Olumide Fafore's Blog: May 2015

Friday, 29 May 2015

Read: President Buhari's Inaugural Message.

Read President Buhari's text below;

I am immensely grateful to God Who Has preserved us to witness this day and this occasion. Today marks a triumph for Nigeria and an occasion to celebrate her freedom and cherish her democracy. Nigerians have shown their commitment to democracy and are determined to entrench its culture. Our journey has not been easy but thanks to the determination of our people and strong support from friends abroad we have today a truly democratically elected government in place.

Seem to be saying I have delivered.

South Africa too timid in handling Nigeria BY MILLS SOKO

South African National Defence Force. Picture: AFP PHOTO/MARCO LONGARI

SA has played a large role in peacekeeping in Africa, as in Burundi in 2001, where soldiers in Bujumbura protected politicians returning to participate in a transition government. Picture: AFP

THE inauguration on Friday of Muhammadu Buhari as Nigeria’s president presents a fresh opportunity for SA and Nigeria to repair their frayed relationship. But it also provides a chance for SA to alter its timid and ambivalent policy approach to Nigeria.

On May 29, Nigeria will experience, for the first time in its history, a peaceful transfer of power between two political parties. Since 1999, when the then-government of Nigeria allowed new political parties to form, Nigeria has been governed by one party, the People's Democratic Party. In March, Gen. Muhamadu Buhari, the candidate of the opposing coalition party, All Progressives Congress, succeeded in winning the presidential election, marking a critical juncture in the democratic transition timeline of this African country.

New Nigerian President, Muhammadu Buhari, salutes his supporters during his Inauguration in Abuja, Nigeria, Friday, May 29, 2015. (AP Photo)

Nigerians celebrated their newly reinforced democracy Friday, dancing, singing praises and releasing white doves as Muhammadu Buhari, the first candidate to beat a sitting president at the polls, became their president.U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, accompanied by the commander of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. David M. Rodriguez, was the first foreign official to meet with Nigeria's new leader after the inauguration. A senior State Department official said Washington is ready to increase military aid and could quickly send more advisers. More pics after cut...

President Muhammadu Buhari is currently hosting World leaders to a dinner at the Aso villa in Abuja after his inauguration as President. More pics after cut....

Former Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan was received and welcomed by a mammoth crowd today, Friday May 29, 2015 at the Portharcourt International airport after handing over to President Buhari. Goodluck Jonathan is on his way to Bayelsa State to his hometown Otuoke. Farewell sir. More pics after cut

Congratulations to our new President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari. More pics after cut.....

Democracy Day statement by National leader Bola Tinubu...

May 29, 2015, shall be recorded in our history as the moment when democracy finally was allowed to participate in Democracy Day. The reason for this is the legion of average Nigerians who voted to make this happen. Should any of you wish to see a true hero of democracy, don’t fret. Just look in the nearest mirror.

The celebrations prior to this were false showings; they were the commemoration of wrong.

The path we have taken to come to this august moment has not been one of easy victory or swift progress.

Mrs Aisha Buhari "Education of Children is My Husband Priority"

Mrs Aisha Buhari in a statement released to mark the International Children’s Day, today, May 27, said education was going to be one of the main focuses of the incoming government.

“Our children are our future. Education of our children is the best way to secure the future of our country,” she said.

Nigerian soldier guarding civilians in Bama — In the last few months, much of the area under Boko Haram control has been retaken
Up to 4,500 other rank and file soldiers could be dismissed, they say.Nigeria's army has sacked at least 200 soldiers for cowardice and failure to fight against Boko Haram militants, several soldiers have told the BBC.

The Bring Back Our Girls Group is had a sit out to commemorate the 408^th day that

over 200 school girls were abducted from Chibok by Boko Haram.

It’s the second children’s day Nigerians are celebrating without these girls.

ChibokGirls ambassador have placed a demand on the incoming President-elect’s

administration to rescue “Our Sisters”. More pics after cut.....

A combination of file pictures made on May 27 shows FIFA officials. From left to right from upper row: Rafael Esquivel, Nicolas Leoz, Jeffrey Webb, Jack Warner, Eduardo Li, Eugenio Figueredo and Jose Maria Marin. The seven men are among several soccer officials arrested. (AFP/Getty Images)

The Justice Department unsealed a 47 count indictment early Wednesday charging 14 world soccer figures, including officials of FIFA, with racketeering, bribery, money laundering and fraud. Four of those accused, including two sports marketing companies, have already pleaded guilty and are likely to be cooperating.

