The passionate plea to President Muhammadu Buhari by Northern leaders to end the spate of insecurity ravaging the country dominates the headlines of Nigerian newspapers on Friday.
The Guardian reports that Northern leaders yesterday made a passionate plea to President Muhammadu Buhari to end the spate of insecurity ravaging the country.
Leading the charge, the Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, lamented that terrorists kill people on a daily basis in the northern part of the country, especially in the Northwest, and the killings are mostly not reported.
This is just as the Sultan called on Christians to disregard the recent threat by some persons who warned that those found attending churches in Zamfara State would be killed.
Speaking at the fourth quarter meeting of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) with the theme, ‘NIREC, Security Agencies and Peace in Nigeria’, the Sultan, who is also the Co-Chair of NIREC, said there is no single day that passes without people being killed in the North.
“If I continue talking about the insecurity in the North, we will not leave this room. A few days ago, we were witnesses to the media reports on how people were killed in a bus in Sokoto. There is no single day that passes without people being killed in the North, but we don’t hear it.
“I will not stop going to the mosque to pray because I saw in a paper that if I go to the mosque, I will be killed, let me be killed, I must die, so Christians should not be afraid of going to church to worship because an anonymous person is threatening them,” he said.
He said Nigeria has a series of challenges facing it, and if leaders don’t wake up and come together to understand the issues facing the country, the challenges will escalate.
The newspaper says that by exploring opportunities in the production of vaccines rather than being dependent on importation from developed countries, Nigeria stands a chance to improve its foreign exchange earnings from the continent, within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
This was the position of the President of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), Dr. Michael Olawale-Cole, while providing the chamber’s position on the management of the Omicron variant of Covid-19.
According to him, despite the positive growth recorded all through the three quarters of 2021, the recovery of the economy from the impact of Covid-19 in 2020 is still fragile.
Olawale-Cole warned that any imposition of lockdown as a measure to contain and manage the spread of the virus should be avoided at all cost, recommending that Nigeria needs a long-term containment strategy and public health action plan to manage epidemics and pandemics without having to lock down the economy.
According to him, Nigeria and other African countries are obviously lagging behind in terms of total vaccinations, even as he highlighted steps to strengthen Nigeria’s response to the Covid-19 virus.
The Punch reports that the Federal Government has said the Siemens AG power project which plans to grow Nigeria’s power delivery to 25,000 megawatts will be revived in the first quarter of 2021.
The Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, said on Thursday that the German firm, Siemens AG, would begin operations in Nigeria soon and that activities to get the project going would commence in earnest.
Under the Presidential Power Initiative, Siemens is supporting Nigeria to raise electricity capacity to 25,000MW. But the project has been dragging since an agreement between the German firm and the Federal Government was reached on August 31, 2018 in Abuja.
Nigeria and Germany had agreed to cooperate with the aim of resolving the challenges in the nation’s power sector and expanding capacity for future power needs. Aliyu told journalists at a workshop organised by Power Correspondent Association of Nigeria that efforts were ongoing to get the project up and running.
The newspaper says that Nigeria’s power sector decreased in growth by 45 per cent in real term in the third quarter of this year when compared to the preceding quarter, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed.
Also, industry figures obtained in Abuja on Thursday showed that after posting a peak generation of 5,008.9 megawatts on December 7, 2021, the figure dropped by 1,119.6MW to an off peak of 3,889.3MW on December 8, 2021.
A document on Power Sector Data Review, which was presented by the NBS at the 1st Abuja Electric Power Conference and Exhibition organised by the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry, also stated that the contribution of the sector to real Gross Domestic Product decreased in third quarter 2021.
This came as experts and operators at the conference called on the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission to efficiently and sustainably enforce the sector’s market rules to allow the business function as required.
The NBS power review report stated, “In real terms, the sector grew by 14.36 per cent in Q3 2021, an improvement from the growth rate of –3.66 per cent recorded in the same quarter of 2020.
The Sun reports that the Federal Government has said it will carefully scrutinise oil companies bidding for the takeover of assets that Shell and other oil majors will be divesting from in the country.
This was as Shell and ExxonMobil have indicated their interests to divest from onshore and shallow water assets in the country.
Speaking at separate business meetings with top managements of Chevron and Schlumberger at their headquarters, in Houston, Texas, United States (US), on Tuesday, Minister of State Petroleum Resources Chief Timipre Sylva, said the Federal Government will implement due diligence in the selection and eventual approval of any company that will take over the assets from which these companies intend to divestment.
He stated that the previous practice where by companies were allowed to purchase strategic assets without verifying their capacity to operate such assets would no longer be tolerated.
“In the past companies were just allowed to buy assets that they had no capacity to operate. We would no longer allow that to happen again because Government is the ultimate lover. If they are not able to operate such assets optimally government won’t be able to generate revenue from such assets.
The newspaper says that Inter-Agency Task Team (IATT), comprising anti-corruption agencies under the Presidency, has described the annual loss of $4.2 billion worth of crude oil, which is never accounted for, as a totally unacceptable hemorrhage that should be stopped in the interest of the country.
To this end, it has called for the enforcement of stricter anti-corruption measures in all agencies of the government to enthrone transparency and accountability.
Speaking at a high-level seminar to mark the International Anti-Corruption Day 2021 in Abuja on Thursday, the Executive Secretary of the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI) and a member of IATT, Dr Orji Ogbonnaya Orji, said it was his agency’s special report that revealed the annual $4.2 billion crude oil that is either lost or stolen every year.
According to him, these losses pose serious challenges to the government’s ability to deliver public goods and services to citizens. “Particularly, secret ownership or exploitation of mineral resources undermines national security and poses an existential threat to the country.
GIK/APA