The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) said the commission will “soon” take action on the case of suspended Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Adamawa State, Hudu Yunusa-Ari.

INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye made this known on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Thursday.

According to Okoye, the police have concluded investigations on the matter.

The INEC spokesman said the electoral umpire has enough proof to establish a case against Yunusa-Ari.

Okoye also said the electoral umpire has enough proof to establish a case against Yunusa-Ari.

He said, “I am aware that the police have concluded investigations and I am aware that in the next few weeks, Nigerians will be informed of what will happen.

“Under the law, it is the responsibility of the Independent National Electoral Commission to prosecute him (Ari) if a prima facie case has made out against him.”

Recall that Yunusa-Ari came under fire after the supplementary election in Adamawa on April 15, 2023, after he announced Aisha ‘Binani’ Dahiru of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the dramatic poll while the collation of results was ongoing.

INEC nullified Yunusa-Ari’s decision and suspended him while former President Muhammadu Buhari ordered a full investigation on the electoral commissioner and the security personnel that were around him when he made the declaration.

INEC subsequently concluded the election and announced the incumbent governor, Ahmadu Fintiri of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) as the authentic winner of the drama-filled poll.

Yunusa-Ari’s whereabouts were unknown for over two weeks but he turned himself in to the police on May 2, 2023. The police later granted him bail on May 5, 2023 while Nigerians continue to ask with curiosity what becomes of the case.

When asked on Thursday whether INEC has enough evidence to establish a case against Yunusa-Ari, Okoye said, “Yes.”

He said the police and the electoral commission were in talks during the probe of the embattled INEC official and a decision will be made “very soon.”

Okoye said, “There has been some level of interface between the Nigeria Police Force and the Independent National Electoral Commission and the commission was involved in some of the processes leading to the investigation. Very soon, the commission will take action relating to the Adamawa REC.”

The Bank of America (BoA) has said the it sees the value of the naira settling at N680 to the dollar by the end of the year, saying that the currency has moved from overvalued to being undervalued following the government’s recent foreign exchange reform.

This as it postulates that the next move of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is to curb the oil theft that has besieged the nation.

This was contained in a note by the bank as seen by BusinessDay.

According to the bank, “We now see a USDNGN fair value of 680 per USD (previously 580). However, USDNGN is likely to trade above this level, with year-end 700, and a return to 650-680 in early 2024,” the Bank of America analysts said.

“The caution is transition time, aligning rates and still to unlock more USD into the formal market will take some time. When the dust has settled, the value of the naira should be stronger and appreciating,” the analysts added.

BoA notes that higher oil exports ($12 billion more) and a liberalised import regime ($10 billion increase in non-oil imports) can still result in consistent current account surpluses over the medium term.

“With the current momentum, Tinubu’s next big move should be to reduce oil theft – by reforming the security sector and involving host communities near the pipelines,” Bank of America, one of the big four banking institutions of the United States said in a note seen by BusinessDay.

If successful, the global financial institution predicts this could increase Nigeria’s crude production to 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in 12 to 18 months, from the current 1.2m bpd, barring OPEC limits.

“In our view, increasing crude oil production to 1.6m bpd in the next 12 months is feasible and would be a structural improvement from current levels of about 1.2m bpd. If we include condensates, total oil production could rise from the current 1.4m bpd to 1.8m bpd in two years a level that Nigeria was producing pre-pandemic,” Bank of America added.

Nigeria depends on hydrocarbons for 90 percent of its exports, at least half of fiscal revenues, and about 6 per cent of GDP.

“Higher oil revenues and increased effort for non-oil revenue would ease the high debt service burden,” Bank of America said.

Top universities and colleges in the United States (US) would have to review admissions rules based on race considerations that have often benefited black international students, especially Nigerians, more than Native Americans for whom they were designed after the US Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the practice was unlawful.

According to the Institute for International Education, more than 13,000 students from Nigeria are enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States. Many were able to get into some of these universities through affirmative action.

The issue of black immigrants benefiting from affirmative action in the admissions process at selective colleges and universities was a sore subject in America. While some universities and colleges touted gains made in student body diversity, particularly with the increase in black student enrollment, native black Americans felt cheated.

“Although these colleges and universities would like to attribute this success to their affirmative action programs, data suggests that such gains in black student enrollment have resulted from the increasing enrollment of black immigrants and at the expense of native black students—the students for whom affirmative action was initially intended to benefit,” notes a study by the Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality.

The study argued that extending race-based preferences to black immigrants works against a fundamental rationale in the legal dispute that gave rise to the provision.

Black immigrants overall have higher admissions metrics compared to native blacks; using race-based preference results in the admission of a disproportionate number of black immigrants compared to native blacks, particularly at the most elite institutions.

