The aftermath of Kemta Borehole commissioning and Itoku market heads visit to Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola aka YAYI, Amosun begins full scale demolition of Kemta Itoku kampala market, thecitypulsenews.com reports.
In what can be tagged pure and reckless political victimisation, Ogun State government acting under the instruction of Governor Ibikunle Amosun has moved heavy bulldozing machines to Senator Solomon Adeola aka Yayi’s maternal ancestral home at Kemta, Itoku in Abeokuta.
thecitypulsenews.com stated that aside being uncomfortable with the recent positive political steps being taken by Yayi and his supporters, there are also two critical developments which is connected to the governor’s show of hostility against Yayi.
First is the borehole that was commissioned for a community use on behalf of Senator Yayi .Secondly, a courtesy visit by some notable market leaders from a popular market in Abeokuta (Itoku) are believed to form the major basis for this renewed hostile behaviour of Governor Ibikunle Amosun against Senator Adeola.
Just last week, we got wind of the governor’s insensitive and anti masses plan, after some patriotic and concerned group of individuals supporting Senator Yayi’s governorship aspiration bid and erected a community borehole and situated it around his maternal lineage compound.
At the end of the commissioning exercise, the governor drove down to the area in the evening and hinted people around the community of his intention to demolish some unidentified structures, part of which Yayi’s maternal ancestral compound was also listed.
In another development, there are feelers that the Governor was visibly disturbed with the recent visit of some notable Itoku market heads who expressed their willingness and readiness to support Senator Yayi’s governorship aspiration.
As at the time filing in this report, there is clear indication that a bulldozer machine have been moved to the site and is currently pulling down various houses at Kemta, including the one in question.
“I am making good progress,” Buhari writes Guinean President Conde
President Buhari thanks Conde for prayers offered by Guineans -Photo credit; Premium Times
President Muhammadu Buhari has written to thank the President of Guinea, Alpha Conde, for the nationwide prayers held last week by Guineans for his recovery and good health.
In a letter dated July 24, Mr. Buhari, who had earlier made a phone call to Mr. Conde, who is the current Chairman of the Assemblies of Heads of State and Government of the African Union, stated:
“I thank you for your kind and thoughtful action in organizing nationwide prayers for my good health. It is a gesture that I will forever cherish and treasure.
“Your Excellency will be pleased to hear that I am making good progress, and as soon as doctors advise, I shall return to my duties and continue serving the Nigerian people who elected me and are daily praying for my recovery.”
A statement by Mr. Buhari’s spokesperson, Femi Adesina, on Tuesday stated that Mr. Buhari had in an earlier letter, accepted his nomination as leader of the “2018 AU Theme on the Fight Against Corruption”, which came from African leaders at the 29th Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the AU in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on July 4.
“While thanking you for the kind words and for the nomination,” the president wrote to Mr. Conde, “I wish to express my readiness to accept this new important role and to reiterate my commitment to contribute towards our collective efforts to strengthen good governance and development on the continent. I, therefore, look forward to working closely with you in the realization of this objective.”
Governors in the South-West Zone met on Monday in Abeokuta, the Ogun capital, and resolved to strengthen regional integration as pathway to the economic prosperity of the region.
The governors agreed to work together to explore the different areas of comparative advantage of each constituent state and pool resources together for the prosperity of the people.
Their decisions were contained in a communique issued after the one-day meeting.
The leaders also resolved to develop a 25-year development master plan for the transformation of the entire region.
They agreed to eliminate all artificial barriers that mitigate against co-operation, synergy and benefits of economies of scale within the region.
The governors agreed to pay less attention to their political and religious affiliations and make the aggregate welfare of the Yoruba people their priorities.
The forum, which resolved that it would henceforth be known and called ‘` Western Nigeria Governors’ Forum, ‘’ also declared the region a “zero tolerance area” for crime.
They agreed to develop a revenue optimisation strategy for constituent states of the region, noting that the prosperity of any of the states would be negated if the other states were poor.
