The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has sold dollars to Bureau De Change operators at the rate of N1,251/$1.

According to a statement issued by the apex bank’s Director, Trade and Exchange Department, Dr Hassan Mahmud, $10,000 was made available to each of the BDCs which benefited from this.

The BDCs were directed not to sell the dollars at a rate which exceeds 1.5 per cent above the purchase price, meaning that it should not be sold beyond N1,269 per dollar.

“We refer to our letter to you referenced TED/DIR/CON/GOM/001/071 in respect of the above subject wherein the CB approved a second tranche of sale of FX to eligible BDCs.

“We write to inform you of the sale of $10,000 to each BDC at the rate of N1,251/$1. The BDCs are to sell to eligible end users at a spread of not mora than 1.5 per cent above the purchase price.

“ALL eligible BDCs are directed to make the Naira payment to the underlisted CBN Naira Deposit Account Numbers before close of business on Thursday March 28, 2024, and submit confirmation of payment, with other necessary documentation, for disbursement at the appropriate CBN Branches.”

The bank threatened sanction to any BDC that breaches its directive.

“Please note that any BDC that breaches above terms shall be sanction appropriately, including outright suspension from further participation in the sale,” the statement read.

Last month, the bank had announced its decision to sell foreign exchange worth $20,000 to each eligible Bureau De Change operator across the country.

Former CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, had stopped the sales of foreign exchange to BDCs in 2021.

[DailyTrust]

Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris on Monday said there is no hiding place for Nadeem Anjarwalla, a Director of Binance who escaped from custody and fled the country after he was detained by the Nigerian Government.

The minister said the International Police (Interpol) were currently on Anjarwalla’s trail.

Idris was reacting to the Binance executive’s escape from Nigeria.

According to Idris, since Binance is an international firm, there is no way the culprit will evade arrest.

His explanation came barely few hours after the Office of the National Security Adviser confirmed that Anjarwalla, a key suspect in the ongoing criminal investigation regarding Binance’s activities in Nigeria, managed to escape lawful custody on Friday, March 22nd, 2024.

In an official statement released by the Head of Strategic Communication for the Office of the National Security Adviser, Zakari Mijinyawa, it was explained that collaborative efforts between the office, relevant security agencies, various government bodies and the international community are already underway to swiftly locate and detain the fugitive.

The statement stressed that security agencies are working with Interpol for an international arrest warrant on the suspect as preliminary investigation shows that Anjarwalla fled Nigeria using a smuggled passport.

The personnel responsible for the custody of the suspect have been arrested, and a thorough investigation is ongoing to unravel the circumstances that led to his escape from lawful detention.

It would be recalled that the Federal Government of Nigeria, like other governments around the world, has been investigating money laundering and terrorism financing transactions perpetrated on the Binance currency exchange platform.

Anjarwalla, who holds British and Kenyan nationalities and serves as Binance’s Africa regional manager, was being tried by Nigerian courts before he escaped while under a 14-day remand order issued by a court.

He was scheduled to appear before the court again on 4 April 2024.

[DailyPost]

The Federal Government on Monday said it would carry out a census of all schools in the country.

The government said the data from the census would assist in tackling the challenges facing the sector.

The Minister of Education, Prof. Tahir Mamman, stated this in Abuja on Monday at a two-day capacity-building workshop for desk officers in the ministry, its departments, and agencies.

Mamman said the school data would help the ministry to advise the state governments to move to do the right thing.

He said: “It is our plan that by the end of this year or early next year, we will be signing a partnership contract with a firm that will be working with our IT people to generate data on all schools in Nigeria.

“This is because we need to know our teachers and every single student; we need data to know the trend of learning and our school infrastructure.

“This exercise will enhance decision-making and policy formulation as the data collected and collated will aid evidence-based planning, measure implementation and progress, and identify areas where improvement is required.”

The Minister also decried the rate of learning crisis in the country saying a report submitted to him showed that some pupils found it difficult to identify numbers while many could neither read nor solve simple mathematical questions.

He however noted that impacting soft basic skills on students was a part of the ministry’s plans towards achieving its deliverables.

The Minister said the training was aimed at enhancing the capacity to track, collate, harmonise and report progress in the implementation of the Ministerial Deliverables and the Education Sector Roadmap.

