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Monday, 23 January 2017
$11m Missing From The Gambia's State Coffers After Jammeh Exile
Friday, 20 January 2017
Jammeh Offered Final Chance For Peaceful Exit
NEWSTHE GAMBIA
Leader of 22 years requests four-hour extension of deadline given by West African bloc to cede ahead of intervention.
West African leaders gave Yahya Jammeh, who lost elections last month, until midday on Friday to hand over power and agree to leave The Gambia or face military action carried out by the regional bloc ECOWAS.
Later however, Jammeh requested a four-extension until 4pm local time to cede, government sources said, according to the Reuters news agency.
It was not clear what he planned to do, though diplomats said his departure looked increasingly possible.
The leaders of Guinea and Mauritania headed for The Gambia on Friday for talks with Jammeh.
West African troops entered the country to bolster new President Adama Barrow - who was sworn-in on Thursday - but military operations were suspended a few hours later in favour of a final diplomatic push to convince Jammeh, who has stubbornly refused to quit, to exit peacefully.
In his first media interview with Al Jazeera, Barrow urges Jammeh to leave the country and hopes that the 15 ECOWAS countries can find him a safe haven.
"We cannot allow Yahya Jammeh to remain in the Gambia, it will make our job difficult. That's why all our negotiations is he leave Gambia, he can later come back. But as of now the political climate doesn't allow that."
"I advise him in good faith to give peace a chance. It is about democracy."
Gambia's only land border is with Senegal and the regional coalition, which ECOWAS says involves 7,000 troops, has entered from the southeast, southwest and north.
Jammeh started negotiations with ECOWAS on Thursday and agreed to step down. He demanded, however, an amnesty for any crimes that he may have committed during his 22 years in power and that he be permitted to stay in The Gambia, at his home village of Kanilai.
Those demands are not acceptable to ECOWAS, said Marcel Alain de Souza, head ECOWAS. Jammeh's continued presence in The Gambia would "create disturbances to public order and terrorist movements"," he said.
Support for the long-ruling leader has been crumbling. The army chief joined ordinary citizens celebrating in the streets on Thursday seven weeks after contested polls.
"Diplomacy is a long road - it always has been and always will be - so every opportunity to find a resolution is the best means possible for the region," Robin Sanders, a former US ambassador to ECOWAS, told Al Jazeera.
"The last thing that West Africa needs is another conflict."
While there has been talk that a deal may include an amnesty for Jammeh, whose regime has been accused of various human rights abuses, Sanders said that this would set a bad precedent.
"Also in this case, I am not in the camp of complete amnesty because what you do is signal additional impunity going forward with other leaders, not only just in the continent but across the world," she said.
Barrow was sworn in at The Gambia's embassy in Dakar, in neighbouring Senegal, on Thursday.
Celebrations erupted in Banjul, meanwhile, where tensions have run high over the crisis, especially since the declaration of a state of emergency by Jammeh made on Tuesday.
Barrow, a real-estate agent turned politician, had flown into Senegal on January 15 to seek shelter after weeks of rising tension over Jammeh's stance.
At least 46,000 people have fled The Gambia for Senegal since the start of the crisis fearing unrest, the UN's refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday, citing Senegalese government figures.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
Military The Gambia Politics AfricaMore Than 45,000 Have Fled The Gambia This Month: UN
Geneva (AFP) - More than 45,000 people have fled a political crisis in The Gambia this month, the United Nations said Friday, as veteran leader Yahya Jammeh faced a midday deadline to leave office.
"Around 45,000 people are now reported to have arrived in Senegal from The Gambia... amid the ongoing political uncertainty as Senegalese and West African troops entered the country on Thursday," the UN refugee agency said in Geneva.
"It is feared that more people may continue to flee as the situation remains tense," UNHCR said, adding that another "800 people have crossed into Guinea-Bissau."
The UN agency noted that arrivals in Senegal have included "Gambians, Senegalese, bi-nationals, as well as Ghanaians, Liberians, Lebanese, Guineans, and Mauritanians among other foreigners."
Jammeh, who has been in power more than 20 years, lost elections last month to Adama Barrow but has refused to stand down.
Soldiers from Senegal and four other west African countries have crossed into The Gambia to bolster Barrow, who has been sworn in at the country's embassy in Dakar.
West African leaders have said regional forces would intervene with force if Jammeh refused to stand down.
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Thursday, 22 December 2016
'Plastic Rice' Seized In Lagos, Nigeria
Nigeria has confiscated 2.5 tonnes of "plastic rice" smuggled into the country by unscrupulous businessmen, the customs service says.
