SENIOR Staff Association of Universities, Teaching Hospitals, Research Institutes and Associated Institutions, SSAUTHRIAI, Federal Psychiatric Hospital, Uselu branch, yesterday, dissociated itself from media reports that fresh crisis was brewing in the hospital over the alleged refusal by the Chief Medical Director of the hospital, Dr. Sunday Olotu, to give a written approval to some staff invited by Department of State Security, DSS.

An Abuja Magistrates’ Court, yesterday, ordered that one Buhari Ahmadu, 21, of no fixed address be remanded in prison for alleged criminal trespass.

ABIA State government, yesterday, openly put the Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Chief Goddsday Orubebe, on the defensive, by accusing him of neglecting the state and treating it as not part of the region. The government made its position known when Orubebe led a delegation of senior staff of his Ministry, including the Minister of State, to Government House, Umuahia.

SOUTH African Court, yesterday, sentenced former leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, Mr. Henry Okah, to 24 years imprisonment, having been found guilty on 13-count charge of terrorism. The charges related to two car bombs in Abuja, in which 12 people were killed and 36 injured on October 1, 2010, on the anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, and another two explosions in Warri, earlier in March, 2010.

Arsons, bombings, killings, prison breaks, kidnappings have become routine; hardly a day passes without killings in parts of the country. Damaturu, Gombe, Maiduguri, Mubi, Potiskum, Yola, have held headlines for bombings. The incidents spread to Abuja, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Kogi, Niger, Sokoto States, joining the perennial killings in Plateau State. The most embarrassing of the incidents remain the bombing of the nation’s 50th independence anniversary in Abuja and the targeting of elite military and other security offices.

Chief of Naval Staff, CNS, Vice Admiral Dele Ezeoba, yesterday, warned the officers and men of the Nigerian Navy against complicity in crude oil theft in the Niger Delta, saying anyone caught will have himself to blame.

Tragedy struck,Monday, at Odogunyan area of Ikorodu, Lagos, when a factory worker with African Steel Mill was electrocuted after the company allegedly denied him access to its toilet facilities.

A major effort in peacemaking by the PDP ends with the exposure of internal dissensions traced to the style and schemes of its national chairman. It was celebrated as the boldest peace shooting initiative ever in the history of the fractious Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. Central to the plan was a tour of the six geopolitical zones by the National Chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur and members of the National Working Committee, NWC to build bridges across the divides in the party.

KADUNA—AGENTS of top politicians, who are uncomfortable with Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s leadership of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, NGF, are behind the campaign posters purportedly announcing the presidential ambition of Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa State and his Rivers State counterpart, Amaechi, it emerged yesterday.

THE Federal Government, yesterday, said that the on-going National Integrated Power Project, NIPP, being executed in Ihovbor, Edo State, with a view to boosting power supply in the Niger Delta region, will be completed in April this year.

…Ndigbo to decide this week …
AS the death toll in last Monday’s bomb blasts at a bus park in Kano rises to 80, President of the Igbo Youth Movement, IYM, Evangelist Elliot Uko, has urged Igbo youths to remain calm and await the decision of Igbo leaders this week. In a chat with reporters, Uko holds northern leaders and politicians responsible for the Boko Haram insurgency, saying that sponsors of the sect have murdered sleep. Excerpts:

The Minister of Communications Technology, Mrs. Jonson Omobola was in Lagos recently to unveil a job creation scheme ‘’Microwork for Job Creation-Naijacloud’’ that seeks to reduce unemployment and create wealth for Nigerian youths. The project with support from the STEP-B project of the Ministry of Education, according to the Minister would address the issues of employability and job creation using information technology. She also talks on a number of industry issues in Nigeria. Excerpts:

*Hands off Constituency Projects *Backs Jonathan on Boko Haram
ABUJA— STRONG indications emerged, Tuesday, that the Senate may revisit its decision on zero allocation for Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC, in the 2013 fiscal year because of the face-off with the commission’s Director General, Ms Aruma Oteh.

THE dust raised by his last controversial book There was a Country has not settled. A former Military Governor of North Western State during the Nigerian Civil War, Alhaji Usman Faruk has just published his own version of the war in which he casts the Northern leaders who executed the war as patriotic heroes. On the very day he died, alarming statements were being made by people who were not even born before the Nigerian civil war, most of them threatening mayhem, revenge and even another civil war following the bombing of buses in Kano which, as it turned out, mostly took the lives of people from the same stock as the presumed bombers. One or two prominent writers even hinted that the bombing in Kano may have hastened his death. Chinua Achebe’s Nigeria is falling apart at a rate no one could have imagined. The tragedy is that history will record him as a symbol of its cultural wealth, as well as a symptom of its failure to utilise its assets.

With the telecom sector regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC set to roll out the mobile number portability, MNP, the feeling in the industry is that the major operators who may be having network congestions due to too many customers may lose part of their revenue as some subscribers may likely opt out to smaller networks and still retain their original number.