Politics Fayose Empowers Ekiti Carpenters With N1.2billion Contract

Ekiti state governor, Ayo Fayose has
awarded a N1.2bn contract to the
Carpenters and Furniture Association in
the state; PUNCH reports.

Representing the Governor at the
signing of the Memorandum of
Understanding for the contract, Chief
Dipo Anisulowo, Chief of staff to the
Ekiti governor said, ''This is an
empowerment project. We are awarding
the furniture aspect of the Millennium
Development Goals project to these local
furniture makers. The project covers
about six local government areas in Ekiti
State, so they will make the chairs and
the tables for all the schools in the six
LGAs.

''The whole project would cost the
government about N1.2bn. This gesture
by the governor is the first of its kind in
Ekiti State. The governor did this to
make good his promise to empower local
contractors and artisans in the state.

''I hope you would not disappoint the
governor because he has reposed a lot of
confidence in you to have given you this
project. I pray you will reciprocate his
kind gesture by doing a very good job'',
Anisulowo said.

U.S., Iran Resume Nuclear Talks After Netanyahu Warnings

The top U.S. and Iranian diplomats have begun a third day of talks over Iran's nuclear program in the Swiss resort of Montreux.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign
Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif resumed their discussions on March 4, hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that a deal meant to rein in Tehran's nuclear program could "pave Iran's path to the bomb" rather than block it.

The United States and five other powers are seeking a deal with Iran under which Tehran would limit its nuclear program, which Western nations fear could lead to the development of nuclear weapons, in exchange for sanctions relief.

Reacting to Netanyahu's speech to the U.S. Congress,
President Barack Obama said Netanyahu had offered no viable alternative.

The negotiating sides have set an end-of-March deadline for a framework agreement and a June 30 deadline for a full deal.

Thirty Two Killed In Ukraine Mine Explosion

Thirty two people have been killed and 70 more are
trapped underground following an explosion at a coal mine in rebel held eastern Ukraine.

The blast took place at a mine in the Donetsk region of the country and emergency services have launched a rescue attempt to reach those trapped.

Miners arrive to help with the rescue effort "More than 30 people were killed. Rescue workers have not yet come to the place of the explosion, they are removing
the poisonous gas and then will go down," said Vladimir Tsymbalenko, head of the local mining safety service.

One of the men caught up in the blast and taken to
a Donetsk hospital said: "I was blown away by an
explosion. I came round. There was dust everywhere and people were moaning."

Families of those caught up in the disaster have been
gathering at the entrance to the mine in Zasyadko, Donetsk.

The mines in Donbass are among some of the most
dangerous in the world due to the high levels of methane produced which increase the risk of explosions.

Separatist authorities in Donetsk said the blast occurred at a depth of more than 1,000 metres (0.6 miles) and that 230 workers were in the mine at the time.

The statement added the explosion was caused by a
mixture of gas and air - a common cause of industrial
mining accidents.

Some 300 men die in mine accidents in the region every
year.

He kept that quiet! Chris Brown 'has nine month old daughter' with close friend

Chris Brown is reportedly a father.

TMZ reports that the 25-year-old singer has a nine-month- old daughter.

According to the website, the baby's mother is Nia, a 31- year-old former model who has known Chris for "several years".

While the pair are not together romantically, sources
close to both parties tell TMZ that they are "on very good terms" and Chris is "happy about being a father".

There is no word yet on the child's name or any custody arrangement the parents have in place.

However, TMZ reports that there doesn't appear to be any formalagreement where custody is concerned.

The website has revealed the first photo of the infant,
who certainly looks to have inherited her famous father's big brown eyes, similar nose and cheeky smile.

The star has been in a tumultuous on-off relationship
with 26-year-old model Karrueche Tran since 2011.

Following numerous run-ins with the law over the years, Chris was ordered to serve 131 days in jail for violating the terms of his parole on May 9 last year.

Due to overcrowding in the jail, he was given early
release on June 2, 2014, which means he may well have
missed the birth of his daughter.

Appeal Court Gives Jonathan Green Light, Rules He is Qualified to Seek Re-election

PDP congratulates president on verdict.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja Tuesday dismissed an appeal challenging the eligibility of the President Goodluck Jonathan to seek another term of four years in office, holding  that the president is eligible to re-contest in the March 28 residential election.

The court dismissed an appeal filed by Cyriacus Njoku
against a judgment of an Abuja High Court which had earlier dismissed the case.

A panel of five justices of the appellate court, headed by Justice Abubakar Yahaya, in a unanimous judgment, held that the appellant’s suit was speculative and imaginary.