Lagos customs chief Haruna Mamudu said the fake rice was intended to be sold in markets during the festive season.
He said the rice was very sticky after it was boiled and "only God knows what would have happened" if people ate it.
It is not clear where the seized sacks came from but rice made from plastic pellets was found in China last year.
Rice is the most popular staple food in Nigeria.
Whoever made this fake rice did an exceptionally good job - on first impression it would have fooled me. When I ran the grains through my fingers nothing felt out of the ordinary.
But when I smelt a handful of the "rice" there was a faint chemical odour. Customs officials say when they cooked up the rice it was too sticky - and it was then abundantly clear this was no ordinary batch.
They've sent a sample to the laboratories to determine exactly what the "rice" is made of.
They are also warning the public not to consume the mystery foodstuff as it could be dangerous.
Fake food scandals are thankfully rare in Nigeria when you compare it to countries such as China.
The big scandal here is fake pharmaceutical drugs that kill a huge number of people every year.
A total of 102 sacks, each containing 25kg (55lb), was seized.
Investigations are under way to establish how much of the contraband has already been sold.
The customs official called on "economic saboteurs who see yuletide season as a peak period for their nefarious acts to desist from such illegal" business activity.
Mr Mamudu did not explain how the plastic rice was made but said it had been branded as "Best Tomato Rice.
Now it's very obvious that this so-called rice might even be in the Nigeria market now.
What baffles me the most is, what could possibly be the profit made from selling unwholesome goods to the general public and even the merchant's relations, jeopardizing the health of a whole nation.
This should be seen as an act of terrorism and be treated as such.
This issue have been viral on the social media for some time now but the federal government through it's agent turned down the claims, now it's very evident.
HOW TO IDENTIFY 'PLASTIC RICE'
• It floats on water:
Be observant, once you see majority of your rice grains floating in water maybe when you want to wash/parboil, please do not continue with the cooking.
• It gives off plastic/rubber smell when being burnt.
Always test you rice before cooking. Get a portion of it and burn, if it smells plastic like do not go further with the cooking.
• after boiling, the rice sticks together more than the usual one, so when you boil it and discover that the rice is very sticky/gums together more than the way it's supposed to be, please do not eat it.
There are other ways of identifying this so-called rice but I'll stop here. Please be observant this Christmas period, be mindful what you eat, drink, and put on...try and kill the rush hour syndrome of this period and protect your health and the health of the whole nation.
Thanks for reading...much love from Jeff 😘😘😘
Sunday, 4 December 2016
Trump Appoints A Nigerian As Part Of His Economic Team
The members of the forum are:
Stephen Schwarzman (forum chairman), chairman, CEO, and cofounder of Blackstone Paul Atkins, CEO of Patomak Global Partners, former commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission
Mary Barra, chairwoman and CEO, General Motors
Toby Cosgrove, CEO, Cleveland Clinic
Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Larry Fink, chairman and CEO, BlackRock
Bob Iger, chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company
Rich Lesser, president and CEO, Boston Consulting Group
Doug McMillon, president and CEO, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Jim McNerney, former chairman, president, and CEO of Boeing
Adebayo “Bayo” Ogunlesi, chairman and managing partner, Global Infrastructure Partners
Ginni Rometty, chairwoman, president, and CEO of IBM
Kevin Warsh, Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow in economics at the Hoover Institute, former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Mark Weinberger, global chairman and CEO, EY
Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO, General Electric
Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize winner, vice chairman of IHS Markit
For Ogunlesi, the Trump advisory appointment may be a distraction as he has his hands full. Ogunlesi on 15 October was named as an independent director of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. Apart from being managing partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, he also serves on the boards of Callaway Golf Co. and Kosmos Energy Ltd. At the same time he’s the chairman of Africa Finance Corp. and serves on the boards of various not-for-profits ranging from New York Presbyterian Hospital to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Ogunlesi, whose father came from Makun, Sagamu in Ogun state was born in 1953. His father, Theophilus Ogunlesi was Nigeria’s first professor of medicine. After attending Kings College, Lagos for his secondary education , he received his B.A. with first class honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, from Oxford University. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979 and later got an MBA from Harvard Business School. Ogunlesi had a banking career with Credit Suisse First Boston from 1983 and rose to become its executive vice chairman. Before joining Credit Suisse, Ogunlesi was an attorney in the corporate practice group of the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. From 1980-81 he served as a law clerk to Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He was a lecturer at Harvard Law School and the Yale School of Organization and Management, where he taught a course on transnational investment projects in emerging countries, according to Wikipedia He is married to an optometrist, Dr. Amelia Quist-Ogunlesi. His company Global Infrastructure Partners manages Gatwick Airport in the UK.