“It will further ensure that government policies and programmes are effectively tracked and implemented,” he added.

He charged heads of MDAs, desk officers, and other participants to tailor their programmes, activities, and projects towards the realisation of the deliverables.

The myinister urged the participants to turn in timely, credible and reliable report of the activities, programmes and projects of their departments and organisations.

Mamman said: “The uppermost focus of the Ministry in general is in the areas of ensuring the generation of credible, timely, and reliable education data at all levels and the promotion of skill development.

“It is also in the enhancement of skill development across the entire education landscape for innovative and employability education; teacher training and development; and reducing the number of out-of-school children in Nigeria.

“I believe if we get it right in education, everything else will fall into place.

“The doctors who man our hospitals, the nurses who deliver the vaccines, the engineers in charge of our construction work—everybody is the by-product of our activities.”

The Minister commended the government of Kaduna State and the security organisations for helping in the release of the 287 abducted schoolchildren in the state.

The Senior Education Officer, Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), Ian Attfield, pledged to support the government in actualising the deliverables and addressing the learning crisis through continuing education financing.

[TheNation]

PRECISELY 22.5 kilometres south-west of Sokoto, there used to exist a community called Satiru. In March 1906, it was extinguished from the face of the earth. Three years earlier, in July 1903, the British had massacred Muhammadu Attahiru, the 11th Sultan of Sokoto together with over 1,000 of his followers, decapitating him in Burmi (near Bajoga in present day Gombe State, North-East Nigeria) and then displayed photographs of “the beheaded Sultan of Sokoto throughout Northern Nigeria”. 

 Many among the faithful in the region at the time regarded Frederick Lugard and his lot as infidels. The fate of Sultan Attahiru inspired, as Lugard would later complain in his 1906 annual report, “a series of local ebullitions in favour of some Mahdi or reformer”, claiming a mission to rid the people of these infidels. 

  At the beginning of February in 1904, Satiru’s district head proclaimed himself The Mahdi and his son, as Prophet Isa (Jesus). Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru II, whom the British installed the previous year after killing his brother, arrested and detained the Mahdist pretender, who tragically died in detention. His son, Isa, succeeded him.

  In January 1906, an itinerant preacher, Dan Makafo, arrived from French Niger (Niger Republic) to boost Isa’s insurgent claims. The following month, when the neighbouring community of Tsomo were reluctant to accord him recognition as prophet, Isa and his followers attacked the village, reportedly killing 14 and declaring a Jihadist rebellion against the British infidels. 

  Unlike in 1904 when they encouraged the Sultan to deal with Isa’s dad, the British chose in 1906 to handle Isa’s impertinence by themselves. On Saint Valentine’s Day in 1906, the Acting Resident, Mr. Hillary; his assistant, Mr. AGM Scott, and a force of over 70 mounted infantry led by Lt. Francis Blackwood, approached Isa and his rebellious followers in Satiru. The absence of mutual intelligibility did not much help mutual suspicion. Communication quickly broke down between both sides and in the ensuing chaos, Isa and his followers killed Hillary, Scott, Blackwood and 29 of their troops, leaving the remainder to retreat in disarray.

  On March 10, Lugard’s forces returned to Satiru. They comprised 573 rifles, 70 armed police, a 2.95-inch gun and several Maxim guns. Confronting them were Isa and over 2,000 of his followers armed with traditional weapons. It was a mismatch. Lugard quotes what happened next: “Someone gave an order, everyone fired, then a whistle blew, everyone stopped and there was no one left alive in the front.”  

  According to Jonathan Dewhirst, “in total it was estimated that Satiru lost over two thousand men killed, with over three thousand women and children captured. By half-past two in the afternoon the mission had ended, and the town burnt to the ground. The Sultan destroyed the ruins utterly, and decreed that the town should never be rebuilt.” 

  Isa was killed in the massacre. Dan Makafo was apprehended with five remaining leaders of the rebellion. Sultan Attahiru II had the six of them convicted by the Sokoto Native Court for rebellion and murder before executing them. 

  Lugard wrote a racy account of the extermination of Satiru in his 1906 annual report, exulting that the situation “demanded a signal and overwhelming victory for the restoration of our prestige and the prevention of any such rising in future.” 

