FOR about three years, Wisdom Gbofoeyin, who is 12 years old, has been carrying a cross of pain, the pain of a swollen jaw which has caused him sleepless nights and somehow defied initial attempts at treatment. In fact, while some attribute his ailment to natural causes, many others, including his parents, are convinced his agony is a consequence of witchcraft attack and therefore requires spiritual intervention.

YAKUUR- A pensioner, who came for a verification exercise by the Cross River State Government at Yakuur Local Government Area secretariat, Yakuur, in the state, collapsed at the venue out of exhaustion , and was rushed back home, while several retirees and pensioners alleged ill-treatment by officials.

Tragedy was averted weekend as three unidentified aged pensioners slumped during the verification exercise organised by the Lagos State Local Government Pension Board, for pensioners. The incident which temporarily halted the verification exercise occurred when the pensioners were struggling to submit their forms to government officials for verification. The exercise which took place at the old Lagos Secretariat, adjacent the Nigeria Police College, Ikeja, attracted hundreds of elderly persons in their 70s and 80s.

In 2000, some youths in Rivers state formed two cult groups; Deygbam and Deywell and operated in Port Harcourt where they terrorized the residents of the city. Their activities were limited to the state capital while other communities in the state enjoyed relative peace under the watch of local vigilante groups. In 2007 however, when Mr Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi became governor of the state, he chased away all the cultists from Port Harcourt and the residents heaved a sigh of relief.

WARRI- IJAW leader, Mr. Piniki Azaiye, weekend, expressed dismay that the Delta state government allegedly neglected riverside communities in the state in the first one year in office of Governor Ifeanyi Okowa and urged him to correct the absurdity. Azaiye, in a statement, in Warri, said: “Looking at what the governor did in the hinterland, one is forced to ask if riverine communities are not part of the state or is it that he forgot the riverine local government areas or he purposefully ignored them. It is as if he has forgotten his campaign promises to the riverine local government areas of the state.

For refusing to get her children circumcised, a mother of three, Mrs Victoria Ijeoma Akinsanya has been forced to abscond her Festac town, Lagos residence to an unknown destination. Not only that, her younger brother Njoku Ifeanyi was beaten by hoodlums while their aged mother Mrs Celestina Njoku now lives in fear.

The suspected militants who are mostly Ijaws were said to have invaded the communities at about 4am through the creeks using sophisticated weapons.

Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, LASUTH, is a facility that records over 200 emergencies in two of its Accident & Emergency, A&E, units on a daily basis. Situated few kilometres away from the domestic terminal and Murtala Mohammed International Airport, Ikeja, LASUTH, is open to patients from all parts of the country and neighbouring African countries and is prone to unavoidable emergency cases at all times.

IMAGINE when your pregnancy is scanned for the first time so you could see your precious baby growing in the womb, suddenly its whole body gives a shudder and the foetus appears to jump. Such a movement is known as the startle reflex; and the scan described above are from photographs from scans that were taken by Peter Hepper, a professor of psychology at Queens University, Belfast, an expert on the effects of alcohol on unborn babies.

At Alaba Rago in Ojo Local Government Area of Lagos State, nothing goes to waste. Every discarded object –pieces of iron, paper, plastic, wood, bottle, just name it – comes into use. There is no recycling bank there, but all kinds of condemned objects find a role to play in the economic life of not only the people (especially Hausas generally referred to as Aboki, an Housa word for friend) who run the place, but also outsiders who throw away those objects in the first place.