Nigerians living in fear, uncertainty – Obasanjo, IBB

Obasanjo, Babangida

Former heads of state, General Olusegun Obasanjo and General Ibrahim Babangida have expressed concern over the growing insecurity in the country, saying “Nigeria is currently under fear and uncertainty.”

Both leaders, who recently abused each other on the pages of newspapers, however appealed to Nigerians to use the holy month of Ramadan to turn the tide against insecurity, violence and hatred.
In a joint statement  in Abuja on Sunday, they warned that the consequences were capable of affecting the unity of the country.

Their statement reads in part, “While we are very much aware of the efforts various governments in the country are making to confront the escalating security challenges across the country, we believe that it is time that these efforts are scaled up to be more involving and inclusive.

“In this regard, whatever robust security measures are put in place to contain the situation, as is normal in such circumstances; they must be complemented with an equally intensive process of community involvement.

“We therefore urge all governments in the country, starting with all the 774 local councils to comprehensively engage their communities at the various levels, including elders, youth organisations, trade union and associations, women bodies, clerics and other community stakeholders.

“We also call on the Federal and state governments not only to encourage these grass roots engagements for peace and beneficial coexistence but should work out the framework to sustain the engagement.”

They said that in all these efforts, it was important to emphasise that Nigeria’s diversity should be a course for celebration and not a cause for lamentations.

They also appealed to religious leaders, in particular, to have an even greater challenge to use the immense virtues of this holy period to inculcate among the millions of citizens, the spirit of mutual respect, humility and forgiveness.

They furthermore revealed that ample opportunities were at hand to bring all armed belligerents to table for meaningful dialogue with the authorities for Nigerians’ future.

Obasanjo and Babangida added that no meaningful development could ever occur in an atmosphere of violence and hatred.

History, they said, had shown that any society built on the structures of violence and intolerance would not prosper.

While they said that God has blessed Nigeria with abundant resources and talents, they however said there must be peace and harmony to harness them.

They also said they were ready to do whatever was possible to promote the quest for peace and harmony in the country.

FG to send soldiers to fight Islamists in Mali

by Olusola Fabiyi, John Alechenu, Tunde Odesola and Fidelis Soriwei 

Nigerian Soldiers
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INDICATIONS emerged on Sunday that Nigeria will soon deploy soldiers in Mali to confront the Islamists troubling the West African country, the Presidency and foreign affairs ministry said on Sunday.

Spokespersons for President Goodluck Jonathan, Reuben Abati; and Foreign Affairs Ministry, Ogbole Ahmedu-Ode, say Nigeria holds a responsibility to return peace to Mali.

“Nigeria is committed to resolving the crisis in Mali especially as President Jonathan is a co-mediator in the crisis,” Abati told The PUNCH on Sunday, while Ogbole-Ode said it was mandatory for the country to salvage the situation in Mali where Islamic fundamentalists are unleashing attacks on the country’s monuments and people.

The Presidency’s confirmation came on the heels of Ivorien President Alassane Ouattara’s announcement that member state of Economic Community of West Africa would soon send deploy troops in Mali if the situation in the country did not improve rapidly.

Ouattara said this in interview with French weekly, Le Journal du Dimanche. The interview conducted in French and published on Sunday was translated by The PUNCH via Google translator.

The Ivorien President, who is also the incumbent chairman of ECOWAS, said,  “If the (Malian) situation does not evolve positively and quickly, yes, there will be a military intervention in Mali. It seems to me inevitable. “The chiefs of staff of West Africa met in Abidjan this week. All member states of ECOWAS were represented. It shows that the Joint Chiefs of Staff Officers propose the establishment of a contingent of nearly 3,300 men. Initially, it will deploy gendarmes and police. Then, the military.

“My chief of staff said this week rightly that the situation in Mali is deteriorating a little more each day and not only in the north but also south. We plan to establish an African peacekeeping force made up half of Malian soldiers, half of soldiers from Niger, Nigeria, perhaps in Chad and other countries.”

On the urgency of the deployment, Ouattara said, “I think we can talk in weeks, not months. There is urgency. Northern Mali is a land of moderate Islam. Not Malians who violate human rights, force women to wear the burqah and abuse them, who destroy historical monuments, preventing young people from listening to music . I am told that these men come from Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan … They are extremists, terrorists who must return to where they came from.”

Abati said, “The ECOWAS leaders have the responsibility to ensure peace in Mali and the sub-region. Nigeria is committed to resolving the crisis in Mali especially as President Jonathan is a co-mediator in the crisis.

“This country has a brilliant record of participation in peace missions: Sierra Leone, Liberia and so on. Nigeria is fully committed to regional peace.”

Speaking in the same vein, Ogbole-Ode said Nigeria, as “a responsible member of the international community, was bound by agreements it entered into.”

But the opposition argued on Sunday that it was not ideal for the Federal Government to send soldiers to Mali to fight for peace at a time that Nigeria was in the thick of an insurgency.

Attacks by the violent Islamic sect, Boko Haram, since last year have claimed at least 3,000 lives.

The All Nigeria Peoples Party said that although there was nothing wrong if Nigeria sent soldiers to Mali, the present security situation at home did not warrant it.

Speaking in a telephone interview with our correspondent, the National Publicity Secretary of the party, Chief Emma Eneukwu, said there was no need for Nigeria to abandon its problems while trying to solve that of other countries.

He said, “The present problem facing the country requires the attention of members of our armed forces. Our security is zero.

“Let us sit down and face our own problems first before handling that of others for them. We are at danger here already. Let us prevail on the government not to send our soldiers to a foreign land when they have work to do here.”

Also, the National Chairman of the Action Congress of Nigeria, Chief Bisi Akande, cautioned the Federal Government over the plan to deploy troops in Mali.

Akande, who spoke through his media aide, Mr Lani Baderinwa, on Sunday, charged the Federal Government to ensure the safety of lives and property in the country before venturing out to Mali.

“Charity begins at home. We must not be like the proverbial ostrich that buries her head in the sand while her rump is out in the open,” the ACN chairman said.

He wondered why the government contemplated deploying troops in Mali when Africa was not the centre-point of the nation’s foreign policy.

“It is ironic that the government would contemplate sending troops abroad when our security agencies are finding it extremely difficult to combat the security challenges in the country,” he stressed.

Culled from The Punch

Ogonis Plan Occupation Of Key 'National' Installations

  From Kelvin Ebiri, Port Harcourt 

THE Ogonis are to occupy strategic economic installations in their locality, except the government expeditiously implements the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) recommendations.
The Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) has meanwhile received with mixed feelings the Federal Government’s newly constituted Hydro-Carbon Pollution Restoration Project (HYPREP) as part of the implementation of the UNEP Assessment Report on Ogoni Land.
MOSOP’s provisional council chairman, Professor Ben Naanen, told The Guardian that the Ogoni people had been mobilised to occupy key strategic economic installations located in four local government areas to protest the delay in the implementation of the report.
Similar mass action had forced Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) to abandon its operations in Ogoni since 1993 to date.
Naanen said the Ogonis suspect the Federal government, which has failed to implement the report that was submitted to it since August 2011, might have set up HYPREP as a ploy to forestall the planned occupation of key installations in Ogoni and pending legal actions.
Key strategic economic installations located in Ogoni includes the Oil and Gas Free Zone Onne, the Port Harcourt Petrochemical Plant, Notore Fertiliser Plant, two refineries, government-owned farms. There are also key oil and gas installations in the area.
“We are not hiding our intention to occupy strategic economic installations to press the government to implement the recommendations of the UNEP report.  Civil society organisations are also planning other actions. The government is aware of what is coming. There is no going back,” he said.
The MOSOP leader said during the planned occupation of Ogoni, there would be mass demonstration geared at disruption economic activities, primarily to attract government’s attention to the yearnings of the people for a quick implementation of the report.
Naanen explained that the congress of Ogoni people met over the weekend to review the terse statement by Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, announcing the setting up of HYPREP.
The minister had given the assurance that government would implement the recommendations in the report and investigate other hydrocarbon-impacted sites. According to her, with the establishment of HYPREP, it is expected that all stakeholders, especially the impacted communities, would co-operate fully with Government by granting unfettered access to all impacted sites, to ensure complete success.
Naanen said Ogoni leadership are keenly awaiting details and clarification on HYPREP from the Federal Government.
UNEP, in its recommendation, said through a combination of approaches, individual contaminated land areas in Ogoniland could be cleaned up within five years, while the restoration of heavily-impacted mangrove stands and swamplands would take up to 30 years.
According to the report, all sources of ongoing contamination must be brought to an end before the clean-up of the creeks, sediments and mangroves can begin.
The report recommended the establishment of three new institutions in Nigeria to support a comprehensive environmental restoration exercise.
It recommended: “a proposed Ogoniland Environmental Restoration Authority would oversee implementation of the study’s recommendations and should be set up during a Transition Phase which UNEP suggests should begin as soon as possible.
The Authority’s activities should be funded by an Environmental Restoration Fund for Ogoniland, to be set up with an initial capital injection of US$1 billion contributed by the oil industry and the government, to cover the first five years of the clean-up project.”
UNEP also suggested the setting up of an Integrated Contaminated Soil Management Centre, to be built in Ogoniland and supported by potentially hundreds of mini treatment centres, would treat contaminated soil and provide hundreds of job opportunities.
Culled from the Guardian

