Despite this growth, 5G comprises just over 1 percent of Nigeria's total active telephone service subscriptions, with 2G still dominating at 58 percent. Industry experts argue that the higher cost of 5G-enabled devices remains a barrier to wider adoption.
CGTN
In October 2021, Shola Usman was arrested and held without charge for eight months in a prison cell in Mabushi Police Station in Abuja, Nigeria. Four months later, a court ordered that assets worth millions of naira (1USD= 908 Naira) belonging to the 44-year-old mother of six be confiscated while she was in arbitrary detention. She had not appeared before a judge.
It was not until June 2022 that she was released from custody on bail, after Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police was made to intervene through an official petition by her lawyer.
Usman, an agricultural entrepreneur who farms staples like rice and maize and sells them to wholesalers and retailers, was accused of defrauding the wife of a powerful politician. She denied all accusations, but still paid the price.
“The politician,” Usman told Quartz, “had the money to drag me from court to court, and used his influence to obtain a court order to freeze my bank accounts, claiming that I committed fraud.” She did not wish to reveal the identity of the politician for fear of further reprisal.
Nigeria, which ranked 150 out of 180 countries surveyed in Transparency International’s 2022 corruption perception index, see graft as resulting in the “perversion of justice, wrongful convictions, and acquittals of guilty parties,” according to the International Bar Association, a 75-year-old organization that aims to protect and advance the rule of law globally. In a recent report, the association said that corruption “weakens the judiciary and other law enforcement agencies, as corrupt officials can be easily manipulated or bribed,” compromising the delivery of justice.
Furthermore, official statistics by the Nigerian Correctional Service indicate another fault with the rule of law in Africa’s most populous country: In 2023, 69% of the 77,849 inmates in Nigeria were pre-trial detainees, including Usman, who was held in a police station for eight months. Based on this fact, Nigeria’s Inspector General of Police intervened to order her release.
In 2017, human rights lawyer Nelson Olanipekun set out to fix this. He established Citizens Gavel Foundation for Social Justice (Gavel), a civic tech organization aimed at improving the pace of justice delivery through the use of technology. Gavel focuses on indigent victims of injustice and uses an online platform to connect inmates trapped in a judicial limbo with lawyers willing to help.
“The initiative was born from a personal experience a long time ago when my father desperately needed legal aid but was only able to get it through a lawyer who had volunteered to stand in for him,” Olanipekun told Quartz.
At her arrest, Usman alleges that policemen raided her home and took two vehicles, then stormed her mobile shop and warehouse, and carted away merchandise and thousands of sacks of produce.
Stranded in a legal purgatory, Usman told Quartz she “endured inhumane treatment while in detention,” including getting hit on the head, and was left to bleed for days, and being “blackmailed” and “hounded by the politician’s loyal policemen.”
Quartz reached out for comment to officers at the Mabushi Police station where Usman was held. The reporter was told that officers are not at liberty to speak to the media and advised to file an official request for comment, which could take months to respond to.
In comments made last year, Nigeria’s Inspector-General of Police vowed to punish erring police officers who fail to abide by the law enforcement mandate and uphold the constitution. But the country’s war on terror has often led to a culture where excessive use of force is rampant.
These slow processes and limited access to justice are what inspired Gavel, says Olanipekun.
After resigning from a career as a corporate lawyer, Olanipekun started spending his days visiting prisons and police stations, where he spoke to people who were unjustly detained in an effort to help secure their release by representing them in court, he recalls.
But even before he started Gavel, which operates in Nigeria and the United Kingdom, Olanipekun dabbled in pro bono work.
He remembers the case of three orphaned young boys in a remote village in Anambra State in southwest Nigeria, who vandalized the roof of the house they inherited from their parents to prevent their uncles from taking the building.
“This was between 2011 and 2012. They were underage and didn’t know what to do when their uncles had them arrested,” says Olanipekun, who attended every court hearing in the boys’ case until he managed to get them out.
A 2023 field study by The Hague Institute for Innovation of Law (HiiL), an international non-government organization committed to people-centered justice, found that 81% of Nigerians experienced at least one legal problem in the past year, with many facing multiple problems mostly related to disputes with neighbors, domestic violence, land disputes, crime, and housing issues.