Sunday, 27 November 2016
How They Deceived Us
The lie was told so subtly that we didn’t notice.
To gain popularity, they convinced us that it was all about gender equality🤔. Then they preached to us, saying it was a human rights and child rights agenda.
To draw the attention of women, they hid under Women Empowerment Campaigns.
We saw everything they did as part of civilization, because of this, we applauded them and blindly sang their praises.
We were so blind that we did not notice when they went from equality to role reversal, and from ‘rights’ to ‘wrongs’. They told us it was all a matter of understanding. I mean, if she earns more than he does, why can’t she be the head while he submits?
They told us we had the right to our bodies. They told us that if the guys can do ‘it’ anytime with anybody, so can the girls🙂. They introduced free love, and ‘friends with benefits’, and convinced us that we were just exercising our rights to enjoy our bodies.🤔 We agreed. Which youth wouldn’t?
When we complained about STDs, they introduced condoms, and even started sharing it to us free of charge in our secondary schools.
They told us that from the age of 16, we had the right to do whatever we wanted to. This made us to start seeing our parents and school teachers as toothless bulldogs as they no longer had the right to discipline us.
Talk of sweet freedom!
When we complained about teenage pregnancies, they told our parents to educate us about contraceptives as early as possible. Then they introduced the reformed sex education in our school as a guise to give us more condoms.
Some of us still got pregnant, and we complained yet again. So they decided to legalize abortions, this was in a bid to help us. You see, they really cared about our future, and wanted to ensure that we live a free life.
Abortion made sense to us so we accepted it. I mean, why bring a child you don’t want or can’t take care of into the world? We felt a bit guilty because it seemed like murder. But they told us not to worry. According to them, what we were doing was merely taking out an unwanted foetus, and not killing a child. Yet again, we accepted it, and got pacified.
They said that we weren’t supposed to be accountable to any deity, religion, our parents or the society. Next, they told us we had the freedom to do what we wanted with our lives, so far as we weren’t hurting other people or trampling on their rights.
Almost immediately, we stopped regarding God.
We rather chose to play football, hang out, or watch seasonal movies on Weekends.
We also decided to experiment with homosexuality, it seemed like fun, and they encouraged us, when we told them that the society frowned against our choice, they legalized it and told us we can get married too.
We decided to go further and experiment with drugs, they frowned against it publicly, but we still had access to it. Moreover, we were minors, and the law enforcement agents couldn’t really punish us.
We looked for role models and they gave us Hollywood stars with multiple divorce stories, musical icons addicted to drugs/alcohol, and sports stars with numerous extra marital affair scandals.
They told us, that those celebrities were successful and free and we should aspire to be like them. Some of us started pumping iron, getting tattoos, and injecting steroids in order to look as manly and as ‘successful’ as our role models.
We started seeing fidelity as a sign of weakness and just like our ‘role-models’, we started going after everything in skirt.🙄
We equally tore off pictures of our successful and ‘sexy’ looking role models off celebrity magazines, and pasted them on our mirrors, we started dieting like mad so we can lose weight and look like them. We noticed that they hardly wore any clothes, so we followed suit.
When we became bored, they introduced us to their clubs and night parties. They told us to throw caution to the winds and just have fun, even when some of us got raped, they encouraged us to shut up and keep having fun.
Some of us became addicted to alcohol, but we were told not to worry that it was one way to prove our manhood, so we continued.
At a time we noticed that we had lost our will, we had become their slaves without knowing it.
We noticed that we don't have any reason to live again, and life was no longer purposeful.
In the bid to look sexy, some of us became victims of anorexia nervosa.
Those of us in relationships found it impossible to be faithful. Many started contemplating suicide. Many more had STDs, some of us experienced series of psychological traumas and mental breakdowns, a lot more dropped out of school as a result of unwanted pregnancies, drugs, or an abortion that went wrong.
At this point we saw our future get dashed before our faces, we started looking for whom to blame. After a fruitless search, we had to admit that we didn’t even know who ‘they’ were. Then the reality dawned on us.
We remembered our fathers telling us that “unlimited liberty is slavery in disguise”. We also remembered when our mothers told us that “freedom without checks and balances is tantamount to advanced bondage”. By then it was too late for us, we had bought ‘their’ freedom lie.
Maybe for you, it is not yet late, then please don’t be deceived by their lies and evil propaganda. Do not be swayed by their subtle message of freedom.
