One of the things I have come to detest about Nigeria is how individuals, especially the ones with means, get to use security agencies like they are personal thugs. Once upon a time in Nigeria, when you needed to settle scores without recourse to the law, you hired urchins from a motor park to beat up people. These days, you use the police or the Department of State Services for the same purpose. Both agencies differ in scope and responsibilities, but they fulfil similar functions of punishing people on behalf of those who can afford to summon them. They so cheaply make themselves available to service anti-democratic causes that they leave you no doubt about which master they serve.

Many instances of people using security agencies to abuse others do not make it to the news, but all the ones that do reflect the shameful fact that Nigeria has too many puny-sized gods in high places. The latest example is the case of Chioma Okoli, a Facebook user who shared her thoughts on a brand of tomato paste, Nagiko tomato mix, on social media. She complained that the product contained too much sugar, and suggested it might be harming people. Boom! She was arrested and has since been transferred to the police headquarters in the Federal Capital Territory.

Briefly setting aside the very troublesome fact that someone could be arrested over a review of a product, you must wonder why the company marketing the product, would meet a review of their product with such imperiousness. If they failed at managing a simple situation like responding to a product review tactfully, then we must also worry about the quality control of their production process. The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control should probably investigate them because the truth does not need that amount of high-handedness to be defended.

In this age of online marketing and social media networks, businesses contend with subjective consumer tastes in ways they probably could not have imagined decades ago. We live in times when almost everything (and everyone) has become a product, and consuming them warrants feedback. There is no escaping the tyranny of public judgment. Even religious organisations are now regularly dragged to consumer review websites to be reviewed. People will scrutinise based on other people’s momentary feelings, and unfortunately, the most brutal opinion will stay permanently online. Anyone and anything can be hurt by public opinion. Whether or not the intentions were malicious, mischievous, or an expression of the reviewer’s sincere thoughts, we all live with this vulnerability.

For businesses, harsh reviews require having (and maintaining) organisational purpose and deft public relations management. Since Okoli did not tag them in her Facebook post, they could have ignored her. The exchange would have passed like the many million small things people chinwag on social media every minute. Even if they must respond to a reviewer, they could have done so from their official account. All they needed to do was list the contents of their products to counter her assertions that their product had too much sugar and was therefore injurious to public health. By instead responding with police arrest, they have shown that they are the kind of people who will force anything down your throat.

As they have shown themselves, their actions are not isolated. As I stated earlier, there are many instances of this abuse of power happening every single day but they just do not make it to the news. Too many people in Nigeria cultivate networks of access to power to abuse others and thereby assert their self-importance. From politicians to government officials and even at varying middling levels, it is all the same story of disproportionate use of force over what could have been resolved through civil means.

Take another recent example of the Ogun State Local Government Chairman, Wale Adedayo, who petitioned authorities that their state governor, Dapo Abiodun, had hijacked allocations meant for local governments. What he alleged surprised no one. There is a reason the local government in Nigeria is comatose. The wonder is not that one person eventually spoke up, but that other local government chairpersons have been (and are still) quiet about it. In a place where governors are not above accountability, the response would be to disprove the claim. Because it is Nigeria, the DSS arrested Adedayo instead!

It was a turn of events that shows that many things in Nigeria just do not make sense. Why was any of that the business of the DSS? If the governor is defamed by the accusation, he has enough resources to pursue a civil case against his accuser. Now, Adedayo is being tried for making an allegation that he “knew was a false allegation and likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace.” The officers who wrote the charge sheet likely do comedy part-time. The Nigeria police might not be outstanding where it matters, but give it to them when they want to punish you, they know how to strain logic to make spurious charges.

Again, another recent example of the DSS being used for personal scores happened when their official was summoned by an unnamed Nigerian whose tailor did not deliver on their promise. Some things one hears in Nigeria and one’s head bursts. How does anyone consider it appropriate to call a DSS official to harass a tailor in the market? How did the officer too not think it was beneath their professional profile? That is an indication of how unserious that organisation has become.