The leaders agreed to set up a committee to codify the values and ethics of the Yoruba people as part of efforts to preserve the uniqueness of the people of the region.
The host governor, Sen. Ibikunle Amosun, earlier in his opening remarks, noted that the forum serves as a platform to “cross-fertilise ” ideas for the good of the region.
He called on the leaders to take advantage of the geographical location, climatic condition and the large land mass of the region to promote agriculture for food security in the region.
Amosun also called for concerted efforts of the constituent states of the South-West region against crimes that threaten the peace of the area, including cultism, kidnapping and pipeline vandalism.
The meeting was attended by Governors Abiola Ajimobi (Oyo), Rotimi Akeredolu (Ondo), Ayodele Fayose (Ekiti), Akinwunmi Ambode (Lagos), Rauf Aregbesola (Osun) and the host, Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun).
Lagos State is scheduled to host the next meeting of the forum.
West Ham have completed the signing of former Real Madrid and Manchester United striker Javier Hernandez for £16 million ($20.8 million, 17.9 million euros), the Premier League club said on Monday.
A deal to bring Mexico’s record goalscorer to London Stadium was hammered out several days ago.
Hernandez has penned a three-year contract and will fly out to Germany in the coming days to join up with West Ham coach Slaven Bilic and his new team-mates.
“I am very happy to join West Ham United. For me, the Premier League is the best league in the world and when the opportunity came, I was desperate to sign for this club,” said Hernandez, who will sport the name Chicharito on his jersey.
The move follows the arrivals of England goalkeeper Joe Hart and Argentine defender Pablo Zabaleta from Man City, as well as Austrian winger Marko Arnautovic from Stoke in a club-record deal.
“He has a proven goalscoring record in the Premier League, La Liga and the Bundesliga, as well in the UEFA Champions League and at international level with Mexico,” club joint-chairman David Sullivan said.
Hernandez, now 29, spent four seasons with United, where he scored 59 goals in 156 appearances, before going on loan to Real Madrid in the 2014/15 campaign.
The two-time Premier League winner left Old Trafford in August 2015 for Germany, where he was even more prolific, netting 39 times in 76 matches for Bayer Leverkusen.
The Jigawa State Governor, Muhammadu Badaru, has dismissed speculations that he is backing former Kano governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, for president in 2019.
The speculations followed the inauguration of a presidential campaign office for Mr. Kwankwaso in Dutse, the Jigawa State capital last week. The event was said to have been attended by some aides of Mr. Badaru.
However, reacting to the speculations through his spokesperson, Bello Zaki, Mr. Badaru said it was “baseless and unfounded” the speculations that he had dumped President Muhammadu Buhari to back the ambition of Mr. Kwankwaso.
According to Mr. Zaki, the inauguration of the presidential campaign office of Mr. Kwankwaso was like any other political activity in the state that the state government has no power to stop.
The inauguration was coordinated by a loyalist of Mr. Badaru who is also the Managing Director of the state owned Jigawa Television (JTV), Ishaq Hadejia.
At the event, Mr. Hadejia was assigned by the Kwankwasiya Movement, the group that opened the office, to lead in spreading the ideology and campaign of Mr. Kwankwaso across the 27 local government areas of the state.
The movement said its mission was to sensitise residents of Jigawa on the need to embrace Mr. Kwankwaso to ensure that the north completes a presidential term.
Mr. Kwankwaso, who is a serving senator, was the runner-up in the All Progressives Congress presidential primary that nominated Mr. Buhari in 2014.
But Mr. Zaki insisted that the presence of Mr. Hadejia at the opening of the campaign office in Jigawa has nothing to do with Governor Badaru.
“Anybody in this cabinet of ours is not restricted to what only Governor Badaru wants. He is entitled to his right of loyalty and support’” he said of Mr. Hadejia.
“We are not aware of Kwankwaso presidential campaign and the inauguration of his office. We are not a party to it,” Mr. Zaki told PREMIUM TIMES.