An Indian man rests inside a concrete pipe on a hot summer day in Hyderabad, India, Wednesday, May 27, 2015. Hundreds of people have died in southern India since the middle of April as soaring summer temperatures scorch the country, officials said Tuesday. (AP Photo)

Officials say soaring summer temperatures in India have left over 1,100 people dead over the past month.

Most of the deaths have been reported in the southeastern states of Andhra Pradesh and Telengana. More pics after cut....

Read Amaechi remarks below:

"I have been listening to Mr. Nyesom Wike and I have been trying not to reply him. He has been accusing me of corruption and I have been trying to keep quiet over the issue of corruption. A thief cannot call me corrupt. The first lesson he needs to learn is that he was Chief of Staff to my government. If I have no records, I have records on him. One way we succeeded in moving this state forward was that we refused to probe Dr. Peter Odili’s government, despite the pressure on me to probe Dr. Odili’s government, because at the end of the day, they will not ask me the number of persons I probed, but what I did while in government.

Nigeria President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari

For 33-year-old construction company worker Suleiman Hashimu, the country's first ever victory by an opposition party prompted a more unusual response: to walk half way across the country.

"Two years ago, I made a promise to God that should General Buhari win the 2015 presidential election, I would trek from Lagos to Abuja to celebrate his victory," Hashimu told AFP.

Malia Obama.

According to Sky News, Felix Kiprono has fallen in love with 16-year-old Malia Obama.

“People might say I am after the family’s money, which is not the case. My love is real,” he said.

“I am currently drafting a letter to Obama asking him to please have Malia accompany him for this trip.”

Women queue to board buses during an evacuation of Nigerians displaced by Boko Haram militants, at the camp for displaced people in Geidam, Yobe state, Nigeria, May 6, 2015.

In a makeshift hut sheltered from a stinging desert wind, Adama Issaika holds her infant daughter close. Three months ago, she stood helpless as gunmen from the Islamist group Boko Haram lined up her husband and relatives against a mosque and shot them dead.

“My littlest boy, Alirou, reached out and touched his father on the ground,” she recalled.
One of thousands of Nigerians who piled into crude canoes to escape across Lake Chad to neighboring Chad, Issaika is caught in West Africa’s vice of anguish.

Soldiers are seen on a truck along a road in Maiduguri in Borno State, Nigeria May 14, 2015.
Image by: REUTERS

"Boko Haram elements are there," Daouda Malam Marthe, first vice president of parliament, said on state radio. "The prolongation of the state of emergency is a necessity."
The emergency declaration, which parliament voted in favour of on Tuesday, also gives security forces additional powers including the ability to order searches of homes day or night.
Niger, Chad and Cameroon have since February helped Nigerian troops push Boko Haram out of towns and territories the militants had captured in an effort to create a hardline Islamic state in northeast Nigeria.

Africa@52 - Resource Nationalism a Must: The Herald.

Those were the days: celebrating the liberation of Benghazi from the Qaddafi dictatorship in October 2011. Flickr / Magherabia.

Fifty-two years ago leaders from 23 independent African countries gathered in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to launch the Organisation of African Unity. Its major objective was for those African countries which had already achieved political independence to mobilise resources to help nations on the continent still under colonial bondage to be free.

That dream came to near fruition with the attainment of majority rule in South Africa in 1994. To date, the Saharawi Democratic Republic, ironically occupied by Morocco, a fellow African country, remains the biggest scar on the road to a politically free Africa. Overall, it is mission accomplished. We have every reason to thank the founding fathers of OAU in 1963, now the African Union.

REUTERSON THE SPOT: President Pierre Nkurunziza, who is running for a third term, speaks to reporters in Bujumbura, Burundi, after the attempted coup. REUTER

Heads of state need to set the stage for good governance and development by calling into line leaders who cling to power beyond their mandates, writes Thabo Makgoba.

Cape Town - On May 25, citizens and governments across the African continent, together with the people of the global diaspora, commemorate Africa Day.

It is a pivotal time as it presents an unprecedented opportunity for the citizens and decision-makers of the continent, together with those who have a vested interest in its growth and development, to reconnect and recommit themselves to supporting all interventions to develop a better Africa and a better world.

(Reuters) - Authorities in Burkina Faso began exhuming the remains of former president Thomas Sankara on Monday in a bid to establish responsibility for a murder that has dogged the West African nation since 1987.

Sankara's relatives have for years pressed for his body to be tested, saying they suspect it may not be that of the former president, who died in a coup that brought his former ally Blaise Compaore to power.

michelle-obama-bring-back-our-girls.jpg.pagespeed.ic_.58C1CJ5bQA

Aisha, nine years old, and her elder sister, Falmata, 13, were both abducted from their home in Damasak, in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, during a raid by Boko Haram militants in March. Their much older brother, Bukkar, isn’t sure they’ll ever return. He believes they might have been drafted into the insurgents’ growing army of female suicide bombers. Indeed, he has every reason to think so.