According to an op-ed by Robert Cherry, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a descendant of slavery, Mariah Norman, in 2021, bemoaned how immigrants or children of immigrants dominate the black student environment at Harvard.

She pointed to the Nigerian Students Association, which claims 200 members, suggesting that one-third of Harvard’s black student body is in the club. More than 15 black affinity groups exist on campus, like the African Students Association and the Caribbean Club. And while the Black Students Association encompasses all, there wasn’t an organization solely for black students like Norman until students got together in 2021 and formed one. Norman believed that nothing would change until Harvard started reporting on the ethnic composition of its black student population.

“The large numbers of African immigrants on American college campuses, coupled with the remarkably small numbers of native blacks on those same campuses, calls into question the effectiveness of America’s affirmative action programs. While affirmative action started as a system to right the wrongs of slavery and institutional anti-black racism, helping wealthy immigrants who weren’t here for those struggles doesn’t serve any of the program’s original intentions, argued Cherry.

The bulk of the international students at these high-priced universities are the children of politicians, top business leaders, and company executives in Nigeria and other African and Caribbean nations.

The latest Supreme Court decision has ended this debate by putting an end to affirmative action. The Court consolidated two cases against Harvard and the University of Carolina.

In the case against the University of North Carolina, the plaintiffs argued that the school is bound by both the Constitution’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars race discrimination by institutions that receive federal money.

The plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, said that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preference to Black, Hispanic and Native American ones. The university responded that its admissions policies fostered educational diversity and were lawful under longstanding Supreme Court precedents.

The case against Harvard accused the university of discriminating against Asian American students by using a subjective standard to gauge traits like likability, courage, and kindness, and by effectively creating a ceiling for them in admissions.

Lawyers for Harvard said the challengers had relied on a flawed statistical analysis and denied that the university discriminated against Asian American applicants. More generally, they said race-conscious admissions policies are lawful.

Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a group founded by Edward Blum, a legal activist who has organized many lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions policies and voting rights laws, several of which have reached the Supreme Court.

The universities both won in federal trial courts, and the decision in Harvard’s favor was affirmed by a federal appeals court.

Outside the school, there are also concerns that the Supreme Court decision could complicate diversity efforts elsewhere, narrowing the pipeline of highly credentialed minority candidates and making it harder for employers to consider race in hiring.

The justices of the US Supreme Court voted 6 to 3, along ideological lines, with the liberal justices all in dissent.

As the Presidential Election Petitions Court reconvenes on Monday (July 3), the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has lined up witnesses to defend the election victory of President Bola Tinubu and one of them is Dr. Lawrence Bayode, Deputy Director in the ICT Department of the electoral umpire, THE WHISTLER reports.

The petitioners, including the Labour Party and Peter Obi as well as Peoples Democratic Party and Atiku Abubakar, had concluded tendering of evidence and presentation of witnesses last Friday, insisting among other prayers, that INEC’s failure to upload scanned polling unit results in real-time contradicts the Electoral Act 2022 and amounts to electoral fraud.

In their separate petitions, they want the PEPC to nullify Tinubu’s election while declaring them winners of the 2023 presidential election.

Obi had presented before the court cloud engineering and cyber security experts, including a Professor of Mathematics to explain his team’s findings on the INEC Results Viewing Portal, IREV, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, machines, and deflate INEC’s claim that “technical glitches” prevented transmission of the presidential results to the IReV portal.

Atiku also presented a forensic expert, among other witnesses.

In Bayode’s witness statement on oath seen by THE WHISTLER, he said during the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections, INEC’s technical team did everything to restore the (IREV) application to functionality, including the creation and deployment of patches and updates to resolve the glitches that made the BVAS machine not to upload results in real-time from the polling units.

He contended that the downtime encountered on the IREV application lasted for 4 hours and 50 minutes until it was resolved and the first presidential result was “successfully” uploaded at 8:55 pm on the 25th of February, 2023.

“The investigation by the INEC experts shows that the system was returning error codes specifically HTTP 500 error.

“HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) 500 error is a coding message which indicates that a computer or server has encountered an unexpected error that has prevented it from carrying out or fulfilling a specific request or executing a command,” he said in his witness statement.

Bayode further explained that the upload of data or images captured and automatically stored on the BVAS machine by presiding officers requires data service of mobile network operators.

“Where there is no data service or where the service is poor, the BVAS device is designed to work offline. The upload of data will occur when data service is available,” Bayode added, maintaining that offline transmission using BVAS did not affect the integrity of upload of the election result to the e-transmission and IREV portal.

THE WHISTLER reports that INEC has five days to call its witnesses to pave the way for the legal team of Tinubu and the All Progressive Congress to do the same.

In line with the PEPC directive, parties must have concluded presentation of their evidence by July while parties will adopt their final addresses in August.

Judgment on the petitions will come in September.