Nigeria is among the countries around the world with the least level of obesity preparedness. This was disclosed in a recent report published by the World Obesity Federation. Stakeholders are concerned that this could affect both the health sector and the economy of the nation.
Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared results for 12 states so far, including the economic hub of Lagos, where incumbent governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu of the ruling party was reelected.
But observers say Saturday's elections were characterized by widespread violence, voter suppression and intimidation.
Local media reported that 21 people were killed and scores injured across the country.
In Imo state, police rescued 17 INEC staffers abducted by gunmen on the morning of the elections as they were heading to their polling units.
Rights group Amnesty International condemned the violence.
"There were pockets of violence and prevention of people to make their choices in the ballot, disrupting electoral processes and campaign of calumny, and the employment of thugs. We strongly condemn such human rights violations," said Aminu Hayatu, Amnesty International's conflict researcher.
Amnesty International said social media was used to incite tribal hatred and ethnic slurs and urged social media companies like Twitter, Meta and WhatsApp to improve their screening-out of hateful content.
There were also issues of staff delays and technical difficulties during Saturday's polls.
But Nigeria's information minister, Lai Mohammed, who voted in his hometown in south-west Kwara state, said the election was one of the most credible in Nigeria's recent history.
Idayat Hassan, director at the Center for Democracy and Development, disagrees.
"The likelihoods of postelection violence are high but how widespread is what we do not know," Hassan said. "Considering this is a projection, the response of the state is what we should actually be looking out for. How will the Nigerian state be able to timely nip any form of insecurity in the bud with the minimum use of force?"
Kano state authorities have imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew in anticipation of unrest as more results are announced.
Amnesty International wants authorities to identify and punish promoters of election violence.
"Such are violations against the international human rights law which Nigeria is signatory to. We're calling on [the] government to investigate and fish out those who are behind such human rights violations, irrespective of who they are," Hayatu said.
Last month, observers said the presidential election in which the ruling party's Bola Ahmed Tinubu was declared the winner lacked transparency and didn't meet the expectations of most citizens.
Experts said there's heightened tension in many states, including Adamawa state where incumbent governor Ahmadu Fintiri of the People's Democratic Party and Senator Aishatu Ahmed-Binani of the All Progressive Congress are locked in a tough race.
Ahmed-Binani is the first woman with a realistic chance of being elected governor in Nigeria.
By Timothy Obiezu, VOA
Related story: State elections postponed in Nigeria due to dispute of presidential vote
Nigeria's opposition Labour Party candidate Peter Obi has filed a court petition challenging last month's disputed presidential election, the party said, kicking off what could be a long legal campaign lasting several months.
There have been numerous legal challenges to the outcome of previous Nigerian presidential elections but none has succeeded.
Obi campaigned as an outsider, galvanised young and first-time voters and had appeared to throw the contest wide open, raising some voters' hopes for change after years of hardship and violence under outgoing President Muhammadu Buhari, 80, a former army general.
But Obi came third behind winner Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress party (APC) and main opposition People's Democratic Party's (PDP) Atiku Abubakar, both of whom had powerful political machines and decades of networking behind them.
The APC and PDP have, between them, governed Nigeria since the end of military rule in 1999.
"We are challenging the qualifications of the candidate that was declared the winner. We are also challenging the processes that led to his declaration as the winner, among others," Labour Party spokesperson Yunusa Tanko told Reuters.
Election observers from the European Union, the Commonwealth and other bodies reported a range of problems, among them failures in systems designed to prevent vote manipulation.
The observers criticised the electoral commission for poor planning and voting delays, but they did not allege fraud. The commission itself apologised for the technical problems during the count.
The Appeals Court will sit as a tribunal and has 180 days to hear and make a ruling on Obi's challenge. Atiku has also said he would petition the court and has until midnight on Wednesday to file his papers.
If a candidate is not satisfied with the outcome of the tribunal, they can approach the Supreme Court, which will deliberate on an appeal within 60 days.
Nigeria's next president will be sworn in on May 29.
