The alert by the United States that the Al-Qaeda insurgent group is penetrating the North-western part of Nigeria and the warning that the Igbos will join forces with the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra if the presidency does not go the South East zone in 2023 are some of the trending stories in Nigerian newspapers on Thursday.
The Vanguard reports that the U.S. has alerted the Nigerian government that the Al-Qaeda insurgent group was already penetrating the North-western part of Nigeria.
The report said that Dagvin Anderson, commander of the US special operations command, Africa, who disclosed this during a briefing, said the group was also expanding to other parts of West Africa.
In his remarks, which TheCable (local online publication) obtained from the US Department of State, Anderson said the US would continue to partner with Nigeria in sharing intelligence.
He said: “We have engaged with Nigeria and continue to engage with them in intel sharing and in understanding what these violent extremists are doing. And that has been absolutely critical to their engagements in Borno State and into an emerging area of Northwest Nigeria that we’re seeing al-Qaeda starting to make some inroads in.”
The newspaper says that a former national chairman of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Okwesilieze Nwodo, has declared that Ndigbo would join Nnamdi Kanu, the IPOB leader, to seek Biafra secession from Nigeria if South-East does not produce the president of the country in 2023.
Nwodo, who was also a former governor of Enugu State and national secretary of PDP, said that Ndigbo had suffered grievous marginalisation in Nigeria and should be given a chance to produce a president for the sake of equity and national unity.
He said this during an exclusive interview with Vanguard on Tuesday, adding that South-East geopolitical zone had been persecuted for over 50 years even though the region was more patriotic than any other geopolitical zone in terms of economic development of the nation.
He said “Yakassi’s call is very fair and that is the correct thing. In the first republic, the country was led by Tafawa Balewa, in the second republic, it was led by Shehu Shagari. And then, those of us in PDP made a very strong case to move the presidency to South East, because even the military people were all from the north, apart from Aguiyi Ironsi, who presided over for a very short time.
The Punch reports that in 13 months, Nigerians spent N2.37tn on petrol imported into the country by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, data released by the corporation have shown.
The corporation said on Wednesday that its total revenue generated from the sales of white products for the period May 2019 to May 2020 stood at N2.39tn.
It disclosed that petrol contributed about 98.84 per cent of the total sales with a value of N2.37tn. The corporation said it made N92.58bn through the sale of petrol in May 2020.
It said the revenue from petrol sale was generated through its subsidiary, the Petroleum Products Marketing Company, as the oil firm also announced a 43 percent decrease in oil pipeline vandalism in May.
The newspaper says that the Nigerian Communications Commission has revised the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data pricing to allow mobile network operators and financial institutions negotiate mutually beneficial rates.
The Executive Vice Chairman, NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, said the commission amended the determination earlier issued in July 2019 by removing the price floor and the cap.
According to him, each USSD session is 20 seconds and costs N1.63 per session on the MNO network. He said the cost should form the basis of negotiations between MNOs and other related service providers using USSD channels.
The amendment was carried out after a dispute between MNOs and financial institutions on the applicable charges for USSD services and the method of billing.
The Sun reports that the National Association of Aircraft Pilots and Engineers (NAAPE) has threatened to withdraw the services of pilots and aircraft maintenance engineers from all airlines if those recently sacked by Air Peace and Bristow Helicopters are not recalled.
At a news conference Wednesday in Lagos, the President of NAAPE, Mr. Abednego Galadima, said the recent sack of pilots and engineers by Air Peace and Bristow Helicopters, under the pretence of COVID-19 pandemic, is a ‘flagrant disregard of extant labour and trade union laws of the workplace.’
The NAAPE president stated that if the call is not heeded in two weeks, they would be left with no option than to withdraw the services of pilots and aircraft maintenance engineers across all airlines, adding that the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) should ground their operations as safety would no longer be guaranteed.
Galadinma said its members were made to sign new terms of conditions of employment under duress or be fired and their salaries cut without recourse to the statues governing industrial relations in the country.
The Guardian reports that total gross credit for various transactions in Nigeria rose by N3.33 trillion from N15.56 trillion at end-May 2019 to N18.90 trillion at end-June 2020.
These credits were largely recorded in manufacturing, consumer credit, general commerce, and information and communication and agriculture, which are productive sectors of the economy.
According to a Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) report, the rise in interest rate reflected the liquidity condition in the system, noting that the inflation rate of 12.26 percent for March 2020, resulted in negative real rates for deposits, but positive real rates for the prime and maximum lending rates.
Besides, bank customers paid between 15.01 percent and 30.70 percent for borrowed funds, but interest paid on their term deposits dropped by 1.46 percentage points to 6.27 percent, the CBN’s Economic Report for the first quarter (Q1) of 2020 showed.
GIK/APA