At least two new Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) appointed by President Bola Tinubu may be card-carrying members of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the president’s party.

Two other nominees are also found to be long-term allies of prominent politicians serving in the Tinubu administration.

President Tinubu last Wednesday announced the nomination of 10 Resident Electoral Commissioners (REC).

The nominees are Etekamba Umoren (Akwa Ibom State), Isah Ehimeakne (Edo), Oluwatoyin Babalola (Ekiti), Abubakar Ma’aji (Gombe), Shehu Wahab (Kwara), Bunmi Omoseyindemi (Lagos) and Aminu Idris (Nasarawa).

Others are Mohammed Yelwa (Niger), Anugbum Onuoha (Rivers), Isma’ila Moyi and (Zamfara).

In announcing the nominations, presidential spokesperson Ajuri Ngelale noted that the president exercised the powers granted him by Section 154 (1) of the Nigerian constitution and Section 6 of the Electoral Act (2022).

“Tinubu expects the new appointees to abide by the highest standards of professional and ethical conduct in the discharge of their duties,” Ngelale said.

Initial confusion

However, there was confusion initially over the nomination of the new RECs. Ngelale had earlier in the afternoon issued a statement containing the names of nine nominees.

The nine nominees were Isah Ehimeakne (Edo), Bamidele Agbede (Ekiti), Jani Bello (Gombe), Taiye Ilayasu (Kwara), Bunmi Omoseyindemi (Lagos), Yahaya Bello (Nasarawa), Mohammed Yalwa (Niger), Anugbum Onuoha (Rivers) and Abubakar Dambo (Zamfara).

But by the time the second list of RECs came out, there were 10 names with the inclusion of Umoren from Akwa Ibom.

Also, five nominees that made the initial list were dropped. They are Messrs Agbede (Ekiti), Bello (Gombe), Ilayasu (Kwara), Yahaya Bello (Nasarawa), and Dambo (Zamfara).

No reason was given for the changes.

RECs ties with Tinubu, APC, others

To ensure the neutrality of the electoral umpire, Nigerian law prohibits the appointment of members of political parties as resident electoral commissioners, individuals who coordinate INEC activities in different states.

However, at least four of the RECs nominated by Tinubu are known to have ties with him, the APC or politicians in his government.

They are Umoren, Shaka, Omoseyindemi and Onuoha.

Umoren is a member of the APC and a long-time ally of the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio.

He served as the Chief of Staff at the Akwa Ibom State Government House when Akpabio governed the state between 2007 and 2014.

Akpabio also nominated him to serve as the Secretary to the State Government (SSG) under his successor, Udom Emmanuel, then an ally of Akpabio. Umoren was only sacked in 2018 following a fallout between Akpabio and Emmanuel, which also led to the removal of other key allies in the state executive council.

August 2018, during a welcome rally for Akpabio in Uyo, Umoren and other sacked members of Emmanuel’s state executive council embraced the All Progressives Congress (APC).

In what could best be described as an induction into the party, Umoren accepted a broom, an emblem of the APC, from Akpabio on stage and chanted APC through the speakers.

“Akwa Ibom, you are in safe hands,” he told the audience as he shook the broom vigorously.

Another open supporter of Tinubu and the APC is the nominee for Edo State REC, Isah Shaka.

PREMIUM TIMES reviewed Shaka’s digital footprint and found multiple social media posts before, during and after the 2023 general elections that showed his bias towards Tinubu and his party, the APC.

In one of such posts reviewed by this newspaper, Shaka took to social media to list reasons other Nigerians should support Tinubu just like he was doing.

In another post a few days before the presidential election held on 25 February, Shaka showered praises on Tinubu on his Facebook page.

“He is the issue,” he wrote of Tinubu on 18 February. “He is the subject matter. He is the target. He is the Numero Uno in this game. He is the subject of discussion across the Nation. He is the owner of the game. He that wrestles with him sharpens him and makes him pay attention. He is the Jagaban. He is the President of Nigeria 2023-2032 By his grace Almighty God.”

Again, minutes after INEC declared Tinubu winner of the presidential election around 4 a.m. on 1 March, Shaka took to his page to congratulate the party. “Congratulations to all APC families,” he posted.

Curiously, on Friday shortly after PREMIUM TIMES reviewed Shaka’s Facebook page where he scribbled some of his thoughts, his profile and posts were removed from the social media platform.