There were several cases of violence and voter intimidation in last month's presidential vote as well as this weekend's governorship polls. Turnout was low despite the highest number of registered voters, at 93 million.
The APC won 15 of the 28 governorship races, including commercial hub Lagos, compared to PDP's 8 and one went to a regional northern party.
Elections in two states were declared inconclusive and counting was suspended in two others due to violence.
By Camillus Eboh, Reuters
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Nigeria has successfully introduced new banknotes on about 10 occasions since independence in 1960. So why has the latest attempt been so controversial and traumatic? And what measures need to be taken to avoid a future debacle?
Nigeria’s central bank announced the introduction of new banknotes last November, with the changeover to new notes scheduled for mid-December. The rollout of the policy disintegrated into chaos, amid mounting anger among ordinary Nigerians.
The rollout of the currency change was disastrous. The fallout included:
. Severe shortages of the new banknotes.
. Precipitous declines in business transactions (especially in the informal sector).
. Long queues at bank premises and overcrowded banking halls
. Attacks on bank staff and destruction of bank property, including ATMs that failed to dispense cash.
The policy also led to lawsuits by some state governors against the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Government.
I have identified five factors that marred the redesign policy, most of which could have been avoided by the Central Bank of Nigeria.
Litany of errors
Cost-benefit: An egregious error committed by the central bank was its violation of the principle of cost-benefit analysis. This is a simple rule in economics that implores policy makers to undertake an initiative only when the benefits exceed the costs. One should ask: What were the benefits of introducing the policy? What were the potential costs at the time of implementation?
The central bank justified the redesign policy as follows: to rein in counterfeiting, promote a cashless economy by limiting the amount of the new banknotes that can be withdrawn, reduce the large quantity of dirty notes circulating in the economy, discourage hoarding, curb crimes like kidnapping and terrorism, and head off illicit financial transactions.
It also saw the policy as a way of addressing the huge amount of currency outside the formal financial sector; 85% of banknotes circulate outside the banking system, largely because of hoarding and illicit financial transactions.
And the cost? If indeed the central bank considered the cost, it obviously underestimated it. How would anyone ignore the large-scale disruptions in the economy and loss of productivity that the policy caused, not to speak of the stress and anxiety inflicted on Nigerians?
Communication: Of all the pitfalls that doomed the currency redesign policy, at least as conceived originally, the lack of effective communication about the overarching goals and modus operandi of the exercise was the most devastating.
Nigeria’s central bank threw a basic element of strategic planning and communication to the winds when it failed woefully to communicate and educate the public about expectations, prior to launching the policy. According to strategic planners, a major policy initiative that is not well communicated, from the top of the strategy planning pyramid to the bottom, is bound to fail.
The central bank should have sought the buy-in of major stakeholders, especially the National Economic Council and the National Assembly. The central bank would have had a better chance of avoiding the ferocious push-back it got.
The central bank finally began rolling out a communication plan by late December 2022. But this was too little too late. By then Nigerians had already characterised the policy as decidedly punitive. The narrative that had gained ground was that the change was designed to curtail the ability of politicians to buy votes during the 2023 elections.
This inevitably raised the question of why millions of Nigerians should suffer because of politicians?
The central bank’s mishandling of communication was also manifested in the fact that it failed to issue policy guidelines to commercial banks and the public days after the Supreme Court nullified the bank’s earlier deadline. This has exacerbated the confusion associated with the policy, as merchants and businesses continue to reject the old notes, despite the court’s rulings.
Inappropriate timeframe: The timeframe for implementation was unrealistic and impracticable. By setting a very short timeframe for phasing out the old notes, the Central Bank of Nigeria appeared to have adopted textbook assumptions about how the Nigerian banking system works.
Anyone who has been to a typical commercial bank in Nigeria would know it would have been impossible for the banks to undertake the monumental task of collecting old notes and dispensing the new ones within the one-and-a-half month window originally allowed by the central bank. Overcrowding, chaos, excruciatingly slow service and unnecessary bureaucratic red tape are quite common during normal banking hours. It is not uncommon to observe people with “connection” circumvent queues and obtain preferential access to bank staff. Although Nigerian banks pride themselves as being digitised, a lot of paper-pushing still goes on within the banking system.