Terminally-ill Baby Charlie Gard has been set free by his parents to die, two weeks before he marked his first birthday on earth.
The parents tearfully gave up their legal battle to keep the baby alive on Monday, saying his condition had deteriorated too far for any possible recovery, in a case they said had touched the world.
The parents said their 11-month-old son might have been able to live normally if he had received experimental U.S. treatment earlier but too much time had been “wasted”.
“We have decided to let our son go,” his mother Connie Yates told London’s High Court, where a judge had been due to hear final arguments as to why a hospital should not turn off life support.
“Charlie did have a real chance of getting better. Now we will never know what would have happened if he got treatment.”
“We are now going to spend our last precious moments with our son Charlie, who unfortunately won’t make his first birthday in just under two weeks’ time,” Gard said.
Charlie has a rare genetic condition causing progressive muscle weakness and brain damage and his parents had sought to send him to the United States to undergo therapy, in a campaign backed by U.S. President Donald Trump and Pope Francis.
Britain’s courts, backed by the European Court of Human Rights, refused permission, saying it would prolong his suffering without any realistic prospect of helping the child.
The parents had begun a final attempt to reverse that decision, saying there was new evidence which showed the therapy offered by Michio Hirano, a professor of neurology at New York’s Columbia University Medical Center, could work for Charlie.
Hirano had said he believed there was at least a 10 percent chance his nucleoside therapy could improve the condition of the boy, who cannot breathe without a ventilator, and that there was a small but significant chance it could aid brain functions.
But the court heard on Monday that scans last week showed Charlie’s muscular condition had deteriorated so much that treatment would no longer work.
A Vatican spokesman said Pope Francis was praying for Charlie and his parents and that he “feels especially close to them at this time of immense suffering”.
“There is one simple reason for Charlie’s muscles deteriorating to the extent they are in now – time. A whole lot of wasted time,” his father Chris Gard said outside the court, where supporters chanted “Justice for Charlie” and waved blue balloons.
“Had Charlie been given the treatment sooner he would have had the potential to be a normal, healthy little boy.”
The case has attracted heated debate about medical ethics and whether doctors or parents should decide a child’s fate. Staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), where Charlie is on life support, have received death threats and abuse, something condemned by the parents and the judge.
The judge hearing the case, Nicholas Francis, said no parents could have done more for their child.
GOSH and the family will now discuss the immediate future and the parents plan to set up a fund in his honour.
The Economic Community of West African States is studying the implications of admitting Morocco following its request last month to join the organisation, Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister Geoffrey Onyeama said.
Morocco’s request was accepted “in principle” by leaders of the group known as Ecowas at a June 4 summit in the Liberian capital, Monrovia.
“The principle, of course, is one of non-hostility to Morocco,” Onyeama said in an interview in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on July 20. “There’s no enmity there that would mean an immediate and automatic negative response to such a request. What has to be looked at a bit more is all the technical ramifications.”
Still, Nigeria didn’t send a high-level delegation to the Ecowas summit after it emerged that Morocco would present its request to join the 15-member bloc. “We would’ve preferred to have had the opportunity to discuss internally and this was not given by the Ecowas secretariat,” Onyeama said.
Several Nigerian lobby groups, including an organisation of retired ambassadors, are putting pressure on the Nigerian government to reject the application because of the decades-old dispute over Western Sahara and Morocco’s geographical distance. Nigeria recognises the Western Sahara as an independent nation, while Morocco claims it as part of its territory.
‘Economic Diplomacy’
Onyeama, 61, served as deputy director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization before his appointment as foreign affairs minister in 2015. He sees “economic diplomacy” as part of his role as Nigeria struggles to wean itself off its dependence on crude, he said. The country went through its worst economic contraction in a quarter of a century last year as a plunge in the price and output of its main export took a toll.
Africa is “the centrepiece” of Nigerian foreign policy under President Muhammadu Buhari, Onyeama said, citing Nigeria’s role in a military intervention in Gambia this year, its involvement in peace missions in Darfur, Somalia and South Sudan, and its support for the establishment of a rapid deployment force for the continent.