In the lead judgment delivered by Justice Yahaya, the court held that Jonathan had only spent one term in office as the president going by the provision of the constitution.

The court noted that the appellant lacked the locus standi to challenge the president’s qualification to contest adding that where a party lacked locus, the court could not assume jurisdiction.

On that ground, the court upheld the decision of the lower court which dismissed Cyriacus’s suit for lack of locus standi.

“We agree with the lower court that the appellant has no locus to sue”, the court held.

On the cause of action, the court held that the case of the appellant was speculative and imaginary as none of the reliefs he sought accrued any benefit to him.

On the issue of taken oath of office and allegiance twice by Jonathan, the court pointed out that the constitution was the grundnorm.

It held that court of law was duty bound to consider the entire provision of the constitution.

Justice Abubakar said: “In this appeal, it is not controverted by the appellant that the first oath taken by the first defendant (Jonathan) was the oath he took as the vice- president and not as president.

“But he took the oath in May 2010 to complete unexpired tenure of late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua.

“Section 37(1)(b) disqualifies a person from contesting for president if he had been elected twice.

“Disqualification is through election and not oath taking.

Election is a process of choosing a person to occupy a
position by voting. When election is given its literal meaning, it connotes when a voting is employed to choose a person for political office.

“This did not take place when Jonathan stepped into the shoe of his principal who went to the great beyond.

To say these things were done is to import words not used by the constitution. Section 146(1) of the constitution cannot be deemed an election for a vice president to step into the office of a president.

“Election involves conducting primaries by party, nomination, election and announcement of results. All these processes were not done. If a vice-president succeeds a president that dies, that cannot be challenged. It is a mode of stepping into the vacant office provided for by the constitution.

“When a president dies, the vice-president automatically becomes president as provided for by Section 130 (1)(2) of the 1999 Constitution.”

In addition, the court also held that oath taken by Jonathan in May 2010 was a constitutional process.

He noted that going by Section 135 (2)(b) of the Contitution, the president took the
oath of office for the first time in May 2011, adding that the 2010 oath was to complete the unexpired term of Yara’Adua.

The court also noted that if Jonathan was disqualified as prayed by the appellant, the system of election would have then been altered.

“It was not election that produced the first respondent in May 2010, the oath he took then was not an oath of elected president as provided for by Section 180 of the constitution.

“The process which produced the first respondent in 2010 was not election but a constitutional process.

This was different to what happened in 2011.
“The process of election was followed in 2011. The oath of office taken in 2011 was the first oath taking by the first respondent as an elected president having fulfilled all the process, of election,” the court further held.

Meanwhile, the PDP has congratulated President Jonathan for his victory at the Court of Appeal.

PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, in a
statement yesterday said the court ruling represents a
positive step towards President Jonathan’s impending
overwhelming victory at the polls come March 28.

The party described the verdict as “victory for democracy and the rule of law especially in protecting the inalienable rights of eligible citizens to freely participate in the electoral process without any form of hindrance” adding that the development has helped to enrich the judiciary and further deepened the nation’s democratic evolution.

The PDP also applauded President Jonathan for always remaining focused and upholding democratic principles, which enable Nigerians to operate in an environment that allows for full expression of fundamental rights.

Commending the judiciary for its stabilising role in the polity, the PDP urged its members and supporters across the country to close ranks and stand on the platform of this judicial victory to intensify efforts for eventual electoral victory for the president and other candidates of the party in the general elections.

Don’t allow PDP buy you with dollars – Fashola warns Nigerians

Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fashola, has
advised Nigerians against voting for politicians
with no good track record.

The governor gave this charge yesterday, while
commissioning nine network of roads in Maidan-
Aina-Agiliti area of Mile 12, Kosofe Local
Government Area of the state.

Fashola told them not to be carried away by the
empty promises being made by the incumbent
federal government as it was yet to fulfill any in
the last four years.

He advised Nigerians not to be bought by dollars
and other incentives being shared by the Peoples
Democratic Party, PDP, as inducement in its
desperation to win elections in the state.

Fashola said, “”If you collect dollars, know that you
have collected your security, your roads and your
infrastructure. Tell them your dignity cannot be
bought by naira or dollars.”

Fashola also commissioned 18 Classroom Blocks at
Aiyedire Ajibola Senior High School, in Ketu area of
the state, saying the road project was an evidence
of his government’s slum regeneration and urban
renewal plan.

He said whoever had visited the area before the
construction would understand why the whole
residents had turned up to witness the
commissioning.

