JENNA Bourgeois, Chairman Dynamic Intelligence has announced that his company is exiting from the Nigerian market with ‘immediate effect’.
The technology company with operations in the United States, Canada and Africa claimed that contractors and employees in the Nigerian division defraud the company.
Bourgeois made this disclosure on Thursday via his Linkedin handle, where he aired his opinion about doing business with Nigerians and cautioned other prospective international organisations about doing business in the country.
He offered to provide free business advice to those who want to run business in the nations he described as fraudulent bunches.
“While we kept giving Nigerians a chance to gain skills and employment, we cannot run a company when we can’t trust the people who work for us. Any company interested in conducting business in Nigeria can reach out to us to learn how to avoid being scammed by technical resources.
Bourgeois also lamented the waste of resources the company had earlier invested in the country and adviced customers to exploit the Indian market instead.
“It is a kick in our face that we spent so much time trying to give Nigerians the benefit of the doubt to have this happen. Customers who wish to outsource, are well-advised to seek an India-owned company for the best results.”
THE federal government says the Newspaper Vendors Association of Nigeria would be enrolled in the N-Power Programme to help acquire fundamental skills acquisition and development.
The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, on Friday, said this when members of the Federal Secretariat branch of the Association, led by its chairman, Desmond Obiagwu, paid him a courtesy visit in Abuja.
In a statement disclosed by the ministry of labour, Ngige expressed the government’s desire to encourage them in their efforts because they aid the government activities.
“You have helped this Ministry in Labour administration, as newspaper marketing is part of information dissemination.
“Through your activity, we get information on brewing labour unrest, and we are able to nip it in the bud through conciliatory meetings,” he said.
Ngige commended the vendors for being good citizens by choosing to earn a decent living through newspaper vending and shunning crime.
“The Chairman of the Federal Secretariat branch of the Newspaper Vendors Association of Nigeria, Desmond Obiagwu, congratulated the Minister on his re-appointment and wished him success in navigating the tough terrain of the Labour Ministry,” the statement read.
He expressed the association’s delight over his re-appointment, as he had forged a harmonious relationship with them during his previous tenure, and also pledged the continued support of the association to the Ministry.
The N-Power is a youth empowerment scheme sponsored by the Federal Government of Nigeria to addresses the challenge of youth unemployment by providing a structure for large-scale and relevant work skills acquisition and development.
THE Adamawa state government has on Friday began reintegration of the 133 Nigerian refugees, who returned to the country after six years in Cameroon.
The Director Refugees, Migrants and Affairs, Lawal Hamadu told THE ICIR that the returnees are currently undergoing medical chek-up.
According to him, this exercise is to ensure they are medically sound, without any form of the disease, after which the immigration service would conduct documentation of their nationality.
Adamawa government were present to convey the refugees to their various communities where they fled from, he said.
The state government is here to “identify and take home their indigenes,” he said.
The Nigeria Deputy Chief, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Roger Hollo, UNHCR in a tweet welcomed the 23 families from Adamawa and Bauchi States.
“We are committed to supporting these families for sustainable integration back into their communities,” Roger said.
The commission said there were about 95,000 Nigerians in Cameroon taking refuge over insecurity in Lake Chad Basin of which 8000 are indigenes of Adamawa, and others are from Borno and Yola states.
Earlier, the Minister for Humanitarian Services, Disaster Management, and Internally Displaced Persons, Sadiya Faruk, said the repatriation was the first phase. Repatriation would continue for all those willing to come back to their homes, she added.
Faruk said the Nigerian and the Adamawa government were elated to welcome the refugees and reintegrate them into society.
The secretary to the Adamawa State Government, Basir Ahmed also, said the refugees would be moved to a conservative area for security purpose.
He said community heads would be invited to identify the various refugees, verify where they claimed to flee from and take them back home.
The returnees arrived on Thursday at the Yola International Airport aboard the Nigerian Air Force C130
They were accompanied by officials of the National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons, UNHCR, IOM, NAPTIP, security agencies and other humanitarian organisations.
The UNHCR records that violent attacks by non-state armed groups in parts of North-East Nigeria have displaced over 240,000 Nigerians, with Borno State being the most affected.