  Nine years earlier, in February 1897, General Harry Rawson led an expedition that massacred its way through the Benin, ransacking the city and its civilization in retribution for an incident recalled by Queen Victoria in her diary of January 12, 1897 as follows: “A number of English officers & civilians, including doctors &c who went on a friendly mission, but imprudently not armed, were attacked & fired upon by the King of Benin.”

  Satiru was almost assuredly the most egregious but by no means the only example of such punitive colonial expeditions. Lugard described the policy as one entailing “a terrible retribution” with the stated goal being to “render any further appeal to arms unnecessary in the Sokoto Province for very many years”. 

  On the centenary of the extermination of Satiru, historian, Richard Gott, recalled that this was a vain hope, pointing out that “active Islamic resistance continued in Northern Nigeria until the 1930s, remaining a permanent concern and irritant to colonial officers.” 

  Some could argue with justification that this resistance continues until the present day. Not unlike the colonial period, martial retribution has not prevented assaults on uniformed symbols of the Nigerian state. Instead it has guaranteed it. 

  In the last week of October 1990, youths in Umuechem, an oil-bearing community in Rivers State, protested against Shell Petroleum, alleging acts of pollution that had decimated their environment, livelihoods and well-being. Shell invited the police to quell the protests, which had been largely peaceful. 

  In the early hours of October 31, a squadron of the Police Mobile Force invaded the community shooting at random “in a purported attempt to locate three of their members who had not returned the previous evening”. Over 80 members of the community were reported killed and nearly 500 houses destroyed or burnt by the police. A judicial commission of inquiry into the Umuechem Massacre later found “no evidence of a threat by the villagers and concluded that the Mobile Police had displayed ‘a reckless disregard for lives and property.’”

  Umuechem did not quell restiveness in the Niger Delta. Instead, it appeared to inflame the region’s youths and radicalise them. The brutal murder by armed gangs of 12 police officers in Odi, Bayelsa State in November 1999, led to bloody reprisals on the orders of President Olusegun Obasanjo “which may have killed hundreds of unarmed civilians”. 

  As Chief of Army Staff, General Victor Malu oversaw the reprisals in Odi. A mere two years later, in October 2001, the killing of 19 soldiers in his community, Zaki Biam, in Benue State, led to similar reprisals in which “more than 200 people died at the hands of the soldiers”. Over the three-year period from 1999 to 2002 alone, CLEEN Foundation and the World Organisation against Torture, OMCT, reported “over fifty separate and documented incidents” and “over ten thousand Nigerians have reportedly been victims of extrajudicial executions at an average of over 200 executions per incident”.

  Fourteen years later, the excuse for the Zaria Massacre was that an un-named member of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, IMN, as the Shiites of Nigeria are mostly called, had desecrated the epaulette of an Army General. Full casualty count has never been established but the official inquiry acknowledged that it took nearly 50 soldiers using 14 lorries, over six hours to dispose the bodies in mass graves in Mando, near Kaduna.

  Half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1974, a soldier was reported missing in Ugep, Cross-River central. Soldiers sent by the commanding officer to look for their colleague set upon the villagers “killing innocent men, children and raping their women who were eagerly waiting to celebrate Christmas”. Thirteen people were reported killed and over 100 injured. Days thereafter, the body of the soldier was found in a gutter in the village. An inquiry later showed that the soldier who was “given to drunkenness and suffered occasional epilepsy” had “choked on his sputum and died”.

  There may be little comparison between the circumstances of the reported death of the soldier in Ugep in 1974 and what transpired in Okuama, Ughelli South in Delta State 50 years later. Remarkably, the Okuama incident occurred in the month of the 118th anniversary of the extermination of Satiru. 

  President Bola Tinubu has rightly communicated the revulsion of all right-thinking persons at the mass murder of three senior officers of the Nigerian Army with 13 men under their command, followed by the desecration of the remains. He has also given the armed forces a free hand to ensure that “the offenders will not go unpunished” and promised to honour the memory of the fallen soldiers. 