Nigeria is against African nations leaving the International Criminal Court because the continent has “no mechanism for holding leaders to account,” he said. South Africa and Burundi announced plans last year to leave the court because it has mainly brought African leaders to trial. South Africa revoked its decision this year following a local ruling that declared the proposed pullout unconstitutional.
Relations with South Africa are particularly important to Nigeria for driving Africa’s development, which is why they both have a “bi-national commission” represented at the presidential level, according to Onyeama. It was useful in resolving issues around Nigerians affected by xenophobic attacks in South Africa and there’s a joint-monitoring mechanism now in place to track developments, he said. The Guardian NG
60 % of proceeds from Tuface concert for IDPs–UNHCR
TuFace Idibia: pledges support for IDPs
Sixty per cent of the proceeds realised from the Tuface charity concert would be channelled toward providing protection and empowerment of the Internally Displaced Persons in the North-East.
Mr Jose-Antonio Canhandula, Country Representative, United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), has said this at a charity concert on Saturday in Abuja.
The concert was organised by the Tuface foundation to support UNHCR in its interventions in the North-East.
He said that the humanitarian challenges in the North-East, due to Boko Haram insurgency, were enormous, adding that it had brought inadequate protection of women and girls and their empowerment as a major challenge.
‘’ The crisis in North-East Nigeria actually affects women and children more than anybody else.
“We intend to see how this proceed can be used to alleviate the plight of women, widows and heads of families.
“We would also see how we can use the proceed to resolve the issues of youths not employed, by training them in skills acquisition programnes and activities on livelihood”, Canhandula said.
Canhandula lauded Innocent Idibia, popularly known as 2baba, for his commitment in assisting IDPs and refugees by supporting UNHCR’s interventions, describing him as a musical icon.
He said that the partnership with 2baba was a very positive initiative, noting it had started bringing Nigerian voices to talk about Nigerian problems and indeed, the problems in the North-East.
The UNHCR country representative, however, stressed the need for government, members of public and musicians to come together and talk about population related problems and how resources could be mobilised to solve them.
He called on Nigerians with resources to support IDPs, adding that this class of people found themselves in the unfortunate situation due to no fault of theirs.
Canhandula assured that the UNHCR would utilise the donations realised at the event judiciously and for the purpose intended.
He described UNHCR as a transparent organisation, promising that it would account for every amount spent in its interventions.
“When we get support from personalities, we do make sure that we use the money in the manner that we have agreed and the donours can come to see the impact of their donations on the IDPs.
“We have a strong code of conduct as all international organisations have and we sign the code of conduct that ensures that we have a public accountability.
“I have an accountability to my supervisors and also to the government,” he said.
Also speaking, 2baba, who lauded the organisation for its interventions in assisting the victims of insurgency, pledged his continued support for the IDPs.
He said that the concert, the first of its kind, was the beginning of a greater partnership with UNHCR, especially in addressing ‘’the gigantic humanitarian challenges in the North-East.’’
Tuface said that he was happy with the turnout of people for the event, adding that response indicated that Nigerians were ready to contribute to bringing succour to the IDPs and refugees.
He said that the magnitude of the challenges in the North-East gave cause for concern and required concerted efforts to addressing them.
“I always preach about one love and one man cannot do everything, it requires a joint effort and I am working with UNHCR because it is a credible organisation.
“UNHCR has done so much in terms of shelter, food and we are working with it because it is always on ground and we are not.
“There are so many things that need to be done, we are not targeting any specific project, our goal is to make life easy for the IDPs.
‘’However, we want to focus more on education because most of them in the camps are children and education and orientation is key, they need to work on their mindset,” 2baba said.
The musician appealed to Nigerians not to relent effort joining the noble cause by downloading the song dedicated to the IDPs as their ring and call back tones for as low as N50.
He called on other artists to follow suit by joining their voices to assisting the IDPs, refugees and other persons of concern.