Photo: Premium Times

President Goodluck Jonathan and First Lady Patience Jonathan.

Culled from the Daily Trust;

President Goodluck Jonathan will be leaving office this week unable to resolve what has become a major telecommunication controversy: the 2012 sale, by the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC), of the National Public Security Communications System (NPSCS) network to OpenSkys Services Limited, owned by billionaire businessman, Chief Emeka Offor.

The indication last week was that the outgoing President was yet to assent to the transaction, which a government advisory panel had declared a compromise of national security.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo on Sunday said Nigeria had been poorly managed for eight years, telling Nigerians to be patient with the incoming administration of President-Elect, Muhammadu Buhari, to correct the prevailing abnormalities.

He said this during a visit of a delegation of South-West women leaders, under the leadership of Iyalode of Yorubaland,Chief Alaba Lawson, to his Abeokuta Hilltop residence.

Obasanjo noted that it would take a sizable time for Buhari to correct the anomalies.

Senator-elect, Buruji Kashamu's supporters were at the Federal High Court Lagos this morning, Monday May 25, 2015 to protest peacefully over the proposed extradition of the Buruji following alleged drug charges in the United States. Another pic after cut...

A soldier fires an AK-47 rifle during a protest against President Pierre Nkurunziza and his bid for a third term, in Bujumbura.
Image by: REUTERS

The protester was killed when local police opened fire on a group of around a hundred demonstrators in Muyange in Bururi province, around 60 kilometres southeast of the capital, the sources said.
Civil unrest was also reported in Matana, further south in the same province.

Muhammadu Buhari - How I Will Choose My Ministers

President-elect Muhammadu Buhari has dismissed the ministerial lists in circulation on the social media as fake because his ministers will not emerge the way the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) picked members of its Federal Executive Council (FEC) in the last 16 years.

Buhari made this known in an exclusive interview he granted senior editors of Daily Trust at his country home in Daura, Katsina State on Tuesday.

An estimated 2 million women in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Arab region, Latin America and the Caribbean live with obstetric fistula. And yet, the health condition is practically unheard-of in the United States and other Western nations because a fistula is largely preventable with access to timely obstetric care. The United Nations has called on communities worldwide to raise awareness and intensify actions toward ending this harrowing injury, in light of the third annual International Day to End Obstetric Fistula on Saturday, May 23.

A recent spike in new Ebola cases in Guinea has been traced to patients contracting the deadly disease at funeral ceremonies, government health officials said. Ebola is easily spread through contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person, or the remains of someone who has died from the virus. The rise in cases comes a week after another Ebola-hit country, Liberia, was officially declared Ebola-free.

Nigerian officials are calling for local and international assistance as over 100 babies are being delivered daily in refugee camps across Borno state. Most of the pregnant women in the camps were displaced by the Boko Haram insurgency and raped by the militants, a Nigerian newspaper reported.

“We record an average of between five and six births in each of the 21 camps daily,” Alhaji Grema Terab, the executive chairman of Borno’s State Emergency Management Agency, told Leadership newspaper. “The state government is solely responsible for their daily feeding and provision of other needs.”

Ai Weiwei and Joan Baez, Copyright: picture-alliance/dpa

She has been called the voice of a generation and him the conscience of a country. Now Joan Baez and Ai Weiwei are to receive human rights group Amnesty International's top honors in Berlin.

Amidst the fanfare and flashbulbs, there will be one notable absentee from tonight's Amnesty International's Ambassador of Conscience award ceremony. As if cruel testament to his newly-minted accolade, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is unable to travel to Berlin to collect the award.

Nigeria Soldaten in Diffa Aktion gegen Boko Haram

Nigerian army spokesman Colonel Sani Usman said 579 officers and troopers were appearing before two courts in Abuja for "quick dispensation of justice, discipline and professionalism."

Usman gave no details of when the trials began but said on Wednesday: "We have about 473 officers and soldiers being tried at the Army Headquarters Garrison and 106 in 81 Division." He did not specify the charges.

Our dear President, please permit me to write my last epistle to you as our leader and Commander-in-Chief. By this time next week, I expect you to have flown back to Yenagoa via Port Harcourt. How I wish I could have the opportunity of being on that last trip, not to mock you but to capture your swinging moods in those few moments of realising that the end has come eventually. I would love to know how many of your big friends would take the pain to follow you or if most would abandon you to your fate and move on pronto to the new brides. Even as a writer with what I believe is vivid

Rights groups decry Ethiopia press clampdown ahead of elections

Ethiopian Prime Minster Hailemariam Desalegn

Ethiopia on Sunday holds its first general election since the death of long-time strongman Meles Zenawi whose successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, is almost certain to stay in office.