There is a similar story of ex-First Lady Aisha Buhari who also sent the police to waylay a young man who had written an unflattering comment about her on then Twitter (nowX). Listening to the police officer who arrested the young man testify in court detailing how they went about it, you realised how entirely petty our leaders can be. Their mean-spiritedness is, unfortunately, serially enabled by security agents who seem unable to define their role within Nigeria’s so-called democracy.

Mubarak Bala, the Kano atheist, is another person suffering because we have a police force that has conditioned its reflexes to attend to the errands of oppressive forces. One man, ironically a lawyer, petitioned the police against Bala and threatened Muslim violence if they did not punish him. That was enough for the police to have him arrested, incarcerated, and eventually imprisoned. Tani Olohun (real name Adegbola Abdulazeez) is languishing in jail for the same reason. Time and space will not permit me to reel out more examples, some of whom are even pastors, who have also used the police to arrest individuals over personal issues. They could have pursued a civil case, but no, they must use force because what is at stake for them is proving themselves as connected to power.

It was bad enough when politicians and regular individuals used the police (or the DSS) to harass regular citizens. Now things have degenerated to the point that even a business operation thinks that is the way to address issues. Gone are the days when customers were always right because buying something with their money gives them the privilege to be right or wrong about their assessment of a product. Writing an unflattering review of a tomato can now get you arrested. The resources expended in taking Okoli to police headquarters would probably fuel the patrol vehicles of their hapless officers currently begging for money from road transport workers as you read this, but they would rather spend it proving a useless point.

In the Bible, Keren-happuch was the youngest of the three beautiful daughters of Job, who against the norms of a patriarchal society, inherited her father’s vast latter-day wealth along with her two other sisters. But in the sometimes inexplicable twist of fate, this is the story of another Keren-happuch whose sun set before it rose.

Her story as told by her mother was hard to follow. Even if I had eaten the head of a tortoise, the fabled medicine for anhedonia, the woman’s story, especially her futile search for justice, would still have broken my heart into many pieces.

Perhaps you have heard it, too. It’s the story of Mrs. Vivian Akpagher whose 14-year-old daughter, Keren-happuch, died two years ago in circumstances that still leave the woman and her family broken and traumatised.

Sometime in June 2021, Keren-happuch Akpagher, a student of Premiere Academy, Lugbe, Abuja, had managed to place a call to her mother to complain that she had eye infection and needed proper medical attention outside the school. It wasn’t a normal call, according to her mother. After an earlier call by a matron who appeared to have tried to downplay the situation, Keren-happuch used the phone of a sympathetic teacher to call her mother.

Unusual call

Her mother was confused. The Keren-happuch she knew wasn’t the kind of daughter that took her studies lightly or one to raise a false alarm. Yes, she was diabetic, but she had learned how to use her insulin and also to watch her diet. So, what was this about? As far as teenagers go, her mother said, she was a jovial, happy, lovable girl who along with her three siblings – all boys – had come to terms with the passing of their father.

Of all the things her mother thought about when Keren-happuch made that second desperate call from school, the last thing on her mind was that that could be the beginning of her last days with her daughter.

After she arranged for her to be brought to a hospital from school in company with the matron and it was time for them to take her back, she refused to follow the staff, insisting that her mother must follow them to the school and get a pass to take her home.

The school staff tried to assure her that Keren-happuch would be fine, that it was only a minor problem, perhaps a bacterial infection, which would be managed at the sick bay. But her mother instinct kicked in. She brushed aside the assurances and drove behind them to Premiere Academy. On arrival, the misery she was subjected to before she could finally take her daughter home was an indication of the foreboding days ahead.

Like Keren, like Syl

She was vetted and coldly scrutinised. And in a school where she had two other children, her ID was taken and snapped at the gate before Keren-happuch was finally released to her after hours of cat-and-mouse with the authorities. As she departed, she had an eerie feeling that she was walking into a trap, but the relief from retrieving her daughter and hope that she would be fine overcame her sense of the looming danger.

Sadly, what she was afraid of would not only happen to her, a slightly different but no less traumatic variety of it would happen again five months later to another family in another school nearly 700 kilometres away in Lagos. Grief likes company.