Boko Haram: President Jonathan Under Fresh US Pressure

From Laolu Akande (New York) and Marcel Mbamalu (Lagos) 

PRESIDENT Jonathan is coming under intense international pressure to firm up his administration’s handling of the Boko Haram violence, which is now beginning to threaten his chances of staying in power beyond 2015.
This comes as indications emerged that the religious sect had issued fresh warnings to a Nigerian High Commission in a Southern African country, threatening attack if the authorities failed to comply with unstated demands.
An email sent to the High Commission, whose newly-appointed High Commissioner of South-South extraction is yet to assume duties, made a passive mention of “compensation”, otherwise what happened to some media houses in Nigeria would befall the Commission.
Sources close to the High Commission disclosed that the matter had been “transmitted” to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria and that officials “ are taking the threat very seriously,” by observing safety and security measures.
Informed US sources disclosed that the menace of Boko Haram is one of the issues that the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is looking to raise personally with President Jonathan with whom she has asked for a meeting early next month, as she prepares for what looks like her valedictory tour of selected African states.
As the Obama administration wraps up its first term ahead of November polls, it is believed that the wife of the former American President, Clinton, would not be part of Obama’s second term if he wins.
The US State Department is expected to announce the African tour later this week, and it is expected to take Hillary Clinton to Abuja and few other African capitals, but the Nigerian meeting is said to be high on the US’ agenda, as it is in other western capitals.
While the US government has named three Boko Haram leaders as terrorists, there are serious internal pressures from the Republicans in Congress and some other arms of the US executive arms of government to declare the entire Boko Haram as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO)
Dependable sources hinted that the US government might buckle under the pressure from inside and name Boko Haram an FTO if, by the end of this year, President Jonathan has not effectively brought down the Boko Haram menace.
Already, virtually every security agency in the US Federal Government is said to be supporting the move to designate the entire Boko Haram as an FTO.
According to dependable US Congressional sources, these agencies include, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice.
The State Department is virtually the only unit of the US government actively holding down the designation right now, since it is the one empowered to do so. A personal Clinton meeting with Jonathan early in August is expected to detail the internal workings of the US government agencies on the matter.
But it was also gathered that the Nigerian government, especially its Embassy in the US, continues to strongly question the plan to declare Boko Haram an FTO, arguing that the US did not do the same in Niger Delta during the menace of the militants, which the Nigerian government eventually ended.
Besides, the Nigerian government had argued that designating Boko Haram an FTO would be counter-productive and would also expose ordinary Nigerians traveling internationally to undue and possibly invasive body searches at western airports.
Also, the Nigerian government is asking for some conclusive proof that Boko Haram is linked with other global terrorists like al-Qaeda beyond calculated suspicions.
This is expected to be one of the important issues that Clinton wanted to raise with Jonathan in the planned early August meeting in Aso Rock, as views (even in the US Congress) are also focusing on whether, or not, Jonathan presidency can survive the Boko Haram and other opposition beyond 2015.
In fact, there was an open declaration by a Republican Congressman earlier this month at a Congressional hearing on Nigeria, questioning whether Jonathan can surmount all its current oppositions.
Republican Congressman, Chris Smith, the chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa, while addressing the hearing in the presence of representatives of the Obama administration said, “the questions our government must answer are: will this government — Jonathan’s presidency in Nigeria — withstand its opposition and what can we do to help Nigeria to remain Africa’s essential nation?
Smith openly raised those questions at the oversight congressional hearing held July 10 by the House sub-committee on the issue of Boko Haram. It was at the hearing that Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN President, Pastor Ayo Oristejafor also challenged the US government on what he called hypocrisy of not declaring the entire Boko Haram as terrorist group.
Although there are also important economic issues that Clinton is expected to raise during his imminent visit to Abuja, sources in the US government point to the current sentiments about the Jonathan government in the US congress as critical, partly compelling Clinton’s desire to have a personal meeting with President Jonathan in Aso Rock early August.
While addressing the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP meeting July 17 in Abuja, the Nigerian President himself addressed the issue of opposition to the PDP-led government, saying, “people want to drown us, and you see, most of the statements being made by these people is because they know PDP is a very robust party.”
According to him, “It is our duty to continue to resist and tell Nigerians the correct things we are doing and we believe that if we do not have a party as robust as the PDP, probably, the present Republic would have collapsed, because we witnessed what happened in the First Republic.”
So, in western capital too, based on reports from their Nigeria-based diplomats, some are already edging their bets in the seeming murky waters of Nigeria’s politics ahead of the 2014 elections.
When the US Congressman Smith raised the questions, seeking for a focus by the US government, he traced the issue to the emergence of Jonathan in 2010.
According to him: “When Yar’Adua finally died in May 2010, ...power brokers only accepted Jonathan to be sworn in as president because he was not considered a threat and likely wouldn’t run for reelection. However, Jonathan surprised them by announcing in September 2010 that he had consulted widely throughout Nigeria and would run for president.”
Continuing, the Congressman from New Jersey added “The issues of excessive government force in the Niger Delta, northern Nigeria and other areas of the country over several past governments in Nigeria has fed resentment.  Combined with the northern political opposition, the increasing resistance by minorities and the civil society political revolt, the Jonathan Administration faces significant forces arrayed against it.  The questions our government must answer are: will this government withstand its opposition and what can we do to help Nigeria to remain Africa’s essential nation?
US State Department sources added that when the Jonathan-Clinton meeting happens in Abuja, the US Secretary of State will seek to urge the Nigerian president to address the Boko Haram concerns.
Clinton’s deputy on Africa, Ambassador Johnnie Carson, had said recently exactly what the US wants Nigeria to do on Boko Haram, perhaps to avoid an FTO designation from the US: “Boko Haram thrives because of social and economic problems in the north that the government must also address. A coordinated government effort to provide responsible, accountable governance to all Nigerians, while creating opportunities for economic growth, will diminish the political space in which Boko Haram operates.”

Nigeria and the Imperative of Edo Revolution

By BEN LAWRENCE


What is in a name?  To some people without any references, there is nothing in a name. Their approach to human existence is to grab and chew and die. What happens after death has no meaning to them. After all, their families have no past. Their philosophy is that of a common mammal that lives day to day only to devour anything in sight.

But mammals still have limitations. It is said that a lion shuns any prey when it has its stomach full. Only some humans, especially those in Africa, are insatiable in their search for prey. So they brook no opposition and want to have everything to themselves, including the power of life and death. But human beings, with some finer selves that are spiritually above those of animals, act with enlightened self-interest to live and let live because the neighbour’s pain in one form or the other becomes theirs.

It was Frederick Douglass, America’s first black newspaper editor, who wrote that to expect freedom without struggle is to have the ocean without its waves and storms, and thunder without lightning. Booker T. Washington, also a post-liberation black intellectual and developer, said in his book, Up From Slavery, that there is no difference between the pain suffered by the oppressor and that of the oppressed. The oppressor toils mentally to find how to keep down the serf from rising. He only pretends to feel no pain. Washington succintly wrote that “the law of changeless justice binds the oppressor with the oppressed.”

Comrade Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole, perhaps, was beholden to this law. Small wonder he rose above the animal instincts of the predator to put up a gallant fight that has thrown a bright ray of light into the darkness that has enveloped Nigeria since 2003, that of undue submission to the black maid of powers. This is where it becomes relevant that there is something in a name. All the holy books hold that man is not just the body alone. The soul cannot be seen or touched, yet without it the body is mere dust.

Oshiomhole has not changed his tailor since victory over the dark forces of decay and retrogression that seized the ancient Edos for decades. Edos were first to be westernised in Africa south of the Sahara. They established a cabinet form of government before Britain and others. They decentralised their administration long before the white man set foot on the shores of the Atlantic.

