Sahara Reporters Latest News Today Wednesday 18th December 2019
Sahara Reporters Latest News Today and headlines on some of the happenings and news trend in the Country, today 18/12/19
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E2%80%99t-be-granted-bail-%E2%80%94efcc Reason Kalu Can’t Be Granted Bail —EFCC
Anti-graft agency, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, has explained why convicted former governor of Abia State, Orji Kalu, cannot be granted bail.
On Tuesday, Kalu’s counsel, Mr Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), had informed the court of a bail application he filed on behalf of the former governor seeking to be released on bail pending the outcome of his appeal against the judgment.
However, EFCC counsel, Mr RotimI Jacobs (SAN), opposed the bail application, according to the News Agency of Nigeria.
“Although bail is generally a right of an accused as guaranteed by the constitution, it is not a right available to a convict because the presumption of innocence had crystallised into guilt and conviction,” he said.
According to Jacobs, an application for bail pending appeal is sparingly granted.
He said that such a bail could be granted in a situation where the term of imprisonment would have elapsed before determination of the appeal.
He argued that that was not the situation with Kalu’s case.
On Kalu’s health condition, Jacobs said that there was no recent medical report to show his state of health, arguing that the medical report tendered in his case was done more than a year ago.
Jacobs added that the request by Kalu to be released on bail so as to seek traditional medicine was not tenable, as visitors were allowed into the custodial centre.
“He says he needs his herbalist to treat him but he has not said that his herbalist came to the prison and was not allowed to see him.
“In one breath, the applicant is saying that he wants to be released on health grounds while in another breath, he is saying that as a senator, he needs to be released on bail so as to carryout his official functions,” he said.
Citing the case of Federal Republic of Nigeria vs Joshua Dariye, he argued that the Nigerian criminal jurisprudence was robust enough to handle appeal and dispense with same within a reasonable time.
Besides, he argued that the medical facilities at the Ikoyi Custodial Centre were capable of handling Kalu’s medical condition.
The case was adjourned until December 23 for ruling on the bail application.
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Petrol, Diesel Cars Banned In London Street
Petrol and diesel vehicles will be banned from a street in central London in an innovative attempt to reduce pollution, local authorities said.
Officials said Beech Street, which runs underneath the Brutalist designed Barbican Estate, would become Britain’s first “24-7 zero emission street”.
During an 18-month trial starting next year, the area will be restricted to electric or hybrid vehicles, pedestrians and cyclists, the City of London Corporation announced on Monday.
However, access will be given for refuse collection and deliveries, for those using car parks off the street and emergency vehicles.
“Drastically reducing air pollution requires radical actions, and these plans will help us eliminate toxic air on our streets,” said Chairman of the corporation’s environment committee, Jeremy Simon.
Officials told AFP they expected a reduction of 90 to 95 per cent in traffic on Beech Street, and an improvement in air quality around the immediate area, which includes two schools.
“The scheme aims to bring nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels within air quality guidelines set out by the European Union and World Health Organisation,” a corporation statement said.
The trial is separate from the ultra-low emission zone introduced across the centre of London earlier this year, for which motorists in older, more polluting vehicles must pay a charge to enter.
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PDP Tackles Buhari, APC Over N37bn National Assembly Renovation Fund
The Peoples Democratic Party has condemned the N37bn earmarked for the renovation of the National Assembly.
The PDP described the amount as “an unpardonable rip-off plot and a last straw of the brazen corruption that pervades the President Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress administration.”
The party says it is indefensible for the Buhari Presidency to propose N37bn for renovation work on the National Assembly complex, which was built at a cost of N7bn.
PDP noted that the money was embedded in the budget of the Federal Capital Development Authority as approved by President Buhari.
In a statement by PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, the party posited that the figure was not only sacrilegious but also confirms that the APC-led administration was “overtly corrupt and only out to steal, drain and divert our national resources for selfish purposes of certain individuals in the present administration.”
It added, “The party insists that such corruption is unacceptable in a nation confronted by alarming economic downturn, extreme poverty, hunger, decayed infrastructure and security challenges.”
The PDP charged President Buhari to demonstrate the integrity of his approval by immediately publishing a detailed breakdown of the renovation project in line with his recent directives to ministries, departments and agencies of government.