JOSEPH Attah, spokesperson of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) has refuted the claim that seme border has been closed to all forms of business and that security officials have stopped all activities.
He said the border was partially closed due to smuggling and other illegal activities but insisted that people with legitimate reasons and businesses are allowed free access.
“The borders are not closed. People with legitimate businesses and reasons are moving across the borders. If people stayed away from the borders, then ask if they are into legitimate businesses,” Attah said.
The restriction followed ongoing military exercise conducted by the customs, immigration, police and military personnel codenamed ‘Ex-Swift Response’ at the border which has raised questions and putting people on edge at the border.
Attah said the restriction is just precautionary security routine that calls for no alarm.
The exercise spearhead by the Office of the National Security Adviser comes on as a directive of the Federal Government focused at securing the nations land and maritime boarders.
“In the morning of Wednesday, we heard that people were not being allowed in and out of the borders, so we quickly called our people to correct that aspect of the joint military exercise.
“The exercise is not meant to debar people from moving freely in and out of the borders as long as they have legitimate reasons to be there. That was on the morning of Wednesday,” he said.
However, the spokesman reportedly said it is likely the Nigeria-Benin Republic border could remain partially closed for the next 28 days as joint border security exercise would be conducted in 25 states across the South-South, South-West, North-Central and North-West zones.
It is to be recalled that in 2016, Audu Ogbeh, the former Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, had condemned the porosity of the Seme border.
According to him, laxity at the border renders efforts of government useless in the fight against the entry of contraband goods into the country.
AN investigative journalist at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR), Yekeen Akinwale says Federal Government should do more to monitor various projects awarded across the country.
Sharing his experience at a two-day Open Contracting Workshop for journalists and members of Civil Societies Organisations (CSOs) in Ado-Ekiti on Friday, Akinwale decried the high rate of abandoned projects in the country.
Akinwale said that the federal government, states as well as local governments must collaborate more in projects planning, execution and monitoring as many projects were abandoned due to lack of collaboration between the three tiers of government.
The workshop was organised by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a civil society organisation promoting open contracting in Nigeria.
“It is unfortunate that government spends a lot of money to execute projects across the country, but many of them are either uncompleted or abandoned because of poor synergy between the stakeholders and monitoring,” he said.
“There are issues of contracts awarded to incompetent contractors, some awarded to politicians while some don’t even exist in reality but on paper.”
Akinwale, who is the 2018 DAME Investigative Journalist of the year, cited abandoned plastic waste recycling plants in Osogbo, Ekiti and Kaduna as examples.
He stressed that poor synergy between stakeholders led to why the multi-billion naira projects that ought to generate revenue, create job and rid the environment of plastic waste lies in ruins.
Akinwale also charged the media and the CSOs to work together to amplify good governance, transparency and accountability noting that they both have complementary roles to make government accountable to the citizenry.
The Programme Director at PPDC, Ifeoma Onyebuchi, while addressing participants at the close of the workshop identified contracting as, ” governments number one corruption risk”.
She submitted that any project to be implemented should have a link to the four points agenda of the present government, which include: social investment, knowledge economy, infrastructure and industrial development and agriculture and rural development.
The workshop was attended by CSOs, media, and private sectors, individuals and groups wholly or partly independent of any institutions.
GOING by the available tools in fighting malaria which include the use of mosquitoes nets and insecticides, the World Health Organisation said the global goal of eradicating malaria by 2030 would be unachievable, except new transformative strategies and tools were developed.
The findings surfaced in a report from WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group on Malaria Eradication (SAGme) where the executivesummary was launched and published on Friday.
The report is a three-year-long analysis of the global fight against malaria where the group considered the biological, technical, financial, socio-economic, political and environmental factors that underpin malaria.
“Accelerated research and development in new tools for malaria prevention and treatment is key if the world is to eradicate malaria in the foreseeable future,” the summary read partly.
WHO also said there is an urgent need for countries to develop strong political wills and invest in universal health coverage with a well-functioning primary health care system.
It added that access to affordable and quality people-centred health services are key, if countries want to eliminate malaria and prevent re-establishment of transmission.
The global health agency noted that most of the tools being used to tackle malaria currently were “developed in the last century or even earlier”.