The pang of government-inflicted slavery was bound to be broken because one of their kind was to rise from the dust to free them once more. Nigeria has seen how a people under a trustworthy leadership can regain their freedom. A revolution starts like a spark of the Prairie fire. The peaceful revolution in Edo State is bound to spread to the ethnographically sisterly states of Ondo, Ekiti and Delta in one form or the other. These people are going to defy the do-or-die threats of animals in human form. And, Nigeria, better be warned not to tamper with this infectious spread of the priceless liberty Edos have just won. Never in my life did I see Nigerians so submissive to the blackmail of power as I have witnessed between 1999 and now. Gallant Nigerian youths rose in their thousands to challenge imperialism in the 1940s, a process that gathered considerable moss to force the British to vacate power.

Nigerians challenged nepotism and oligarchy after independence and also at all times checked their leaders’ tendencies to misappropriate the people’s patrimony. The dictatorship of the military was checked robustly and their heavy boots could not trample the liberty of Nigerians. The most ham-fisted of the military, General Sani Abacha, was challenged frontally and in most cases he yielded to the voice of the people.  Then came the so-called democracy of 1999 and one man aggregated to himself all the wisdom of the Nigerian people and rode rough-shod over their interests.

Oshiomhole has set in motion a trend that must not be reversed. This is the time to demand accountability of the rulers of this country as was done in the past. The memories of past great fighters for freedom must not be dimmed. True, the stage has been so empty. The few of us in our seventies are still being expected to fight for the lazy youths. Some of us started to fight evil forces in Nigeria and in the world from the late teens. Tony Enahoro was gaoled at 21 for challenging the British. Michael Ogon was 21 when he defied the British and was put in prison.

Raji Abdallah was 25 when he went to jail for exposing the odium of imperialism. Remi Fani-Kayode and Ayo Adebanjo, in 1953, opposed Nigeria’s participation  in the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and were thrown in Broad Street Prison in Lagos. They were young. We cannot forget in a hurry Tunji Otegbeye, Femi Okunnu, Ogoegbunam Dafe and others of the Nigerian Youth Congress who put post-independence leaders on their toes.

Nigeria had Tai Solarin, Wahab Goodluck, Simon U. Bassey, Nelson Okoro and many others who constituted the check force to bad governance. Micheal Imoudu was 29 years old when he led railway workers to protest to the Governor-General of Nigeria against poor treatment of Nigerian workers. Mathew Ayodele Tokunbo was 26 when he emerged as general secretary of the Nigeria Trade Union Congress. The present youth is dormant. The so-called pro-democracy and legal rights activists are mainly dishonest and fake. Oshiomhole’s mobilisation of Edos to demand their rights should be a beacon for the youths to pick the gauntlet to break the system that now shackles them. It must not stop with Edo State.

Nigeria's Abandoned Youth: Are They Potential Recruits for Militants?

By Gillian Parker/Kaduna

In a small, stone, tin-roof building in Regassa in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, in a room whose walls are decorated with slates inscribed with Koranic verses, Adulai, 15, lies on a mat, feverish with malaria and typhoid. His younger brother Adamu tends to him. "He's very sick," says Adamu. Adamu has not eaten since the night before. He says he is hoping for some leftovers from a nearby house, where the family is finishing lunch.
Adulai and Adamu are not orphans, but they might as well be. A year ago, their parents, poor farmers with more children than they can afford, took them hundreds of miles from Katsina on the edge of the Sahara to Kaduna to study the Koran in a ramshackle Islamic school called a tsangaya. They are just two among millions of boys who have made the same journey in similar situations across the country. Communal rooms in this tsangaya host up to 80 boys at night. Thin, straw mats cover the floor. Filthy bags holding modest belongings are nailed high on the grimy walls. The boys — known as almajiris — are meant to be under the guidance of mallams, or religious teachers. In reality, when the almajiris "break" for the day, they stream out in the scores onto the streets armed with small plastic bowls to begin a long day of begging. "Almajiri is a Hausa word meaning emigrant," explains Dr. Khalid Abubakar Aliyu, secretary-general of Jama'atu Nasril Islam, an umbrella Muslim group. "It is someone who is searching for knowledge to make himself a better individual. But it has now become a concept of its own in northern Nigeria, synonymous with begging." 
Nigeria's population of 160 million is roughly split between a mostly Muslim north and a largely Christian south. Absolute poverty — defined as people who can only afford the bare essentials of food, shelter and clothing — rose to 60.9% in 2010 from 54.7% in 2004, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. That inequality is widening. And the majority of the poorest states lie in the dusty, arid north. Add into that destitution a polygamous society that can produce dozens of children in a single family and parents, with little means to feed them, willingly send their offspring to tsangayas, often hundreds of miles away in neighboring states or even countries.
In cities across northern Nigeria, the scale of the problem is apparent. Young boys swarm around cars stopped in traffic looking for alms or scraps of food. Kids with painful skin diseases and open sores on their heads and hands stare into car windows. Accidents, even fatalities, are common. Dr. Suleiman Shinkfi runs a Kaduna-based NGO helping almajiris. "They are children that assume that they don't have anybody," he says. "They feed on the roadsides, they rush for your scraps when you finish eating. Sometimes they fight dogs for food." Naturally, the children are vulnerable to criminality, says Tayo Fatinikun, state secretary of the Child Protection Network in Sokoto. "They are living where they don't have families. Some are as young as 6 years of age. It is an impetus to criminal activities." Arinze Orakwe from the National Agency for the Prohibition of People Trafficking adds: "These children are vulnerable to all sorts of social problems — abuse, violence. [They can be] cherry-picked for any vice that adults want to use them for." 
Concern is growing that the almajiris might also provide fertile recruitment grounds for northern Nigeria's Islamist militants, Boko Haram. Boko Haram has killed more than 250 people already this year, according to Human Rights Watch, including 138 people in Nigeria's second city, Kano, in a series of coordinated bomb attacks. (The militants are suspected of helping to stage a prison break in Kano that saw more than a 100 inmates escape on Thursday.)
Almajiris have long been accused of perpetrating violence on behalf of political elites in the north who seek to undermine the southern Christian-led government. Now the suspicion is that they are making easy recruits for Boko Haram. The government is aware of the problem. "Borno state, where the [Boko Haram] originated, has some of the worst human development indexes in the country in terms of access to health care, high maternal fatality, high infant mortality, high fertility," Nigeria's Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said. "We have to target it. We have to tackle unemployment, poverty and improve social services for vulnerable people." 
The issue of the almajiris is sensitive, however. Few are prepared to confront the mallams, who yield considerable influence. One, Mallam Abubarkar, who runs a tsangaya in Kaduna, has 17 children from two wives. He feeds his family with farm produce sent to him by his charges' parents, along with the $1,300-a-year school fees they bring in. Mallam Abubarkar says the almajiris pose no danger. "I went through this, I begged on the streets," he says. "All the mallams went through the same process. Islamic doctrine allows for one to seek help and allows one to give help — and almajiris are in this position, asking for help because of God." Shinkfi says that's nonsense. "Mallams are doing it for business, not in the name of God," he says.
But still the almajiris keep coming. Abdul is another. He does not know what age he is or where he's from. Six years ago, he arrived at the school in Kaduna — he thinks he might have been 4 — where his parents left him. He has not seen them since. He is a child, alone, destitute and easy prey for criminals and militants alike. How many like him will come back to haunt Nigeria in the years to come?

PDP chairman’s son, others arraigned for subsidy fraud

 by Ade Adesomoju 

L–R: Mr. Olawale Akoni, SAN; an EFCC official; accused persons, Mr. Mahmud Tukur; and Mr. Mamman Nasir, after their arraignment for the misapplication of fuel subsidy at the Lagos High Court, Ikeja ... on Wednesday.

Mahmud Tukur, son of the incumbent National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, Bamanga Tukur, was among the oil marketers who were on Thursday arraigned at a Lagos High Court in Ikeja for oil subsidy fraud.

Also arraigned for the alleged fraud totalling N5.6bn were Mamman Ali, son of a former national chairman of the PDP, Ahmadu Ali; and Abdulahi Alao, son of an Ibadan-based businessman, Abdulazeez Arisekola-Alao.

Tukur, Alao, Ochonogo Alex and Eterna Oil and Gas Plc were jointly arraigned before Justice Adeniyi Onigbanjo on nine counts, including an alleged fraudulent collection of about N1.899bn from the Federal Government as payment for subsidy on Premium Motoring Spirit, a.k.a petrol, which they never supplied.

Also, Alao, along with his company, Axenergy Limited, in a separate charge of seven counts, was arraigned before Justice Habeeb Abiru for alleged subsidy fraud amounting to N1.472bn.

