THREE construction staff of Okmas Nigeria Limited, abducted by a seven-man kidnap gang along Patani-Oduophori Road in Delta State, have regained their freedom after spending 25 days in captivity.

A former Per-manent Secretary in the United Nations, Professor Agboola Gambari, has told President Muhammadu Buhari that ‘change’ must not remain a slogan because he was elected on that platform, hence he must be prepared to deliver on all his campaign promises.

Two teenage boys, both aged 10, were weekend confirmed dead after drowning in a river at Madaka village in Gagarawa Local Government Area of Jigawa State.

Concerned by the over 500 deaths from cholera recorded in the country this year, United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, has raised alarm over increasing cases of the deadly disease, urging Nigerians to adopt good personal hygiene practices throughout the rainy season.

Workers in the upstream sub-sector of the oil and gas industry have said Federal Government must seek alternative ways of funding Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, joint venture, JV, operations with oil companies.

Residents of Gbaji-Seme, a border community in Badagry West Local Council Development Area of Lagos State, has asked the Federal Government to allocate to them at least 10 percent of the total annual revenue collected from Seme Border, to facilitate community development.

A total of N738 billion worth of agricultural products were imported into the country in the first quarter of 2015, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in its latest foreign trade reports. Agricultural imports increased by N132.1 billion or 21.8 percent from N606 billion in Q1 2014 to N738 billion in Q1 2015, the data show.

“At the CBN, we are doing a lot of things to promote resource efficiency, energy efficiency. We thing I can proudly tell you is that we have connected to the national grid. Before we were running on generators but now we have connected to the National Grid, so our generators are no longer running 24/7. Secondly, we are also in terms of energy efficiency, we shut down systems at certain periods rather than leaving the system running 24/7- apart from essential systems. We are also using energy efficient bulbs.

The Nigerian Academy of Education, NAE, weekend, attributed the inability of the academia to carry out successful academic research work to poor funding of the education sector in the country.

Acrimony arising from the initial rejection of the election of Senator Bukola Saraki as Senate President by All Progressives Congress, APC, yesterday, deepened among his countrymen in Kwara State.

Bayelsa State Government, yesterday, expressed dissatisfaction with the response of Shell Petroleum Development Company, SPDC, to frequent oil spills in the state.

The Commissioner for Environment, Mr Iniruo Wills, said in Yenagoa, that several meetings between the state government and officials of the oil firm in the past had been fruitless.

Well, as you can imagine, if the system is already deluged with problematic surplus Naira, the infusion of any additional Naira will only worsen the already suffocating burden of too much money. Consequently, if government makes sectoral interventions with hundreds of billions of Naira when surplus cash is already a problem, you will understand that the impact of spending the additional intervention funds in any manner whatsoever, will simply ‘inadvertently’ exacerbate the threat of inflation.

Worried by the acrimony among Benue State politicians, the paramount ruler of Tyoshin, Ter Nagi, Chief Ayua Abomtse has appealed to politicians in the state to sheathe their swords and forgive one another in the interest of the state.

Civil Society Organisations yesterday urged the government, non-governmental organisations, religious groups, charitable and voluntary organisations to invest heavily in providing succour to the Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, in the country.

The Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC in Bauchi State has appealed to the state government to pay workers salary before the commencement of the Ramadan fasting.