The tools included insecticide-treated mosquito nets, indoor residual spraying, rapid diagnostic tests and drugs based on artemisinin.
“To achieve a malaria-free world we must reinvigorate the drive to find the transformative strategies and tools that can be tailored to the local situation. Business, as usual, is not only slowing progress, but it is sending us backwards,” said Marcel Tanner, Chair of the SAGme.
The global aim is to have a 90 per cent reduction in the malaria case incidence and mortality rate by 2030. But the latest WHO report shows that progress is stalling.
Global malaria infection and death rates have remained virtually unchanged since 2015.
According to the World Malaria Report 2018, there were 219 million cases of the disease in 2017, where only eleven countries carry 70 per cent of the burden. The eleven countries include Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania and India.
Nigeria is the highest carrier of the burden with 25 per cent. Thus, more than 53 million Nigerians had malaria in 2017, the largest in the world. The disease is the fourth leading cause of death in Nigeria.
WHO said access to health services had remained a major challenge in fighting malaria.
“Only one in five pregnant women living in areas of moderate to high malaria transmission in Africa is able to obtain the drugs she needs to protect herself from malaria.
“Half the people at risk of malaria in Africa sleep under an insecticide-treated net and just 3 per cent are protected by indoor spraying with insecticides,” said WHO.
Need to rethink approaches- WHO
“Our priority now should be to establish the foundation for a successful future eradication effort while guarding against the risk of failure that would lead to the waste of huge sums of money, frustrate all those involved… and cause a lack of confidence in the global health community’s ability to ever rid the world of this disease,” the report said.
Setting unrealistic goals with unknown costs and endpoints can lead to “frustration and backlashes”, said the director of the WHO’s global malaria programme, Pedro Alonso, so the world should focus first on developing new medicines, vaccines and insecticides to get malaria cases and deaths under control.
“With the tools that we have today, it is most unlikely that eradication could be achieved,” Alonso said. “We need to focus on getting back on track.”
Credit: WHO
WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said eradicating malaria would both save lives and boost economies.
Freeing the world of malaria would be one of the greatest achievements in public health, he said.
“With new tools and approaches we can make this vision a reality,” he said.
The report showed that by scaling up current malaria interventions, an additional two billion malaria cases and four million deaths would be prevented by 2030.
But the achievement would happen provided those interventions reach 90 per cent of the population in the 29 countries that account for 95 per cent of the global burden.
The cost of this scale-up is estimated to be US$ 34 billion. The economic gain would be around US$ 283 billion in the total gross domestic product (GDP) – a benefit to cost ratio in excess of 8:1.
The world’s first malaria vaccine, RTS,S/AS01, has been developed and it is being deployed in Ghana and Malawi, with plans for rollout in Kenya.
THE Economic Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) may assist the United States government to apprehend the Nigerians involved in the $1.1 billion cyber fraud discovered lately.
The accused persons, most of whom the United States Justice Department claimed are in Nigeria have been under surveillance for arrest and possible prosecution for the alleged offence committed.
Wilson Uwujaren, Head, Media and Publicity of the EFCC told The ICIR that the “issue will come up possibly,” when asked for likely partnership with the US authorities since the claim was that most of the accused persons are based in Nigeria.
“We have an event for four….so I will rather invite you to come.”
Meanwhile, two among those allegedly involved, Valentine Iro, 31, and Chukwudi Christogunus Igbokwe, 38, had been arrested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
The ICIR earlier reported how the accused persons fraudulent transferred at least $6 million within seven months.
Below is the list of defendants named in the 252-count charge
ECONOMIST and financial analyst, Bismarck Rewane says Nigerians can’t wait for the 10-years plan of President Muhammadu Buhari.
Rewane said this on Thursday during a programme on Channels Television while reacting to President Buhari declaration that he would lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty over the course of the next 10 years.
The World Bank says a person can be said to be living in extreme poverty, if they live below the poverty line of $1.90 which translates to N693.5 per day.
President Muhammadu Buhari during a two-day retreat for minister-designates in Abuja on Monday said:
“We must work as a team. Working as a team demands that we know what the next person is doing. You must open communication with your colleagues. Lack of communication leads to a lack of cooperation and sub-optimal performance.