“The difficulty in gaining timely justice in Nigeria was what inspired Gavel and later [the] Podus application which launched in 2021,” says Olanipekun.
“Podus connects any person in need of legal aid with an available pro bono lawyer near them so that in the shortest possible time, they can get justice,” he explained.
The simple interface, which started as a mobile application before shifting online as a web app, requires complainants to sign up, then fill out an online form where they select one of nine categories including rape, extortion, domestic abuse or defamation, select the region, then describe details of their case and add their name and contact information.
Clients are then connected to one of Gavel’s network of 200 volunteer lawyers in their vicinity all over Nigeria, who take on their case in return for appearance fees and stipends to cover basic costs, which Gavel pays through funds donated by sponsors, partners, and agencies like Osiwa, Luminate, Civic Hive, Trust Africa and BudgIT. Partnering lawyers are thoroughly vetted through an extensive examination of their record as human rights advocates and their contribution to their local bar associations.
According to Adewole Ibukun, Head of Procurement at Gavel, the organization has helped release over 5,000 pretrial detainees.
“Many of them were remanded in custody because they didn’t have a lawyer,” Ibukun told Quartz. “Others are summarily locked up by police for crimes they did not commit, in which case Gavel facilitates their bail.”
A 2021 Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) report about Nigeria’s human rights record over the last two decades supports Ibukun’s statements.
The report highlights unlawful detention as a persistent human rights violation, whereby “citizens continue to be unlawfully detained under harrowing pre-trial detention for years without formal charges being brought against them,” noting that Nigerian police routinely charge suspects with grave offenses to detain them while making little effort to investigate or prosecute the cases.
A tech-assisted lifeline at a critical human moment
Gavel’s services were a lifeline for Shola Usman, who,, had lost access to her bank accounts and was forced to borrow to stay out of prison. Usman herself — a wealthy business owner — doesn’t technically fit the traditional profile of Gavel’s pro bono clients. But the company made an exception, as she had been left with no access to her own funds.
“A friend sent me the link on WhatsApp and as soon as I created my case I was assigned to Barrister Oluwaseyi Arowosebe. Gavel has been supporting me since August 2022,” said Usman.
Despite its complexity, Usman’s case appears simple compared to that of Daniel Jagaba, a 51-year-old father of three who was falsely accused of rape in 2017.
Jagaba, who was precariously employed in menial work like house-painting and carpentry, was released soon after his arrest for lack of sufficient evidence.
“But the police officer who was investigating the case rearrested me and demanded a bribe of 50,000 naira [equivalent of $137 at the time] to grant me bail,” Jagaba told Quartz. “When I failed to raise the money, I was kept in pre-trial detention pending the transfer of my case to an appropriate court.”
When the case was filed at a High Court, the trial lingered between 2018 and 2019. Then, the covid pandemic broke out, delaying proceedings another two years, Jagaba said, at which point the case was moved to another high court presided over by a new judge who restarted the trial.
“I was in prison when the Gavel team visited to offer their pro bono services. My lawyer had abandoned me after stripping me of what little money I had, so I asked for their help and told them my story,” he said.
“When Gavel eventually started to follow up on my case, the corrupt prosecutor, who I found out while in detention had conspired with the policeman, stopped attending the court hearings,” Jagaba said.
Jagaba’s Gavel-appointed lawyer made several attempts to strike down the case for want of diligent prosecution, until Jagaba was finally acquitted and discharged in October 2022.
A path to change
Lawyer and Gavel’s legal representative in Abuja, Abioye Mosunmola, cites procedural bottlenecks as a reason behind the slow legal processes.
“Judges still write in longhand during court proceedings, and there are many other outdated practices,” Mosunmola told Quartz.
“Gavel’s tech initiatives propose the infusion of tech into court processes to make it easier for lawyers to carry out their legal tasks, and for judges to dispense justice,” Oluwaseyi Arowosebe, a lawyer and consultant with Gavel, told Quartz.
“The police arbitrarily arrest innocent citizens and detain them for weeks and months without a remand warrant and without charging them to court,” said Arowosebe. “Corrupt judges sell justice to the highest bidders, and innocent people are robbed of their fundamental human rights by state actors who have no respect for the rule of law.”
