Akpabio, who thanked the President for reaffirming his commitment to making education key in his development agenda for the youth, through the establishment of technology based tertiary education, also pledged the continuous peace and support of the region to his administration.

Contained in a statement by his Chief Press Secretary, Mr Jackson Udom, on Tuesday, the former Senate Minority Leader said,” let me, onbehalf of the people of the South South region, thank President Buhari, for approving the establishment of the University of Science and Technology in the region and to be sited in Akwa Ibom State”.

Akpabio further noted, ” the two new universities of Science and Technology have been established to compliment others already sited in other parts of the country, adding, let me also assure our President of the continuous peace and support of the region  for the success of his administration”.

The post Akwa Ibom : Akpabio lauds Buhari for approving University of Science & Technology first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

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Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, has maintained that the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) cannot issue a sit-at-home order to the people of Rivers State.

Governor Wike stated this on Monday while featuring on Channels Television’s Politics Today.

The governor noted that Rivers is a South-South state and not one of the South-Eastern states.

IPOB had through its spokesperson, Emma Powerful said human and vehicular movements would be restricted across the South-East on Monday to mark the 54th anniversary of Biafra.

In compliance with this, economic and commercial activities came to a standstill in the South-East region of the country.

However, Governor Wike faulted the directive, noting that he is not against the activities of the outlawed group in the eastern part of the country.

In his words, “IPOB cannot make an order to say sit at home in Rivers State. I have said so clearly before because it does not exist in Rivers State.

“Rivers State is not part of South-East. Rivers State is South-South, we are in the Niger Delta. I am not saying whether the people in the South-East should not obey what IPOB has said or not. But they cannot give order to Rivers people to sit at home.”

Streets in Owerri, Imo State capital were empty. Businesses, schools, and other major economic hubs were shut. Vehicular movements were also grounded.

However, there is a heavy presence of security operatives in strategic places in the city to forestall any breakdown of law and order.

Also, in Abia State, streets were deserted and shops are under lock and key while in Anambra State, the situation is the same. Economic and social activities have been halted and there is a heavy security presence in major locations of the state to maintain law and order.

The situation is not too different in Ebonyi State as few vehicles were seen on the highway. The inner streets were deserted with security men positioned at different locations.

The state governor David Umahi had earlier instructed that no resident will be penalised if he or she chooses to stay at home.

Many businesses in Delta State capital, Asaba were also shut as residents comply with the sit-at-home order. Banks and major shopping malls were closed.

At the popular wood market along the Asaba-Onitsha expressway, most shops were closed with a few traders around.

The post ‘Rivers is a South-South state, IPOB cannot give sit-at-home order’ – Wike first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post ‘Rivers is a South-South state, IPOB cannot give sit-at-home order’ – Wike appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

The first is that, President Muhammadu Buhari may be the last Nigerian president. We will get so riled as a people by this daily bloodshed inflicted on us by an evading army of bloodthirsty Fulani nomads, sauced by Buhari’s obvious unpretentious Fulani leader leadership of Nigeria, that the hurt regions will demand, with a baffling stubbornness, their right to go their different ways. This equation is still mutating in the womb of time. Second, and the most apparent, which is also related to the former, is that Buhari is certainly unfolding as an un-Nigerian Nigerian president. We do not need a diviner to look into the Ouija-board for us to know the apparentness of these obvious permutations. I will explain presently.

Mrs. Funke Olakunrin was said to have been killed by yet unidentified but suspected Fulani herdsmen along the Ondo-Ore road. The killers, according to a modus operandi that is a profile of their brutality in the South West of Nigeria, were said to have suddenly emerged from their bush domicile, taken over the highway and began sporadic and indiscriminate shooting at oncoming vehicles. In the process, Mrs. Olakunrin was hit.