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Court Sentences Air Peace Passenger For Smoking Onboard
A passenger with Air Peace whose name was not revealed by the airline has been sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for smoking onboard last Wednesday.
The airline in a statement said that the convicted passenger had committed the act on its Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, flight.
A statement by the spokesperson for the airline, Stanley Olisa, said that the court also gave the convict the option of N200,000 fine for the offence, which he said negated international convention.
The passenger was convicted on Tuesday, six days after he committed the offence by the Ogba Magistrate Court in Lagos.
According to Olisa, the passenger was discovered in the act by one if its crew members, Adewale Oyebade.
The airline lauded Oyebade for his safety consciousness, stressing that this exposed the passenger secretly carrying out the act.
He charged the flying public to make it an obligation to comply with all established flight safety standards, adding that such measures were meant for their well-being.
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Two Customs Officers Killed In Kogi State
The Nigeria Customs Service has confirmed the killing of two of its officials in Kogi State.
Comptroller of Customs in charge of Niger/Kogi Area Command, Abba Kassim, disclosed this while mourning the death of the officers.
He said that a team of patrol officers were attacked on Thursday resulting in the death of the two men.
The officers killed were identified as S. Ohiremen, Assistant Superintendent of Customs, and S.M. Omale, Assistant Superintendent of Customs.
He added that H.I. Oladapo, Deputy Superintendent of Customs, sustained gunshot injury during the attack.
“On Thursday, December 12, 2019, at 2200hrs, a team of patrol officers were attacked by armed bandits along Lokoja-Okene Road.
“The injured officer was quickly moved to Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja, for medical attention.
“We are pained by the sad development and share in the grief of losing fellow officers, colleagues, brothers, husbands, and fathers.
“We will continue to work with other sister agencies in identifying the armed bandits in connection to the attack on our officers. “Anyone found guilty will be made to face the full wrath of the law.”
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FIRS To Begin Clampdown On Tax Defaulters
The Federal Inland Revenue Service is set to begin enforcement on tax defaulters in Nigeria.
This was contained in a notification sent to tax payers warning them to clear their taxes or face sanction.
“The FIRS hereby informs all taxpayers (individuals, partnerships, enterprises, corporate organisations, ministries, departments and agencies) who are in default of payment of taxes arising from self-assessment, tax audit, tax investigation, transfer pricing audit, demand notices and any other liabilities, that the service will commence a nationwide tax enforcement exercise from December 18, 2019 with a view to prosecuting defaulters and recovering all outstanding tax liabilities.
“The taxes referred to are as follows: 1. Petroleum Profits Tax; 2. Companies Income Tax; 3. Value Added Tax; 4. Withholding Tax; 5. Tertiary Education Tax; 6. NITDA Levy; 7. Stamp Duty; 8. Capital Gains Tax,” the notice reads.
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Buhari: Military Tyrant Who Never Fought War By Bayo Oluwasanmi
Bayo Oluwasanmi
Bayo Oluwasanmi
Nigeria’s democratically elected president turned military tyrant, Muhammadu Buhari, from all indications has turned Nigeria into an evil empire.
Buhari has completely wiped out our democracy. All freedoms have been curtailed and contained. Judiciary and legislature have become annexes of the executive. Buhari has castrated and rendered impotent the two arms that could effectively check his authoritarianism. Insecurity, violence, killings, unrest, and all other evil reminders of a tyrannical regime are back with Buhari. Only Major General Dictator Buhari and the profiteers of miseries are too blind to see the looming anarchy.
The PUNCH in its reaction to the illegal continued detention of Omoyele Sowore and Olawale Bakare, wrote a scathing editorial condemning the brutalities of Buhari. Titled “Buhari’s lawlessness: Our stand,” PUNCH came out boldly and disrobed Buhari’s civilian presidential dress and replaced with military fatigue to match his tyrannical one-man rule dictatorship.
The paper said, “As a symbolic demonstration of our protest against autocracy and military-style repression, (all our print newspapers, the PUNCH, Saturday PUNCH, Sunday PUNCH, PUNCH Sports Extra, and digital platforms, most especially Punching.com) will henceforth prefix Buhari’s name with his rank as a military dictator in the 80s, Major General, and refer to his administration as a regime, until they purge themselves of their insufferable contempt for the rule of law.”