  A dispassionate Board of Inquiry must get to the root of how these soldiers met their unconscionable fate, who was responsible, and how they were deployed on the mission that consumed their young lives. It is time to turn the page on this cycle of escalation, retribution and bloody reprisal that has prospered for 118 years since Satiru.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

I HAVE been to a number of budget ‘defence’ sessions in the National Assembly, and some were like bazaar sessions with buying and selling going on.

On some occasions, I watched a ‘Distinguished Senator’ who was a Committee Chairman, perform. He was unperturbed that he was sitting in public with journalists present. He left no one in doubt that he was sitting, primarily to extract juice from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, appearing before him. Like a corrupt police officer at a counter, he made all sorts of demands, with members of his panel nodding their heads.

He would ask what provisions in the budget had been made for him and his team or, how did the chief executive of the MDA expect them to work so hard on budgets and get peanuts in return? If, for example, the government official explains that there are travels, including overseas provided for in the budget for the ‘Distinguished Senators’, he would ask for an increase in the number of trips.

He would then pause as if lost in thought, and then enquire how much foreign airline tickets cost and, frown that the proposed budgets do not adequately cover the cost of first class tickets. At the end of session, having hiked the proposed budget, he would assure that the new proposals would be passed and that he would soon visit the MDAs concerned. He was a sanctuary of corruption in the National Assembly.

There is an ‘Honourable Member’ who uses his knowledge of forensic accounting to intimidate the MDAs who are, in many cases, led by chief executives who are ready to play ball. He would tear down particular budget proposals, engage the chief finance officer of the MDA in what may seem to be professional arguments on the budget proposals. After wearing out the confidence of the finance officer or intimidating him, he turns to the now hapless chief executive, offering to help the MDA with its seemingly tattered budgets proposals.

Essentially, binary budgets are passed annually by the National Assembly; one submitted by the executive and the other, by the legislators. In considering the former, the National Assembly grafts its own budget on that submitted by the Presidency.

While signing the 2018 Budget allegedly under protest, then President Muhammadu Buhari accused the National Assembly of ‘padding’ it by introducing 6,403 projects of their own amounting to N578 billion.

He wailed that the insertions “relate to matters that are the responsibility of the states and local governments, and for which the Federal Government should therefore not be unduly burdened.”

Conversely, he said the National Assembly made cuts amounting to N347 billion in the allocations to 4,700 projects submitted to them for consideration. He claimed that: “Many of the projects cut are critical and may be difficult, if not impossible, to implement with the reduced allocation. Some of the new projects inserted by the National Assembly have not been properly conceptualised, designed and costed and will therefore be difficult to execute.”

He further revealed that “many of these new projects introduced by the National Assembly have been added to the budgets of most MDAs with no consideration for institutional capacity to execute them or the incremental recurrent expenditure that may be required.” In other words, the new insertions were, basically, duplications, yet the funds are approved.

As President, he clarified that: “The logic behind the Constitutional direction that budgets should be proposed by the executive is that, it is the executive that knows and defines its policies and projects.” Despite this, and his knowledge that the budget was packaged in criminality, Buhari signed it.

The defence of the NASS by then spokespersons, Senator Aliyu Sabi Abdullahi and Abdulrazak Namdas was that it had the powers to do what it deems fit with the budget.

Its argument was that: “Adjustments and reductions in the locations, costs and number of projects approved were made in order to address geo-political imbalances that came with the executive proposal. The introduction of new projects was done to ensure the promotion of the principles of Federal …Character as contained in Section 14, subsection (3) of the 1999 Constitution…”

It added that: “The number of projects had to be increased in order to give a sense of belonging to every geo-political zone of the country to ensure socio-economic justice, equity, fairness, and to command National loyalty.”

If the claims of the NASS were true, all it needed to do was to return the budget to the Presidency for necessary adjustments, rather than rewrite it or, write and pass its own budget.

After signing such budgets annually, Buhari again, wailed openly while signing the 2022 Budget that 6,576 new projects had been smuggled into it by the National Assembly.

Since I am not sure a gun was held to President Buhari’s head while signing those budgets which we all know border on criminality, my conclusion is that the racketeering was mutually agreed by both arms of government and was beneficial to the perpetrators.

Interestingly, there is a continuum: then Senate President Ahmad Lawan, returned to the Senate albeit under controversial circumstances, while then Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, is currently the Chief of Staff to President Bola Tinubu.

