The appeal by Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to the international community to promote a platform for knowledge sharing in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in the subscriptions across all telecommunications networks are the leading stories in Nigerian newspapers on Thursday.
ThisDay newspaper reports that President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday appealed to the international community to promote a platform for knowledge sharing from the output of science and research to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his presentation during a virtual Extraordinary China-Africa Summit on Solidarity against COVID-19, Buhari said that Nigeria would support and be part of any joint and collective action plan at both the regional and global levels to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout.
The summit was co-hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, South African President and African Union (AU) Chairman, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Senegal President and co-chair of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), Macky Sall.
Buhari implored the summit to be united to contain the virus, which he said knew no borders.
The newspaper also said that subscriptions across all telecommunications networks have maintained a steady growth pattern in one year, reaching 190,806,067 in April.
According to the report, this represented a marginal increase by 0.80 percent or 1,523,271 as against the 189,282,796 recorded the previous year. The latest data, obtained from Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) website yesterday, shows that in the past one year, there has been a proportionate increase in the number of teledensity, which is measured by the number of active telephone connections per 100 inhabitants living within an area and is expressed as a percentage figure.
| The Punch says that the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee on Wednesday at its virtual meeting shared to the three tiers of government a total sum of N547.31bn as federation allocation for the month of May. FAAC’s virtual meeting was chaired by the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mahmoud Isa-Dutse, according to a statement issued by the ministry in Abuja on Wednesday night. The ministry stated that from this amount, inclusive of Value Added Tax, exchange gain and excess bank charges recovered, the Federal Government received N219.8bn; states, N152.44bn; Local Government councils N114.1bn. Oil producing states received N37.02bn as derivation (13 per cent of mineral revenue). The newspaper also reports that Nigerians and neighbouring countries that benefit from smuggling consume 54 million litres of petrol, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation has said. The Punch also reports that about 20 operators in the aviation sector, including the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, have submitted their operational restart plans to the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority as the country prepares to reopen its airspace to commercial flights beginning from June 21, 2020. The report quoted the latest report from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) as saying that inflation rose from 12.34 percent in April to 12.40 percent in May. From a month ago, the headline inflation increased by 15 basis points to 1.17%, the steepest since July 2017. The percentage change in the average composite Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 12 months period ending May 2020, over the average CPI in April year-on-year was 11.79 percent, showing 0.08 percent increase from 11.71 percent recorded a month earlier.
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