Buhari Is Not Just Fit To Govern Nigeria! – Danjuma Lamido

The argument on which General Buhari is
being promoted as the alternative choice is
not only wobbly but pitifully immature.

History matters. Records are not kept simply
to assist the weakness of memory, but to
operate as guides to the future. Of course,
we know that human beings change.

Public offence, crimes against humanity must
be answered in the public domain, not in
caucuses of bargaining. On General Buhari,
we have been offered no evidence of the
purest prospect of change. On the contrary,
all evident suggests that this is one
individual who remains convinced that this
is one ex-ruler that the nation cannot call to
order.

General Buhari was one of the Generals who
treated the Oputa Panel with palpable scorn.
Like Babangida and Abdusalami, he refused
to put in appearance even though complaints
that were tabled against him involved a
career of gross abuses of power and blatant
assault on the fundamental human rights of
the Nigerian citizenry. Prominent against
these charges was an act that amounted to
nothing less than judicial murder, the
execution of a citizen under a retroactive
Decree.

Who brought about Decree 20 that executed
three youths – Lawal Ojuolape (30), Bernard
Ogedengbe (29) and Bartholomew Owoh (26)?

To put it quite plainly, one of those three
Ogedengbe – was executed for a crime that
did not carry a capital forfeit at the time it
was committed.

This was an unconscionable crime, carried
out in defiance of the pleas and protests of
nearly every sector of the Nigerian and
international community religious, civil
rights, political, trade unions etc.

Gen. Buhari and partner-in-crime, Late
Tunde Idiagbon persisted in this heartless act
for one reason and one reason only: to place
Nigerians on notice that they were now under an iron, inflexible rule, under governance by fear.

The execution of those youthful innocent for
so he was, since the punishment did not
exist at the time of commission – was
nothing short of premeditated murder, for which the Gen. Buhari should normally stand trial upon their loss of immunity.

Are we truly expected to forget this violation
of our entitlement to security as provided
under existing laws? And even if our
sensibilities have become blunted by
succeeding seasons of cruelty and brutality, if
power itself had so coarsened the
sensibilities also of rulers and corrupted their
judgment, what should one rightly expect
after they have been rescued from the snare
of power. At the very least, a re-evaluation,
leading hopefully to remorse, and its
expression to a wronged society. At the very
least, such a re-evaluation should engender
reticence, silence. In the case of Buhari, it
was the opposite. Since leaving office he has
declared in the most categorical terms that he
had no regrets over this murder and would
do so again.

Human life is inviolate. The right to life is
the uniquely fundamental right on which all
other rights are based. The crime that Gen.
Buhari committed against the entire nation
went further however, inconceivable as it
might first appear.

That crime is one of the most profound
negations of civic being. Not content with
hammering down the freedom of expression
in general terms, Buhari specifically forbade
all public discussion of a return to civilian,
democratic rule. Let us constantly applaud
our media those battle scarred professionals
did not completely knuckle down.

They resorted to cartoons and oblique,
elliptical references to sustain the people’s
campaign for a time-table to democratic rule.
Overt agitation for a democratic time table
however remained rigorously suppressed
military dictatorship, and a specifically
incorporated in Buhari and Idiagbon was
here to stay. To deprive a people of volition
in their own political direction is to turn a
nation into a colony of slaves. Gen. Buhari
enslaved the nation. He gloated and gloried
in a master-slave relation to the millions of
its inhabitants. It is astonishing to find that
the same former slaves, now free of their
chains, should clamour to be ruled by one
who not only turned their nation into a slave
plantation, but forbade them any discussion
of their condition.

Tai Solarin who stood at street corners,
fearlessly distributing leaflets that took up
the gauntlet where the media had dropped it
was incarcerated by that regime and denied
even the medication for his asthmatic
condition. Tai did not ask to be sent for
treatment overseas; all he asked was his
traditional medicine that had proved so
effective after years of struggle with asthma!
Shehu Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria
had already run out of steam and was near
universally detested except of course by the
handful that still benefited from that regime
of profligacy and rabid fascism.

Responsibility for the national condition lay
squarely at the door of the ruling party,
obviously, but against whom was Buhari’s
coup staged? Judging by the conduct of that
regime, it was not against Shagari’s
government but against the opposition.

The head of government, on whom primary
responsibility lay, was Shehu Shagari. Yet
that individual was kept in cozy house
detention in Ikoyi while his powerless
deputy, Alex Ekwueme, was locked up in
Kirikiri prisons. Such was the Gen. Buhari
notion of equitable allotment of guilt and
responsibility.

