A monarch, the Esu Karu of Karu, Nassarawa State, Luka Payan and security agents, on Wednesday, warned residents of Karu against taking laws into their own hands and avoiding all forms of ‘jungle justice.’
Panya said this at a meeting with security agents, traditional rulers, community, religious, motorcycle and tricycle leaders, following the recent bizarre story of stolen genitals.
He said that in the last three weeks, there had been incidents of stolen genitals around Karu, Masaka, Ado, New Nyanya and the latest in Sharp Corner, where the suspect and his car were burnt.
He stressed that it was his duty to ensure that his subjects were safe because the essence of leadership is to ensure that the community is peaceful and attains the required development.
“We have a duty to talk to our people so we know how to manage these issues of stolen genitals, so we don’t take laws into our hands.
“I urge every representative, especially the chairman of the motorcycle/tricycle riders association to pass the message to their people.
“There is no society that is free of crime, but there are ways to handle these through security agencies, not jungle justice because anybody can be affected,’’ the Esu said.
Jatau warned that no act of jungle justice would be tolerated any longer in the community. He said that Karu was a sensitive town and close to the Federal Capital Territory, and therefore, expressed his fears that if the present situation was not well managed, could escalate to religious or ethnic crises. Jatau advised the people to be careful not to raise false alarms as anyone seen at the scene where jungle justice was being carried out, would be charged to court too.
Similarly, the Police Area Commander in charge of Karu, Francis Obigwa, said that the issue of alleged stolen genitals, which had been proven to be untrue medically, was becoming overwhelming.
According to Obigwa, there have been ongoing arrests regarding the case and both the suspect and victims will be charged in court. He said that some persons were now capitalizing on the trending issue to commit all manner of crimes, adding that the police are on the alert to deal with such individuals.
As the global community marked the 2023 World Mental Health Day, a Consultant Psychiatrist, Dr. Vincent Nwokejiezi Ubochi, has challenged the government and the citizens alike to create an environment where there is safety, peace and harmony, and where compassionate services to humanity form the core value of existence.
In his goodwill message on the event, Dr. Ubochi, who is the Chief Consultant Psychiatrist, Federal Neuropsychiatric Enugu, noted that mental health is a universal human right, which everyone must have and give to others.
He stated that mental; being a critical pillar of human well-being and quality of life, affects all facets of life, and enjoined people to prioritize, pay attention to theirs and that of others.
World Mental Health Day is celebrated on 10th October every year.
Dr. Ubochi’s message reads:
“Today is World Mental Health Day, a day set aside to preach mental health to the world. Mental health and mental illness are widely misunderstood. Today is important to me because it afford me yet another opportunity to tell our people what is closer to the truth than the information peddled by many non professionals about mental health in the social media space, among others. Truth is ideal and perfect, but something closer to it that can offer better utility and that is evidence based can be classed superior. I am not by any means debasing the other information but to challenge us to think beyond speculations and embrace evidence. Also, today represents to me a call for deliberate and aggressive advocacy towards preventive and restorative Psychiatry.
Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual, realizes his or her ability, can cope with the stresses of life, can work productively, and is able to make contributions to their community (WHO).
Mental health therefore is a positive state of mental and emotional well-being and not merely the absence of mental disorders.
This definition implies that mental health is a critical pillar of human well-being and quality of life .
Our mental state affects all facets of our lives.
Our values, world view and / or our interpretations of and relationships with ourselves and environment, our family, work, attitudes, character, including our physical health are shaped by our mental health .
Mental health can only be achieved when there is peace and harmony, in an environment that is safe and where compassionate services to humanity forms the core value of our existence.
I use this opportunity to challenge the government and the citizens alike to create this haven which I call ‘mental health’ for the people.
WE MUST PAY ATTENTION TO OUR MENTAL HEALTH AND THOSE OF OTHERS .
Make mental health a priority.
Mental health is a universal human right. You must have it and give it.
