People who promote insurrection in Nigeria face a “rude shock”, its president warned on Tuesday, raising the possibility of a fierce crackdown on rising violence in the southeast that has included arson attacks on police station and electoral offices.
Security forces are already grappling with criminal gangs in the northwest who carry out mass kidnappings for ransom, a decade-old Islamist insurgency in the northeast, and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off Nigeria's southern coast.
Electoral offices and police stations have been burned down in recent months across the southeast, a region where armed gangs have carried out a series of killings of police officers, prompting a police operation in May.
Nigerian authorities have blamed those attacks on a banned separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and what police call its armed wing, the Eastern Security Network. But the IPOB has repeatedly denied involvement.
The statement issued by the office of President Muhammadu Buhari, who previously led Nigeria as a military ruler in the early 1980s, said "a rude shock" awaits "those bent on destroying the country through promoting insurrection, and burning down critical national assets".
It referred to the 1967-70 civil war fought over the secession of an area in Nigeria's far southeast called Biafra that killed one million people.
"Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through (that) war, will treat them in the language they understand. We are going to be very hard sooner than later," Buhari, who served in the army against the secessionists, was quoted as saying.
On Monday the streets of towns across the southeast were quiet and businesses were shuttered after the IPOB urged people to stay at home to commemorate those who died in the war.
The presidency statement said there had been 42 attacks on offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission in recent months across 14 states.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Nigeria’s president threatens rebels amid rising violence in southeast
Monday, May 31, 2021
Dozens kidnapped from Islamic school in northern Nigeria
An armed gang abducted dozens of students from an Islamic school in the northcentral Nigerian state of Niger on Sunday, police and state government officials said.
Some 200 children were at the school at the time of Sunday’s attack, the Niger state government said on Twitter, adding that “an unconfirmed number” had been taken.
The abduction came a day after 14 students from a university in northwestern Nigeria were freed, having spent 40 days in captivity.
A spokesman for Niger state’s police said in a statement that gunmen on motorcycles attacked the town of Tegina, in the Rafi local government area of the state, at approximately 3pm (14:00 GMT) on Sunday.
He said the attackers were “shooting indiscriminately and abducted a yet to be ascertained number of children at Salihu Tanko Islamic school”. One person was shot dead during the attack and a second person was seriously injured, the state governor’s spokeswoman said.
Armed groups carrying out kidnapping for ransom have been blamed for a series of raids on schools and universities in northern Nigeria in recent months, abducting more than 700 students for ransom since December.
The school’s owner, Abubakar Tegina, told the Reuters news agency in a phone interview that he witnessed the attack.
“I personally saw between 20 and 25 motorcycles with heavily armed people. They entered the school and went away with about 150 or more of the students,” said Tegina, who lives approximately 150 metres (about 500 feet) from the school.
“We can’t be exact because most of them have not reported to the school as at that time,” he said, when asked for further details of the number taken.
Tegina said there are approximately 300 pupils aged between seven and 15. He said pupils live at home and only attend classes at the site.
One of the school’s officials, who asked not to be named, told the AFP news agency that the attackers initially took more than 100 children “but later sent back those they considered too small for them, those between four and 12 years old”.
The state government, in a series of tweets, said the attackers had released 11 of the pupils who were “too small and couldn’t walk” very far.
Most students kidnapped in recent months have been taken from boarding schools.
Armed gangs have been terrorising people in northwest and central Nigeria by looting villages, stealing cattle, and kidnapping people for ransom.
On April 20, gunmen known locally as “bandits” stormed Greenfield University in northwestern Nigeria and kidnapped about 20 students, killing a member of staff in the process.
Five students were executed a few days later to force families and the government to pay a ransom, and some 14 students were released on Saturday.
Local press said that the families had paid a ransom totalling 180 million naira ($440,000) for their release.
The criminal gangs maintain camps in the Rugu forest which straddles Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and Niger states.
Search Underway for Kidnapped Students from Nigeria’s Kaduna State
Friday, May 28, 2021
Crypto will ‘come to life’ in Nigeria, central bank governor says
At a 279th meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee in Abuja, Central Bank of Nigeria Governor Godwin Emefiele expressed confidence that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) will be legal in the country, Business Insider reports Wednesday.
Emefiele did not directly mention a decision to reverse the CBN’s February ban of institutions from buying and selling crypto, but noted that the bank has been investigating the industry:
“We are committed in the CBN, and I can assure everybody that digital currency will come to life even in Nigeria [...] Under cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, Nigeria comes 2nd, while on the global side of the economy, Nigeria comes 27th. We are still conducting our investigation, and we will make our data available.”
Emefiele also said the Nigerian government will do its best to prevent crypto from being used to finance illicit activities. “We found out that a substantial percentage of our people are getting involved in cryptocurrency, which is not the best. Don’t get me wrong, some may be legitimate, but most are illegitimate,” he said.
The banker also expressed concerns over the crypto market crash in mid-May, which has been largely attributed to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s decision to suspend Bitcoin payments for cars and his further BTC criticism:
“We saw the market collapse. Initially, when Elon Musk tweeted around the time when we said our banking and payment facilities are no longer available for cryptocurrency transactions, and he tweeted that he will invest $1.5 billion, and the price went up. He now tweeted and raised a few concerns, and the thing plunged.”