“We are working to lift Nigerians out of poverty and set them on the path to prosperity. We intend to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty over the next 10 years”, Buhari said during the retreat.
But Rewane, the chief executive officer of Financial Derivatives Company, said Nigerians can’t wait for 10 years, they want results now.
“How are they going to achieve this? The President has laid out his vision but the thing is that 10 years is a long time. Nigerians can’t wait for 10 years, they can’t even wait for 10 months, they want results now.
“Mr President, yes we like this (10-year plan) but we want some immediate deliverables.
“To get the immediate deliverables, first and foremost there has to be fiscal and monetary coordination to be able to unlock and deliver results.
“We have to manage our expectations and go back to total factor productivity or labour productivity,” he said.
FEDERAL Prosecutors of the United States Department of Justice on Thursday said 80 persons in the US and Nigeria,were believed to have stolen about $1.1 billion through several various fraudulent schemes in seven months.
They were indicted in a 252-count charge by the prosecutors reported by nearly 14,000 petitioners.
“I’ll like to give you some numbers. In the first seven months of this year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) internet crime complaint centres received nearly 14, 000 complaints from victims reported Business Email Compromise (BEC) incidents with a total loss of $1.1 billion,” says Paul Delacourt, the FBI Assistant Director in charge of the case.
Most of the defendants according to the prosecutors live outside the US. But in the report cited by The ICIR, the Nigerians among the suspects include Valentine Iro (31) of Carson and Chukwudi Christogunus Igbokwe (38), of Gardena, both based in the US.
A 145-page document filed to the US District Court for the Central District of California detailed scores of Nigerians indicted in the fraud.
Another document, Financial Recipient Loss by Month shared by the prosecutors in a 31:48 seconds footage, revealed that in 2019, almost $40 million was lost in January this year, followed by other unclear sums in April and May, then January, July, February and March respectively.
According to the FBI Los Angeles Technology Enabled Crime (TEC) Task Force, shared by the prosecutors, from the accused 23 local defendants, 15 are based in Loss Angeles. From the 15, only one has not been arrested.
Seven others were detailed among those residing outside Loss Angeles but only three have been apprehended.
“That is the chart of the 23 domestic defendants. We have 80 defendants. Most of them are internationals. We will talk about that, but these are the 23 that we are looking for within the US. Six of them are fugitives, so if their faces are uncovered, it means we are looking for them. So if anyone has information we would like you to call us,” one of the prosecutors stated.
Reports say the defendants allegedly laundered the money through a Los Angeles based money laundering network.
“Eleven of them were arrested Thursday in Southern California, while three others were taken into custody elsewhere in the U.S., according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California,” the report stated.
The ICIR earlier reported on 17th August, how the FBI arrested Obiwanne Okeke, popular Nigerian businessman for committing internet fraud.
THE Election Petition Tribunal in Kogi State on Friday sacked Sen. Dino Melaye as Senate-elect representing Kogi West Senatorial District.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Dino as winner of his constituency after the February 23 election.
Melaye polled 85,395 votes to win Sen. Smart Adeyemi of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who got 66, 901 votes.
The Tribunal, however, made the verdict based two factors – over-voting and non-compliance with the electoral act, thus called for a fresh poll.
Adeyemi, his main challenger from the APC had shortly after the poll petitioned the tribunal to complain over irregularities in the National Assembly election. He also cited non-compliance with the Electoral Act.
Meanwhile, Dino is already contesting for the governorship position in the state and has commenced campaign.
Report by Vanguard says that the three-man panel chaired by Justice A.O Chijioke, unanimously accepted Adeyemi’s argument, thus ordered for re-election.
On Tribunal judgement. No cause 4 alarm at all. Even if it went my way they will still go to the Appeal Court. Our mandate can not be taken. We will get judgment at the Appeal Court. There will be fresh election in Kogi West bc I will be Governor. For my Senate mandate no shaking
But, Melaye, reacting via his social media handle, discarded the judgement on the election, stressing that he would emerge next governor of the state.
“On Tribunal judgement. No cause for alarm at all. Even if it went my way they will still go to the Appeal Court. Our mandate cannot be taken. We will get judgment at the Appeal Court.
“There will be a fresh election in Kogi West because I will be governor. For my Senate mandate, no shaking,” he stated.
