Author: Chief Editor

• World Bank report shows massive gaps in systems to track poor countries’ debts • FEC okays 2011-2025 National Development Plan worth N348.7tr • External reserves to surpass $42b mid next year, says Emefiele The Senate, yesterday, approved the sum of $16 billion, €1 billion and a grant of $125 million as foreign loans for President Muhammadu Buhari to fund his administration’s legacy projects. The red chamber specifically approved the issuance of €500 million from the Bank of Industries and €750 million Eurobond in the International Capital Market. It asked the President to forward the terms and conditions of the…

Governor of Ondo State, Rotimi Akeredolu, has asked the Federal Government to devolve power to the states to enable them work effectively. Akeredolu made this call on Tuesday while receiving officials of the National Senior Secondary Education Commission, who visited the state for an education stakeholders’ summit. Chief Press Secretary to the Governor of Ondo State, Richard Olatunde, made this known on Wednesday in a statement titled, ‘Gov Akeredolu to FG: Devolve power to states, make them effective.’ According to the Governor, the issue of restructuring in the country can be linked to the devolution of power to the states.…

•I’ll never disappoint you, says winner Candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) and former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Chukwuma Soludo, has emerged Anambra State governor-elect, after winning yesterday’s supplementary election in Ihiala Local Government Area of the state with 8,283 votes. Thus, overall, Soludo won 19 out of the 21 local governments in the state and polled a total of 112,229 votes to defeat his closest rival and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Valentine Ozigbo, with 53,807 votes. The All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Andy Uba, came a distant third with 43,285…

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo started Africa Leadership Forum in 1988 in Ota Farm. He observed then that most people in positions of authority in Africa came into office unprepared for the challenges of leadership and development. Obasanjo’s dream then was to groom the succeeding generation of leaders in Africa in order for them to face these challenges and overcome them. In 1993, before he became Nigeria’s president, he led a team to Singapore with a view to study and learn from the Singapore experience and use its success parameters to drive the development process in Africa. To cut a long…

Fortuitously, Martins Oloja admonishes us in his piece of Sunday, September 5, 2021, to de-emphasise media inquisition on Abuja and the goings-on in high places, in the nation’s capital city, which is usually the major focus of media attention. He advises we reset our binoculars and interrogate happenings around and about the country, for editorial balance. A lot really happens in the provinces, by the way, which are subsumed by the mono-directional fixation on the nation’s capital. While some leaders have jettisoned their primary responsibilities to serve their people and are floating around in Abuja as interim overseers of political…

Mrs Aisha Buhari, the wife of Nigerian President, and also Global Tuberculosis (TB) Ambassador, on Tuesday, urged stakeholders to work together to eliminate the disease in the country. Mrs Buhari made the call at the 2021 National TB Conference on Tuesday in Abuja, FCT. The theme for this year conference is “sustaining a resilient TB response in Nigeria: Addressing the impact of COVID-19 and other diseases”. She said that in spite of TB being curable, Nigeria still continued to lose its citizens to it. She noted that with the help of governors’ wives more awareness was being created on TB,…

BY REUBEN ABATI abati1990@gmail.com The recent Governorship election in Anambra state, held on Saturday, November 6, 2021 was meant to be a major turning point for Nigeria. Most commentators said the election would be characterized by violence or that it would amount to a blow-out for Nigeria and the entire South East. Pundits told everyone to be careful. There were permutations about voter turn-out, the preparedness of the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the character of the main gladiators in the contest and their supportive stakeholders, divided as they were and still are, along religious, ethnic, clannish…

Maintains sanctions against Guinea The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has resolved to maintain the sanctions it imposed on Guinea, while imposing similar ones against the Transitional Government in Mali. The resolution was part of the outcomes of the ECOWAS Extraordinary summit of the Authority of Heads of State and Government held on Sunday, in Accra, Ghana. Laolu Akande, Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Office of the Vice President, said the summit was convened to review the political situations in Guinea and Mali. He said a communique was issued at the end of…

A former governor of Ekiti State, Segun Oni, has warned the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) against gambling with the choices of its governorship candidates in the two states of Ekiti and Osun next year. Oni said the PDP must be “decisive, deliberate and direct” in picking popular candidates with track records and name recognition to have the chances of winning the way Governor Willie Obiano did for All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra State. Oni, a PDP governorship hopeful in Ekiti State, said this in Ado Ekiti on Monday in a statement issued by the Director General of his…

• I can still win this election, says PDP’s Ozigbo • APC refutes plan to drag Soludo, INEC to court • INEC adjusts voting time, rerun holds 10a.m. to 4p.m. • APC woes self-inflicted, says Nwosu • YIAGA Africa demands audit of BVAS to prevent delay, voter disenfranchisement • Some collation officers not good at Mathematics, says INEC director The three leading political parties in Anambra State governorship election, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), are upbeat for today’s supplementary polls in Ihiala Council called by the Independent National Electoral…