There is no evidence that the diploma Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu submitted to the country’s electoral commission was forged, the BBC’s Global Disinformation Team has found. Allegations that President Tinubu’s certificates were faked went viral on social media following the release by Chicago State University (CSU) of his academic records last week.
“We have looked at some of the most widely circulated claims,” it said.
Below is the rest of its findings.
The release of the president’s academic documents is the culmination of a judicial case filed in August by one of his main rivals in February’s presidential election, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Mr Abubakar was hoping to have the victor disqualified after accusing him of falsifying the CSU diploma of Bachelor of Science in Business Administration awarded in 1979 that he submitted to the electoral authority (INEC).
To obtain evidence for his case in Nigeria, Mr Abubakar approached a US court in August, requesting it to compel CSU to release Mr Tinubu’s academic records through a process called discovery, where the parties exchange information including documents ahead of a trial.
Mr Tinubu’s lawyers opposed the discovery application, citing privacy concerns, but the US court decided it should proceed.
The documents requested by Mr Abubakar were:
1. A copy of any diploma issued by CSU in 1979
2. A copy of the diploma CSU gave to Mr Tinubu in 1979
3. Copies of diplomas with the same font, seal, signatures, and wording awarded to other students that are similar to what CSU awarded to Mr Tinubu in 1979
4. Documents from CSU that were certified by Jamar Orr, who was then a staff member of CSU, in the 12 months from 1 August 2022
In response to request one, CSU submitted seven diplomas covering different disciplines with the names of the students redacted. According to the university’s registrar, these diplomas had not been collected by the students.
In response to request two, CSU stated that it could not find the diploma they issued to Mr Tinubu in 1979, because they do not keep copies of diplomas already collected by students.
In response to request three, CSU stated that it produced for Mr Tinubu a replacement diploma dated 27 June 1979. It also released diplomas awarded to other students that bore similar font, seal, signatures and wordings as Mr Tinubu’s diplomas.
In response to request four, CSU submitted other academic documents initially attested to and released by Mr Orr.
In line with the judge’s ruling, Mr Abubakar’s lawyer Angela Liu last week questioned Caleb Westberg, CSU’s current registrar, in a deposition.
The BBC was given access to the deposition transcript by Mr Abubakar’s spokesperson, Phrank Shaibu.
Some social media users in Nigeria allege that the deposition and the diplomas released by CSU confirm that the diploma submitted to Inec by Mr Tinubu was forged. This claim was also repeated by one of Mr Abubakar’s lawyers, Kalu Kalu, at a press conference last week.
We found there was no evidence to support this claim.
The CSU released several diplomas issued between 1979 and 2003. We analyzed all of them.
There are three different diplomas for Mr Tinubu that we refer to throughout our analysis:
· The original one, from 1979, which he has said in the past was lost when he went into exile in the 1990s
· The second one, that he submitted to Inec – supposedly a replacement diploma from CSU (it is similar to diplomas issued by CSU in the 1990s)
· Additionally, CSU holds another replacement diploma for Mr Tinubu that they say is probably from the early 2000s that he never collected
The allegations on social media are based on a comparison between the document Mr Tinubu submitted to Inec and the 1979 diplomas released by CSU.
During Mr Westberg’s deposition, Mr Atiku’s lawyer focused on the copy of the diploma President Tinubu handed to the electoral commission and suggested that it was unlike any of the diplomas released by CSU.
However, while Mr Westberg agreed with Ms Liu that the diploma in question does not look like the samples from 1979, he stated that the certificate actually looks like three of the diplomas CSU released to Mr Abubakar. Our analysis confirms this.
It turns out that the discrepancy in the appearance of the diploma is down to it having been re-issued in the 1990s.
Mr Westberg said the template of CSU’s diploma has changed several times over the years. He said any request for a new diploma would resemble the current template at that time, no matter when the student graduated.
As such, if Mr Tinubu had reordered his diploma in the late 1990s, what he would have been given would look like what was obtainable then.
Three of the diplomas dating from the 1990s that CSU submitted were similar to Mr Tinubu’s.