Like Mrs. Akpagher, the Oromonis also had their son, Sylvester, as a boarding student in Dowen College, one of the elite private schools in Lagos. For a long time, school bullies and absent-minded administrators ignored Sylvester’s anguished complaints, which he recorded in videos.

His parents obviously didn’t notice on time, too. Everyone, it seemed, turned a blind eye until Sylvester took ill and died from circumstances related to his abuse shortly before his 12th birthday.  

Abuse and bullying have become epidemics in our schools. According to a 2007 study by Elizabeth Egbochukwu in the Journal of Social Sciences, four out of five children are at risk, the sort of risk that may have claimed the lives of Keren-happuch and Sylvester within five months of each other and which Keren-happuch’s mother probably thought she could prevent by rushing to take her child home on that day.

Of course, schools love to show off their safety records and virtually all would claim low incidence and tolerance of abuse. But even at 99 percent, the one percent of students who may die or be damaged from abuse or bullying is some family’s 100 percent.

What I feared…

As Keren-happuch’s mother’s story goes, the night after she took her daughter home, the girl became gravely ill. She had to be taken to Queen’s Clinic, Area 6, Abuja, where urine and virginal swap tests had allegedly revealed dead spermatozoa, apart from a piece of festering condom also removed from her inside.

When her personal effects were retrieved from Premiere Academy, she had marked a place in her Bible, “What I always feared has happened to me (Job 3:25).” There was a strong suspicion at the hospital that she may have been sexually abused.

Her mother said she was told her daughter died from sepsis. She claimed that she kept officials of the school informed from the moment of Keren-happuch’s admission, up to the point where she later died and about all that happened, including what the doctor said.

On its part, the school has denied any wrongdoing, insisting that Keren-happuch wasn’t gravely ill when her mother took her home and that she might have died from her mother’s negligence. The school has also reported the doctor who allegedly said a used condom was retrieved from Keren-happuch to the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN).

With Keren-happuch’s mother and the school at dagger’s drawn, you would expect the police to take a genuine interest to find out the truth. But after two years on this case, it’s beginning to look like even if you beat the police on the head with the facts, they would still not recognise them. On occasions when the police are determined to work, they do very well, in spite of the challenges.

But when the police decide to bungle a case – which is more often than not – they make such a thorough mess that leaves no sensible margin of common sense whatsoever for either the process or outcome of the matter.

More questions than answers

How, for example, can the police explain that neither Keren-happuch’s mother who was squeezed to pay over N1 million for her daughter’s DNA nor her representatives were present at Queen’s Clinic when DNA was taken, whereas the school and the police were there? And how come Mrs. Akpagher who paid for the test can no longer have access to it?

How can the police explain that two years after Keren-happuch’s death, the matter is still languishing in the court, while police sources tell the press they are being leaned upon to kill the matter? How? And isn’t this malicious official negligence the same reason two years after Sylvester’s death, the police have also failed to do what is required to get the coroner’s report ready?

It’s not only the police that should be getting a beating here. The report in LEADERSHIP on Sunday also indicated that the House of Representatives in the 9th National Assembly took a casual look at the matter, and almost immediately abandoned it, since it’s not typically the sort of case that allows them to eat with two hands.

The current assembly, especially Senator Ireti Kingibe, representing the FCT and the House Committee Chairman on FCT, Muktar Aliu Betara, will do well to revisit the matter immediately.

Nothing will bring back Keren-happuch, of course. But this is a good test case for the new Inspector General of Police Kayode Egbetokun, who has promised that the force on his watch would turn a new leaf.

He can’t walk past this crime scene without justice for Keren-happuch’s memory. It was Keren-happuch yesterday and Sylvester the next day. The only incentive an abuser needs to get their next victim is for Egbetokun to do nothing about Keren-happuch and Sylvester.

Lately, there has been a raging debate on the part of the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF), centered around the existence and continuing utility of the National Social Register (NSR) of the Poor and Vulnerable Households (PVHHs) in Nigeria; a needless debate that should never have started at all, much less rage on for the period that it did.

Needless debate, in the sense that the register is something that has been in the works from way back since 2016, when the National Social Safety - Net Coordinating Office (NASSCO) that oversees the NSR was established under the office of the former Vice President, before its subsequent transfer to the then newly created Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, in August 2019.