Among the seven counts instituted against the son of the Ibadan businessman before Justice Abiru was one in which he was alleged to have “with intent to defraud attempted to obtain” about N1.168bn by falsely representing the money to be claim for importing 13,364,284 litres of PMS.

Ali, along with a Sierra Leonean, Christian Taylor, and their company Nasaman Oil Services in yet another charge, was arraigned before Onigbanjo on three counts among which the prosecutors said the suspects fraudulently obtained about N2.23bn in the name of subsidy for importing various litres of PMS.

Date for commencement of trial in the joint charge involving Ali and Taylor had been fixed for October 30, while the one involving Tukur, Alex and Alao had been fixed for November 13.

Common to all the charges faced by the accused are the offences ranging from obtaining various sums of money by false pretences, conspiracy to obtain money by false pretences, forgery and attering.

The prosecuting agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, alleged that the accused on different occasions in 2010 and 2011, fraudulently obtained the money from the Federal Government under the Petroleum Support Fund in respect of various litres of PMS which were never supplied.

The anti-graft agency also alleged that in order to facilitate the alleged offences, the accused forged some documents – Bill of Lading and Origin Certificates – which were issued by firms from whom they falsely claimed to have imported the PMS.

The accused were granted bail shortly after their arraignments before Onigbanjo.

However, Alao will not regain his freedom along with others because his bail application before Justice Abiru was not heard on Thursday.

The judge ordered that Alao should remain in custody of the EFCC till August 1, when his bail application would be heard.

Counsel for the EFCC, Mr. Rotimi Jacobs, had urged Abiru to turn down the request by Alao’s counsel, Babajide Koku, SAN, for hearing of the bail application on Thursday.

A former president of the Nigerian Bar Association, Chief Wole Olanipekun, and Tayo Oyetibo, both SANs, are the lead counsel for Tukur, Alex and Eterna Oil and Gas.

Jacobs had urged the court to refuse hearing the bail application on the grounds that it was not ripe for hearing since he was only served with a copy of it just before the proceedings and as such he needed to be given time to file a written reply to it.

Justice Onigbanjo, however, granted bail based on the same conditions in the two separate charges.

The bail for each of the accused was in the sum of N20m with two sureties in like sum.

Onigbanjo ordered that one of the various sets of two sureties each must be a blood relation with a landed property worth N500m in Lagos. The ownership title documents of such property, which must be verified at the land registry, are to be submitted to the court registrar.

He said the other sureties must be a Grade Level 16 civil servant in the employment of either the Lagos State Government or the Federal Government, and they must provide evidence of tax payment.

He also asked them to deposit their passports with the EFCC officers who must depose to an affidavit of collecting them.

Onigbanjo, who said the essence of granting bail was to ensure that the accused would be available for trial, also asked the court registrar to verify the “residential, business and physical addresses” of the sureties.

Shortly after granting the bail in the charge involving Tukur and Taylor, their counsel, Joe Gadzama, expressed fear of how difficult that Taylor, a citizen of Sierra Leone, might not get a blood relation to stand as surety for him.

The judge then asked him to file an affidavit for variation of the bail conditions.

Meanwhile, the arraignment of another set of oil marketers before Abiru could not hold on Thursday due to the absence of one of the accused, Walter Wagbatsoma.

Others who were charged along with Wagbastoma are Adaoha Ugo-Ngadi, Fakuade Babafemi Ebenezer, and Ontario Oil and Gas Nigeria Limited.

The judge had on Wednesday adjourned till Thursday due to Wagbastoma’s absence in court and upon request by Jacobs that the Attorney-General of the Federation, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, SAN, had indicated interest to lead the prosecution personally.

The minister was also absent in court on Thursday, a development which Jacobs said was due to pressing state assignment.

Jacobs told the court that the minister had asked him to continue with the matter, but the matter was adjourned till Wednesday by the time which Wasgbatsoma would be expected to appear in court.

The offences of the accused were said to violate Sections 1, 1(1)(2) and 1(3) of the Advance Fee Fraud and Other Related Offences Act 2006.

Nigeria's trouble Getting worse

An extreme Islamist group is becoming ever more lethally effective ... The Economist

VIOLENCE in Nigeria’s north and centre is worsening. Increasingly deadly attacks on churches by Boko Haram, an extreme Islamist group, are straining fragile relations between Christians and Muslims. Attacking churches is not new for Boko Haram but it has turned its attention to targets in Nigeria’s “middle belt” where the two religions mix, often stoking ferocious retaliation. Christian leaders have been warning that the patience of their flocks “will wear out”.
Fierce fighting erupted in Jos, a mixed city, on July 7th, killing at least 63 people. A day later a Nigerian senator and several other mourners were gunned down during a mass burial. Parts of the city are now under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. Boko Haram released a statement on July 10th saying it was behind the attacks and would continue to kill officials. It threatened that Christians “will not know peace again” until they accept Islam.

The prospect of widespread sectarian unrest is growing. Last month Boko Haram attacked three churches in Kaduna, a northern city that had been largely untouched by the insurgency, killing 21 and igniting four days of violence that left another 100-plus dead. Curfews and daily violence persist in Kaduna and other cities far from Boko Haram’s heartland in north-eastern Nigeria.
President Goodluck Jonathan claimed in March that the menace would be dealt with by June. But heavy-handed military tactics have only boosted the group. Fleeting efforts to negotiate have failed. After criticism flared when he flew on a prearranged trip to Brazil while Kaduna burned, Mr Jonathan felt obliged to sack his national security adviser and his defence minister. Nigeria, he said, needs “new tactics”, yet he failed to explain what they might be. As a southern Christian, he has long been urged by outsiders to work with northern leaders. Sure enough, his new security adviser is a northern Muslim.
Boko Haram began its insurgency in 2009 in the north-eastern city of Maiduguri with rudimentary bombs and drive-by shootings; men on motorbikes targeted police and clergy in an attempt to carve out a Muslim state. The group rapidly evolved, with its first suicide-bombing hitting the UN headquarters in Abuja, the capital, last August, killing 25 people. Suicide-bombings, barely known in west Africa until last year, are now the most potent weapon in Boko Haram’s arsenal. In November more than 100 people were killed in such bombings as well as in gun attacks.
The group is thought to comprise several hundred members, though its hard core of planners and ideologues may number as few as 30. The north, where poverty is rising sharply despite strong national economic growth, is an ideal recruiting ground. Security sources say that boys as young as 15 are carrying weapons for Boko Haram in Maiduguri and Damaturu, two of the worst trouble spots.
As violence sparks sectarian clashes and criminal gangs hide behind the sect’s name, it is not always clear which atrocities are genuinely the work of Boko Haram. The group probably has no overall leader but relies on separate cells in the various regions. It is unclear how closely they co-ordinate their actions. In Kano, the biggest northern city, a string of attacks and kidnappings suggests a measure of joint planning, with the possibility of a link to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as the regional version of the late Osama bin Laden’s organisation is known. Some Boko Haram people are said to have been trained by AQIM in Mali but there is no sign that non-Nigerian jihadists control the group. Still, General Carter Ham, head of America’s Africa Command, says it has links to AQIM and to Somalia’s fearsome Islamist militia, the Shabab.

Boko Haram: A Growing Islamist Threat?

Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and its second largest economy, as well as one of America’s top oil suppliers. Despite a return to civilian government in 1999 after a long spell of military dominance, Nigeria remains a fractious nation, divided along ethnic and religious lines.
A watershed presidential election began peacefully in April 2011, a first for a country with a history of rigged and violent votes in the 12 years since the end of military rule. The incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan, a mild-mannered former vice president and zoologist, won an easy election victory after a poll judged by analysts to be perhaps the country’s fairest ever.
But the outcome turned violent. Mobs of Muslim youths in the north began rioting after the defeated opposition candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the north, failed to rein in his supporters. That set off a wave of retaliation against Muslims. In the end, the death toll appeared to be higher than in the previous election, when more than 300 people were killed.
The persistent violence has been attributed to ethnic and religious tensions, discrimination by southerners against immigrants from the north, and frustration over corruption in a country where most subsist on less than $2 a day while top officials have access to billions in oil revenues.
Overall, some 50 million youths in Nigeria are unemployed, the World Bank says, in a country of 154 million. Despite abundant oil revenues, incomes have barely budged in 30 years, life expectancy is only 48 and the country remains one of the most economically unequal in the world, according to the United Nations.
Boko Haram: A Growing Islamist Threat
Boko Haram, a shadowy Islamist insurgency, has haunted the predominantly Muslim region of northern Nigeria, surviving repeated, bloody efforts to eliminate it. It appears to be branching out and collaborating with Al Qaeda's affiliates, alarming Western officials who had previously viewed the militants as a largely isolated, if deadly, menace. The group has called for a strict application of Shariah law and the freeing of imprisoned members in the region, where mass unemployment and poverty have helped fuel social discontent.
In 2009, the group seemed on the verge of extinction. In a heavy-handed assault, Nigerian soldiers shelled its headquarters and killed its leader, leaving a grisly tableau of charred ruins, with hundreds dead.
But by the summer of 2011, the group was striking the Nigerian military, the police and opponents of Islamic law in near-daily assaults and bombings, using improvised explosive devices that can be detonated remotely and bear the hallmarks of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Beyond the immediate devastation, the fear is that extremists bent on jihad are spreading their reach across the continent and planting roots in a major, Western-allied state that had not been seen as a hotbed of global terrorism.
In August 2011, a suicide bomber driving a vehicle packed with explosives rammed the United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, killing 23 people. Boko Haram took responsibility for the blast. The attack appeared to confirm the worst fears of Western analysts and diplomats — that repression is hastening its transformation into a menacing transnational force.
A series of Christmas Day church bombings rocked the country in what appeared to be a coordinated assault by Boko Haram. At least 25 people were killed. Until then, the group had mostly targeted the police, government and military in its insurgency effort, but the church bombings represented a new, religion-tinged front, a tactic that threatened to exploit the already frayed relations between Nigeria’s nearly evenly split populations of Christians and Muslims.
In January 2012,more than 100 people were killed in a series of attacks on Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city by Boko Haram. The attackers struck eight government security buildings, the national police said, including the regional police headquarters, two local police stations, the local headquarters of the State Security Service, the home of a police official and the state police command headquarters.
In June 2012, suicide car bombers attacked three churches in northern Nigeria, killing at least 19 people and wounding dozens, and setting off retaliatory attacks by Christian youths who dragged Muslims from cars and killed them, officials and witnesses said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, but Boko Haram has often attacked church services.
A few days earlier,militants attacked two churches in the central Nigerian city of Jos, spraying the congregation of one of them with bullets and killing at least one person, and blowing up a car in a suicide bombing at the other, wounding 41. Boko Haram claimed responsibility.
A Sinister New Threat: A War Against Schools
By the end of March 2012, the insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria struck a new target schools . At least eight public and private schools in the city of Maiduguri have been firebombed, apparently the work of Boko Haram. Crude homemade bombs — soda bottles filled with gasoline — have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.
The simple yellow facades have been blackened and the plain desks melted to twisted pipes, leaving thousands of children without a place to learn, stranded at home and underfoot, while anxious parents pleaded with Nigerian authorities to come up with a contingency plan for their education.
Boko Haram’s very name is a rallying cry against schools — “Boko” means “book” or “Western learning” in the Hausa language, and “haram” is Arabic for forbidden — but it has never gone after them to this degree before, analysts say.
Maiduguri, the birthplace of the Boko Haram insurgency, has become used to living under siege.  Fear and an army-enforced curfew empty the scruffy low-rise streets well before dark. Nervous public officials — prime assassination targets of the insurgents — avoid speaking the group’s name or blaming it. Army checkpoints are omnipresent. The soldiers, also a favorite target of snipers, are grim-faced and brusque.
Yet the destruction of Maiduguri’s schools has bewildered and demoralized students, parents and teachers in a way that other attacks have not. The targeting of children, even indirectly, is seen as a new and sinister twist.
Transition to Civilian Rule        
Nigerians, keenly aware that their impoverished and wealth-stratified nation had not realized its potential, hoped that President Umaru Yar’Adua might help it do so after his election in 2007. But Mr. Yar’Adua’s chronic ill health sapped his initial promises of reform and led to a constitutional crisis in his country. Mr. Yar’Adua, who suffered from kidney and heart ailments, died at age 58 on May 5, 2010.
The West African nation’s vice president, Goodluck Jonathan, had been acting president since February 2010, filling a power vacuum left by Mr. Yar’Adua who departed for emergency treatment in Saudi Arabia in November 2009. When Mr. Yar’Adua returned to Nigeria in late February 2010, he did not reclaim the powers which the Nigerian Parliament reluctantly transferred to his deputy. By virtue of his presence, Mr. Yar’Adua had placed a question mark over the presidency of Mr. Jonathan, a native of the rival southern half of Nigeria. With Mr. Jonathan’s election, that has been removed.
When Mr. Yar’Adua was inaugurated president in May 2007, it was the first time since Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960 that power passed between two civilians. Nigeria has long been one of Africa’s worst-governed countries. It returned to democracy in 1999 after a long bout of brutal military rule. The elections held in 2007 were chaotic and marred by widespread charges of fraud.
Afterward, opposition parties challenged the results in the courts, and a newly emboldened judiciary overturned the elections of the Senate president, seven governors and dozens of other lawmakers. A panel of judges later unanimously threw out a challenge to Mr. Yar’Adua’s victory, ruling that the evidence of ballot box stuffing and phantom voting booths presented by two candidates was not enough to overturn the result.

State creation: Tension over moves to favour only Southeast

By Yusuf Alli

Senate President David Mark

Barely three days after the conclusion of its retreat, the Senate is gripped by tension over moves to create one state - from the Southeast only.
The Chairman of the Northern Senators’ Forum, Senator Umaru Dahiru, yesterday said no such decision was taken at the retreat, adding that it is impossible to have new states created from one geopolitical zone alone.
After the retreat of the Senate Constitution Review Committee in Asaba, Delta State, the   Senate Leader, Mr. Victor Ndoma-Egba, was quoted as saying that the Senate had agreed to have a new state from the Southeast.
Ndoma-Egba said: “At the end of the retreat, the following were suggested as key issues that needed to be tackled by the Constitution Review Committee: creation of one state for the Southeast zone for equity and fairness.”
The Senate Leader’s statement has ignited tension, with most Northern Senators expressing surprise.
The National Assembly received 45 memoranda requesting for the creation of states from the existing 36. 
Although state creation is one of the issues before the Constitution Review Committee, there were fears that some forces were pulling the strings to restrict it to only the Southeast.
 A  Senator from the North said: “It must be a joke for anyone within the committee to assume that he can use influence to restrict the creation of state to only a geopolitical zone.
“The truth is that they cannot recommend a new state for the Southeast outside other geopolitical zones. Do not forget that there has been agitation for creation of states from some old provinces, like Zaria , Kabba, Oyo, Ijebu, Edu, Old Annang, Warri, Kontagora, Muri, and Ogoja.”
Another high-ranking Senator said: “Let them smuggle anything they want into the constitution review, the majority will decide at the end of the day. Those behind this latest seed of hatred can have their say; they will not have their way in the chamber.
“I am surprised that an exercise that has not started has been concluded. Things are not done this way at all.”
The Chairman of the Northern Senators’ Forum, Senator Umaru Dahiru, said: “To the best of my knowledge, creation of new states did not come up at the retreat. It was surprising to hear that a new state for the Southeast was one of the issues suggested to the committee.
“Maybe Nigerians should ask how they arrived at that in Asaba. I am aware that there are many requests before the National Assembly, including those from the North, and the constitution review process has not even got to the level of giving any geopolitical zone a slot.
“I do not know if anyone has superior information that this Forum does not have.”
A Senator from the Southeest said: “I doubt it if the Senate Leader will make such a commitment. But if he did in Asaba, it cannot hold water at all. We cannot accept the creation of one state from a zone alone. It is impracticable.
“I am aware of the anger of some Senators on the purported statement of Senator Ndoma-Egba but I have not lost any sleep at all because the process of creating a state is not one-off thing.”
A Senator from the Southeast said: “The Constitutional Committee of the Sixth Senate had concurred that there should be a state from the Southeast. So, it is nothing new.
“I want to appeal to our colleagues not to politicise this matter at all.”
A Senator from Ogun State , Alhaji Gbenga Kaka, said: “I was at the retreat throughout. They just said they received 56 requests, which they said they were going to consider.
“So, all that we have received is the proposal. It is when we get there that we will know the number of states to be created. It is not a case of one state.
“If there is any member from the Southeast who spoke, it was Senator Chris Ngige who demanded for a new state from the zone. And no one can blame Ngige for protecting the interest of his zone.
“Also, the Asagba of Asagba used the opportunity to ask for the creation of Anioma State.”

We’re All Climate-Change Idiots

CLIMATE CHANGE is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why, collectively, are we doing so little about it?

Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.