The Lagos REC nominee, Bunmi Omoseyindemi, had enjoyed political patronage from Tinubu and his allies since 2001. He was appointed chairman of the Lagos State Traditional Medicine Board in 2001 when Tinubu governed the state, a position he held until 2015.

In 2016, he was appointed an electoral commissioner in the Lagos State Independent Electoral Commission (LASIEC) by the then-governor Akinwunmi Ambode who was also an ally of Tinubu at the time.

Another REC nominee, Onuoha was found to be an ally of a top official of the Tinubu administration. He has been close to the Minister of Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike.

Onuoha was a Special Adviser on Lands and Surveys to Wike until 2019 when he was crowned as a traditional leader in Rumuepirikom, Obio/Akpor Local Government area in the state – the same community Wike hails from.

However, before he was appointed as a Special Adviser to Wike, he had in 2007, served as the Commissioner, Legal and Political Parties Monitoring at the Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission (RSIEC). He was one of the nine-member RSIEC Electoral Commissioners sworn in by the then-governor, Rotimi Amaechi, in 2007. They were led by the late Nimi Briggs, an emeritus professor.

Ex-INEC staff make list

The president also nominated four former officials of INEC as RECs from Ekiti, Kwara, Nasarawa and Zamfara states.

The Zamfara REC nominee, Isma’ila Moyi, was an official of the commission. He retired as a director of the Stores Directorate at the INEC headquarters in Abuja in 2015. Before then he had served as an administrative secretary for the commission in Zamfara, Sokoto, Adamawa, Katsina, Borno and Kano states.

The REC nominee for Nasarawa State, Aminu Idris, is a former director of Election Planning and Management (EPM) at the INEC headquarters.

While the nominee for Kwara State REC, Wahab, is a former INEC administrative secretary in Benue State, the Ekiti REC nominee, Oluwatoyin Babalola, was INEC’s director of Legal Drafting and Clearance.

What the Law says

The third schedule to the Nigerian 1999 Constitution prohibits the appointment of a partisan person into INEC in Item F, paragraph 14.

“There shall be for each State of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, a Resident Electoral Commissioner who shall be a person of unquestionable integrity and shall not be a member of any political party,” section 14, 3(b) states.

Section 6 of the Electoral Act (2022) added that the appointees “shall be answerable to the Commission” and “shall hold office for a term of five years from the date of his or her appointment which may be renewable for another term of five years and no more.”

The section also said the appointments must be in accordance with the Federal Character Commission Act.

“The Resident Electoral Commissioner appointed under the Constitution may only be removed by the President, acting on an address supported by a two-thirds majority of the Senate praying that the Resident Electoral Commissioner be so removed for inability to perform the functions of the office, whether arising from infirmity of mind or body or any other cause, or for misconduct,” the section states.

Jega’s warning

A few days before Tinubu nominated the new RECs, a former chairperson of Nigeria’s Electoral Commission, INEC, Attahiru Jega, criticised the existing laws that empower politicians to appoint top officials of the commission.

Jega, who headed the electoral commission from 2010 to 2015, said such nominees are usually not thoroughly screened, a situation he said has a ‘damaging effect’ on the integrity of elections.

“The appointment of Resident Electoral Commissioners should be divested from the president and given to the Commission at INEC, with powers to hire and fire,” he said at a retreat for members of the Senate in Akwa Ibom State.

Like Buhari, Like Tinubu

With the new appointments, Tinubu appears to be following the path of his predecessor, former President Muhammadu Buhari.

Buhari had on multiple occasions nominated partisan individuals and persons with integrity issues as INEC RECs, drawing widespread criticism from Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and members of the public.

In 2017, Buhari nominated Olalekan Raheem, a member of his party, the APC as REC from Osun state. The Senate stood down his nomination for being a card-carrying member of the APC, which he established during his screening by the senators. Although he claimed to have ditched party politics, it didn’t change his fate.

In 2021, Buhari’s nomination of Lauretta Onochie, a known member of his party, drew another round of criticisms and condemnations from the public.

Although the Senate rejected her nomination, it was not due to her party affiliation.

The chairperson of the Senate Committee on INEC at the time, Kabiru Gaya, said she was disqualified because there was no vacancy in the Delta State slot where Buhari nominated her to represent.

Onochie was later appointed the chairperson of the board of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) by the former president.

