The Minister of State for Mines and Steel Development, Uche Ogah, has alleged that owners of private jets in the country are responsible for the high cases of illegal smuggling of gold outside the shores of Nigeria.
Ogah made the disclosure to the Senate on Tuesday in Abuja at an investigative hearing on $9 billion annual loss to illegal mining and smuggling of gold.
Uche Ogah
Speaking at the hearing organised by the Senate Committee on Solid Minerals, Mines, Steel Development and Metallurgy, Ogah alleged that owners of private jets are masterminds of illegal mining in Nigeria.
Ogar, who lamented the rate of illegal mining in the country, said all efforts to end the menace have failed because according to the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS), it has no powers to check private jets.
He added that illegal mining in Nigeria started in the early 1980s as a result of the indigenisation policy of the military regime in the late 1970s.
He suggested death penalty as punishment for offenders, saying, “Gold smuggling in Nigeria is often done using private jets, the very reason private jets ownership and operations need to be streamlined in the country.”
SaharaReporters had earlier reported that Ogah accused the Godwin Emefiele-led Central Bank of Nigeria of not contributing to his success as a minister after abandoning the steel and mining sector.
The minister’s attack came following speculations that the Abia State-born politician is one of President Muhammadu Buhari's appointees struggling hard to find their feet in the administration.
He further alleged that nothing is being done by the apex bank to develop the sector, adding that more investment is required in the area of research to develop the sector.
The public hearing was designed to get the inputs of stakeholders on the preparations of four bills and for an investigative motion for the solid minerals sector.
The bills included the Nigerian Minerals Development Corporation Establishment Bill 2021 and Solid Minerals Producing Areas Development Commission Establishment Bill 2021.
Others also were the Institute of Bitumen Management Establishment Bill 2021, Explosive Act 1964 Repeal and Re-enactment Bill 2021 and the urgent need to investigate the loss of 9 billion dollars annually, due to illegal mining and smuggling of gold.
He said, “Equally, we need to ask the Ministry of Finance to speed up the export policy on solid minerals because that is the only way to have operators into the sector.”
On the bill for the establishment of the Nigerian Mineral Development Commission (NMDC), Ogah said he would want an enlargement of the minerals listed there.
He said, “Let us not limit ourselves to only seven minerals because we have other minerals that are needed for industrial revolution.
“We must look at how to fast track development of these mineral resources, and so we must look at the relationship between the ministry and the state governments.
“States must be ready to be involved in driving the production of mineral resources, not just talking about the resources been cited in the states. States should work toward getting institutions to help drive the development of solid minerals resources in their states.
“We need to harmonise all the issues, so we could have a clear direction for the growth of the sector.”
PoliticsNewsAddThis : Original Author : SaharaReporters, New York Disable advertisements :
Professorship is only attained by active academics who devoted their time for teaching and research in the University. Besides, there are certain steps that are followed before any one in academia is promoted to the rank of Professor. Someone need to pass through the ranks like every other professional cadre.
In the University promotion system, an academic needs to attain the rank of Senior lecturer, Reader and then Professor after having published the required number of scholarly articles in his research area. Time in rank is also important for promotion to the next rank in academia particularly University, it is usually three years between the successive ranks.
Isa Pantami
For anybody to be promoted to the rank of professor, he/she needs at least ten years teaching and research experience in the University. Dr I sa Ali Pantami has not been active in academia for more than six years now.
In order to do justice to Dr Pantami, with regards to the recent rumour of been promoted to the rank of Professor, I run a background check on popular scholar indexed citations website such as Google Scholar and Research Gate to see his recent scholarly contribution on cyber security but found little or insufficient to qualify him to be promoted to the rank of Professor. Dr Pantami as a modern scholar has only Research Gate account with only 23 citations and Research Gate score of 3.66.
Academic publications are entirely different to the other forms of publications public figures such as Hon Minster Dr Isa Ali Pantami presented during meetings or retreats. Articles are accepted as scholarly articles after passing through different vigorous blind reviews by professionals in different acadmic profession before been publiahed. In fact most of the standard journals reject more articles than they are accepted for publications.
I am not in anyway trying to demean Dr Isa Ali Pantami, in fact I am personally his fan, but when it comes to something very critical as this one, we need to ask questions.
My question is that, who promoted Dr Isa Ali Pantami to the rank of Professor?
OpinionAddThis : Original Author : Nasir Mansir Disable advertisements :
Ondo State Governor, Oluwarotimi Akeredolu (SAN) has said his administration is ready to protect the lives of the people of the state at all cost.
Akeredolu said although some people are not happy with the recently signed anti-open grazing law in the state, he will stand by it and ensure that farmers are saved from losing their farm crops to an outdated open grazing practice.