The News Agent of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the 60 per cent from the proceed of 2baba’s song for IPDs, entitled, “Hold My Hand” will be donated to UNHCR to support its interventions in the North-East.
The concert, dubbed “Eargasm,’’ featured 2baba, Waje, Kelly handsome, Style Plus, among other artists.
Others present were top government officials and members of the House of Representatives. NAN
Prosecution can wait ! When Diezani’s Husband, Allison Madueke Bobbed and Bubbled At Lagos Boat Club
Allison Madueke Bobbed and Bubbled At Lagos Boat Club
Diezani is grandmother of Nigeria’s biggest economic heist! She makes Abacha look like a minnow when compared to her penchant for grand financial larceny! Nigerians may be infuriated and having sleepless nights over the fleecing spree allegedly embarked upon by the Nigeria’s last substantive Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke; one man who appears unperturbed about her ordeals is the man under whose matrimonial authority she was before politics took her up the ladder of fame and later down the path of infamy. Diezani’s husband, Admiral Allison Madueke (retired) is a happy man for a reason unknown to many.
Cited at the Ikoyi Boat Club where he had come to unwind in the late hours of Friday, Madueke, whose chubby and radiant looks belie that of a man under any kind of pressure, was all smiles and cheers. His insouciant disposition became more telling as he warmed up and exchanged pleasantries with everyone who came around him.
It was tough attempting to reconcile his merry mien and very cheery outlook with that of a man whose wife has been battling debilitating cancer on the one hand and fighting to save her neck from the noose-tightening war being waged against her from both the domestic and international fronts. The retired top naval officer looks every inch happy, and it did not appear his version of happiness was fathomed.
Madueke was one-time Chief of Naval Staff and governed Imo and Anambra State at different times back in the military days. He was said to have been instrumental to his wife, Diezani’s feverish rise in politics; though she had a sterling career as a technocrat who became the first woman to be appointed to the board of Shell Petroleum Development Company Nigeria before joining the government of late President Umaru Yar’Adua, as Minister of Transport, from where she rose to become Federal Minister of Mines & Steel Development, then Nigeria’s first female Minister of Petroleum Resources and later, OPEC President. Source: The Capital NG
Former Vice President , Atiku Abubakar has said that the restructuring committee set up by the All progressive Congress, APC, was needless.
On his twitter handle, Atiku said: “I favor restructuring because I am proudly Nigerian and favour a united Nigeria that offers every man, woman, and child a brighter future where each and everyone has a chance to build and share in this great nation’s potential.
“The restructuring I want to see happen is changing the structure of our country to take power from the elite and give it back to whom it belongs to, the people.
“It will help to bring the benefits of the change that our people were promised in the last general election.
“The whole purpose of restructuring is to eliminate those policies that feed the mindset that drives the sharing behavior.
“Our national wealth is being drained by a select few instead of building a country for all of us. It has to end.
“We need to return resources and power back to the people.
“By restructuring, we can guarantee unity, equity, security for our nation. I favor a united Nigeria that offers everyone a brighter future and we have a chance to build and share in this great nation’s potential.
“The restructuring I want to see happen is to bring the benefit of the change that our people were promised in the last general election.
“Let me caution that restructuring is not a magic bullet that would resolve all Nigeria’s challenges but is a necessary first step.
“Those, who seek to dismember the country, think that once their dream is achieved their part of the country will become a paradise. Not so.
“To me, restructuring means making changes to our current federal structure so it comes closer to the vision of our founding fathers.
“It also means restructuring the very issues and challenges that led our founding fathers to opt for a less centralized system.
“The issue of restructuring is beyond resource control. My vision of restructuring will not make some states richer and others poorer. Restructuring is a win-win for all Nigerian states.
“If we are to grow our revenues we need to change the way we think of our resources and nurture them for the benefit of all.
“So let us start by not thinking as if our resources consist only of oil. Oil is not infinite.
“We must begin to look for other and more sustainable sources of income than oil.” –Point Blank News