Over 36.8 million Ethiopians have registered to vote in what is seen by the international community as a key test of the state's commitment to bringing greater democracy to the Horn of Africa nation.

Why Boko Haram And ISIL Target Women?

Binta Ibrahim at a refugee camp in Yola, Nigeria, on May 4 after Nigerian soldiers rescued her in the Sambisa Forest. (AP / Sunday Alamba)

In all the battles waged by men, one of the most effective ways to destroy the enemy is to destroy its women. Rape and sexual abuse are wartime “strategies” as old as war itself.

Yesterday The New York Times ran a devastating report that hundreds of girls as young as 11 have been raped and impregnated by members of Boko Haram. Based in Nigeria, the radical Islamist sect has long proven its cowardice by targeting girls, including the 300 mostly Christian schoolgirls they kidnapped last year, inciting the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. For the young victims now carrying their abusers’ unborn children, returning to anything like normal life is impossible to imagine.

A Rohingya migrant cries as he sits with others in a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman on May 14, 2015. (AFP )

It takes a lot to forsake your home, clamber on to a crammed, rickety boat, and venture out into the uncertainty and danger of the high seas. But this is precisely what tens of thousands of people from Burma's Rohingya ethnic minority have done in recent years, leaving before the monsoon season settles in and their fates become even darker.

Stephanie Sinclair of the U.S., a VII Photo

Agency photographer working for National Geographic magazine, has won the first prize Contemporary Issues Stories with the series "Child brides: Too young to wed". Tahani (in pink), who married her husband Majed when she was 6 and he was 25, poses for this portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their mountain home in Hajjah Hajjah, Yemen. Nearly half of all women in Yemen were married as children. Child marriage is outlawed in many countries and international agreements forbid the practice yet this tradition still spans continents, language, religion and caste.
Imageby: Reuters

Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda said child marriage inflicted life-long trauma on many girls and far more must be done to address its psychosocial impact.
"(With child marriage) we are sanctioning rape, we are sanctioning abduction, we are sanctioning a modern form of slavery, it's trafficking, it's forced labour," said Gumbonzvanda, a human rights

lawyer whose mother and sister were both wed as children in her native Zimbabwe.
"It's a huge bundle of violations, and the moment we just call it 'marriage', it is like we are giving it a blessing and acceptability."

Lagos state Governor Raji Fashola, is currently in the United States and yesterday Tuesday May 19, 2015 visited the US Senate building where he met with some of the Senators. More pics after cut...

The Chairman of the PDP tendered his resignation letter this morning May 20, 2015 to the NWC of the party. His resignation is said to be with immediate effect. PDP member Adeyanju Deji confirm Muazu's resignation on twitter and that President Jonathan has asked for the resignation of PDP Board of Trustees members and its chairman, Chief Tony Anenih. Read Adeyanju's tweets after cut...

Nigerian military: 10 Boko Haram camps destroyed in forest

Soldiers are seen on a truck in Maiduguri in Borno State, Nigeria May 14, 2015

Nigeria's military says it has destroyed 10 Boko Haram camps, killed many militants and captured heavy weaponry in the northeastern Sambisa Forest.

This comes after a surge in attacks by the Islamic extremists including suicide bombings, assaults on a business school and villages and a repelled night-time raid by hundreds of fighters on the biggest military base in northeast Nigeria.

(Reuters)

Under the shade of a wooden shack in the western Chadian town of Bagasola, heavily pregnant Zara Gayi sells mangoes and vegetables, hoping to earn enough money to feed her four children. On a good day she can make three dollars.

"My husband used to ride boats to Nigeria. Since the border closure months ago, he cannot work anymore. In the past, he could earn 100,000 Naira ($500) a month," she told the United Nations children's agency UNICEF.

Former Grand Slam doubles tennis champion Bob Hewitt was sentenced to six years in prison by a South African court on Monday after being found guilty of two counts of rape and a charge of sexual assault of minors, local media reported.

Pages

Friday, 29 May 2015

Wednesday, 27 May 2015

Nigeria President-elect, Muhammadu Buhari

In a makeshift hut sheltered from a stinging desert wind, Adama Issaika holds her infant daughter close. Three months ago, she stood helpless as gunmen from the Islamist group Boko Haram lined up her husband and relatives against a mosque and shot them dead.

Monday, 25 May 2015

Saturday, 23 May 2015

Wednesday, 20 May 2015

Monday, 18 May 2015