Author: Chronicle Editor

Nigeria’s upper chamber has threatened to override the veto power of its acting President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo after he withheld assent to four bills. Osinbajo, who last week signed seven bills, conveyed his position in a letter to the Senate, read on the floor Wednesday by President of the Senate, Dr Bukola Saraki. According to the Acting President, he declined to sign the Lottery Bill because of the existence of a pending legal challenge to the competence of the National Assembly to legislate on the subject matter. The letter reads: “Pursuant to section 58(4) of the constitution, I hereby convey…

Kola Awodein, lawyer to President Muhammadu Buhari, has denied bribing Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court, with N500,000.00 at the behest of the President. Justice Ademola is standing trial for alleged corruption and he was the judge that presided over the suit by a lawyer during the contrived certificate issue affecting the then presidential candidate Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). A witness at the trial of Ademola made the allegation on Tuesday. Mr Awodein, a senior advocate of Nigeria described the allegation as “malicious, utterly ridiculous, and revolting,” in a statement released today. “Nigerians know that…

By Okey Ndibe I believe that the frenzied quest by disaffected Igbo youth for Biafra represents, above all, an indictment of the kind of leaders who for close to twenty years have run the affairs of the southeastern states. Those agitating for Biafra often make a case that the Igbo are marginalized in the affairs of Nigeria. That may well be true, especially when the criterion is the presence and quality of Federal projects in the five southeast states. For me, however, a more critical factor has to do with the lack of imagination by the zone’s political and entrepreneurial…

President Jacob Zuma’s decision to withdraw South Africa from the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been ruled “unconstitutional and invalid” by the High Court. South Africa notified the UN of its intention to leave last October, saying the ICC undermined its sovereignty and pursued “regime change”. But the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) argued that the government had to first seek parliamentary approval. The court ordered the government to revoke its notice of withdrawal. The decision to pull out came after a dispute over Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s visit to the country in 2015. South African authorities refused to arrest Mr…

A Mexican man has apparently taken his own life just half an hour after being deported from the United States, BBC has reported. Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, 45, jumped from a bridge at the border after he was deported for the third time. He was found unconscious next to a plastic bag with his belongings and died in hospital a short while later. His death came as the Trump administration issued new guidelines to widen the net for deporting illegal immigrants from the US. Witnesses said Mr Olivas was shouting that he did not want to return to Mexico and seemed…

By Folarin Ademosu When Mr. Babatunde Fashola, Minister of Power, Works and Housing, was asked by the Senate Committee on Housing, about the N2 billion ‘regional housing’ project in his ministry’s proposed expenditure for 2017, he claimed the Ministry of Finance was responsible. It is not unlikely that Mr. Fashola knew more than he divulged to the Senate committee. More than anything else, the encounter between the former Lagos governor (Fashola) and the Senate committee chairman, Senator Barnabas Gemade, justifies the concern about frivolous and questionable insertions by the various Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, in the N7.3 trillion Appropriation…

Assets held by Nigeria’s sovereign wealth fund almost doubled to 413.63 billion naira ($1.36 billion) by the end of the third quarter of 2016 from the beginning of the year, it said on Wednesday. The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority’s (NSIA’s) assets rose 93.6 percent from 213.67 billion naira at the end of 2015, according to a presentation shown at a press briefing in Abuja. The boost in a “fairly solid year” came after the NSIA deployed more capital, while “equity markets were very strong,” said Managing Director Uche Orji. The Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority is a Nigerian establishment which manages…

Britain will provide additional aid money to South Sudan, where famine has been declared in parts of the country, and to Somalia, where there is a credible risk of famine, the government said on Wednesday. Britain will provide 100 million pounds ($125 million) to each country in 2017/18 in addition to existing flows of aid. “The world faces a series of unprecedented humanitarian crises and the real threat of famine in four countries,” International Development Secretary Priti Patel said in a statement. U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said on Tuesday that nearly 1.4 million children were at imminent risk of death…

A whistleblower has led the Nigerian government to a suspicious bank account, with no signatories, but where N8.4 billion was secretly kept. A report today said some of the money has been converted into dollars and wired abroad but the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has filed an ex parte motion to place it under temporary assets forfeiture. According to TheNation newspaper, a telecommunications company has gone to court, claiming ownership of the money, The Nation reported that a whistleblower alerted the government to strange deposits in the ECOBANK account by some suspected government officials. “Of the many deposits, about…

The Donald Trump administration has issued tough guidelines to widen the net for deporting illegal immigrants from the US, and speed up their removal. Undocumented immigrants arrested for traffic violations or shop-lifting will be targeted along with those convicted of more serious crimes. The memos do not alter US immigration laws, but take a much tougher approach towards enforcing existing measures. There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Tuesday the new guidelines would not usher in mass deportations, but were designed to empower agents to enforce laws already…