Given this culture of impunity, the claims by Senator Abdul Ningi of PDP Bauchi, that the 2024 Budget was padded by N3.7 trillion or over 10 per cent of the N28.78 trillion budget, did not come as a surprise. He, as an old Senator, has been part of this culture. Therefore, his claims or revelations must have startled his fellow ‘Distinguished Senators’. They neither gave him the floor to explain himself, nor provide facts why they think his claims were frivolous. They simply suspended him for three months. The sin Senator Ningi seems to have committed is that having been invited to the table, he did not observe the ethics that you do not talk while eating.

A similar punishment was inflicted on Abdulmumin Jibrin in 2016 when as the Chairman of the House Committee on Appropriation, he revealed that the 2016 Budget was padded. He had gone to the extent of naming the then Speaker, Deputy Speaker , Chief Whip and Minority Whip of allocating N400 billion to themselves in the NASS Budget.

During the session on Ningi, another Distinguished Senator, Jarigbe Jarigbe, Cross Rivers North, was exposing some of his colleagues for collecting humongous amounts of at least N500 million each. His microphone was quickly switched off before he could inflict more damage.

Some claimed such monies were for constituency projects. Who supervises such projects; who oversights them? Do they pass through the normal public procurement and contract processes? Side-tracking criminality does not change its essence.

A former governorship aspirant in the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) recently conducted governorship primary election and a former member of the House of Representatives, Hon Omosede Igbinedion has expressed reservation on the way Governor Godwin Obaseki has piloted the affairs of the party as its leader since he joined at the eve of his re-election bid in 2020.

  In a statement by Igbinedion titled “The hypocrisy of politics”, she said the old members of the party that Obaseki came to meet in the party have been pushed out of the scheme of things as principal offices in the Obaseki administration were taken by himself and those who came with him from the All Progressives Congress (APC).

 Igbinedion said she expected that the running mate to Ighodalo should have been ceded to the old PDP to give them a sense of belonging.

  She also criticized those who have been claiming that she was on her way to the APC because of a recent visit to his Abuja home by the APC governorship candidate, Sen. Monday Okpebholo.

   According to Igbinedion “The Governor we have today, only joined the party along with his SSG and a host of others, simply because they had issues in their own party and needed a platform, which the PDP gave them.”

  She said some of the people criticizing the picture that surfaced after Okpebholo’s visit “only attend campaigns when and if they are given transport fares, or else they choose not to leave their houses and use money sent to them for data to write rubbish online, same people who demand to be paid to remain in a political Party.

  “Go and look at the results from the last federal elections where PDP in Oredo lost to Labour by 37,994 votes, PDP in Egor and Ikpoba Okha lost to Labour by 19,777, PDP in Orhionmwon and Uhumwonde lost by 2,986, whilst PDP in Ovia North East and South West lost by 1,455 votes. We lost all the seats in Edo South at the National. Oredo produced the poorest results for PDP, with only 11,899 votes, compared to the 18,396 votes pulled for PDP in Ovia.

  “It is on record that I have never lost Ovia North East, since 2015 till date to any political party. The records are there to show. 

  “If Anyone has issues with me speaking against the injustice done to the original PDP members who had sustained the party till now and made it formidable enough for the governor to seek reelection in 2019, then I am sorry but I owe you no apology. 

 “I stepped aside my ambition for governorship on the grounds of equity, fairness and justice for the Esan people and now the question we must answer is; when choosing a deputy governor was it equitable, fair and just to not consider age, gender, the old PDP and the Ovia Constituency, that has never had governor or deputy governor before, but always given block votes to PDP ?

  “Do not be deceived, most old PDP Members are silently protesting and ready to either work for Labour or decamp to APC. My appeal as a bonafide PDP Member is that we should settle the House before it’s too late.”

[Vanguard]

There is unarguably a progressive value erosion in our country. This is happening increasingly, and there is no hope of it abating soon. This cankerworm is significantly influenced by westernisation and globalisation but with the shared responsibility of local catalysts like collapsed family systems, near extinction of communal oversight and accountability, abdication of moral reinforcement by religious centres, failure of governmental institutions and a skewed education curriculum that pays little attention to proper moral education and developing cultural personality identity.