The NSR itself represents the international best practice for the targeting of the poor and vulnerable of any nation. In addition, being the result of a decidedly deliberate effective collaboration mechanism between the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) and 36 states and the FCT (yes, that dreaded “and” prefix to the FCT again!) that commenced with the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between NASSCO and each of the 36 states plus the FCT, the NSR is an aggregate of the respective State Social Registers (SSRs) of the 37 entities.

The SSRs, on the other hand, are each generated by the respective State Operations Coordinating Units (SOCU) of NASSCO in all the states of the federation, including the FCT, which are each managed under the respective states' Ministries responsible for planning, and also manned by personnel drawn from the civil service bureaucracy of each state.

It is actually the various SOCU offices domiciled at the subnational level, through their respective state - level personnel, that are deployed to carry out the task identifying the PVHHs in the targeted communities at the selected Local Government Areas (LGAs), Wards and Communities that have carefully been identified and ranked. This is done in conjunction with a multi - sectoral team at the LGA level by way of geographical or poverty targeting, using the poverty headcount generated from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) national Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) survey, and high - resolution poverty maps on satellite imagery.

It is followed by community - driven sensitisation and engagement to establish community lists by way of Community - Based Targeting and Proxy-Means Testing through focus groups discussions, comprising the men, women, youths, the elderly, PLWDs, and minority groups, for example. Each of these groups is mandated to work separately to first define precisely what poverty means and represents in their own community, and then go ahead to establish a list of PVHHs within that community that meet the defined criteria for being poor and vulnerable.

The next stage is to publicly discuss and develop a harmonised community list of the PVHHs generated by the different focus groups, with a copy left behind with the community for records and reference purposes. Following from that, CBT teams comprising State and LGA sectoral teams are then formed and deployed to visit and enumerate each household on the harmonised list. The CBT teams will obtain demographic and socioeconomic data of each household member via digital tablets fitted with a Mobile App designed for that purpose, along with other digital identification information, where that is available, which is then stored in an electronic database for cleaning and consolidation.

The final stage involves data cleaning and storage, during which the enumerated harmonized data is reviewed and cleaned up to correct misspelt information and also eliminate possible duplicates. The resulting cleaned up data is stored in the respective SSR database fully supported and managed by the SOCU of that state, with the data contained therein made freely available for use by the specific state to implement its own dedicated sectoral intervention programmes. The SSR is subsequently transmitted electronically to the central database for consolidation into the NSR.

The reasoning behind FGN’s commendable effort to generate and develop the NSR, therefore, is to commence the all - important process of harmonising and sanitizing all humanitarian and social protection interventions across the country. This is by way of having a single national register of the PVHHs nationwide for all operators to be able to utilize for the purpose of implementing their social intervention programmes and activities nationwide. Its primary intent and design objective is for any entity or organization desirous of providing any form of humanitarian assistance or social intervention in any of the communities on the register to mine their targeted beneficiary data from the NSR. They would then proceed to visit the specific area of the community to verify and satisfy themselves about the existence of the households and individuals on the mined data, ahead of the eventual delivery of their humanitarian assistance or social intervention to their targeted population. 

As Consultant to the International Labour Organisation on the ILO/NASSCO ECDEVCO Project on “Strengthening and Expanding the NSR as a Shock - Responsive Social Protection System in Nigeria” a couple of years ago, I had the privilege of joining two high profile meetings back then; one, a strictly online meeting involving high ranking federal government officials, and the other, a mix of physical and online meeting with top officials from the 36 states and the FCT who joined in from their respective locations. The meetings were called to discuss several issues that also included social intervention programmes, amongst others, and it was clear from the contributions by several participants at the two meetings that a lot more needed to be done in order to sensitise and clear a number of misconceptions around the NSR itself at the time.

In line with that, a Ministerial Dialogue on Socialising the NSR was organised by NASSCO at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja on Tuesday, February 16, 2021. The event was designed to kick-start the planned National and Zonal Stakeholder Consultation process in support of socializing and creating demand for the adoption and use of the register for social development initiatives across all levels of government.