Robert Gifford, a psychologist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who studies the behavioral barriers to combating climate change, calls these habits of mind “dragons of inaction.” We have trouble imagining a future drastically different from the present. We block out complex problems that lack simple solutions. We dislike delayed benefits and so are reluctant to sacrifice today for future gains. And we find it harder to confront problems that creep up on us than emergencies that hit quickly.

“You almost couldn’t design a problem that is a worse fit with our underlying psychology,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Sometimes, when forming our opinions, we grasp at whatever information presents itself, no matter how irrelevant. A new study by the psychologist Nicolas Guéguen, published in last month’s Journal of Environmental Psychology, found that participants seated in a room with a ficus tree lacking foliage were considerably more likely to say that global warming was real than were those in a room with a ficus tree that had foliage.

We also tend to pay attention to information that reinforces what we already believe and dismiss evidence that would require us to change our minds, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. Dan M. Kahan, a Yale Law School professor who studies risk and science communication, says this is crucial to understanding the intense political polarization on climate change. He and his research colleagues have found that people with more hierarchical, individualistic worldviews (generally conservatives) sense that accepting climate science would lead to restraints on commerce, something they highly value, so they often dismiss evidence of the risk. Those with a more egalitarian, community-oriented mind-set (generally liberals) are likely to be suspicious of industry and very ready to credit the idea that it is harming the environment.

There are ways to overcome such prejudices. Professor Kahan has shown that how climate change solutions are framed can affect our views of the problem. In one study, not yet published, he and his colleagues asked people to assess a scientific paper reporting that the climate was changing faster than expected. Beforehand, one group was asked to read an article calling for tighter carbon caps (i.e., a regulatory solution); a second group read an article urging work on geoengineering, the manipulation of atmospheric conditions (i.e., a technological solution); and a control group read an unrelated story on traffic lights. All three groups included hierarchical individualists and egalitarian communitarians.

In all cases, the individualists were, as expected, less likely than the communitarians to say the scientific paper seemed valid. But the gap was 29 percent smaller among those who had first been exposed to the geoengineering idea than among those who had been prompted to think about regulating carbon, and 14 percent smaller than in the traffic light group. Thinking about climate change as a technological challenge rather than as a regulatory problem, it seems, made individualists more ready to credit the scientific claim about the climate.

Research also suggests public health is an effective frame: few people care passionately about polar bears, but if you argue that closing coal-burning plants will reduce problems like asthma, you’re more likely to find a receptive audience, says the American University communications professor Matthew Nisbet.

Smaller “nudges,” similarly sensitive to our psychological quirks, can also spur change. Taking advantage of our preference for immediate gratification, energy monitors that displayed consumption levels in real-time cut energy use by an average of 7 percent, according to a study in the journal Energy in 2010. Telling heavy energy users how much less power their neighbors consumed prompted them to cut their own use, according to a 2007 study in Psychological Science. And trading on our innate laziness, default settings have also conserved resources: when Rutgers University changed its printers’ settings to double-sided, it saved more than seven million sheets of paper in one semester in 2007.

Simply presenting climate science more clearly is unlikely to change attitudes. But a better understanding of our minds’ strange workings may help save us from ourselves.

Beth Gardiner is a freelance journalist.

Ariz. sheriff says Obama birth certificate is fake

Associated Press

• Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio …
• Maricopa County Sheriff's Cold …

PHOENIX (AP) — Investigators for an Arizona sheriff's volunteer posse say President Barack Obama's birth certificate is definitely fraudulent.

Members of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's posse said in March that there was probable cause that Obama's long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April 2011 was a computer-generated forgery.

Now, Arpaio says investigators are positive it's fraudulent.
So-called "birthers" maintain Obama is ineligible to be president because, they contend, he was born in Kenya. However, Hawaii officials have repeatedly verified Obama's citizenship, and courts have rebuffed lawsuits over the issue.
Mike Zullo, the Arizona posse's chief investigator, said numeric codes on parts of the long-form birth certificate indicate those parts weren't filled out, yet those sections asking for the race of Obama's father and his field of work or study were completed.
Zullo said investigators previously didn't know the meaning of the codes but they were explained by a 95-year-old former state worker who signed the president's birth certificate. Zullo said a writer who published a book about Obama's birth certificate and was aiding investigators let them listen to an interview he conducted with the former state worker.
The Arizona Democratic Party said in a statement that Arpaio's investigation is intended to draw attention away from problems within his own agency, such as hundreds of sex-crime cases that the sheriff's office failed to adequately investigate over a three-year period.
A civil trial is set to begin Thursday in a lawsuit that accuses Arpaio's office of racially profiling Latinos. The suit filed by a handful of Latinos will serve as a precursor to the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit that alleges a broader range of civil rights violations against Arpaio's office.
Obama released a copy of his long-form birth certificate in an attempt to quell citizenship questions. His campaign declined to comment on Arpaio's allegations.

But Joshua A. Wisch, a special assistant to Hawaii's attorney general, said his state's vital records are some of the best-managed and have "some of the strongest restrictions on access to prevent identity theft and fraud."

"President Obama was born in Honolulu, and his birth certificate is valid," Wisch said in a statement. "Regarding the latest allegations from a sheriff in Arizona, they are untrue, misinformed, and misconstrue Hawaii law."....culled from Yahoo

Reps seek review of ICJ judgment on Bakassi

by John Ameh 

Speaker, House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal

The House of Representatives on Wednesday asked the Federal Government to file a process for the review of the International Court of Justice judgment ceding the Bakassi Peninsula to the Republic of Cameroon.

In a resolution in Abuja, the House said the process should be initiated before October 10, ahead of the 10th anniversary of the judgment.

The Federal Government had in 2006, signed the Green Tree Agreement with Cameroon, formally ceding the territory to the latter in compliance with the ICJ judgment.

However, the agreement, an international treaty, was signed without the approval of the National Assembly.

Lawmakers, debating the matter on Wednesday, observed that the decision of the government was in breach of Section 12 of the 1999 Constitution, which required that such treaties must be ratified by the National Assembly to have the force of law in Nigeria.

In a motion by the member Representing Calabar-South/Bakassi Federal Constituency, Mr. Essien Ayi, he said his people would continue to oppose the judgment because government did not exhaust all the remedies before it proceeded to cede the territory.

Ayi argued that under Article 61 of the ICJ Statute, a judgment of the court could be reviewed whenever new facts emerged not known at the time the judgment was delivered.

According to him, a process for such a review is to be filed before the expiration of 10 years of the delivery of the judgment.

In the case of Bakassi, the expiration date is October 10, 2012.

The lawmaker stated that “one of these facts is that the 1913 Anglo-German treaty relied upon by the ICJ to cede Bakassi to Cameroon is in breach of Article 6 of the General Act of Berlin Conference that enjoined European powers ‘to watch out the preservation of the native tribes and not to take over or effect transfer of their territory.’”

Ayi, who noted that “gross injustice” was meted to the Bakassi people by both the Federal Government and the United Nations, cited three cases in history where countries applied for a review of the ICJ judgment.

Got Milk? You Don’t Need It

Dairy Products, Heartburn, lactose intolerance, Milk.

Drinking milk is as American as Mom and apple pie. Until not long ago, Americans were encouraged not only by the lobbying group called the American Dairy Association but by parents, doctors and teachers to drink four 8-ounce glasses of milk, “nature’s perfect food,” every day. That’s two pounds! We don’t consume two pounds a day of anything else; even our per capita soda consumption is “only” a pound a day.

Today the Department of Agriculture’s recommendation for dairy is a mere three cups daily — still 1½ pounds by weight — for every man, woman and child over age 9. This in a country where as many as 50 million people are lactose intolerant, including 90 percent of all Asian-Americans and 75 percent of all African-Americans, Mexican-Americans and Jews. The myplate.gov site helpfully suggests that those people drink lactose-free beverages. (To its credit, it now counts soy milk as “dairy.”)

There’s no mention of water, which is truly nature’s perfect beverage; the site simply encourages us to switch to low-fat milk. But, says Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, “Sugar — in the form of lactose — contributes about 55 percent of skim milk’s calories, giving it ounce for ounce the same calorie load as soda.”

O.K., dairy products contain nutrients, and for those who like them, a serving or two daily is probably fine. (Worth noting: they’re far more easily digested as yogurt or cheese than as fluid milk.) But in addition to intolerance, there’s a milk allergy — the second most common food allergy after peanuts, affecting an estimated 1.3 million children — that can be life-threatening.