One of them, which bears the date 18 December 1998, is identical (aside from the names, class of degree, and dates) to the diploma Mr Tinubu handed over to Inec.
Mr Westberg also stated that CSU does not keep notes of when a graduate asks for the reissuing of a diploma and therefore Mr Tinubu’s request for a copy of the diploma was not recorded.
The copy he gave to the election commission had part of the university logo missing, which Mr Westberg said in his deposition was possibly “cut off” when it was photocopied.
We analyzed the diploma. It appears in fact that its bottom part was not included during the photocopy process.
The BBC reached out to Mr Tinubu’s team to get a copy of the diploma in question. They sent what they said was the only existing copy of the diploma. It is a black and white photocopy identical to what was submitted to Inec.
Another claim, made by a fact-checking organization in Nigeria, was that the diploma Mr Tinubu submitted was not from CSU as its diplomas do not include the phrase “with honors” under the degree name.
But the BBC found that while this was not reflected in the other diplomas released by CSU, it does appears in Mr Tinubu’s diploma issued in the early 2000s, which was authenticated by Mr Westberg during his deposition.
It has the words “with honors” – a match with the diploma with the same detail submitted by the president to Inec.
Mr Westberg said that the school could authenticate this particular diploma because it was still in its possession as it was never picked up.
Not every student graduates from university with honors. Mr Tinubu, as attested to by CSU in several court documents seen by the BBC, did graduate from CSU with honors.
The BBC contacted CSU with questions about its diplomas and it referred us to a statement that read in part: “We are confident and always have been in the veracity and integrity of our records regarding Tinubu’s attendance and completion of graduation requirements”.
Another allegation making the rounds on social media is that the person who attended CSU with the name Bola A Tinubu is female.
Mr Tinubu attended Southwest College (now known as Richard J. Daley College) before transferring to CSU in 1976. In Southwest’s transcript, there is an “F” (for “female”) in the column where gender is indicated, leading to claims that it was a woman who attended the school and Mr Tinubu “stole her identity”. Mr Atiku’s lawyer, Mr Kalu, alluded to this in a press conference last week.
However, in his deposition, Mr Westberg stressed that there was no confusion about the gender of the person who attended CSU as he was a male named Bola A Tinubu. He said the university used other factors other than the name to authenticate the student’s identity.
According to him, the Social Security Number (SSN) in the transcript from Southwest College matches what it has in other documents in which the student’s gender is clearly marked as male.
However, the released documents did raise questions about Mr Tinubu’s birth date and the secondary school he attended.
One of the documents stated that Mr Tinubu attended Government College Lagos in 1970. However, information available on the school website stated that it was only founded in 1974.
Aside from the gender discrepancy, the birth dates in some of the released documents differ from the official birth date of President Tinubu, which is 29 March 1952.
His transcript from CSU has his date of birth as 29 March 1954. His undergraduate admissions application form has his date of birth as 29 March 1955.
Mr Atiku’s lawyer said during Mr Westberg’s deposition that on the forms submitted to Inec, Mr Tinubu had given his date of birth as 29 March 1952.
Mr Westberg, during cross-examination, responded that the discrepancies could have been due to human error.
We contacted Mr Tinubu’s team for comment about these discrepancies and a spokesperson directed us instead to his party – the All Progressives Congress. We then contacted Mr Tinubu’s presidential campaign spokesperson Festus Keyamo, who is also a minister in the government. He did not take our calls or respond to our text and WhatsApp messages.
We also sent questions to Mr Abubakar’s team. They did not respond.
All the the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA intensifies efforts ahead of the Imo governorship election, the party’s national leader and governor of Anambra state, Charles Soludo has assured supporters that the party is certain to emerge victorious in the state in November.
Soludo made the remark while receiving Tony Ejiogu, the APGA governorship candidate in Imo state, at the Anambra state government House in Awka.