PUNCH is the only newspaper standing with the people. The rest have gone into hiding.
Because Major General Dictator Muhammadu Buhari never fought any war, he lacks the leadership traits common with successful military generals. Tactical leadership is the core of military generals such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Hannibal, and Saladin.
What makes a leader? Certain fundamental leadership traits are indispensable to fighting generals with responsibility to lead soldiers and civilians as the case may be. General Mark A. Milley, the 39th Chief of Staff of United States Army, said the trait of a good military leader are: “agility, adaptability, flexibility, mental and physical resilience, competence, and most importantly character.” Buhari has no agility, can’t adapt, not flexible, lacks mental and physical resilience, lacks competence, and zero character.
Because Major General Dictator Buhari lacks the traits of a successful military general, it’s impossible for him to transfer or apply tactical leadership to governance as a civilian president. Leadership is about doing the right things big or small. It’s about treating people with dignity and respect, earning and building the trust of people, setting the highest moral and professional standards, and holding oneself and everyone in the organisation or government accountable, communicating openly, transparently, and continually. Buhari is tragically deficient in all areas.
Buhari has failed to provide institutional leadership for the country. He does not see himself as supervisory manager responsible for the smooth running of the country. He is the wrong leader for the tough times. Because Major General Dictator Buhari is not a tactician, he can never offer the required level of insight and wisdom into governance. He is a dramatic failure in intelligence, reasoning, persuasion, deliberation, and reflection.
Buhari’s ineptitude as president defies logic. All his life, he has proven to be a self-aggrandising opportunist, who wreaks havoc in any decision that he makes. At every giving opportunity, he never missed the opportunity making himself a laughing stock. He has acquired a reputation as a president who is wholly indifferent in the choice between truth and falsehood.
Sowore, Bakare, and scores of others who were detained illegally by Buhari are victims of his unrestrained tyrannical rage. In a country where lions are led by donkeys, Buhari remains undisturbed, untouched, and unchallenged. For how long will Nigerians tolerate and him?
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Bayo Oluwasanmi
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End Of Discussion: Deathly Ban On Free Expression And Rise Of Fascism By Chido Onumah
At a time Nigeria requires a robust conversation about its politics, economy, ethnic relations, unity, and indeed, future, the country’s over-indulged lawmakers, egged on by a president who is anything but a democrat, are placing a deathly ban on free speech. This proposed ban must be opposed and defeated by any means necessary!
Two dangerous bills are currently in the National Assembly seeking not only to establish an “Independent National Commission for the prohibition of hate speeches” but to curtail free expression and take state repression of alternative voices to a whole new level by making the right to hold contrary views a capital offence. Social media and the civic space are the new arenas in Gen. Buhari’s renewed war against Nigerians; a war that goes back to 1984. And he isn’t alone. That other interloper, our First Lady, has already warned that, “If China can control 1.8 billion people on social media, I see no reason why Nigeria should not attempt controlling only 180million people.”
There are enough reasons to oppose these bills. One, they are a throwback to the dark years of repression that saw the humiliation, harassment disappearance and assassination of journalists and social activists; two, the bills are being proposed in the regime of a military dictator-turned politician—a self-professed born again democrat—whose antecedent does not speak of one in tune with the tenets of an open society; three, the proposed laws do not take into account the country’s current realities; realities that include a bulging youth population weaned on a regular diet of technology and free flow of information; four, and importantly, these bills bear the tell-tale signs of the precursor of a political agenda that typified the second term of the regime of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo.
For these reasons and more, those who cherish freedom and are concerned about the prospect of Nigeria sliding into one-man rule or the rule of a triumvirate, must band together and say unequivocally that we shall never travel this road again. Our country has a long history of murderous attacks on the media, civic space and freedom of expression. And unless we halt the current slide, this history will repeat itself with very tragic consequences.
Last week, the PUNCH Newspaper, in a well-crafted editorial highlighting the creeping fascism in the country noted, “As a symbolic demonstration of our protest against autocracy and military-style repression, Punch will henceforth prefix Buhari’s name with his rank as a military dictator in the 80s, Major General, and refer to his administration as a regime, until they purge themselves of their insufferable contempt for the rule of law.”