Emily Robertson

Other conditions are not easily classified, and I have one of those. When I was growing up, drinking milk at every meal, I had a chronic upset stomach. (Channeling my inner Woody Allen, I’ll note that I was therefore treated as a neurotic, which, in fairness, I was anyway.) In adolescence, this became chronic heartburn, trendily known as GERD or acid reflux, and that led to a lifelong Tums habit (favorite flavor: wintergreen) and an adult dependence on Prevacid, a proton-pump inhibitor. Which, my gastroenterologist assured me, is benign. (Wrong.)

Fortunately my long-term general practitioner, Sidney M. Baker, author of “Detoxification and Healing.” insisted that I make every attempt to break the Prevacid addiction.  Thus followed a seven-year period of trials of various “cures,” including licorice pills, lemon juice, antibiotics, famotidine (Pepcid) and almost anything else that might give my poor, sore esophagus some relief. At some point, Dr. Baker  suggested that despite my omnivorous diet I consider a “vacation” from various foods.

So, three months ago, I decided to give up dairy products as a test. Twenty-four hours later, my heartburn was gone. Never, it seems, to return. In fact, I can devour linguine puttanesca (with anchovies) and go to bed an hour later; fellow heartburn sufferers will be impressed. Perhaps equally impressive is that I mentioned this to a friend who had the same problem, tried the same approach, and had the same results. Presto! No dairy, no heartburn! (A third had no success. Hey, it’s not a controlled double-blind experiment, but there is no downside to trying it.)

Conditions like mine are barely on the radar. Although treating heartburn is a business worth more than $10 billion a year, the solution may be as simple as laying off dairy. (Which, need I point out, is free.) What’s clear is that the widespread existence of lactose intolerance, says Dr. Baker, is “a pretty good sign that we’ve evolved to drink human milk when we’re babies but have no need for the milk of any animals. And no matter what you call a chronic dairy problem — milk allergy, milk intolerance, lactose intolerance — the action is the same: avoid all foods derived from milk for at least five days and see what happens.”

Adds Dr. Barnard, “It’s worth noting that milk and other dairy products are our biggest source of saturated fat, and there are very credible links between dairy consumption and both Type 1 diabetes and the most dangerous form of prostate cancer.” Then, of course, there are our 9 million dairy cows, most of whom live tortured, miserable lives while making a significant contribution to greenhouse gases.

But what about the bucolic cow on the family farm? What about bone density and osteoporosis? What about Mom, and apple pie?

Mom: Don’t know about yours, but mine’s doing pretty well. Apple pie (best made with one crust, plenty of apples) will be fine.

But the bucolic cow and family farm barely exist: “Given the Kafkaesque federal milk marketing order system, it’s impossible for anyone to make a living producing and selling milk,” says Anne Mendelson, author of “Milk.” “The exceptions are the very largest dairy farms, factory operations with anything from 10,000 to 30,000 cows, which can exploit the system, and the few small farmers who can opt out of it and sell directly to an assured market, and who can afford the luxury of treating the animals decently.”

Osteoporosis? You don’t need milk, or large amounts of calcium, for bone integrity. In fact, the rate of fractures is highest in milk-drinking countries, and it turns out that the keys to bone strength are lifelong exercise and vitamin D, which you can get from sunshine. Most humans never tasted fresh milk from any source other than their mother for almost all of human history, and fresh  cow’s milk could not be routinely available to urbanites without industrial production. The federal government not only supports the milk industry by spending more money on dairy than any other item in the school lunch program, but by contributing free propaganda as well as subsidies amounting to well over 4billion in the last 10 years.There’s nothing un-American about re-evaluating those commitments with an eye toward sensibility. Meanwhile, pass the water... Mark Bittman on food and all things related. 

Syrian Defense Minister Killed as Rebels Strike at the Heart of Power

Balkis Press/ABACAPRESS.COM

Photograph given out by Syrian presidency shows Syrian president Bashar El Assad (left) receiving General Dawood Rajiha, as he appointed him as new Minister of Defense in Damascus, Syria on August 9, 2011.

By formally designating Syria a civil war, the International Committee of the Red Cross may have inadvertently revealed an uncomfortable prospect for the country’s future: Civil wars are typically protracted and bloody as both sides fight with their backs to the proverbial wall. And they rarely result in the complete vanquishing of either combatant party; far more common are political and territorial compromises that redefine the state. But when a civil war fought on sectarian religious lines reaches the capital city and the seat of power — as it did last weekend, prompting days of continuous fighting involving armor and artillery that continued to rattle Damascus into Wednesday morning, with Syria's state-run TV saying that the country’s defense minister was killed in a suicide blast — the prospects for any kind of soft landing via a political settlement may have been eclipsed, leaving the country’s fate in the hands of its hard men.
Rebel propagandists touted their military operation in the capital as the beginning of a final offensive, but its scale suggested a more limited but nonetheless decisive objective: By forcing the regime to use armor and artillery in the capital, the rebels have sent a message to the regime’s key support bases that Assad has lost control of much of the country and that his promises to crush the rebellion ring hollow. The blast at national security headquarters that killed defense minister Daoud Rajiha and also deputy army chief, Assef Shawkat — who is also reportedly President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law — is a signal that the regime’s ability to protect even its inner core is crumbling.
“It happened in the most guarded neighborhood inside Damascus, very close to where Bashar and his mother and other family members are, and where there are many intelligence locations,” retired Syrian Brigadier General Akil Hashem, who is in exile in Paris, told TIME. “I received information that a bodyguard in the inner sanctum of the regime was the one who placed the explosives inside the building, and now Syrian television is confirming that too. The regime is collapsing from inside.”
The latest violence in Damascus may not spell the imminent collapse of the Assad order, but it puts the regime’s fate in writing on the wall: “Once the fighting gets into the key cities, the advantage passes from the military to the insurgents,” says Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “As long as the fighting is confined to villages and small towns, those can be surrounded and pounded into submission with artillery fire. You can’t do that in a city of 5 million people. Your heavy weapons become meaningless, because you can’t destroy Damascus — and so, the city’s Sunni neighborhoods become a sea in which the rebels can swim and multiply.”
By some accounts, the military during the past three days ordered whole neighborhoods in the capital to evacuate their homes in order to clear the rebels from Sunni areas. Not only do such actions confirm to the citizenry that the regime faces a popular insurrection rather than simply a terrorism problem, as its propagandists claim; they also  build resentment against the security forces and create an even more permissive environment for the insurgents. “But if the regime can’t drive the rebels out of the capital,” Landis notes, “the regime is finished.”
The brutality and mounting chaos of a war that has already claimed some 16,000 victims has certainly prompted many of the regime’s key Sunni backers to reconsider their allegiance. Assad’s regime is founded and maintained on an inner core of Alawites, a community which sees its interests and fate intimately tied to that of the ruling family and views the rebellion as a mortal threat. But the Alawites are just 12% of the population, and the regime has also relied on the backing of Syria’s Christians (some 10%), Druze (3%), and other minorities, as well as political and business elites from among the  Sunni majority to be able to govern the sprawling country. Eighteen months into the rebellion, the regime may no longer be able to count on its Sunni backers. And without them, it cannot for long maintain its rule over all of Syria.
Two high-profile defections earlier this month — top military man Gen. Manaf Tlass and former Ambassador to Iraq, Nawaf al-Fares — prompted many headlines suggested the regime was nearing collapse. But the unfortunate reality of Syrian power politics is that the significance of their defections has to be read through a sectarian prism. Both men were amongst the most senior Sunni figures of the regime, as have been all 13 generals that have jumped ship thus far. So far, there has been no sign of elements of the regime’s Alawite core being willing to jump ship. So the regime is certainly weakening, and its ability to govern all of Syria and restore the old order may be fatally damaged. But that doesn’t necessarily portend its imminent collapse.
“Until now, not a single Alawite, Christian or Druze of any significance within the military-political complex is known to have left Assad’s side,” notes Aron Lund, an analyst at Sweden’s Olaf Palme Center. “The fact that this core of religious minorities has remained cohesive is one explanation for the regime’s relatively strong position after more than a year of popular rebellion. It is also the reason that it can’t extinguish the uprising – Assad lacks both the manpower and the moral authority among Syria’s 65% Sunni-majority population. This growing sectarian polarization is now putting severe strain on the long-running alliance between Alawite and rural Sunni military families (as well as on the parallel alliance between the military and the Sunni urban commercial bourgeoisie).”
But, warns Lund, the loss of its Sunni allies won’t be enough to bring down the regime.
“Large-scale Sunni disavowal of the regime would in itself not be enough to convince most of the Alawite hard core around the president that the battle is lost,” he writes. “Quite the contrary, these members of the ‘inner regime’, who lack a safe exit from the conflict, are likely to try to dig down further in their home areas in northwestern/northeastern Damascus and western Syria, regardless of the fate of the rest of the country.”
It’s beyond doubt, now, that the decades-old political order of Alawite minority rule over all of the former Ottoman province on which modern Syria emerged at the end of World War I is nearing its denouement. The fight, now, may be increasingly over how and by what it is replaced. Despite a common sense of the dangers arising from the collapse of the Syrian state, divergent geopolitical stakes in the Middle East leave the international community unable to forge a joint response. Western and Arab powers are pressing for President Bashar Assad’s ouster, while Russia, China and Iran looking to prevent regime-change. U.N. Special Envoy was in Moscow Tuesday, hoping to convince Russia to put more pressure on Assad ahead of a Security Council vote on the future of its observer mission, while Secretary General Ban Ki Moon is doing the same in Beijing. But Western powers are unlikely get Russian and Chinese support for a new resolution threatening sanctions against the regime if it fails to pull back its forces.
Western powers remain reluctant to consider unilateral military intervention in Syria, mindful not only of their limited resources and political capital in the Middle East, but also of the perils inherent of taking effective ownership of a country in the throes of a civil war with region-wide consequences. At the same time, reports last week that U.S. officials believe the Assad regime has recently moved some of its known chemical-weapons stocks have underscored some of the dangers inherent in the regime’s collapse. While opposition figures insist Assad might use such weapons to ensure his regime’s survival, many Western analysts believe the regime may simply be safeguarding a key strategic asset against the prospect of international intervention or rebel territorial gains. Either way, that concern is a reminder of the potentially devastating consequences of Syria’s collapse.
But absent any prospect for a political solution between a regime digging in for a fight to the finish and an opposition that remains incorrigibly divided even as military rebels become more organized and capable — and determined to bring down Assad at any cost — Syria’s future looks set to be decided with arms, in the streets of its towns and cities. And that threatens a grim fate for many thousands more Syrians both before, and after Assad goes, with potential reverberations all across the “arc of instability” that runs from Lebanon to Afghanistan.
– With reporting by Vivienne Walt/Paris