Soludo stated: “You’ll agree with me that Imo State has been a stronghold of APGA. Most of our founding fathers are also from the State. Imo is APGA, and APGA is Imo. We have been through trials and tribulations in the past, yet we remained strong as a party. It’s time to reclaim back Imo through our persistence and consistency.
APGA is the first Party to be registered with the word “progressives” in its name. Others see other parties as a political platform to win elections but in APGA, we believe in true federalism with a mandate, core value, framework, and structure to move the nation forward.”
He expressed optimism in the victory of APGA in Imo State while noting that the herculean task of defeating an incumbent is achievable as evidenced by the massive support the party has enjoyed in the past in Imo where it won elections.
Palestinians walk through debris amid the destruction from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City's al-Rimal neighbourhood on October 10, 2023. Israel kept up its deadly bombardment of Hamas-controlled Gaza on October 10 after the Palestinian militant group threatened to execute some of the around 150 hostages it abducted in a weekend assault if air strikes continue without warning. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)
Israeli warplanes pounded downtown Gaza City, home to Hamas’ centers of government, with relentless bombardments into early Tuesday, after Israel’s prime minister vowed retaliation against the Islamic militant group that would “reverberate for generations.”
The 4-day-old war has already claimed at least 1,600 lives, as Israel saw gun battles in the streets of its own towns for the first time in decades and neighborhoods in Gaza were reduced to rubble. Hamas also escalated the conflict, pledging to kill captured Israelis if strikes targeted civilians without warning.
Israel’s military said it had found the bodies of roughly 1,500 Hamas militants in Israeli territory as it gained effective control in the south and “restored full control” over the border. It was not immediately clear if those numbers overlapped with deaths previously reported by Palestinian authorities.
Israel said that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza are holding more than 150 soldiers and civilians snatched from inside Israel after the attack caught its vaunted military and intelligence apparatus completely off guard.
As the Israeli military activated 300,000 reservists in a massive mobilization, a major question was whether it will launch a ground assault into the tiny Mediterranean coastal territory. The last ground assault was in 2014.
Thousands of Israelis were evacuated from more than a dozen towns near Gaza, and tanks and drones were deployed to guard breaches in the Gaza border fence against new incursions. In Gaza, tens of thousands fled their homes as airstrikes leveled buildings.
The moves, along with Israel’s formal declaration of war on Sunday, pointed to Israel increasingly shifting to the offensive against Hamas, threatening greater destruction in the densely populated, impoverished Gaza Strip.
“We have only started striking Hamas,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a nationally televised address. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”
The Israeli military said it struck hundreds of Hamas targets in Gaza’s City Rimal neighborhood, which is home to Hamas’ ministries and governing buildings, overnight.
The massive devastation in Rimal signaled what could be a new Israeli tactic in Gaza: warning civilians to leave certain areas and then hitting those areas with airstrikes of unprecedented intensity.
The heavy bombardment began in areas of Gaza bordering Israel over the weekend, and overnight shifted to the center of Gaza City. If these types of bombardments continue, Gaza civilians will have fewer and fewer places to shelter as more neighborhoods become uninhabitable.
In a briefing Tuesday, Hecht suggested Palestinians should try to leave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, but the military later said the crossing was closed.
Asked if Israel considered Hamas’ civil government, such as parliament and ministries, legitimate targets, Hecht said “if there’s a gunman firing rockets from there, it turns into a military target.”
In response to Israel’s aerial attacks, the spokesman of Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, said Monday night that the group will kill one Israeli civilian captive any time Israel targets civilians in their homes in Gaza “without prior warning.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen warned Hamas against harming any of the hostages, saying, “This war crime will not be forgiven.” Netanyahu appointed a former military commander to manage the hostage and missing persons crisis.
The Israeli military said more than 900 people already have been killed in Israel. In Gaza and the West Bank, 704 people have been killed, according to authorities there; Israel says hundreds of Hamas fighters are among them. Thousands have been wounded on both sides.