Ondo Governor Rotimi Akeredolu
The governor spoke in his office on Tuesday while receiving the Pastorate of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, led by the State Overseer, Pastor Jacob Asubiojo.
This was disclosed in a statement the Chief Press Secretary to the state governor, Richard Olatunde posted on his Facebook page on Tuesday.
According to the statement, Akeredolu noted that the law was not targeted at anyone.
The governor was also said to have noted that the state chapter of the Miyetti-Allah Cattle Breeders Association of Nigeria was ready to cooperate with his administration on the open grazing ban.
The governor also announced that the state government is partnering with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to train herders on feedlot (a type of animal feeding operation).
The statement quoted the governor as saying: "I want to urge you to intensify your prayers for us. We need it. You have referred to our efforts in trying to secure this our homeland. We have made efforts, we established Amotekun and banned open grazing.
“It is not what is pleasing to everybody. Some people are not pleased with us. We are ready to stand by it and face whatever it will cost us. Pray for us. Amotekun and the anti-open grazing law are not pleasing to some people and they are gathering together, planning evil. Pray for us. Their evil will not work.
“What we are saying is that your herds can not keep destroying our crops. The FAO has come and we have discussed it. The Miyetti-Allah here in Ondo appears to want to cooperate with us because they know that when their cows destroy crops, we seize their cows and they pay the farmers before they are released.
“The FAO will train them on how to do feedlot. They will be trained to make feed and take it to the cows. We are not discriminating against anybody. We just want to make it clear that you can’t make your own ends meet and destroy other people’s source of livelihood. We know your prayers are very important to us. We need it.”
An Ikeja High Court has ordered Oshodi Local Government Area of Lagos to pay the sum of N1 million as compensation to a motorist, Mr Louis Idahosa for extorting him of N28,000.
Idahosa was extorted of the said amount for allegedly driving against traffic (wrong-way driving), Tribune reports.
File photo used to illustrate story.
Justice Obafemi Adamson said it was not part of the constitutional duties of local governments to impound vehicles and inflict traffic-related penalties on road users.
The judge, therefore, described the action taken by the local council officials as illegal, saying it is contrary to fundamental human rights as contained in Sections 34, 36, 41(1) and 44 of the 1999 Constitution.
Apart from the award of N1 million to the applicant for breach of his right to fair hearing and freedom of movement, the judge ordered the local council to refund N28,000 to Idahosa and also gave an injunction restraining Oshodi Local Government Area from harassing road users.
It also awarded a cost of N100,000 against the counsel for Oshodi local council, Mr L. O. Mazoke.
“An Order is hereby granted directing the respondents (Oshodi LGA) to refund to the applicant (Idahosa) N28,000 which was extorted from him under the guise that he drove one-way without affording him a fair hearing.
“An Order of perpetual injunction is hereby granted restraining the respondent or its agents from harassing, threatening or arresting motorists or road users for traffic offences, imposing fines and impounding vehicles.
“Doing so is ultra vires (beyond legal power or authority) their powers outlined under the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended),” Justice Adamson said.
Idahosa had via his legal counsel, Emmanuel Eze filed a fundamental human rights suit dated September 3, 2019, against the local government.
Eze told the court that Idahosa on August 28, 2019, while being chauffeured in his Toyota Corolla car with registration number KRD551CZ, in Oshodi/Isolo Local Government Area, they were accosted by six men who were not in uniform.
“They stopped and arrested Idahosa and his driver insisted that the driver’s wrong-way driving contravened traffic laws.
They were subsequently taken into the council office.
“Idahosa insisted that if any crime had been committed, he and his driver should be arraigned in court.
“Officials of the respondent did not agree to an arraignment but resorted to harassing, intimidating and threatening them with continuous detention.
“The applicant was forced to pay N28,000 into the respondents’ treasury.
“He however discovered that only N25,000 was written on the receipt issued and upon enquiry, he was informed that the outstanding N3,000 was gate pass fee,” Eze said.
Oshodi local council, in court documents, however, denied ever extorting Idahosa and his chauffeur, claiming the persons who arrested and extorted them were not working for the local government.
LegalNewsAddThis : Original Author : SaharaReporters, New York Disable advertisements :
He was Nigeria’s closest instance of the Renaissance Man: musician, sculptor, inventor, sportsman, architect, scholar, mythmaker, lay philosopher, folklorist, and culture ambassador/impresario. A true Jack of many trades who strove so hard to be master of all, he was a man of many capabilities , with a voice that was admirably polyphonic. His impulse was both idealistic and relentlessly pragmatic. Endowed with a vision that was acutely focused and seamlessly eclectic, he developed a practice that was proudly traditional and transgressively modern. This plural propensity, this borderless inter-connectedness are the defining characteristics of his vast artistic empire; for the rhyme and reason which power his music are but close cousins of the ones that energize his numerous undertakings, and the tempo of his countless dreams.