In a collaboration between Gavel and the National Judicial Council (NJC) in 2022, the Oyo State Judiciary deployed the Nigeria Case Management System, a web platform that seeks to automate case flow management in the courts to facilitate the safe electronic exchange of documents between the different court levels.
In Lagos, Gavel partnered with the Lagos State Ministry of Justice to deploy the Justice Clock, which gives complainants access to their case files and legal advice online.
But these initiatives are no panacea for the country’s systemic challenges to the rule of law.
The corruption and dysfunction that plagues Nigeria’s legal system has been thoroughly documented, in particular the human rights violations committed by the now defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), a unit of the Nigerian police tasked with fighting violent crimes.
In October 2020 the #EndSARS campaign in which Gavel took part, saw at least 56 people killed by excessive use of force by the police and military, leading to the disbandment of the unit by presidential decree within days.
But other pro-democracy actions were met with resistance, according to Nelson Olanipekun, Gavel’s founder, citing his organization’s recent bid to report what it calls“compromised” Court of Appeal judges to the National Judicial Council (NJC), the constitutional body responsible for disciplining errant judges.
Quartz received a copy of the NJC’s acknowledgement that it had received Gavel’s Nov. 28 petition regarding the “recklessness and gross abuse of the revised judicial code of conduct for judicial officers” in Nigeria, informing Gavel that “action is being taken.”
“Yet despite the assurances, the NJC still promoted the accused judges to the Supreme Court,” said Olanipekun.
“The repressive nature of state actors is one hell of a problem to contend with,” said Olanipekun.
This story is published in collaboration with Egab.
By Chidi M. Nwachukwu, Quartz
Related story: Set them free! The judge who liberates Nigerians forgotten in jail
Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote is planning to set up an oil trading arm, likely based in London, to help run crude and products supply for his new refinery in Nigeria, six sources familiar with the matter said.
The move would reduce the role of the world's biggest trading firms, which have been negotiating for months to provide the refinery with financing and crude oil in exchange for products exports. The giant 650,000 barrel-per-day refinery is set to redraw global oil and fuel flows and the trading community is closely watching the way it will operate.
Dangote, whose wealth is estimated by Forbes at $12.7 billion, did not reply to several comment requests.
BP, Trafigura and Vitol among others have met Dangote in Lagos and London in recent weeks to offer loans for the some $3 billion in working capital the refinery needs to buy large amounts of crude, trading sources told Reuters.
The traders asked the refinery to repay loans with fuel exports but so far they have signed no deals as Dangote worries they would reduce his control of the project – and potentially his profit, the sources said. Dangote has also met state-backed firms in his search for cash and crude.
"He is going to try and do it himself," an industry source told Reuters. Sources told Reuters the new trading team will be led by ex-Essar trader Radha Mohan. He joined Dangote in 2021 as director of international supply and trading, according to his Linkedin profile. Two sources said the team was in the process of hiring two new traders.
The refinery took nearly a decade to complete -- and came in at a cost of $20 billion, some $6 billion over budget.
The plant has refined around 8 million barrels of oil between January and February and will take months to get to full capacity. So far, Vitol has prepaid for some product cargoes to help the refinery buy crude, while Trafigura has swapped some crude oil in exchange for future fuel cargoes, sources with knowledge said. Geneva-based Vitol and Trafigura declined to comment.
By Julia Payne and Libby George, Reuters
Related story: Anti-graft body of Nigeria visits Dangote Group in forex probe
Binance will discontinue its naira (NGN) services in response to heightened regulatory scrutiny in Nigeria, it said in a blog post today. The cryptocurrency exchange will begin delisting any existing NGN spot trading pairs by Thursday, March 7. It advised users to withdraw, trade, or convert their NGN assets into crypto before the service discontinuation. Any remaining NGN balances in users' spot and funding wallets will be converted to USDT on Friday, March 8, it noted.
By Wednesday, March 6, Binance will also delist NGN services on its auto-invest tool and remove the currency from the list of supported payment options on Binance Pay.
This development follows recent regulatory actions by the Nigerian government, which imposed restrictions on both local and foreign cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance. As a result, users have encountered accessibility challenges on the Binance website.
