keynote Speaker in Lagos, Nigeria.

According to Bishop Badejo, “The purpose of the Synod in Africa is the need for every segment to be given access, be given a voice, and be given a place and recognition in the affairs of the Church. The emphasis is that every segment of the Church be given the attention it requires to attain holiness, and eventually, to attain salvation.”

The symposium embraces the bishops of Africa and Madagascar who work through the eight different regions in Africa.

“CEPACS helps bring to the grassroots teachings of the Church on communications, the teachings of the Church on the modern media, the teachings of the Church on what the lives of the professionals of media ought to be, what their role, contribution ought to be,” Bishop Badejo said.

“CEPACS also helps to emphasise the importance of the accompaniment of these communication professionals even in their own private life because what happens in their private lives; their family, their daily activities has an impact on the work that they do in reporting news, in reporting events in the Church.

“That is why it is important that everybody takes interest in this assembly which is organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of CEPACS, so that together, the representatives of the different segments of media that work in the Church, we can all deliberate together on the way forward and how to chart that course together for a Synodal Church, a Church that cares for every segment, everybody, without leaving anyone behind,” the President of CEPACS added.

Source: The RealNews online magazine.

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