Last year, at least four of the 19 REC nominees by Buhari were found to either be members of political parties or have corruption baggage. The Senate, however, went ahead to confirm their appointments.

Gaya, a member of the ruling APC said at the time that the 19 nominees were confirmed because the petitions against them were not enough to stop the Senate from approving them.

The Adamawa scenario

During the last general elections, the sordid effect of the phenomenon Jega criticised, played out in Adamawa when the state’s former REC, Hudu Ari, illegally announced a winner in the governorship elections even though the collation of results was still in progress and when he was not empowered to do so by law.

His action provoked chaos across the state, leading to a mob brutalising a National Commissioner of the commission, Abdullahi Zuru, a professor. Yet, all the Electoral Commission could do was to nullify his pronouncement, which until the latest amendment of the electoral act in 2022, may have been binding.

INEC also suspended him and recommended him for punishment by the then President, Buhari, the only one empowered to sack him.

Screening and Confirmation

It remains to be seen if the Senate will confirm the nominees with partisan interests considering what the law says.

The confirmation of the nominees’ appointments is subject to a two-thirds vote of the members of the Senate who are expected to screen them.

If confirmed, they are to serve a five-year term each, and can only be removed by the president and a two-thirds vote from the National Assembly.

Rarely in modern times can so few have tried to take so much from so many. If Nigeria had lost its arbitration dispute with Process & Industrial Development in a London court on 23 October, it would have cost our people close to $1 billion.

We won, and all decent people can sleep easier as a result. Justice Robin Knowles said Nigeria had been the victim of a monstrous fraud. But it was a close-run thing. As the judge said: “I end the case acutely conscious of how readily the outcome could have been different, and of the enormous resources ultimately required from Nigeria as the successful party to make good its challenge.”
But ordinary Nigerians never took the decisions that ended up before Knowles. Had Nigeria lost, it would have required schools not to be built, nurses not to be trained and roads not to repaired, on an epic scale, to pay a handful of contractors, lawyers and their allies – for a project that never broke ground.

How did it get to this point? How did Nigeria prevail? Was this a one-off, or par for a shabby and distasteful course? What are the lessons for the future?

The ‘P&ID Affair’ was already firmly set by the time I came into office in 2015. A company registered in the British Virgin Islands that no one had heard of, with hardly any staff or assets, had won a contract to build a gas processing plant in Cross Rivers state. The company was owned by Irish intermediaries who knew Nigeria well and had done business in everything from healthcare to fixing tanks.
The previous government could not supply the gas. The plant was never built. Construction was not started. P&ID did not even buy the land for the facility. But the contract, incredibly, was clear: P&ID could sue Nigeria, and claim all the profits it might have made over 20 years as if everything had been completed.

Nigeria was in court in London, trying to talk down liability and costs. Back at home, fixers were looking to work out a quiet settlement. This is often the way. A lot of contracts end up in dispute. P&ID won a settlement in 2017 of $6 billion, with compound interest. People, including out of work ex-British Cabinet Minister Priti Patel, were queuing up to insist we paid, or risk Nigeria becoming an untrustworthy trade pariah.

It was clear that far from the whole story had been told. I tasked Abba Kyari, my chief- of-staff and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, with finding a way, even at that late stage and despite so much conflicting advice, to get us a fair hearing. Working with a number of different agencies and senior officials of government, we began to find a huge amount of evidence, not all of which Knowles was to accept. But he agreed that P&ID had paid bribes. He agreed that one of P&ID’s founders had committed perjury. And he agreed that P&ID had somehow found in its possession a steady supply of Nigeria’s privileged internal legal documents, outlining our plans, strategies and problems.
My own view is that this whole, sorry affair shows how important it is to follow the legal process in resolving a dispute. It shows that given time and opportunity for each side to present their case, the temple of justice can satisfactorily resolve all disputes without resort to extra-judicial measures. It was definitely worth the struggle: this was an attempted heist of historic proportions, an attempt to steal from the treasury a third of Nigeria’s foreign reserves.

But even at this moment, we should note what the English judge cautioned. The arbitration process in London “was a shell that got nowhere near the truth.” We need better contracts, in the public and private sector. And we need greater transparency: the reality is that, had P&ID not conjured up quite such an outlandish ransom, they may have found themselves in the same place as the myriad other invisible contractors who all too often quietly take Nigeria for many millions in out of court settlements. Sterner sanctions are indicated for Nigerian public officials who have been proven to connive with foreign criminals to defraud our country.