Shall we revisit the tragicomic series of trials
that landed several politicians several
lifetimes in prison? You may recall the
judicial processes undergone by the
septuagenarian Chief Adekunle Ajasin. He
was arraigned and tried before Gen. Buhari’s
punitive tribunal but acquitted. Frustrated,
Buhari ordered his re-trial. Again, the
Tribunal could not find Chief Ajasin guilty of
a single crime, so once again he was
returned for trial, only to be acquitted of all
charges of corruption or abuse of office.

Was Chief Ajasin thereby released? No! He
was ordered detained indefinitely, simply for
the crime of winning an election.

The conduct of the Gen. Buhari regime after
his coup was not merely one of double,
triple, multiple standards but a cynical
travesty of justice. Audu Ogbeh, former PDP
Chairman was one of the few figures of
morality within the NPN. Just as he has done
in recent times with the PDP, he played the
role of an internal critic and reformer,
warning, dissenting, and setting an example
of probity within his ministry.

For that crime he spent months in unjust
incarceration; guilty by association? Well, if
that was the motivating yardstick of the
administration of the Gen. Buhari justice,
then it was most selectively applied.

The utmost severity of the Buhari-Idiagbon
justice was especially reserved either for the
opposition in general, or for those within the
ruling party who had showed the sheerest
sense of responsibility and patriotism.

Do we need to remind the Nation of Buhari’s
deliberate humiliating treatment of the Emir
of Kano and the Oni of Ife over their visit to
the state of Israel? I hold no brief for
traditional rulers and their relationship with
governments, but insist on regarding them as
entitled to all the rights, privileges and
responsibilities of any Nigerian citizen. This
royal duo went to Israel on their private
steam and private business.

Simply because the Gen. Buhari regime was
pursuing some antagonistic foreign policy
towards Israel, a policy of which these
traditional rulers were not a part, they were
subjected on their return to an unjust
treatment. Since when, may one ask, did a
free citizen of the Nigerian nation require
the permission of a Head of State to visit a
foreign nation that was willing to offer that
tourist a visa?

One is only too aware that some Nigerians
love to point to Buhari’s agenda of discipline
as the shining jewel in his scrap-iron crown.
To inculcate discipline however, one must
lead by example, obeying laws set down as
guides to public probity.

Example speaks louder than declarations, and
rulers cannot exempt themselves from the
disciplinary structures imposed on the overall
polity, especially on any issue that seeks to
establish a policy for public well-being.

On the theme of double, triple, multiple
standards in the enforcement of the law, and
indeed of the Decrees passed by the Gen.

Buhari regime at the time, let us recall the
notorious case of Triple Alhaji Alhaji Alhaji,
then Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of
Finance. Who was caught, literally, with his
pants down in distant Austria. That was not
the crime however, and private conduct
should always remain restricted to the
domain of private censure.

There was no Decree against civil servants
proving just as hormone driven as anyone
else, especially outside the nation’s borders.
However, there was a clear Decree against
the keeping of foreign accounts, and this was
what emerged from the Austrian escapade.

Alhaji Alhaji kept, not one, but several
undeclared foreign accounts, and he had no
business being in possession of the large
amount of foreign currency of which he was
robbed by his overnight companion. The
media screamed for an even application of
the law, but Gen. Buhari had turned
suddenly deaf.

By contrast, Fela Anikulapo languished in jail
for years, sentenced under that very
draconian decree. His crime was being in
possession of foreign exchange that he had
legitimately received for the immediate
upkeep of his band as they set off for an
international engagement. A vicious sentence
was slapped down on Fela by a judge who
later became so remorse stricken at least
after Gen. Buhari’s overthrow that he went
to the King of Afro-beat and apologized.

These were not exceptional but mere sample
cases from among hundreds of others,
victims of a Decree that was selectively
applied, a Decree that routinely penalized
innocents and ruined the careers and
businesses of many.

What precisely was Ebenezer Babatope’s
crime that he should have spent the entire
tenure of Gen. Buhari in detention? Nothing
beyond the fact that he once warned in the
media that Gen. Buhari was an ambitious
soldier who would bear watching through the
lenses of a coup-detat. Babatope’s father died
while he was in Gen. Buhari’s custody, the
dictator remained deaf to every plea that he
be at least released to attend his father’s
funeral, even under guard.

But then, speaking the truth was not what
Gen. Buhari, as a self-imposed leader, was
especially captivated of enquire of Tunde
Thompson and Nduka Irabor both of whom,
faithful to their journalistic calling,
published nothing but the truth, yet ended
up sentenced under Gen. Buhari’s Decree.