Israel and Hamas have had repeated conflicts in past years, often sparked by tensions around a Jerusalem holy site. This time, the context has become potentially more explosive. Both sides talk of shattering with violence a yearslong Israeli-Palestinian deadlock left by the moribund peace process.
The surprise weekend attack by Hamas left a death toll unseen since the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria. That fomented calls to crush Hamas no matter the cost, rather than continuing to try to bottle it up in Gaza. Israel is run by its most hard-right government ever, dominated by ministers who adamantly reject Palestinian statehood.
Hamas, in turn, says it is ready for a long battle to end an Israeli occupation it says is no longer tolerable. Desperation has grown among Palestinians, many of whom see nothing to lose under unending Israeli control and increasing settler depredations in the West Bank, the blockade in Gaza and what they see as the world’s apathy.
Attacks by both sides created more scenes of devastation Monday. In Israel’s southern coastal city of Ashkelon, a man holding a crutch with one hand and an older boy with the other joined evacuees being shepherded from a street after a rocket blew out the front of a house.
In Gaza, Palestinians passed the bodies of the dead through dense crowds of men in the rubble in the Jebaliya refugee camp.
Early Monday evening, the sound of explosions echoed over Jerusalem when a volley of rockets fired from Gaza hit two neighborhoods — a sign of Hamas’s reach. Israeli media said seven were wounded.
Israeli warplanes carried out an intense bombardment of Rimal, a residential and commercial district of central Gaza City, after issuing warnings for residents to evacuate. Amid continuous explosions, the building housing the headquarters of the Palestinian Telecommunications Company was destroyed.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza have razed 790 housing units and severely damaged 5,330, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said early Tuesday. Damage to three water and sanitation sites have cut off services to 400,000.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, saying authorities would cut electricity and block the entry of food and fuel.
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council aid group, warned that Israel’s siege would spell “utter disaster” for Gazans.
“There is no doubt that collective punishment is in violation of international law,” he told The Associated Press. “If and when it would lead to wounded children dying in hospitals because of lack of energy, electricity and supplies, it could amount to war crimes.”
The Israeli siege will leave Gaza almost entirely dependent on its crossing into neighboring Egypt at Rafah, where cargo capacities are lower than other crossings into Israel.
An Egyptian military official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press, said more than 2 tons of medical supplies from the Egyptian Red Crescent were sent to Gaza and efforts were underway to organize food and other deliveries.
Tens of thousands of Gaza residents continued to flee. The U.N. said Tuesday that more than 187,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have left their homes — the most since a 2014 air and ground offensive by Israel uprooted about 400,000.
The Federal High Court sitting in Abuja on Monday, disqualified the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate in the November 11 governorship election in Bayelsa state, Timipre Sylva.
A member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Deme Kolomo filed the suit FHC/ABJ/CS/821/2023 on June 13, 2023 challenging Sylva’s qualification.
Justice Donatus Okorowo, in a judgement, ruled that Sylva, having been sworn in two times, and ruled for five years as governor of Bayelsa state, would breach the 1999 constitution (as amended), if allowed to contest again.
The judge further held that Sylva is not qualified to run in the November poll because, if he wins and is sworn in, he would spend more than eight years in office as governor, a development that would be against the provisions of Nigerian constitution.
Okorowo, who cited a decided case of the Supreme Court, Marwa vs Nyako, noted that the constitution disallowed anybody from being voted more than two times as governor.
He further held that while the parties to the suit had agreed that Sylva was voted into office two times, adding that if Sylva is allowed to contest the next election, he would have contested more than the stipulated time.
The Chicago State University (CSU) registrar’s deposition raised some interesting points that merit further interrogation. He gave the impression that he was purposefully omitting some information. Even if CSU is a phony institution, as the registrar’s deposition suggested, the United States of America (USA) is the host nation. The educational institutions in that wonderful country cannot engage in curious practices.