The Dialogue had several Ministers and Heads of relevant Government Agencies, International and Local NGOs, and development partners in attendance, with many others joining remotely. It also provided a veritable platform to formally present the NSR database for the MDAs to mine for the purpose of implementing their interventions targeted at the poor and vulnerable across the country. In addition, the NSR also provides a framework for the engagement and consolidation of the efforts of all donors, implementation partners, and NGOs operating across the entire spectrum of the humanitarian and social intervention space nationwide.

It is a great testimony to the enduring impact of that dialogue, along with the continuing efforts by NASSCO to generate and sustain the required demand since then, that a total of well over 50 social assistance interventions are currently mining and delivering their respective programmes nationwide through the NSR, with the numbers set to continue to grow. This is in addition to the National Cash Transfer Office (NCTO), which serves as the primary vehicle for dispensing the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) intervention to some 2 million beneficiaries across the country, under the World Bank funded National Social Safety - Nets Project (NASSP) of the FGN.

So, for any or all of the 36 state governors to feign ignorance of the existence of the NSR or question its credibility now, it is equivalent to them denying the existence of their respective SSRs in many respects, which are all under the direct supervision of their Planning Ministries and state level civil servants whose credibility they are likewise questioning by extension. It is even more perplexing if such a denial is coming from a second term Governor like the three of them that formally conveyed the NGF’s wholesale rejection of the NSR on the excuse of credibility issues around it, following the conclusion of the National Economic Council (NEC) meeting of Thursday, July 20, 2023. It was at that meeting that the planned disbursement of the sum of N5 billion per state was arrived at, to facilitate the purchase and distribution of palliatives to help cushion the debilitating fallouts of the twin policies around fuel subsidy removal and exchange rates unification on the citizens in their respective states.

The general belief at the time was that the NGF’s surprising stance against the NSR might have been predicated around their legitimate desire to be directly in control of the distribution of the palliatives to the beneficiaries in their respective states. That being the case, they could still have realised their objective of accessing those funds directly, without necessarily having to discredit a document that is not only the first ever in the history of the targeted delivery of social intervention in Nigeria, but also stands out as the best and most comprehensive of its kind anywhere on the Continent.

Another important element to consider is the fact that the political affiliation of the individual household members is not a factor in the generation of the NSR database. And since poverty is an equal opportunity life’s circumstance that does not discriminate amongst members of different political parties in any way, the NSR could easily have provided a perfect platform to distribute  the palliatives in a nondiscriminatory fashion across all states, especially in those communities that have already been captured on the database. This is in addition to also providing an opportunity to fashion out a unified and standardised means of delivering the palliatives across all parts of the country.

With the release of the funds to the respective states, however, that opportunity was lost, and I recall jokingly telling a couple of friends that we may likely end up witnessing 36 plus one different ways of distribution of the palliatives, depending on the model and approach adopted by each state. The distribution models might not have hit 37 just yet, but we sure have seen all manner of approaches in use out there, along with the numerous issues associated with each of them, even as a number of states have still not commenced the distribution of their own palliatives as we speak. Coming back to the sharing formula adopted at the NEC meeting, it can also be argued that the NEC should have adopted the equity model in the allocation of the palliatives, as opposed to the equality model that delivered the same ratio of N5 billion and 5 trucks of rice for each state, regardless of their population and poverty indices realities.

The conditions that gave rise to the decision to give out the palliatives in the first instance have no doubt affected all parts of the country in almost equal measure, but the impact will conceivably not have been proportionally the same across the board, with some states evidently feeling it far more than others. This is purely on account of certain baseline factors and considerations, and nothing else. These factors include the population of the state and its corresponding ranking on the NBS MPI table, amongst others. Therefore, even without necessarily naming any state, the population of the poor and vulnerable persons alone in certain states will expectedly be far more than the entire population of some other ones, before and after the introduction of the twin policies that informed the distribution of the said palliatives, for example.

As such, a more scientific approach in the form of a sharing formula that factors and assigns specified weighted percentages of the larger pool to be shared amongst all states, on the basis of such parameters as equal distribution, population of the state, its ranking on the MPI survey, the number of its local governments, and other similar considerations along those lines would have delivered a far more equitable and just outcome for all. It is, therefore, quite surprising that every state seemed very happy and content with the arrangement, such that not a single one of them was reported to have raised any issues around the splitting of the amount into 36 or 37 equal parts.