Mr. Buhari and his handlers did not disappoint. They responded the way a regime and its courtiers who are out of touch with reality would respond. For them, Buhari “earned” the rank and, therefore, should not be concerned that he is being referred to as a general. By that logic, it seems they are tacitly agreeing that Gen. Buhari has not earned the title of president, much less a democrat, if they are not concerned that he is being addressed as a general in a democratic dispensation. For a man who ran for president on four occasions, shed tears when he lost and publicly confessed that he is a born-again democrat, that must sting even if he and his adulators pretend they are unperturbed.
Of course, Gen. Buhari has not hidden his disdain for the rule of law. Several actions of his regime foreshadowed the decision of the Punch newspaper, but none was more egregious than the events of Friday, December 6, where agents of the State Security Service invaded the Federal High Court in Abuja to abduct Omoyele Sowore and Olawale Bakare, two activists who had been granted bail—after more than 120 days in illegal detention on allegation of announcing a revolution on TV—and had subjected themselves to trial.
In August 2018, Gen. Buhari gave a foretaste of what Nigerians should expect when he appeared at the Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and averred that, “Rule of Law must be subject to the supremacy of the nation’s security and national interest.” Under the regime of Gen. Buhari, the rule of law and due process—the legal requirement that the state must respect all legal rights that are owed to a person—the pillars of democracy, have come under severe attack.
Individual, media and civic freedom has been subordinated to the power and authority of Gen. Buhari and his security agencies. There is a name for this: fascism! Under the current regime, we have seen the invasion of the National Assembly by the SSS. We have witnessed flagrant abuse of due process, the desecration of our courts and the strangulation of the judiciary by the same SSS. Now, they have descended on the last bastion of our democracy: the media and civil society.
As pro-democracy and civil society organizations, journalists, civic activists, etc., gather in Lagos on Tuesday, December 17, for this year’s pro-democracy conference, they need to pay close attention to the theme of the conference, “reviving popular action for democracy and freedom in Nigeria.” Nigeria returned to “democracy” in 1999. Twenty years after, the country is still fighting for its rulers to keep faith with the fundamental tenets of democratic governance. Every day, reactionary forces continue to undermine our hard-won victories; they constantly chip away at the prospect of an egalitarian society; they scorn the need for a robust media and civic space and social progress.
What this tells us is that as citizens, we must, as the late great pan-Africanist, Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, admonished, “organise rather than agonize.” We have travelled this road before and no matter how hard they try, this is one battle Gen. Buhari and those who seek to steal our freedoms can’t win.
We stand in solidarity with all prisoners of conscience in Nigeria: Omoyele Sowore, Olawale Bakare, Agba Jalingo and other journalists and civic activists in prisons across the country and call for their immediate and unconditional release. That is the only way to restore the democratic credentials of the Buhari regime.
Onumah is author of We Are All Biafrans: A Participant-Observer’s Interventions in a Country Sleepwalking to Disaster
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Chido Onumah
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BREAKING: Buhari Signs 2020 Budget Into Law
President Muhammadu Buhari has signed the 2020 budget into law.
The President signed the bill at his office in the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Tuesday to return Nigeria to January-December budget circle.
The National Assembly had transmitted the budget to the President on December 13 with the Presidency saying Buhari and the Federal Executive Council would scrutinise the 2020 Appropriation Bill passed by both chambers of the National Assembly on Thursday.
The Senate and the House of Representatives had on December 5, 2019 concurrently passed the 2020 Appropriation Bill, raising the total estimates from the proposed N10.33trn to N10.6trn.
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E2%80%93buhari Democratic Process Too Slow For My Liking –Buhari
President Muhammadu Buhari has said that Nigeria’s democratic process was too slow for his liking.
Buhari made the comment in a brief interview on the state-run Nigerian Television Authority on Tuesday to commemorate his 77th birthday.
He said, “When I came in uniform, I collected those who were leading, took them to Kirikiri (Maximum Security Prison) and told them they were guilty until they could prove themselves innocent.
“I put based on almost all the geopolitical zones committees to investigate them. Those that were found to have lived beyond their means, the balance was taken and were given to the states.
“But I myself was arrested, detained and they were given back what they have stolen.
“So under this system which is supposed to be more accountable, it is too slow for my liking but I have to follow it.”
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