Even in so-called third-world nations, it is unheard of for a student’s gender or admittance requirements to be a point of contention in a university. For instance, a university applicant in Nigeria must have completed at least five credits in a maximum of two sittings, two of which must be credit passes in English and Mathematics. These minimal requirements are never dropped. Even if a student is admitted provisionally, they must be fulfilled before graduation. Otherwise, he or she won’t graduate and won’t get a certificate.
Things as fundamental as credit admittance criteria cannot be an exception in American universities. However, the Chicago State University mentioned the graduation of a particular Bola A. Tinubu (another bogey issue since certificates do not typically bear initials, but CSU admitted a Bola A. Tinubu whose gender and the meaning of the ‘A’ are unknown).
One spent some time attempting to comprehend the CSU depositions. Many people may believe that the President’s person has now emerged from the fog, but this is far from the truth. The problems are becoming worse; shame on the CSU, who were inconsistent in their responses. Insolently responding “It’s a Nigerian thing” to one of the crucial concerns raised before the Nancy Maldonado court, the university’s registrar, Caleb Westberg, displayed too much dismissiveness and ambivalence and even ridiculed the country Nigeria.
Most of the questions had apparent solutions that the registrar didn’t supply. For instance, when did Bola A. Tinubu graduate and when did he pick up his degree certificate were two important questions he left unanswered. Since it distinguishes between students who graduated and received certificates and others who didn’t, this question may be the most important. Many students enroll in schools but never complete them. One’s set can also graduate, however, a specific student might not have discharged some carried-over courses and get delayed.
Because the South West College is a feeder school for the CSU, its students can complete their degrees there even if they have course carryover. In such cases, a student may complete all of their coursework at CSU, but they will not be able to get their diploma or degree until they have completed the failed courses at the feeder South West College. The registrar made no mention of this.
The South West College transcript of Bola A. Tinubu will make this point clear. While the CSU transcript may be complete in terms of credit loads, the South West College transcript is, at the very least, lacking in English. Since English is the language of instruction and examination, passing is compulsory for the students before they graduate or receive their certificate at CSU as elsewhere.
You can understand why I said CSU was being unnecessarily economical with the facts. When did Bola A. Tinubu pick up his or her diploma? This point is crucial to the entire investigation and can reveal all of the evidence, or lack thereof, related to the forgery narrative.
From this angle, the problem of the reissue of the certificate does not even come up if the said Bola A. Tinubu (whoever he or she was) did not discharge the carryover from South West College and was unable to collect the certificate. What hasn’t been issued can’t be reissued. When the original certificate cannot be located, most likely because it was destroyed or lost, a reissue becomes essential but this doesn’t appear to be the case here.
The mystery surrounding the collection of the aforementioned certificate still exists. Clearing it is crucial because a student who has had a certificate denied because they did not complete their academic requirements cannot issue a certificate to themselves. That will be faking. Why then did CSU hide this crucial information?
The University also claimed to outsource the reissuing of certificates to outside vendors, but it made no mention of the identity or accreditation of these vendors. Or does CSU imply that anyone can stroll into a business centre, design their certificate, and add any signature, as was the case with the University President signing the President’s version even though she was not an employee of the University during Bola A. Tinubu’s time there?
Strangely enough, the university’s registrar said that Bola A. Tinubu’s passport, social security number, signature, and other credentials were missing. It is remarkable because even in developing nations, such stories are rare. How can the university tell if the student they admitted is a man or a woman if they don’t have a picture of them?
The fact that the CSU archives, where all the yearbooks are preserved, only have the year Tinubu claims to have graduated in 1979 absent from the library is equally troublesome. This synchronicity is way too strange. Yet, the CSU Registrar, Mr. Caleb Westberg, dares to refer to “a Nigerian thing.” What should the strange disappearance of the University’s 1979 yearbook be called? Can we refer to it as “an American thing,” as he did with Nigeria? It calls for further investigation because it smells more like a purposeful attempt to destroy important data. This should worry the United States government because of the harm that could result if it were to completely escalate.