Commuters Pedal to Work on Their Very Own Superhighway

A Green Light for Copenhagen's Cyclists: A new initiative in Copenhagen aims at building miles of bicycle highways that offer cyclists a safer and faster way to commute.

By SALLY McGRANE

COPENHAGEN — Picture 11 miles of smoothly paved bike path meandering through the countryside. Largely uninterrupted by roads or intersections, it passes fields, backyards, chirping birds, a lake, some ducks and, at every mile, an air pump.

An 11-mile-long path called a bicycle superhighway has opened between Copenhagen and Albertslund, a western suburb.

For some Danes, this is the morning commute.

Susan Nielsen, a 59-year-old schoolteacher, was one of a handful of people taking advantage of Demark’s first “superhighway” for bicycles on a recent morning, about halfway between Copenhagen and Albertslund, a suburb, which is the highway’s endpoint. “I’m very glad because of the better pavement,” said Ms. Nielsen, who wore a rain jacket and carried a pair of pants in a backpack to put on after her 40-minute commute.

The cycle superhighway, which opened in April, is the first of 26 routes scheduled to be built to encourage more people to commute to and from Copenhagen by bicycle. More bike path than the Interstate its name suggests, it is the brainchild of city planners who were looking for ways to increase bicycle use in a place where half of the residents already bike to work or to school every day.

“We are very good, but we want to be better,” said Brian Hansen, the head of Copenhagen’s traffic planning section.

He and his team saw potential in suburban commuters, most of whom use cars or public transportation to reach the city. “A typical cyclist uses the bicycle within five kilometers,” or about three miles, said Mr. Hansen, whose office keeps a coat rack of ponchos that bicycling employees can borrow in case of rain. “We thought: How do we get people to take longer bicycle rides?”

They decided to make cycle paths look more like automobile freeways. While there is a good existing network of bicycle pathways around Copenhagen, standards across municipalities can be inconsistent, with some stretches having inadequate pavement, lighting or winter maintenance, as well as unsafe intersections and gaps.

“It doesn’t work if you have a good route, then a section in the middle is covered in snow,” said Lise Borgstrom Henriksen, spokeswoman for the cycle superhighway secretariat. “People won’t ride to work then.”

For the superhighway project, Copenhagen and 21 local governments teamed up to ensure that there were contiguous, standardized bike routes into the capital across distances of up to 14 miles. “We want people to perceive these routes as a serious alternative,” Mr. Hansen said, “like taking the bus, car or train.”

The plan has received widespread support in a country whose left- and right-leaning lawmakers both regularly bike to work (albeit on slightly different models of bicycle).

Riding on the first superhighway, which grew more crowded as it neared the city, Marianne Bagge-Petersen said she was heading to a support group for job seekers. “I think it’s very cool,” she said, noting that the path allowed her to avoid roads with more car traffic. “Taking the bike makes me feel good about myself. I’m looking for a job, and if I don’t get out, it’s going to be a very long day.”

The Capital Region of Denmark, a political body responsible for public hospitals as well as regional development, has provided $1.6 million for the superhighway project.

“When we look at public hospitals, we look very much at how to reduce cost,” said a regional councilor, Lars Gaardhoj, who had just picked up his three small children in a cargo bike decorated with elephants. “It’s a common saying among doctors that the best patient is the patient you never see. Anything we can do to get less pollution and less traffic is going to mean healthier, maybe happier, people.”

In Denmark, thanks to measures like the superhighway, commuters choose bicycles because they are the fastest and most convenient transportation option. “It’s not because the Danes are more environmentally friendly,” said Gil Penalosa, executive director of 8-80 Cities, a Canadian organization that works to make cities healthier. “It’s not because they eat something different at breakfast.” 

Lars Gemzo, a partner at Gehl Architects, said that within Copenhagen, biking was already the best option for many kinds of trips. “If you want to drive a car for a medium distance, you know you are a fool,” he said. “You are going to waste time.”

Danish statistics show that every 6 miles biked instead of driven saves 3 1/2 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions and 9 cents in health care costs. But many cite happiness among the chief benefits of bicycle commuting.

“When you have been biking for 30 minutes, you have a really good feeling about yourself,” said Henrik Dam Kristensen, the minister for transport, who supports the superhighways. “You really enjoy a glass of wine because you’ve earned it.”

Frits Bredal, the head of communications at the Danish Cyclists’ Federation, cautioned that the superhighways were not perfect. “Ideally, there would be no red lights, there would be a perfect pavement, no holes, no obstacles, a real highway,” Mr. Bredal said.

Several biking innovations are being tested in Copenhagen. Some, like footrests and “green wave” technology, which times traffic lights at rush hour to suit bikers, have already been put into place on the superhighway. Others, like garbage cans tilted at an angle for easy access and “conversation” lanes, where two people can ride side by side and talk, might show up on long-distance routes in the future.

Superhighway users can also look forward to some variation on the “karma campaign,” now under way in Copenhagen, in which city employees take to the streets with boxes of chocolate to reward cyclists who adhere to the five rules of cycling: be nice, signal, stay to the right, overtake carefully and, rather than let bicycle bells irritate you, do your best to appreciate them.

The next superhighway will link Copenhagen with the municipality of Fureso, to the northwest. There, the existing bike path takes riders through a beautiful forest that is, unfortunately, very dark at night.

Last winter, to comply with superhighway standards, Fureso tested solar-powered lighting. “People were so happy about it,” said Lene Hartmann, Fureso’s climate project leader. “One rider said, ‘We feel like the trolls are taking care of us.’ ”

Several years ago, a Fureso resident, Karsten Bruun Hansen, started a “bike bus,” in which cyclists meet and commute together, taking turns blocking the wind. (Inspired by Mr. Hansen’s idea, the municipality also created a bike bus for children to ride to school together.)

Mr. Hansen, who estimates that he personally saves a ton of carbon dioxide every year, hopes that the superhighway will encourage more people to ride their bikes. “It’s unavoidable to commute to work,” Mr. Hansen said. “This way, you are using the time doing something fun.”

Ole Bondo Christensen, Fureso’s mayor, is also looking forward to the improvements that the superhighway will bring. Mr. Christensen, who does not own a car, bikes nearly four miles to work every day. “It’s my way to clear my brain,” he said. “Sometimes I get new ideas.”

This summer, after the rest of the solar-powered lights are installed, Fureso’s section of the road will be superhighway-ready.

“Now, the wind should always be at your back,” Mr. Christensen said with a smile. “We are working on that.”