Victor Efosa Uwaifo was a doughty dreamer and daring doer whose operational philosophy was: do it different, do it new, do it well…. An artist of boundless curiosity and enormous energy, Uwaifo has blessed our world with works which ply the delicate interface between surrealism and realism, the doable and the done. How can one ever forget that sitting-room in his capacious Benin estate, shaped like a ‘sculpted’ airplane with its small oval windows and imaginary cockpit; or that salon car in his driveway fitted with a plane engine’s rotor blades instead of the usual automobile radiator fan – a feat which evokes telling intimations of the engineering experimentations of Professor Ayodele Awojobi, another Nigerian dreamer and doer?
Niyi Osundare
From music to sculpture to engineering, and back to music again, and then you ask: where does Victor Uwaifo get his magic from? Just what is the secret behind his high-minded aspirations and multifarious achievements? Whence comes his pluck, then his pride? The answer to these questions is as clear as the Benin sky on a cloudless day: exemplary family pedigree coupled with the enabling influence of Benin culture, without doubt, one of the richest, deepest, and most resilient of its kind in the world. On every Uwaifo sculpture are fingerprints of ancient, unforgettable ancestors. In his very voice are tone-marks, reverberations, and echoes of maestros who sang when time was young and silence was golden. In the very air which sustains his being are the intimations and breaths of forebears who left but never departed. Uwaifo’s prodigious creativity had a soil to nurture its roots, a wind to spread its fame, a sky of limitless lore and sympathetic spaces to unfurl its wings. Our maestro never lost sight of his status as a vital link in this long chain of History and Culture, and his role as worthy legatee, inheritor, and propagator.
Siwo siwo siwo
Siwoooooooooooooo
Distinctively hearable in virtually every Uwaifo piece, therefore, is the riveting resonance of the Benin Song, its lungful laughter, its sorrowful tonality, its throbbing, threnodic intensity, its mythic memorability, its sombre reflectivity, the overwhelming force of its sonorous musicality that sometimes brings goose pimples to the listener’s body and/or tears to their eyes, the call-and-response rubric of the song which turns casual listeners into enthusiastic choral participants. As my father, himself an accomplished drummer and singer, used to say, you do not hear a Benin song with your ears; you hear it in your heart and your stomach, on its way to your mind.
The performative power and affective magic of this music genre took the Nigerian music scene by storm in the 1960’s, and many of us who encountered it in our early years have found it difficult to outgrow its stubborn ‘addictiveness’. There is just something in the seductive sonority of Uwaifo’s voice and riveting twang of his guitar that never leave the ears alone. Personally, a day hardly passes without my humming an Uwaifo tune, especially in the showers, or when I am at a knotty juncture in the creative process.
My first experience of Uwaifo’s magic occurred around Christmas in 1965 in that most famous of all cities, Ikere – Ekiti, at a party hosted by a fellow ‘Grammar School’ student, who happened to be a lovely princess of the reigning Oba. The party began on a happy, lively note as we teased the air with tunes by the leading highlife kings of the period: Rex Jim Lawson, Roy Chicago, Victor Olaiya, Eddy Okonta, Dele Ojo, I.K. Dairo. But just as our pleasure was heading towards a premature plateau, in came two colleagues who had just returned from Lagos where they had spent the first half of the Christmas holiday. They didn’t only come with a 45 RPM vinyl copy of a new Uwaifo record; they also came with a new way of dancing to it. As the stylus touched the glistening grooves , our overworked turntable erupted with Do Amen Amen Do. The atmosphere created by the new tune was nothing short of electric. The audience leapt to their feet, and the dance floor was filled to capacity. After three or four encores, the rave shifted to the flip side, and Eralo Gbengigialo took possession of the wind, then, the dancers.
The dance style imported from Lagos by my two colleagues was itself imported into Nigeria from Ghana. Kpanlogo, as it was called, was a drum-driven, gong-accentuated, rhythm-powered dance style thoroughly physical in its energetic joyousness and harmonious deployment of the entire body. Victor Uwaifo’s early music fitted so serendipitously into the kpanlogo dance pattern as if one had been invented for the other. To this day, I have never stopped wondering whether it was Kpanlogo which found Uwaifo, or if it was Uwaifo that went in search of Kpanlogo. But one thing is sure: with its vigorous danceability and rapturous rhythmicality, Uwaifo’s music demonstrates two of those characteristics so indigenous to Benin music in its social and spiritual realms. For over 10 years from the mid-sixties, Kpanlogo and Uwaifo’s music promoted each other in an interesting instance of mutual beneficence. Some of my colleagues still remember that bright afternoon in December 1965 when we encountered the Uwaifo magic for the first time, and how we became his lifelong fans and admirers.