As I write this, the omnibus reactions from Buhari’s regimented information machinery is yet to be unleashed on the information highway. They will, assuredly. Buhari will express his regrets at this nefarious activity – a la his information night soil men; he will talk tough; he may even order the Inspector General of Police to vacate his “slimming, hard-working session” (excuse me while I laugh!) to make Ondo State his temporary office. His Man Friday, Yemi Osinbajo, may even be hurriedly suborned to visit Pa Fasoranti to advertise a governmental contrite face, talk tough in the process and get photo-ops suggestive of government’s decision to rout the banditry. Mark my words: You will never hear Buhari, the Nigerian President, personally verbalizing these alleged regrets.

Second, there will never be, as there has never been, any arrest to be made. Third, the Buhari online cyber leopards will be unleashed on the stratosphere to bay our blood. They will straddle the information highway with justifications, rationalizations and permutations to explain off this unfortunate killing. Their recruits, many of whom hail from Fasoranti’s ethnic stock, will tell us how even in America, such killings are no big deal. Anyone like us who volunteers an opinion contrary to legitimizing Buhari’s Fulani ascendancy, they will argue with certainty of algebra, yesterday held a meeting with Atiku Abubakar, bribed with huge sacks of dollars to say what they are saying. All Progressives Congress (APC) governors in the South West will convoke on Fasoranti’s house like mourning Salamanders to shed crocodile tears; they may even call an emergency meeting “to address the menacing insecurity” in the region. They are all a familiar route of the tragedy of the dead burying their dead that has become our lot as Nigerians under Buhari.

The killers of Nigerians, said to be Fulani by their victims, have literally strewn themselves round many parts of the country. Why South West is the core place of harbor they chose to moor their deadly ship is yet inexplicable. Hardly does a week pass without this apparent alien force, deadly and without any iota of humanity, unleashing weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth on their victims. It will appear that their banditry and blood-thirstiness are gaining notoriety by the day, encouraged by a government that is ostensibly not bothered by the incessant blood spillage and is thus flinging its hands up in surrender.

Things have gone really very bad in Nigeria under Buhari. The most bothersome is that neither he nor any member of his government is bothered about the calamity that this portends. The division and ethnic fissures in the country have become hugely pronounced in the last four years. Issues that separate us are the most dominant of the things that link us together today.  There has never been a moment – perhaps, except during the civil war – when divisions of ethnicity, religion and political party affiliations have been this pronounced. Buhari is apparently not bothered. In his silence, his pronouncements, body language, appointments and other indices of governance, he does not pretend that he is not an Un-Nigerian Nigerian President. He is Fulani, Hausa and then probably Nigerian, in that order. The last, for him, is secondary.

Those who can lend their voice on the side of right and righteousness have shut their mouths, lest they be tar-brushed with ink of tribe or party. You must be a PDP lickspittle to ask Buhari to respect the contours of our nationhood pretentions. Those of us who volunteer opinion, do so at the huge risk of being demonized. Yet, it will be criminal conspiracy to allow this sorry pass under the Buhari government become a model without a voice of dissent.

The way things are playing out in Nigeria, Buhari’s silence on killings in the country, which are becoming really alarming, will continue, probably till 2023. I remember Ilorin, Kwara State-born Ddadakwada music exponent, Late Odolaye Aremu, warning us that with the rain that is yet to subside, no one can claim to be immune from the drench of its merciless downpour. So those who are abetting Buhari in this drive should continue in their follies. I have, countless times, psycho-analyzed Buhari as seeing himself as a Fulani President and not what we thought he should be – the Nigerian President. To reinforce this psychosis, he looks away from the bad of his ethnicity and shovels goods in its way. The RUGA policy is an attempt to do the latter and the killings by herdsmen example the former. In the last 20 years of Nigeria’s democratic experiment, the closest to Buhari as an un-Nigerian Nigerian president is Goodluck Jonathan. But even Jonathan is far way out of the class of Buhari in ethnic irredentism. It took Olusegun Obasanjo a straight ethnic jab out of power to realize what Obafemi Awolowo saw decades ago about him merely queuing up at the bus-stop of people whose orientation is basically provincial. If Obasanjo is accosted in the private today, he will express his regrets.