Investigating Bola A. Tinubu’s missing Social Security number is especially crucial because it is a person’s primary identity in the United States and is more significant than their name. Many details will be revealed by Tinubu’s SSN, which those withholding it are attempting to conceal from the people.
If it is true that at least two members of its personnel, including a financial administrator, were formerly found guilty of crimes and have served time in prison, it does appear that the CSU has a history of corruption. Is the Bola A. Tinubu affair a repetition of this heinous past or the emergence of fresh conspirators?
Before foreign media outlets pick up this narrative and further undermine the US and its strong reputation, the US government needs to step in. It is crucial to note that what CSU did in this case cannot occur at any Nigerian Federal University, including admitting a student without a photo, fingerprint, signature, or other identifying information. The call for an investigation stems from the assumption that if it cannot occur in Nigeria, a developing nation, it is extremely unlikely to occur in the American educational system. So, what’s going on St the CSU?
Lastly, the President should, out of love for his country and decency, pick one national television station and tell Nigerians his life story. They deserve to know their President’s real birthdate (1952 or 1954 ? ), primary and secondary schools attended (he once told INEC he attended Ibadan Government College, but the CSU revealed he attended Government College Lagos, which was nonexistent at the time (1970) he claimed he attended), as well as the tertiary institutions.
Nigerians also need the President’s exact occupation since he formerly worked as an accountant for Exxon Mobile despite having a certificate that reads business and management. Complicating it the more, the President indicated on INEC’s form some time ago that he is an economist. The debate and misinformation around his name will be put to rest by the revelation of who he is, no matter how tragic it may be.
Nigerians would forget about it and move on. The President can even resign if the Supreme Court also fails to do the needful. His supporters who urge him to continue to live a lie do not love him or the nation; they only care about their belly.
The Minister of Women Affairs, Uju Kennedy, has expressed disapproval of the actions of an Abuja hospital that shut out a dying victim after a violent attack on a ‘one chance’ bus, saying she will ensure such an incident does not reoccur.
Olorunfemi, a young lady, was stabbed after boarding the bus posing as a commercial vehicle along the Maitama/Kubwa Highway, before being thrown out into the streets.
She was rushed to Maitama General Hospital by Good Samaritans, but the facility did not attend to her for not providing a police report.
“I’m heading to the hospital. I’m going there to fight for the late girl they abandoned so that we make sure it never happens again,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy expressed her concerns about this incident and vowed to investigate it further.
The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) has raised the alarm over the threat of rapid flooding along the River Niger and River Benue Basin, owing to the release of water from the Lagdo Dam in the Republic of Cameroon .
Mr Ahmed reports that, already, states such as Adamawa, Taraba, and Benue were feeling the impact of the huge flooding occasioned by the water from Lagdo Dam.
Farmlands, domestic animals and residential buildings worth millions of naira have been swept away by flood in the Mayo Selbe community of Gashaka Local Government Area of Taraba State.
The agency called on states along the River Benue and River Niger Basin to urgently activate their emergency response plans, warning more states in the basin will experience flooding in the days ahead.
A Human Rights Activist and Lawyer, Chukwudi Ezeobika, has lambasted the Independent National Electoral Commission for not exercising due diligence in conducting a proper investigation into the information and certificates submitted to it by persons aspiring for public offices .
The activist said the action or inaction of the electoral umpire has brought the country to ridicule before the international community whereby the certificate of her President will be subject to scrutiny, casting doubt on the integrity of the country’s leadership. These were contained in a statement the lawyer signed and made available to newsmen in Lokoja on Monday.
Speaking against the backdrop of the Chicago State University certificate controversy, he noted that the electoral umpire has brought so much embarrassment to the entire country because it failed to do the needful.
This, he said is an “Issue to be worried about as it raises serious questions on the integrity, capacity and true independence of the Commission as currently constituted.”
He said that having received huge budgets (which amount to billions of Nigerian naira) both from the Nigerian government and international donors, the INEC Chairman, Prof. Yakubu Mahmood, should have done better to conduct a free, fair and credible election.