The CBN did not immediately respond to Cointelegraph’s request for comment.
As previously reported, Nigeria has emerged as the biggest source of Bitcoin trading volume in Africa as of August 2020, also becoming one of the fastest-growing crypto markets in the world. According to data from Bitcoin P2P marketplace Paxful, Nigeria ranked second only to the United States in trading volume as of December 2020.
Amid the growing adoption of Bitcoin, Nigeria’s national currency, the naira, has been falling. “Bitcoin has made our currency almost useless or valueless,” Senator Sani Musa of the Niger East Senatorial District said in February. Following Emefiele’s latest remarks, the naira dropped 1.2% to near a three-and-half year low on the black market on Thursday.
By Helen Partz
Nigeria's president appoints new army chief after predecessor's death -statement
Nigeria's president has appointed a new army chief, the ministry of defence said in a statement on Thursday, following the death of the military head's predecessor in a plane crash last week.
President Muhammadu Buhari appointed Major General Farouk Yahaya who previously commanded troops operating in the northeast where security forces are fighting an Islamist insurgency, the statement said.
Nigeria's army faces several challenges including the insurgency waged by Boko Haram and its offshoot, Islamic State West Africa Province, that has displaced about 2 million people and killed more than 30,000 since 2009. Troops are also fighting armed gangs in the northwest who kidnap for ransom.
"Prior to his appointment Major General Yahaya was the general officer commanding 1 Division of the Nigerian Army and the incumbent theatre commander of the Counter terrorism Counter insurgency military outfit in the northeast," the statement said.
Yahaya's predecessor, Lieutenant General Ibrahim Attahiru, died in a plane crash on Friday on an official visit to the northern state of Kaduna. read more
Attahiru was appointed in January, alongside other military chiefs, after years of mounting criticism over spreading violence by Islamist insurgents and armed gangs.
Nigeria needs to fix the issues in its dairy value chain
Nigeria spends $2.5bn importing dairy milk annually, to cover for the nearly 60% shortfall in primary production.
While the issues derive their root from a historically outdated model for the breeding and raising of cattle, they are also a result of willful ignorance and lack of technical knowledge on the value chain for this sector, which has a ripple effect across the board.
Milk is the third most consumed food item in Nigeria, however, in 2020 alone, the country imported $534m worth of refined sugar from Spain, Brazil, France and India, and $2.5bn worth of dairy milk from the Netherlands, UK, US, Australia, and others, to power its value chain for everything from evaporated milk, pasteurised milk, to yoghurt, cheese, chocolate, and more.
What is the problem with the dairy sector in Nigeria?
Why are we unable to solve the problem of milk and all its attendant derivatives, which to a large extent contributed to the $10bn the Netherlands earned exporting milk around the world in 2020?
Nigeria has 13 major breeds of cattle, and of them, the White Fulani breed has the most dairy of them all. What has happened is a situation where, because of the outdated mode of handling these cows, there has been no effort to adopt modern global best practices for cross-breeding and calving of these cows through artificial insemination (a process where semen is used from a cattle with a higher production output to fertilise the eggs of a lower producing cow, for the purpose of producing a new line that’s disease resistant, adjusted to the weather, and feeds available in that region of rearing).
What does the country need?
Nigeria requires a comprehensive ranching development plan that focuses the task of primary production on two levers:
Cooperatives who are properly trained in improved methods and global best practices;
Commercial companies that are able to invest in the kind of capital required for building a ranch that addresses all the issues in the supply value chain.
There is also a need for quality veterinary care from professional doctors familiar with cattle specifically, a properly designed irrigation model built into the metal fabrication compartments of the ranch pen, a weaning hose used for automatic extraction of milk from the udder of the dairy cattle, a storage tank that can store the milk at a particular temperature that prevents fermentation and building of bacteria in the liquid before it’s taken by reefer vans to the milk collection centres, and radio frequency identification (RfID) tags built into the monitor braces to track everything from distance covered to amount of feed consumed.
Most importantly, there is a need for a vertically integrated model for developing a feed lot for maize, which remains the best and most nutritious source of feed for cattle globally.
Why are we not addressing these issues?
Until 2018, government policy did now allow for backward integration through import substitution. In doing so, it would have made the subsidies the EU pays to its farmers, and the tariff it pays to Nigeria under the WTO tariff rules for importing dairy milk, unsustainable compared to developing this full vertical in Nigeria. What we have had has always been the lazy man’s approach of importing primary products for processing to meeting the food demands of Nigeria.
Bottom line
I see a stream of opportunities for African entrepreneurs who are bold enough to invest between $500,000 and $1m in the development of key areas of the value chain, and this is because dairy milk can be processed into a variety of things.
One of the curses that have collapsed our food security in Africa is the fallacy that you have to be involved only in primary production for you to take advantage of the supply chain.
And even at this level that holds only 25% of the whole value, we have failed to do the needful. The introduction of tractors, boom sprayers, harvesters and the like will improve turnaround time and enable to better practise precision agriculture.
I’m hoping we pay attention in Africa and I’m hoping we understand that development is not being able to afford imports. It’s more about the ability to substitute local demand and price exports for more value than the imports.
By Kelvin Ayebaefie Emmanuel