In conclusion, the NSR is a living document that is still in the works and is, therefore, set to continue to be strengthened with time. The design is also such that, as the country continues to record successes in its stated objective of lifting people out of poverty, those households and individuals in them that have been so lifted will gradually be expunged from the register at specified intervals, implying that the NSR will also be expected to also shrink at some point in the future. From the latest figures at my disposal as at July 31, 2023, the NSR had reached 764 local governments, 8,000 plus electoral wards, and 177,421 communities in all 36 states and the FCT. The NSR also covered a total of 15,730,004 poor and vulnerable households, comprising 62,819,214 individuals as at the same date. This is in addition to another 2.7 million validated individuals and 1.12 million more on two other NSR subsets; the Rapid Response Register (RRR) and the Unified Register of Beneficiaries (URB), as at March 31, 2022 and April 25, 2023 respectively, based on the latest available figures.

None of the 36 states and/or the FCT has anything remotely close to that in terms of either depth or scope, outside of their respective SSRs which, again, represent the subunits and necessary building blocks of the NSR, in pretty much the same manner the national database of the INEC Register of Voters is compiled. The NGF, through its 36 members, might thus do well to embrace and make effective use of the NSR for the purpose of delivering their own interventions to their respective PVHHs, as opposed to seeking to needlessly discredit and jettison it in the manner they just recently tried to do.

The Labour Party has urged its supporters across the country to stock their homes with necessary items ahead of the proposed indefinite strike by organized labour.

DAILY POST reports that the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and the Trade Union Congress, TUC, may be shutting down the country’s economy on October 3 to press home their demands for better working conditions.

In a statement issued on Wednesday by its National Publicity Secretary, Obiora Ifoh, the Labour Party leadership also declared support for the proposed indefinite strike.

According to the party, President Bola Tinubu’s administration does not care about the hardship bedevilling the nation following the removal of fuel subsidy.

The party lamented that the economic reality of the country has led to the withdrawal of some students by parents who are unable to remit their children’s school fees.

Part of the statement reads, “The party fully supports the resolution of the Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, and the Trade Union Congress, TUC, to embark on an industrial action slated to commence on Tuesday, October 3rd.

“Labour Party is surprised that the government claims that it has removed subsidies on petroleum products and that it now generates over a trillion naira monthly, yet finds it difficult to address workers’ demands.

“Daily, Nigerians are subjected to harsh economic realities where the inflation rate is nearing 30 per cent, where a dollar is sold above N1000, and where per capita income has depreciated.

“Many families are withdrawing their wards from schools over a hike in school fees, while criminal activities are surging daily.

“We think the Nigerian workers have shown enough patience and understanding. We are also using this medium to inform all our members and supporters to stock their homes with their necessary needs, ahead of a long-drawn mass action until victory is ascertained. No retreat, no surrender.”

Nigerian rapper, Azeez Adeshina Fashola, popularly known as Naira Marley, has said he would turn himself in to be investigated over allegations linking him to the death of his former signee, Ilerioluwa Oladimeji Aloba, aka Mohbad if the security agencies can guarantee his safety.

DAILY POST recalls that there have been calls for Naira Marley to be investigated over Mohbad’s death for allegedly sponsoring hoodlums to bully and threaten the late singer after he exited his record label, Marlian Music controversially in 2022.

Speaking in an interview with Reno Omokri on Wednesday night, Naira Marley said he was ready to submit himself for investigations on the condition that his safety is guaranteed.

He said he has been out of the country since August 31, 2023, and only found out about Mohbad’s death on social media.

He said, “I was out of Nigeria from the 31st of August. I’ve been with my family up till date. I haven’t been to Nigeria [since then] that’s one.

“Two, He [Mohbad] has left Marlian Music since… I don’t know the particular date but since 2022, he has left Marlian Music. We’ve not stopped him from dropping music or anything. He has been working with one PR [firm] or something like that ever since.

