President Goodluck Jonathan's cousin kidnapped

The kidnappers of Chief Inengite Nitabai, cousin to President Goodluck Jonathan have reportedly rejected the N30m offered by his family for his release.

Chief Nitabai, a former lecturer at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt was abducted penultimate Sunday at his Otuoke country home in Ogbia local government area of Bayelsa State by ten armed men.

The kidnapped chief is the traditional head of the compound from which the President hails from.
He was also said to have played a major role in the training of Dr. Goodluck Jonathan during his school days as an undergraduate and post graduate student.

Nitabai, it was also learnt has been acting like a father to the President since Jonathan’s real biological father died, it was further learnt.

The alleged rejection of the family offer is coming on heels of the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC) worldwide warning to the embattled Nitabai family that no ransom should be paid to the kidnappers.

The abductors, it would be recalled, had contacted the victim’s family four days after he was whisked away demanding a whooping sum of N500m as ransom to set him free.

A source source close to the Nitabai family told Vanguard that the troubled family instead offered to pay his abductors N30m which they rejected.

“They (kidnappers) rejected the N30m offer which they described as laughable coming from a family linked to the President,” the source said.

Also a security source who pleaded anonymity confirmed the development saying, “we are aware that the family is negotiating with the kidnappers and that they are demanding N500m which the family described as outrageous. They instead offered to part with N30 which the kidnappers were said to have rejected.”

Contacted, the state police public relations officer, Mr. Alex Akhigbe, DSP said he was not aware of the demand.

He however said its operatives deployed in the creeks are making progress in their search for the kidnapped chief.

Meanwhile, the Ijaw Youth Council IYC has warned the family of Chief Nitabai not to pay any ransom to the kidnappers.

The IYC described the action of the kidnappers as crime which the council would not condone.
It said the three man committee it set up to work with security agencies to fish out the kidnappers of Chief Inengite Nitabai are making tremendous progress to secure his release.

Spokesman of the IYC, Eric Omare who disclosed this to newsmen shortly after the inaugural meeting of the council at the Ijaw House in Yenagoa said the identity of the three man committee working with the security agents would not be disclosed for security reasons as serious progress has been made to free the septuagenarian.

Omare added that the committee has established contacts with his captors assuring that in no distance time he would be released.

“In consonance with the position of the IYC we have advised the relevant persons not to offer any ransom in order to effect the release of Mr President uncle because if we offer ransom we are encouraging more kidnapping.

“IYC position is that criminality must be erased from Ijawland, so we have told them not to offer any ransom, though he has not been released but we are very sure in the next few days or hours we would effect his release,” he said.

Vanguard

Nigeria draws with Mexico in football friendly

Mexico and Nigeria played out an evenly-matched 0-0 draw in front of a record crowd in their 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil warm-up match.

Both sides started the match tentatively as Nigeria’s backline, consisting of Godfrey Oboabona, Efe Ambrose, Kenneth Omeruo and Elderson Echiejile, were able to keep Javier ‘Chicharito’ Hernandez and Oribe Peralta at bay.

For Nigeria’s attack, Liverpool’s Victor Moses and Fenerbahce’s Emmanuel Emenike looked like the most likely sources of goals for the Super Eagles.

Moses had a penalty appeal denied in the 8th minute, while three minutes later, Emenike broke through inside Mexico’s penalty area only for Mexico goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa to save.

Nigeria and Mexico have drawn their last two meetings.

The two teams had chances to get on the scoreboard but thanks to outstanding play from Mexico goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa and Nigeria shot-stoppers Vincent Enyeama and Austin Ejide, the friendly ended in a draw.