The social-moral code which governs how individuals behave in a community setting has literarily collapsed in most of our communities. Religious morality has been subdued by a craving for wealth and fanaticism not founded on love, truth, or honour. The elevation of money or accumulation of pecuniary wealth in the public space has become Machiavellian as the “end that justifies the means”. The ‘get rich quick syndrome’ is normalised. The effect of this malaise is evident to all; we see it, feel it, and analyse it, but beyond that, what do we do?

The most critical to my mind is the moral dimension of our public affairs. The decay is evident on a national scale. This is not to say that the other dimensions of our moral decadence are less critical. This column will, however, focus on the morality governing the conduct of public affairs, which needs to be more relevant. The decay is growing at a rate similar to our advancement as a country and the extent of our globalisation. It is as though the more advanced and interconnected we are with the rest of the world, the more immoral we become. Some recent manifestations of the decay in our public morality standards will help us appreciate the extent of the decay.

Historically, Nigeria has often witnessed corruption scandals of fantastical proportions at different times that have shown our decline from morality, as my friend Dr Lasisi Olagunju captured in his recent column ‘The History of scandals’. Each succeeding corruption scandal and sleaze makes the last one look like a child’s play in comparison, both in the audacity of maleficence and the amount of money involved. In the 1970s, Nigerians witnessed the “cement armada” scandal when the military government issued import licences to companies to import vast amounts of cement to build military infrastructure. The corruption in the cement price, the quantity supplied was far less than paid for, the demurrage paid for real and imagined ships carrying cement at the Nigerian ports, and the local and international court cases that ensued left a sour taste in our collective mouths.

In recent times, Nigerians have seen the abdication of moral responsibility by those charged with handling our public affairs in favour of self-interest and material gain. You remember the Dasuki-gate. Billions of dollars meant for combating terrorism and insecurity cannot be accounted for, and the same insecurity has ravaged our communities. You remember the billion-dollar fuel subsidy scam of the 2000s and its sad, lurid details. In this democracy, people collected subsidy payments for petrol vessels that had never come here or existed and falsified the amount of petrol supplied. A few well-connected Nigerians got away with murder in the subsidy scandal.

Most recently, there was the Senator Ningi Budget padding scandal of the national assembly. The presidency presented a budget of about ₦27.5 trillion to our National Assembly, but controversy has trailed the budget with no solid explanation as to what happened. The story of magical ubiquitous solar lights and boreholes still haunts the integrity of the budget. This budget manipulation allegation is a moral question for the National Assembly. It has brought issues of transparency, abuse of power, the conflict between public interest and personal interest, and issues of fairness and equity to public attention. These issues raise questions about whether our national assembly has any moral responsibility.

The most disturbing aspect of these scandals is that we do not learn lessons from them, and most perpetrators go unpunished. Nigerians are used to that and expect little accountability and responsibility from our leaders. Impunity reigns supreme, and things have fallen apart. Moral responsibility is an excellent sign of leadership, but this is vanishing in Nigeria. No leader ever takes responsibility for either failure of oversight or being complicit in a failure of the system to compensate morally for the pain associated with such failures.

No one resigns, apologises, or cares about the people, the victims. The reward for corruption in Nigeria is that perpetrators are given better opportunities to ply their trade. They are valuable to the corrupt system that requires the stealing of public funds to prop it up. Nigerians are used to hearing the names of people they believe should be in jail in new juicy appointments. In comparison, in Egypt, the transport minister, Hisham Arafat, resigned on moral grounds in late February 2019 after a deadly train crash in Cairo killed at least 25 people and left 50 others injured. Please understand that the minister was not driving the ill-fated train. But he resigned on moral grounds.

One of the most striking features of contemporary Nigerian politics and politicians is that paradoxically, political rhetoric is increasingly moralistic while the actual ability of public officials to achieve moral ends is in decline. Our public officials see only shades of grey and operate in a world of contradictions, extreme selfishness, greed, deceit and double-speak. The moral corruption of our democratic process contributes substantially to a moral breakdown in all areas of society. Nigeria’s societal moral values, which govern the conduct of politics, business, and government, have often been corrupted. A society’s moral values define what people see as acceptable behaviour for themselves, what they believe behaviours they exhibit that others will approve of or not and what society collectively accepts or rejects as acceptable behaviour by individuals.

