Point One

 With the report turned in last week by the independent probe of the recent artisanal miners’ death in security custody, those dead miners and survivors are close to getting justice. It will be to added praise of government if it carries through with implementing the report submitted, marking a departure from the practice whereby administrations institute probes to signpost attention to an issue, only to abandon the reports of such probes on shelves to gather dust. Question is whether all issues central to the tragedy were addressed by the panel and will receive due redress. Government raised a 10-member independent probe panel in September, following the death of many suspected illegal miners in custody of the Niger State command of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC). The miners had been arrested in operations by NSDC personnel at Miwishishi and Lukoto areas of the state over two days – 15th and 16th September – and were cramped into a detention facility at the C...

 Ebola is back in Nigeria. Twenty-two years after the last epidemic, the viral disease has made a re-ingress into the country. Unlike the last outbreak that was of Zaire strain, for which there is an approved vaccine, the present epidemic is of Bundibugyo strain with no licensed vaccine or treatment, although trials are reportedly being conducted on inventions. As with the last epidemic, the new case in Nigeria is imported, making it the fifth country to detect the virus since an outbreak was declared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on 15th May, 2026.  In Africa, the epidemic had hit Uganda and Kenya before surfacing in Nigeria. Uganda reported 20 cases and two deaths, but declared itself free of the disease in late August after its last patient was discharged; while Kenya had recorded nine cases as at Tuesday, last week. Outside of the continent, a doctor who returned to France in June from Congo tested positive, but there was no further spread of the virus ther...

On Sunday, October 25th, Brazil will hold a run-off election brought on by the inconclusiveness of its presidential poll that took place on October 5th. Left- wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will square off with right-wing Flávio Bolsonaro, who led in the first round but fell short of prescribed victory threshold of more than 50 percent of votes cast.  Flávio, 45-year-old son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro, finished ahead of Lula with 47 percent of the votes despite that polls had forecast he would come in second place. Lula, 80-year-old, who was projected to win, came second with 44.9 percent of the votes according to data published by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court. Voting is compulsory in the world’s fifth-largest country, and turnout is typically among the highest in the Americas. Lula, who is running on the platform of Workers’ Party (PT), is seeking a fourth and likely his last term after having been elected in 2002 and 2006, and later for a non-con...

 They have gold dust in their soil and that, ideally, should have meant enhanced living conditions for residents. But, no. They are today in mourning, having been bereaved in one swoop of more than a score of their young ones who died in a Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) cell on suspicion of illicit gold picking. It’s all about the Nigerian curse of natural resource. Thirty-seven artisanal miners aged between 14 and 18 years became fatalities on 17th September after suspected illegal miners were arrested by Niger command NSCDC operatives in an operation they carried out in the M.I. Wushishi and Lukoto areas of the state over the two days preceding. Many underaged persons, reportedly including a six-year-old, were nabbed and allegedly cramped into an overcrowded holding facility to which more arrested suspects were added by the day until there apparently was no room to breathe. Female illegal miners were as well arrested. Survivors recounted terrifying moments when...

On Monday, 7th September, Sierra Leonean President Julius Maada Bio hosted his predecessor, Ernest Bai Koroma, on a reconciliation visit to the State House in Freetown. That was barely 24 hours after Koroma returned to the country from some two and half years of exile in Nigeria. “I am back home. And home will always be home. There will never be any substitute for home,” he said upon his return on Sunday, 6th September, capturing the personal meaning of a homecoming that carried wider political significance for his country. Koroma, who was president from 2007 to 2018, had been living in Nigeria since January 2024 following diplomatic engagements led by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to save him from possible jail time over his alleged complicity in a November 2023 armed assault aimed at destabilising the Maada Bio administration. Koroma denied involvement.  Freetown had convulsed with violence on 26th November, 2023, when armed insurrectionists stormed a mil...

 She is a candidate for the Guinness Book of World Records – not just on account of her age, but for the crooked act in which she was reported caught. One hundred and one-year-old granny, Esther Ogunmabo, was lately arrested by operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) for trading in cannabis.  It marked a world record – though an infamous one – because the oldest person previously  known was retired Australian oral surgeon, Victor Twartz (91 years), who in 2015 was tagged the world’s oldest drug smuggler when he was caught at Sydney Airport with 4.5kilograms of cocaine hidden in bars of soap. He had been manipulated by an online cartel into acting unwittingly as a courier. Centenarian Ogunmabo was apprehended on 15th August in Ilisan, Ogun State, with 90 grams of retail sachets of skunk, a strain of cannabis that she reportedly sold in the community. A statement by NDLEA spokesman, Femi Babafemi, said the woman, a great-grandmother, told agency opera...