Mexico had the last significant chance of the match in the 73rd minute when substitute Raul Jimenez failed to react in time to a driven cross from the left flank, resulting in a Nigerian goal kick.
There were debuts for Michael Uchebo, Ramon Azeez, Imoh Ezekiel and Leon Balogun, the last-minute replacement for injured skipper Joseph Yobo in front of a record crowd of 68,220 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

The Super Eagles Team vs Mexico
Vincent Enyeama (Ejide 46) – Elderson, Efe Ambrose (Leon Balogun 46)(Azubuike Egwuekwe 66), Godfrey Oboabona, Kenneth Omeruo – Ogenyi Onazi, Mikel, Ahmed Musa – Victor Moses, Emmanuel Emenike, Michael Uchebo (Ramon Azeez 46)

Vanguard

Nigerians ready to be evacuated from Ukraine

As tensions continue to rise between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimea, the Nigerian Government has said it is closely monitoring events as they unfold, and would immediately evacuate its citizens if the need arises.

An estimated 7000 Nigerians are resident across Ukraine with at least 5000 of them studying in tertiary institutions across the country. 170 Nigerians are also studying in the Crimea, the flashpoint of the unfolding crises.

The Supervising Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Viola Onwuliri speaking with THISDAY in Abuja Tuesday night said the Ministry has been in constant touch with its Mission in Kiev since the crises started.

This Day

The Canonisation Of Terror

The sheer weight of indignation and revulsion of most of Nigerian humanity at the recent Boko Harma atrocity in Yobe is most likely to have overwhelmed a tiny footnote to that outrage, small indeed, but of an inversely proportionate significance. This was the name of the hospital to which the survivors of the massacre were taken. That minute detail calls into question, in a gruesome but chastening way, the entire ethical landscape into which this nation has been forced by insensate leadership. It is an uncanny coincidence, one that I hope the new culture of ‘religious tourism’, spearheaded by none other than the nation’s president in his own person, may even come to recognize as a message from unseen forces.

For the name of that hospital, it is reported, is none other than that of General Sanni Abacha, a vicious usurper under whose authority the lives of an elected president and his wife were snuffed out. Assassinations – including through bombs cynically ascribed to the opposition – became routine. Under that ruler, torture and other forms of barbarism were enthroned as the norm of governance. To round up, nine Nigerian citizens, including the writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-wiwa, were hanged after a trial that was stomach churning even by the most primitive standards of judicial trial, and in defiance of the intervention of world leadership. We are speaking here of a man who placed this nation under siege during an unrelenting reign of terror that is barely different from the current rampage of Boko Haram. It is this very psychopath that was recently canonized by the government of Goodluck Jonathan in commemoration of one hundred years of Nigerian trauma.

It has been long a-coming. One of the broadest avenues in the nation’s capital, Abuja, bears the name of General Sanni Abacha. Successive governments have lacked the political courage to change this signpost – among several others – of national self degradation and wipe out the memory of the nation’s tormentor from daily encounter. Not even Ministers for the Federal Capital territory within whose portfolios rest such responsibilities, could muster the temerity to initiate the process and leave the rest to public approbation or repudiation. I urged the need of this purge on one such minister, and at least one Head of State. That minister promised, but that boast went the way of Nigerian electoral boast. The Head of State murmured something about the fear of offending ‘sensibilities’. All evasions amounted to moral cowardice and a doubling of victim trauma. When you proudly display certificates of a nation’s admission to the club of global pariahs, it is only a matter of time before you move to beatify them as saints and other paragons of human perfection. What the government of Goodluck Jonathan has done is to scoop up a century’s accumulated degeneracy in one preeminent symbol, then place it on a podium for the nation to admire, emulate and even – worship.

There is a deplorable message for coming generations in this governance aberration that the entire world has been summoned to witness and indeed, to celebrate. The insertion of an embodiment of ‘governance by terror’ into the company of committed democrats, professionals, humanists and human rights advocates in their own right, is a sordid effort to grant a certificate of health to a communicable disease that common sense demands should be isolated. It is a confidence trick that speaks volumes of the perpetrators of such a fraud. We shall pass over – for instance – the slave mentality that concocts loose formulas for an Honours List that automatically elevate any violent bird of passage to the status of nation builders who may, or may not be demonstrably motivated by genuine love of nation. According generalized but false attributes to known killers and treasury robbers is a disservice to history and a desecration of memory. It also compromises the future. This failure to discriminate, to assess, and thereby make it possible to grudgingly concede that even out of a ‘doctrine of necessity’ – such as military dictatorship - some demonstrable governance virtue may emerge, reveals nothing but national self-glorification in a moral void, the breeding grounds of future cankerworm in the nation’s edifice.