Nigeria has won this battle with corruption, but the war is far from over. As Knowles concluded: “This case has also, sadly, brought together a combination of examples of what some individuals will do for money. Driven by greed and prepared to use corruption; giving no thought to what their enrichment would mean in terms of harm for others. Others that in the present case include the people of Nigeria, already let down in so many ways over the history of this matter by a number of individuals in politics and administration whose duty it was to serve them and protect them.” Well said.

** Buhari was Nigeria’s President from 2015 to 2023.

Ayo Adebanjo, leader of Afenifere, the Yoruba socio-cultural group, says Nigerians should be ashamed to have a president with a certificate “baggage”. 

Adebanjo spoke in a 41-minute interview published by PUNCH on Sunday. 

During the presidential election tribunal, Atiku Abubakar, flagbearer of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the election, had contested the authenticity of the Chicago State University (CSU) certificate presented to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) by President Bola Tinubu.

Tinubu had said he lost his original certificates and presented a replacement of his CSU diploma to INEC for the 2023 presidential election.

Following a court order, the university later released Tinubu’s academic records, saying his replacement certificate matched its format.

But the Afenifere leader said without technicalities, no honest person can defend Tinubu on the matter.

“There is no truth in what he says. That’s the unfortunate thing. I feel sorry for the country, particularly Tinubu defenders, can they be proud? Whether true or not, why is it him? When they finally produced the record from the university, it was even more damaging,” Adebanjo said. 

“In this Tinubu saga, you presented the certificate from the university, now they are trying to change (the conversation) to his attendance at the university. 

“How many people attended the university and never completed it or even dropped out? You said you attended and have the certificate, and the registrar said they don’t know about the certificate. What more do you want?

“This is what makes me sad in this country and those still saying something in defence of this ugly situation where we should cover our face as Nigerians that the man produced to be our president has this baggage. I am concerned.”

Adebanjo said he had defended Tinubu on the certificate scandal in the past because of the little knowledge he had on the matter.  

“Mind you, I should be one of those who should be proud that Tinubu is the president of this country because I made him the governor of Lagos state. When this certificate saga started, I was the one who defended him. I defended him from the fact I saw at that time. But when some facts are now coming up, I folded my arms,” he said. 

“Forget technicalities, do the substantial justice. Can any honest person, in view of the exposure from the university, say he (Tinubu) got that certificate from the university?”

The Cable

Germany is eyeing imports of natural gas from Nigeria in an effort to secure and diversify its energy supply, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said during a visit to the country.

“This will also have an impact on the global gas price,” Scholz said in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Sunday after a meeting with president Bola Tinubu. If more states offered gas on the global market, prices would decrease, the German leader said.

“It is important to use the capacities where they are, and that we diversify production all over the globe,” Scholz added.

Tinubu said that given Nigeria’s sizable resources, “we are ready to encourage investments in a gas pipeline.”

Germany — which switched off its last nuclear power plants this year and weaned off Russian pipeline gas during last year’s energy crisis — will need large volumes of LNG to run its power-hungry industry. So far, Europe’s economic powerhouse gets crude oil from Nigeria, but not gas.

Scholz last year also visited Senegal, where he offered German help to open up gas fields off the coast. The West African country expects to deliver first quotas of the fuel in the second half of 2024.

This week’s trip is Scholz’s third to Africa since taking office two years ago. Nigeria, the continent’s largest economy, also wants to make business deals in the areas of raw materials with European partners. Scholz will travel to Ghana on Monday (today).

For quite a while, Nigeria has been talking up its desire to end its reliance on oil money and earn more from other sources, especially farming. Its population of around 213m, the biggest in Africa, has some 37m hectares of fertile land. But it grows too little on it.

Worse, some of its produce isn’t healthy. Food exported to Europe and America has been rejected because of its excessive residue of pesticide. To feed Nigeria’s own people, let alone markets abroad, farmers will have to cut back on their use of some chemicals.

That will not be easy, since Nigeria is one of the continent’s leaders at splurging on pesticides, importing some $384m-worth in 2018 alone to kill bugs and weeds. Yet 58% of the pesticides registered for use in Nigeria are banned in Europe because of their toxicity.