Uwaifo’s music grew and developed over the years as new numbers dropped from his stable with melodious rapidity: Siwo Siwo; Oliha, Ebiss Ebiss, Sesese, Agege Ogigbo. The Maestro went from the fast-paced beats of the early days to the genteel, dancehall-like tempo of the likes of Joromi, the dramatic, myth-making narrativity of Guitar Boy, and the light, many-voiced rally of the Ekassa and Akwete series. The tribe of Uwaifo fans enjoyed an exponential increase. Gold discs (about a dozen of them) poured in as rewards of his genius. The nation welcomed a song type so modern in its traditional virtuosity.
Then, with his music career all set and steady, the man who all along had taught us so much about culture decided to go back to school himself. A fortunate University of Benin threw open its door to the Kingdom’s famous son and one of Nigeria’s most valued culture ambassadors. Student Uwaifo snapped up the B.A. with a dazzling First Class, followed up with an M.A., and topped it all up with a prestigious Ph.D. Thereafter, the University wasted no time in offering him a place as distinguished academic. Thus the life of Victor Uwaifo was a chronicle of aspirations searching, constantly searching, for fulfillment. Ever before his engagements at the University of Benin, our Melody Maestro was already a university person in sense and spirit; and his university was one with its universe securely steady and intact.
I saw Victor Uwaifo many times from a respectful distance, and he and I met only once. That was at the 1994 annual convention of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) which held at the University of Benin. Facilitated by the scholar-writer Asomwan Adagbonyin, that meeting, short as it was, brought me up close to the wit, charm, and easy manners of Nigeria’s Ultimate Maestro. Surprised and flattered by his open declaration before the ANA audience that he was dedicating his performance that night to me, I couldn’t help the onrush of powerful memories of that bright afternoon in December 1965 when I encountered his music for the first time. When I told him how much I admired the largeness of his soul and immensity of his gifts, his response came sharp and direct: ‘that admiration is mutual’. I was not sure if he ever knew how so deeply touched I was at his generous reply!
Siwo siwo siwo
Siwoooooooooooo
His personality was an example, his life story a parable. Here was a man with an unassailable belief that he could be whatever he chose to be. A practicing musician with a doctorate degree in Visual Arts; a practical philosopher who pondered the relationship between sound and light; a sculptor who conjured lifelike images out of clay and wood and bronze; a thinker who plumbed the deep structure of culture in tandem with its surface realities; a songmaster who deepened the mutual traffic between melody and memory; an archivist who never lost sight of the neglected Muse of the Nigerian museum; a proud man, ebulliently self-assertive, uncontainable by small spaces; a Guitar Boy who saw Mammy Water and never ran away; a Maestro who sang the endless song.
That was/is Victor Efosa Uwaifo: a culture-conscious, legacy- literate creative activist who has contributed so much to the restoration our cultural memory and propagation of our music. We hope Edo State in particular and Nigeria in general will reward his incredibly valuable life of dedication by making sure that his achievements never die, that his legacy endures. Let Nigeria banish her famous addiction to willful amnesia and ensure that the world does not forget the life and accomplishments of this remarkable man
Rest in power, Victorious Uwaifo. Here below, that song which I sang for you many seasons ago when you were here with us on this side of the Great River:
FOR VICTOR UWAIFO
(In the background throughout, a medley of Uwaifo's songs)
Siwo siwo siwo siwo...
Your voice nestles in the eaves of my memory,
Its red-earth vigour tremulous
Between sappy laughter and a silence
Which left its echoes in the larynx
Of throbbing legends
Wafting past the lyrical beauty of painted thresholds,
Through doors which breast the streets
Like defiant sentries, and shrines where once
Gods swayed through the portals of the sky,
Leaving their word and wand behind
Do Amen Amen dooooo
You sing of Dawn and mysty Stars
When Earth was music
And Rivers danced towards the Sea
With a chorus of capering minnows
Your melody came before the rhythm of the First Rain
Oh that haunting sonority,
That mellow magic in the elbow of a voice!
The guitar's wailing incantations,
Rainbow drums which prompt
Every moment into an eternity of motions
Oserie....
So rivetting, the rhythm of your Red-Earth City
Rhythm of Clay, rhythm of Bronze
Rhythm of ancient hands proclaiming
Miracles of mask and meaning
Rhythm of the snail's millennial sigh at Siloko Market
Echoing forests, pulse of the Panther
Skirted undergrowths dense with daring
And when my Hunter-Minstrel charged
His lips with a flute
Trees broke into a dance beyond recounting
Melody Maestro,
The universe glows in the melody of your magic;
Your athletic virtuosity, the prodigy of your gifts
Unborn seasons thrive on the honey of your voice
The ivory sonority of your endless song
Joromi jo mi o, jo mi jooooooooooo....
Niyi Osundare
OpinionAddThis : Original Author : Niyi Osundare Disable advertisements :
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