Such abandonment of moral rigour comes full circle sooner or later. The survivors of a plague known as Boko Haram, students in a place of enlightenment and moral instruction, are taken to a place of healing dedicated to an individual contagion – a murderer and thief of no redeeming quality known as Sanni Abacha, one whose plunder is still being pursued all over the world and recovered piecemeal by international consortiums – at the behest of this same government which sees fit to place him on the nation’s Roll of Honour! I can think of nothing more grotesque and derisive of the lifetime struggle of several on this list, and their selfless services to humanity. It all fits. In this nation of portent readers, the coincidence should not be too difficult to decipher.

I reject my share of this national insult.
Wole Soyinka



Vanguard

Nigerian Aliko Dangote is 23rd richest man in the world

 Alhaji Aliko Dangote has emerged the 23rd richest man on the 2014 Forbes Billionaires List just released. Three other Nigerians - Mike Adenuga, Folorunsho Alakija and Abdulsamad Rabiu - were also listed on this year's Forbes list of 1,645 billionaires across the globe who together are worth $6.4 trillion.

Africa's richest man Dangote is not relenting in his quest for wealth as he rose from the 43rd position on the Forbes Billionaires List in 2013 to the 23rd position in March 2014 with a net worth of $25 billion, a 20 per cent rise from $20.8 billion he was worth as of December 2013.

Dangote who ranks 64 on the list of 72 most powerful people who rule the world is looking beyond cement, sugar and flour, the three commodities that built his fortune, to the oil business.

In April, he announced $9 billion in financing from a consortium of local and international lenders to construct a private oil refinery, fertilizer and petrochemical complex in the country, which when completed will be Nigeria's first and Africa's largest petroleum refinery. He continues to expand his publicly traded Dangote Cement across the continent, announcing plans in recent months to build new plants in Kenya and Niger.

The self-made billionaire created the Dangote Group, which in addition to cement owns sugar refineries, flour milling and salt processing facilities operating in eight countries, owning the largest cement manufacturer in sub-Saharan Africa. He began trading in commodities more than three decades ago using a loan from his uncle.

Mike Adenuga who ranks second richest in Nigeria however dropped in position from the rank of 267 in 2013 to 325 in March 2014 with a net worth of $4.6 billion.

Oil and fashion billionaire Folorunsho Alakija who ranks third and 13th in Nigeria and Africa respectively ranked 687 on the Forbes Billionaires List 2014 with a net worth of $2.5 billion. Nigeria's fourth and Africa's 23rd richest, Abdulsamad Rabiu, was ranked 1, 372 on the world Billionaires List with a worth of $1.2 billion.

According to Forbes, "our global wealth team found 1,645 billionaires with an aggregate net worth of $6.4 trillion, up from $5.4 trillion a year ago. We unearthed a record 268 new 10-figure fortunes, including 42 new women billionaires, another record. In total, there are 172 women on the list, more than ever before and up from 138 last year.

Bill Gates is back on top after a four-year hiatus, reclaiming the title of world's richest person from telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico, who ranked No. 1 for the past four years. Gates, whose fortune rose by $9 billion in the past year, has held the top spot for 15 of the past 20 years.

Spanish clothing retailer Amancio Ortega (best known for the Zara fashion chain) retains the No. 3 spot for the second year in a row, extending his lead over Warren Buffett, who is again No. 4. American gambling tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who added $11.5 billion to his pile, makes it back into the top ten for the first time since 2007. Another first: A record net worth of $31 billion was needed to make the top 20, up from $23 billion last year.

Leadership

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