“So, when I heard about his death, it was shocking to me. I was out of the country as well. So, I have to find out what was wrong with him just as much as everybody is trying to find out. So, I’m just finding out what was wrong with him online. I’m seeing all the lies too. But we’ve to focus on the fact that: who was he with? How did he die?

“If you’re blaming me, how did I kill him? I have nothing to do with his death or whatsoever. I was so hurt when I heard that. I’ve nothing whatsoever to do with his death.”

Naira Marley added: “I am willing to return to Nigeria to answer questions if the police can guarantee my safety.

“I don’t belong to any cult. I don’t know what a cult is. I have been running away from all these people. I’m actually anti-cult.”

The police have launched an investigation into Mohbad’s demise.

The Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, said he has also invited the Department of State Services to join the investigation.

Ebonyi and Abia states led as food prices jumped by 31 per cent within in 12 months from July 2022 to July 2023.

This is according to an analysis of the ‘Selected Food Price Watch,’ a report published on a monthly basis by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The selected food items include staples such as rice(1kg), beans(1kg), bread (500g), tomatoes, beef, wheat (2kg), garri(1kg) and palm oil (1 bottle).

According to the reports, the highest food price increase was recorded in the price of yam, which jumped by 42 per cent, from N389.75 in July 2022 20 N539.41 in 2023.

This was closely followed by the price of one kilogram of rice, which increased from N467.80 to N653.49 within 12 months.

In the same vein, the price of palm oil went up by 35 per cent, from N890.67 to N1208.62 during the period in review.

Other staple foods which contributed to the food price hike included Garri (1kg), which increased by 33 per cent, from N323.17 to N429.89. 500g of sliced bread also increased from N486.27 to N651.78 (+34 per cent).

A kilogram of tomato (N446.81 to N557.96), Wheat (2kg) (N1094.72 to N1419.14), and Beef (N2118.84 to N2758.13), also accounted for some of the staple food items which recorded significant price spikes.

Further analysis of the report showed that South-Eastern states, led by Abia and Ebonyi recorded the highest food prices during the twelve-month period.

On the other hand, states within the North Central (Kogi, Niger, Benue) recorded the lowest food prices during this time.

In its latest Consumer Price Index, a report which measures inflation, the NBS had said food inflation rate in August, which was 29.34 per cent, was the primary factor which pushed headline inflation from 24.08 in July to 25.80 in August.

The NBS said, “The rise in food inflation on a year-on-year basis was caused by increases in prices of oil and fat, bread and cereals, fish, fruit, meat, vegetables and potatoes, yam and other tubers, vegetable, milk, cheese and eggs.

The legal team of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, is set to file a motion to challenge President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s plea for Chicago State University not to release privileged documents in his academic records.

Recall that Tinubu, through his lawyers, had asked Ms Maldonado to delay the order of Judge Jeffrey Gilbert, a magistrate, that ordered the university to release his academic records to Atiku.

Tinubu asked the judge to save him from suffering severe and irreparable damage by placing an emergency hold on a recent order for his university records to be released.

According to the President, the damage he would suffer would be impossible to mitigate if the order directing the release of his academic records to Atiku is not delayed for possible vacation.

“There is harm in allowing discovery on issues and documents outside the diploma,” Tinubu’s lawyers said in their full briefing to the court seeking a review of Judge Jeffrey Gilbert’s order by Ms. Maldonado, a district judge.

The request for a review and delay of the order till Monday was eventually granted by the US district judge.

Earlier, Jeffrey Gilbert had ordered Tinubu’s alma mater to provide all relevant and non-privileged documents to the applicant, Atiku, within two days.

Speaking to The PUNCH, the Special Adviser to Atiku on Public Communications, Phrank Shaibu, said the legal team had up to 48 hours to respond to the motion in the US court.

When asked on Wednesday to confirm if Atiku has filed the suit as he earlier threatened on Monday, Shaibu reassured that the former vice president would submit the motion before midnight.

He said, “I am sure you have seen his application. We are working on our response. We have up till midnight today (Wednesday) to respond to them. And we will.”

On when they expect the court to rule over the matter, Shaibu stated, “It is after we have responded to the court that it will fix the date and inform the parties.”