Last week, the Central Bank of Nigeria, the country's apex bank, said Nigeria was losing out on taxes from unregistered crypto exchanges and accused Binance of facilitating "illicit flows from sources and users who we cannot adequately identify" to the tune of $26 billion.
What followed was the reported detention of two Binance officials after they were invited to Nigeria to discuss the regulatory restrictions. According to Bloomberg, the officials were held because Binance was operating illegally in Nigeria. The detained officials may allegedly face charges related to currency manipulation, tax evasion, and illegal operations, although formal charges have not yet been filed.
Several reports indicate that the Nigerian government, alleging Binance's involvement in manipulating foreign exchange rates through currency speculation and rate fixing, intensified its scrutiny of the platform by requesting nearly $10 billion in compensation. However, both Nigeria and Binance have refuted these claims regarding the fine.
The ongoing legal dispute between the world's largest crypto platform and Africa's top crypto market is still unresolved. Recently, Nigeria's parliament exacerbated the situation by threatening to issue a warrant of arrest for the company’s executives. Furthermore, they summoned Binance CEO Richard Teng to provide explanations regarding investigations into alleged involvement in money laundering and terror financing, as reported by local sources.
By Tage Kene-Okafor, TechCrunch
Related stories: Nigeria Summons Binance CEO Over Alleged Terror Financing
The report said before the introduction of state education plans, the average girls’ secondary school enrollment declined and rates of early marriage increased.
The study – Gender Review and Advocacy For Gender Responsive Education Sector Planning (GRESP) – was authored by the development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC) with the support of the Malala Fund.
The report covers a gender review of 11 years (2011 to 2023) of State Education Sector Plans (SESPs) in Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara States.
SESPs is the only official education policy in Nigeria that mainstreams girls’ education goals within the education system and establishes performance indicators for government outcomes within the basic education system.
There was a five per cent increase in secondary school enrollment rates across the six states during the period of the education sector plans and the rate of child marriage fell by an average of 6.9 per cent across the states during the period of the plan, the report said.
It further pointed to an intersectionality between the two outcome indicators – enrollment and early marriage. Jigawa State, with the highest increase in enrollment for girls at the basic education level, was also the state with the second most significant reduction in the age of marriage.
Conversely, Kaduna State, which experienced the lowest change in enrollment rates for girls within the same period, also experienced the least change in the age of marriage for girls among the six states.
In terms of positive change in girls’ education outcomes, Jigawa State also takes the lead, followed by Kano, Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina and Kaduna.
Methodology
The dRPC researchers aimed to generate empirical evidence to show how the components of education sector plans and operational plans deliver a gender-responsive education system that keeps girls in school and supports their learning outcomes.
Applying a mixed method research methodology, the gender review first conducted a trend analysis of two girls’ education outcomes to establish patterns in the period before sector plans were introduced in Nigeria and the period during education sector planning in Nigeria.
At the launch of the report last Tuesday, experts said the review is timely and significant, coming against the background of the exogenous shocks to the school system in Nigeria. The shocks include COVID-19 and its impacts and the incessant attacks on schools and abductions of schoolchildren in the region
The researchers also conducted a Focus Group Discussion with a total of 180 school-age children.
Factors threatening school enrollment
The insecurity in north-west Nigeria has led to the compulsory closure of many schools. This is a major factor that would likely stop students, especially girls, from achieving their education plans for the future, the report states.
“Compulsory school closures had a significant impact on students’ psychological, social, and mental well-being, causing a large number of students to forget nearly everything they had learned at school prior to the start of the lockdown and school closure,” it added.
The attacks on some schools may have also deterred some students from going to school. About 14 per cent of female and male participants from educational schools and 7 per cent of girls in all-girls schools mentioned that insecurity and school attacks were factors that could stop them from achieving their educational plans.
The researchers also found that while insecurity was a factor, poverty and lack of financial support are also a threat to future education while COVID-19 also played an impact.
When asked about the impact of COVID-19 on their education, 13 per cent of students from girls’ schools responded indicating a loss of interest in continuing education as a result of COVID-19.
No boys gave such a response, the report said.
Other factors mentioned by participants included drug abuse and peer pressure, bribery and corruption, fear of not succeeding in school, fear of not getting employment after graduation, and discouragement by the community members.
