Point One

 Ebonyi State Governor Ogbonna Nwifuru recently set a peculiar benchmark for financial accountability in local government administration. He ordered chairmen of the state’s 13 councils to settle all outstanding salaries and pensions of their workers within 24 hours or hand in their resignation. There was no subsequent report of any council chairman obliging his resignation directive, or of salaries and pensions remaining outstanding. So, his bluff – if you call it that – worked. The Ebonyi governor was reported to have issued the ultimatum on Sunday, 22nd December, at a Christmas party organised for the elderly and widows by the state government in Abakaliki, the state capital. Addressing some 5,000 attendees at the party, he frowned on a situation whereby most local government areas had failed to pay staff salaries for November and December, saying the development was unacceptable. He described delayed payment of salaries and pensions to council workers in the state as worrisome, ...

 It is official: ransom payment for kidnapped persons in Nigeria is big business. Some N2.23trillion was paid out as ransom money over 12 months between May 2023 and April 2024, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) has revealed. The bureau, which is the nation’s official statistician, said there was an estimated 51.89million crime incidents recorded across Nigerian households in the period under review. In the Crime Experience and Security Perception Survey report recently published on its website, the NBS said the Northwest geopolitical zone had the highest incidence of crime at 14.4million cases reported, followed by the Northcentral zone with 8.8million incidents reported. Conversely, the notoriety of the Southeast zone for insurrectionist violence wasn’t as bad as it seemed, apparently, because the zone reported the least incidence of crime with 6.18million cases. The survey further showed that rural areas experienced more of crime attacks than urban areas, with 26.53million...

 He withstood a gruelling insurgency in his country for more than 13 years. But when rebel fighters moved to oust him early last week, it took less than two weeks for their final push that resulted in his fall. Bashar al-Assad was kicked out in Syria to end his 24-year-long hold on power. His ouster ended more than 50 years of Assad family rule in the Middle East country, having in 2000 succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who in 1970 seized power in a coup to become Syria’s ruler till his death. Assad’s staying power amidst the turbulence of the volatile region was fabled. Following the eruption of the Arab Spring that saw no fewer than four Arab rulers flushed out of power by mass uprisings, opposition fighters took up arms in 2011 to press for regime change in Syria. Protests rocked many other Mideast countries but elicited different outcomes, with conflicts recorded in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Djibouti, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Bahrain,...

From slave labour to sudden wealth. That could well be the story of special constabulary policemen, courtesy of a recent judgment of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria. The court has ordered that more than 22,000 special constables that the police enlisted across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) be regularised by the force, and four-year arrears of allowances paid out to each. By that judgment, millionaire constabularies strutting Nigerian community spaces may be loading. It will be interesting seeing what difference this makes to their psyche and engagement with the public. The industrial court, in a verdict delivered penultimate week, ordered the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Police Service Commission (PSC) to issue the special constables letters of formal employment and pay them the arrears of stipends due to them from way back in 2021. It was late in 2020, under the former Muhammadu Buhari presidency, that the Nigeria Police recruited some 25,...