They’re all lies! We can prove it with our relationships, drug addictions, unwanted pregnancies, violent tendencies etc.
Beware, and please let's warn our youths and teenagers so the menace will not colonise all of this generation.
Not all reality shows are realities, not all models are role models,
Not all that glitters is gold...
Listen to wise counsel and save yourself.
Much love from Jeff...😘😘😘
Wednesday, 16 November 2016
Who Are The Avengers?
AFP
With a name that sounds like it has come from the pages of a superhero comic book, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA) is the latest militant group to emerge in Nigeria - attacking oil installations in a campaign which threatens the economy of Africa's most populous state.
"We are a group of educated and well-travelled individuals that are poised to take the Niger Delta struggle to new heights that has never been seen in this nation before," the NDA proclaimed in one of their first statement's on their website in April.
"We have well-equipped human resources to meet this goal."
It was not an idle threat. The NDA has carried out a barrage of attacks on oil installations in the Niger Delta region, causing a huge decline in oil production, which is the mainstay of the West African state's economy.
"The renewed activities of the militants in the Niger Delta is seriously affecting our oil production," Minister of Finance Kemi Adeosun admitted on state-owned NTA television.
Who is their leader?
This is the first armed group to emerge in the region - where most people are poor despite the fact that it is rich in oil - since late Nigerian President Umar Musa Yar'Adua granted amnesty to militants there seven years ago.
At the time, militants in the region said they wanted a better deal for their people who have suffered environmental degradation and economic dislocation because of oil production by some of the world's leading firms.
Many of the militants were encouraged to drop their arms and agitation in exchange for some cash incentives and training. Former President Goodluck Jonathan, who comes from the Niger Delta, continued the scheme.
AP
The amnesty programme, which provides tens of thousands of former oil militants with a monthly stipend from the government, stemmed the level of violence.
But in the latest budget, President Muhammadu Buhari reduced funding for it by 70%, and has spoken of phasing it out entirely by 2018.
It is difficult to identify or determine who the members of the NDA are - their Twitter handle currently has an AFP photo of a Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) militant taken in September 2008 as its profile picture.
Local people in the region believe members of the group are largely elements of previous militant groups like Mend - led by Henry Okah, who has been incarcerated in South Africa - or the Niger Delta People's Salvation Front led by the vocal Mujahideen Asari Dokubo. They were left out of the government's amnesty programme.
Many say the NDA militants are followers of former Niger Delta warlords like Government Ekpemupolo, who has the alias Tompolo.
He signed up to the amnesty programme but has been on the run since February, refusing to be questioned by Nigeria's anti-corruption agency in connection with $231m (£163m) in missing government funds.
Mr Ekpemupolo has dissociated himself from the group - but none of the former militant leaders have commented.
Others believe the new militants are criminal elements that want to draw attention to themselves now that their kinsman, ex-President Jonathan, is out of power.
Currently, it is not known who officially leads the group, although a Col Mudoch Agbinibo has been signing press releases on behalf of the NDA.
There are suggestions that "Mudoch" is a pseudonym, like the one-time "Jomo Gbomo" of Mend.
Whatever perceptions people might have of the group, its activities in the Niger Delta appear well co-ordinated with a high level of technical expertise.
Oil production down
The NDA has stated unambiguously what it is setting out to achieve: "Our goal is to cripple Nigeria's economy."
After declaring what it called "Operation Red Economy" in February, it blew up an underwater pipeline forcing Royal Dutch Shell to shut down a terminal which normally produces 250,000 barrels of oil a day (bpd).
BBC NEWS ONLINE
Last month, Shell declared a force majeure, which excuses a company from contractual agreements because events beyond its control, on exports of high grade crude oil after an attack on one of its trunk lines.
A few days later, US firm Chevron shut its Valve Platform following another attack, also claimed by the Avengers.
And ahead of President Buhari's first expected visit to the region on Thursday, the NDA said it had blown up two Chevron export terminals.
These attacks have dealt a huge blow to the revenue of the Nigerian government, which says the renewed activities of the militants are seriously affecting oil production.
In fact the country's production has dropped to 1.65 million bpd, as against the projected 2.2 million bpd.
GETTY IMAGES
The military has issued a stern warning that it will deal decisively with any group fermenting trouble in the country, including those it has described as "criminal elements in the Niger Delta".
But this appears to have emboldened the Avengers into more attacks that have had a knock-on affect on the supply of electricity that depends on gas from the oil-producing companies.
For President Buhari, who just marked one year in office, the NDA presents another fresh security challenge to the government which has been grappling with Islamist insurgency in the north-east of the country.
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