The central bank should have considered this fact and allowed for a longer timeframe for implementation.
There was also no persuasive rationale for the rushed implementation of the policy. Neither was the central bank able to explain why the old and new notes could not coexist, a measure the Supreme Court has now mandated the bank to implement.
Conflicting goals and lack of prioritisation: Policy targeting is a major precondition for success. The focus on one unambiguous objective in past redesign policies enabled the central bank to conduct a seamless and less dramatic exercise.
The current redesign policy had too many goals, and it was unclear which one was the target goal.
Identifying target goals enables policy makers to select appropriate instruments for achieving those goals. But when there are too many goals, the danger is that an instrument designed for one goal may undermine another goal.
For instance, the goal of reining in money laundering and illicit financial transactions meant that the Central Bank of Nigeria needed to deliberately restrict access to the new banknotes. But this inflicted unintended hardships on innocent Nigerians who simply wanted to access their hard-earned money.
The central bank should have focused on one major goal. If the goal was to phase out old notes, as the bank is statutorily mandated to do, then the old and new notes could have circulated alongside each other until the old notes were phased out.
A casual announcement that new notes would be circulating from a given date would have been all that was needed. People would not have panicked and rushed to the banks to withdraw money.
Economic headwinds: It is very difficult to implement a major policy initiative that negatively affects people during a period of macroeconomic instability. The central bank policy came at a bad time. Nigeria’s economy is in a shambles, with a 22% inflation rate, 33% unemployment rate – 43% among young Nigerians – and a growth rate of 3%.
These economic challenges have been compounded by a 17.5% interest rate, steep declines in the value of the Naira, and widespread poverty.
Nigerians’ tolerance for economic shocks was already at its limit when the redesign policy was launched. The policy and the confusion that accompanied it tipped them over the edge.
The challenge of credibility
The central bank needs to reestablish its credibility as the “people’s bank,” to reverse a self-inflicted image of an organisation that’s partisan.
The bank has a fiduciary responsibility of catering to the interests of its main “shareholder,” the Nigerian people. But the perception is that the bank lacks independence. To effectively discharge its statutory duties, the Central Bank of Nigeria should initiate a process of re-asserting its independence and regaining the people’s trust and confidence.
By Stephen Onyeiwu, Professor of Economics & Business, Allegheny College
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Whether he was running through defenders in the NFL or studying relentlessly for medical school exams, Dr. Samkon Gado, M.D., (’05) has led a life marked by resiliency and obedience to God’s leading.
Gado was born in Kafai, Gombe State, Nigeria. His family moved to South Carolina before high school so that he could pursue an American education.
After a standout athletic career in high school, where he lettered in three sports and received all-state football honors as a senior running back, Gado received a football scholarship from Liberty, a Division I-AA program at the time.
Following the 2004 season, Gado was recognized as an All-Big South Conference selection but was bypassed in the 2005 NFL Draft. He was signed as an undrafted free agent by the Kansas City Chiefs, where he spent less than two months before being signed by the Green Bay Packers. He impressed the league enough in his rookie season to remain there for six years, spending time with six different teams and racking up 12 touchdowns and over 1,000 yards of offense during his time in the NFL.
But football was never his intended career. Gado’s goal in the NFL was certainly an unconventional one: to save his earnings to pay for medical school and fulfill a dream of serving in medical missions.
Gado married his wife, Rachel, in 2010, and with her support traded a football uniform for a white coat, starting medical school at Medical University of South Carolina. Near the end of his time there, he traveled to Nigeria to do a one-month rotation of his ENT (ear, nose, and throat) residency with Saint Louis University.
He had first considered medical missions when he was a Liberty student, but working in Nigeria only further confirmed a desire God had laid on his heart years earlier.
“I always felt a tug toward cross-cultural missions. My grandfather was a local missionary to Nigeria, and my father was a pastor and minister and has been in the ministry my whole life. I kind of resisted until I came to Liberty,” he said. “I was ready to go somewhere where the Gospel had never gone before. But my idea of missions began morphing a bit, and instead of setting up a hut and serving as many people as I could until I die, I started thinking, ‘What if missions could be a little more organized?’ and I began thinking more about infrastructure.”