Umaru Yar’Adua was very nationalistic in his thought process. You will recall that he was the one who began granting Niger Delta militants amnesty. The major blight on Jonathan’s national apparel was when he denied that his kinsmen, the MEND militants were blowing up installations. He also ensconced his government with his native South-South people. It also manifested when this same Niger Delta ascendancy aspiration and Northern Nigeria machination theory of his blinded him from believing security reports on the kidnap of over 200 girls from their dormitory. Jonathan’s variant of Buhari’s irredentism was reinforced further by his wife’s brusque and infelicitous we no dey born pikin trowey thesis.

In the case of Buhari, the rest of Nigeria, except his Fulani/North, were like the farmer who cultivated a groundnut plantation beside a squirrel-infested forest who, after the squirrels mowed down his plantation, now laments his loss. We should have known from the outset that he was irredentist in cognition. We were blindfolded by the quantum of hate provoked against Jonathan by leg-men of Buhari’s party. When Buhari harangued Jonathan for attacking our Boko Haram, upbraided late Oyo State governor, Lam Adesina for “your people attacking my people” on this selfsame Fulani attacks in the North of Oyo State, Buhari was acting the unshakeable script of a permanent mind construct. No matter how many people are killed by these thirsty hound kinsmen of his, the C-in-C will not budge.

What that tells me is that, if and when Buhari eventually leaves office in 2023, whoever takes over from him cannot act out the script of a Nigerian Presidency any longer. If he is Igbo, his people will prevail on him to remember that their own time too had come; if he is Yoruba, his people will tell him to learn from the pitfalls of Obasanjo who believed, to his eternal regret, that he represented a non-existent nation called Nigeria.

I extend my condolences to Pa Fasoranti on this huge loss. The inexplicable way of providence manifested in this avoidable murder. How good would it have been if the child of the person murdered was that of those who tell us daily that there is no Fulani onslaught in the South West or even in Nigeria; that kidnappings and killings by nefarious Fulani herdsmen – of course with the connivance of accursed Yoruba accomplices – are only the rheum off the nostrils of those overblowing it for political advantage?

The post Fasoranti and rise of Nigeria’s un-Nigerian President | By Festus Adedayo first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Fasoranti and rise of Nigeria’s un-Nigerian President | By Festus Adedayo appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

The victims, as reliably learnt were said to be on their way back from an official engagement in Bayelsa State when the assailants opened fire on their convoy, forcing them to stop along Rumuji axis in Rivers.

Thus, in  the process, the driver of the escort vehicle was reportedly killed while the victims were dragged out of the car and taken to an unknown destination.

Confirming this incident on Saturday, the Police Public Relations Officer in Rivers, Nnamdi Omoni, informed that the Commissioner of Police in the state had mandated a tactical team of joint security agents to comb all the adjourning bushes in search of the kidnapped victims.

Omoni hinted further that the team which was directed to stop at nothing to nab the kidnappers stumbled on two other persons earlier kidnapped and kept in the area.

He, also  added that the operatives killed one of the kidnappers during the operation.

The command’s mouthpiece stressed that the police were in pursuit of the hoodlums to rescue the kidnapped oil workers.

The post Two oil workers kidnapped in Rivers first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Two oil workers kidnapped in Rivers appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.

The decision followed a complaint by some lawmakers that the nominees were not spread across the six geopolitical zones, a situation they described as a violation of the Federal Character Principle.

Lawmakers from the South-South and South East were particularly upset that no nominee for the EFCC is from the region.

The argument for and against the confirmation of the nominees aggravated to a rowdy session forcing the Senate to go into an emergency closed-door meeting.

Reacting, the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, however announced that the confirmation of the nominees for both agencies be stepped down till further notice.

The post Real Reason Why Senate Suspends Confirmation Of EFCC, ICPC Nominees first appeared on MegaIcon Magazine.

The post Real Reason Why Senate Suspends Confirmation Of EFCC, ICPC Nominees appeared first on MegaIcon Magazine.