The report noted that gender responsiveness in education sector planning calls for flexibility to adjust to these unpredictable challenges emerging from the environment impacting negatively on the education of all children, especially girls.
Second stage of analysis
The second stage of the gender review sought to explore relationships between the trend in girls’ education outcomes established in the first step in the analysis and the structures and functions of bureaucracy prescribed by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) model of gender-responsive education.
The GPE model of Gender Responsive Education Sector Strategic Planning (GRESP) argues that during the formation phase of planning, the application of three specific process factors can contribute towards positive girls’ education outcomes.
The factors include: gender equality and girls’ education policies and strategies integrated into education sector plans; Stakeholders, including CSOs and local communities as well as government departments that are consulted during the design; and the GRESP has adequate financial resources allocated to gender equality and girls education strategies.
Here, the analysis found clear and consistent correlations, thus confirming the prescriptive powers of the GPE model of gender-responsive education planning.
Findings show that Jigawa, Kano, and Katsina states budgeted for activities derived from State Education Sector Plans (SESP). While in Kaduna, Sokoto, and Zamfara states, there was less alignment between the activities of the state education sector plans and annual budgets.
In terms of SESP activities in the annual budget, Jigawa State emerged as the state that allocated the most funds to SESP activities. On the contrary, Zamfara, Katsina, and Sokoto performed poorly in terms of allocating funds for SESP activities.
Call for Action
The report noted that with new administrations at the federal and state levels, this is the time for a definitive understanding of what works for girls’ education and what has not worked for girls in the education system of states implementing education sector plans over the 11 years of 2011 to 2023 in Nigeria.
Experts said the findings of the report provide an opportunity to strengthen the gender transformative plans through the advocacy of civil society stakeholders. They said evidence-informed advocacy is critical in Nigeria in 2023 given the recent findings of the 2022 UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report, which showed that the out-of-school population of Nigeria virtually doubled between 2016 and 2022 to 20 million.
Trailing behind India and Pakistan, Nigeria now stands as the third country with the largest out-of-school population. The majority of these children are recognised by the Nigerian government to be girls, many of whom are in the northwestern states with education plans.
In its 2018 data on out-of-school children, the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) reported the estimated number in Nigeria as 10.1 million out of which there were approximately 3.2 million out-of-school children cumulatively in the six northwestern states covered in the dRPC report.
The 3.2 million is about 31.84 per cent of the total estimated number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. Out of this number, 1.9 million were boys and 1.2 million were girls.
Why the six north-west states?
In terms of criteria for selecting the states studied, the researchers said the review of the gender responsiveness of education sector plans of Jigawa, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, and Zamfara was “strategic and important for generating evidence of what works for girls’ education.”
The six states are accessing the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) funding.
The GPE is an independently governed partnership that includes national governments, multilateral organisations, civil society, the private sector, and foundations.
Established in 2002 as the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, the GPE has evolved and now designs evidence-informed and gender-responsive education sector plans.
GPE contends that gender responsiveness in education sector plans offers the most comprehensive and systematic approach to delivering change in girls’ education.
For a country such as Nigeria, GPE serves as a mobilisation point for donor coordination of multiple development impact investors, including the World Bank and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to fund the country-led basic education interventions very often with a specific focus on girls’ education.
Between 2012 and 2020 when Nigeria became a GPE partner, a total of $101 million has been awarded in grants to the West African country, of which $81 million has been disbursed as of January 2020.
States’ performance
In 2020, dRPC organised a gender workshop for the recipients of the grants to assess their education sector plans in terms of gender transformative, gender-responsive, integrated, or gender-blind characterisation.
The result shows that delegates from Kano and Jigawa states assessed their respective education sector plans as gender blind. Delegates from Sokoto and Katsina assessed their education sector plans as gender-responsive.
Meanwhile, delegates from Kaduna State assessed their plan as ranging between gender responsive and gender transformative. This was highlighted by the fact that the state has done much to mainstream gender into the education sector plan.
“We have rated Kaduna to be between transformative and responsive (high on the responsive and just going into the transformative scale),” the researchers said.
By Kabir Yusuf, Premium Times
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