In 2019, Gado and his sister, Ruth, founded The Jonah Inheritance with the purpose of reimagining healthcare in Nigeria from a Gospel perspective. The name comes from both sets of their grandparents’ names: Yunana, a version of “Jonah,” and Gado, which means “Inheritance.”
Gado said the nation is desperate for this type of medical relief.
“Nigeria’s strength is it is one of the top exporters of physicians in the world, but it has one of the worst healthcare systems and the worst infrastructure, so there is a disconnect there,” he said.
The vision includes building a self-sustaining hospital on a 28-acre campus in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Gado said they have raised enough funds to build a border fence and hope to break ground on the hospital this year. The Jonah Inheritance is already actively at work training in-country doctors and medical staff.
Nigerian partners have been overseeing the projects while Gado is in Lynchburg, where he returned in 2020 to work as an ENT surgeon. He is working with his former roommate from Liberty, Dr. Jay Cline (’05); the two are partners at Blue Ridge ENT.
While Gado serves patients locally, he’s also making plans to someday move with his wife and four sons to Nigeria and focus his full attention on The Jonah Inheritance.
“The idea of going to Nigeria, for both of us, is very difficult,” he said. “That’s why what really keeps us moving in that direction, truly, is what the Lord is doing in both of our hearts.”
Gado said his ultimate goal is to not only help people heal physically but also share the Gospel message with them.
“I started seeing medicine from a slightly different perspective, using the Gospel as a framework to actually break down disease,” he said. “I think diseases preach the Gospel to us, and if you think of how diseases happen, you can see and preach through a disease.”
He said cancer is one example.
“Cancer is a cell creating its own agenda. It doesn’t really matter what that agenda is; it’s just an agenda different than what it was designed to do. When it reproduces itself, it destroys the organ and eventually can metastasize to the body and end in death. That’s no different than the sin of Adam.”
Gado said God looks at the heart of the issue, and that is how healing truly comes.
“He doesn’t go after the behaviors. The only way that sin can be addressed is by changing the heart. Once you fix the broken DNA, the body naturally takes care of the cancer.
“Couple our understanding of the Gospel and how it affects medicine with doctors who are of the same mind and who are capable, and teaching them how to marry the Gospel with medicine … now, the whole healthcare encounter is a Gospel presentation.”
While Gado has always had a warrior spirit, he said it was awakened, shaped, and encouraged the most during his time at Liberty, where he encountered LU founder Jerry Falwell Sr. and others whose hearts were on fire for the Gospel and displayed how that message can change the world.
“Spiritually and practically, Jerry Falwell has really been a role model to me,” Gado said. “The biggest thing that Liberty has been to me is that it was an incubator for many things. It allowed me to find godly relationships. For the first time in my life, I was meeting people my age who had a deep passion for the Lord and a passion to serve Him. And that, more than anything, is what the Lord used to deepen my faith. I found brothers, a community of believers, who were following hard after the Spirit of Christ.”
Although securing the finances for The Jonah Inheritance is essential to the project’s success, Gado said he is choosing to look back at the example Falwell gave in achieving his own God-given dream.
“I think of Falwell often, and the parallels are amazing,” Gado said. “He had a vision, and he was unwavering. He knew the power his vision had, and what would fuel his vision wasn’t money; it was prayer. (Dr. Falwell) acquired as much land as possible — long before Liberty was even capable of filling that land. But he, in faith, trusted that the Lord was going to bring the vision to fruition, and he literally took that step (of faith).”
Gado said he will continue to visit Nigeria each year until they move there permanently.
“That’s not something that we would have naturally chosen for ourselves; that wasn’t something that I wanted to do,” he said. “But my commitment to the Gospel needs to be unwavering and, in the end, it will be shown to be true just like it has been for Liberty.”
Learn more at TheJonahInheritance.org.
By Jacob Couch, Liberty Journal