The various crises engulfing the contemporary Nigerian state manifest the breakdown of morality in almost all spheres of the country. The gruesome murder of 16 military personnel last Thursday while responding to a distress call during a communal crisis between the Okuoma and Okoloba communities in Delta State is a product of the failure of morals in the communities. The fact that youths who control both money and firepower in our communities no longer have respect for constituted authority and community elders indicates how low we have gone in morals. Our military, which we should revere for protecting us, has come under attack by the same people it is protecting. Daily, we are bombarded with stories of how our military personnel are dying at the hands of fellow Nigerians – bandits, terrorists, secessionists and now village vigilante groups. This is absurd and shows how low we have come as a society.

The decline of moral values in our communities, particularly in politics and public life, should be a central concern. Politics does not rise or fall on the private righteousness of leaders. Leaders’ self-interest should always be tempered by moral conscience.  We need to strengthen the guardrails of national morality such as the Judiciary, ICPC, EFCC and the Code of Conduct Bureau. We must effectively demand moral uprightness from public officials and celebrate those who uphold such high moral and ethical standards. We should have more role models of people with merit and resounding accomplishments.

We must bring back the mantra that morality and hard work are worthy virtues and celebrate successful Nigerians in sports, art, music, science and technology, academia, business and entrepreneurship, and public leaders who shine as beacons of hope for a better, morally stable, and scandal-free society, where men and women of goodwill and conscience will thrive for the benefit of humanity.

Outgoing Senegal’s President Macky Sall, on Monday congratulated opposition leader Bassirou Diomaye Faye on his victory in Sunday’s presidential election.

Almost all other presidential candidates, including former Prime Minister Ahmadou Ba, the candidate of the ruling Alliance for Republic, APR, have also conceded defeat and congratulated Faye.

"I salute the smooth running of the election and congratulate the winner, Mr. Bassirou Diomaye, who is the winner by the trends. This is the victory of Senegalese democracy," Sall said through a post on his X, former Twitter handle, hours after Ba had congratulated Faye.

The National Electoral Commission, CENA, is still compiling the official tally of the election in the country's 14 regions.

But unofficial estimates indicate that Faye might have received about 57% of the vote, against the runner-up Ba’s 31%.

Under Senegal’s Constitution, a candidate requires more than 50% of the vote to win the presidency in the first round of balloting, otherwise, the two frontrunners go into a run-off vote.

The Appeal Court of Dakar is expected to announce the final figures of Sunday’s contest on Wednesday, and this will be validated by the Constitutional Council, if no objections are raised.

The Council has the final say on electoral matters in the country, while CENA supervises the electoral process.

President Sall will hand over power to Faye, as Senegal’s 5th and youngest President on April 2nd.

It is a perfect birthday present for Faye, who turned 44 on Sunday, the election day, and a great relief particularly to pro-democracy advocates in Senegal and ECOWAS, which is battling growing military incursions into politics in the region, with four of its 15 member States now under army rule.

Credit should also go to the Senegalese population, especially the civil society groups for their resilience in checkmating Sall’s political manoeuvrers.

Among the immediate tasks of Faye, a former tax collector is the reconciliation of a country, whose democratic standing had been shaken in the past couple of years, particularly by Sall's tenure elongation plan, which he was forced under local and international pressure to abandon.

But this was not before the attendant political tension and street protests that killed at least 20 people, followed by uncertainties over the rescheduling of the presidential vote originally fixed for 25 February, before it was moved to March 24.

As an appeasement gesture, a subdued President Sall declared a general amnesty for detainees recently, including Faye and his comrade Ousmane Sonko, who were released to join the campaign trail.

Sonko was barred from contesting the presidential election following his conviction for radicalizing the youths, a charge critics consider politically motivated.

Meanwhile, Faye has promised to tackle corruption and address the needs of Senegal’s youthful population from where he and Sonko draw their most support.

Given the unsalutary experiences of “anointed candidates” or Godfatherism in Africa, political observers will closely monitor the Faye-Sonko relationship with political power in their hands. ##