Sometimes the chemicals are so strong that they don’t only wipe out pests and other crop-predators; they can kill people. In 2020 some 270 people in a village in Benue state died after fishermen using chemicals to catch fish had dumped some of them into the community’s main water source. Scientists at several Nigerian universities argue that dangerous pesticides and other agrochemicals are contributing to rising rates of cancer, which kills as many as 79,000 Nigerians a year. A recent study found that roughly 80% of the pesticides most commonly used by small-scale farmers are highly hazardous.

“Farmers use what’s available and recommended to them,” taking advice from marketers and traders, says Jochen Luckscheiter of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an NGO tied to Germany’s Green party. “If you want to stop them, you have to stop the supply—and make alternative products available.”

In August environmental activists and politicians gathered in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, to review the current laws on importing and using pesticides—and discovered that hardly any exist. Instead, they lamented that two bills going through parliament will make it easier for foreign firms to sell dangerous wares.

Boosting Nigeria’s farm output is no simple task. Farmers need seeds that produce higher yields, affordable fertiliser and better access to markets. They also need security. Thousands have fled their homes and fields because of jihadists in the north and to escape fighting over land between herders and farmers. By contrast with these challenges, it ought to be easy to regulate pesticides so they do not poison people.

A boat carrying over 100 passengers capsized mid water at Benue river on Saturday.

Traders, women and children, heading for Binnari town in Karim-Lamido local government area of the state were on the ill-fated boat.

Many of the passengers were returning from Mayoreneyo fish market in Ardo-Kola LGA.

The boat left Mayoreneyo local jetty at about 3.30pm and capsized 40 minutes later, according to sources.

A resident of Mayoreneyo, Musa Mayoreneyo, told our correspondent that the ill-fated boat had earlier conveyed the passengers from Binnari to Mayoreneyo.

In a telephone interview, a resident of Binnari, said, “As l am  talking to you now, only bodies of two persons were recovered by local divers.”

A source at the Mayoreneyo local jetty told our reporter that none of the passengers had life jacket when the incident occurred.

Acting chairman of inland water transporters in Taraba state, Jidda Mayoreneyo, said that  about 15 bodies were recovered close to the scene.

Confirming the incident, Chairman, caretaker committee of Ardo-Kola, Dalhatu Kawu, described it as tragic.

Daily Trust

Gaza receives largest aid shipment so far as deaths top 8,000 and Israel widens military offensive

Nearly three dozen trucks entered Gaza on Sunday in the largest aid convoy since the war between Israel and Hamas began, but humanitarian workers said the assistance still fell desperately short of needs after thousands of people broke into warehouses to take flour and basic hygiene products.

The Gaza Health Ministry said the death toll among Palestinians passed 8,000, mostly women and minors, as Israeli tanks and infantry pursued what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “second stage” in the war ignited by Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 incursion. The toll is without precedent in decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Over 1,400 people have died on the Israeli side, mainly civilians killed during the initial attack, also an unprecedented figure.

Communications were restored to most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people Sunday after an Israeli bombardment described by residents as the most intense of the war knocked out phone and internet services late Friday.

Israel has allowed only a trickle of aid to enter. On Sunday, 33 trucks carrying water, food and medicine entered the only border crossing from Egypt, a spokesperson at the Rafah crossing, Wael Abo Omar, told The Associated Press.

After visiting the Rafah crossing, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court called the suffering of civilians “profound” and said he had not been able to enter Gaza. “These are the most tragic of days,” said Karim Khan, whose court has been investigating the actions of Israeli and Palestinian authorities since 2014.

Khan called on Israel to respect international law but stopped short of accusing it of war crimes. He called Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack a serious violation of international humanitarian law. “The burden rests with those who aim the gun, missile or rocket in question,” he said.

The Israeli military said Sunday that it had struck more than 450 militant targets over the past 24 hours, including Hamas command centers and anti-tank missile launching positions. Huge plumes of smoke rose over Gaza City. Military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said dozens of militants were killed.

Hagari, who said ground operations were intensifying, also reiterated calls for Gaza residents to move south, saying they’d have better access to food, water and medicine there.

“This is a matter of urgency,” he said.

Israel says most Gaza residents have heeded its orders to flee to the southern part of the besieged territory, but hundreds of thousands remain in the north, in part because Israel has also bombarded targets in so-called safe zones. More than 1.4 million people in Gaza have fled their homes.

The Hamas military wing said its militants clashed with Israeli troops who entered the northwest Gaza Strip with small arms and anti-tank missiles. Palestinian militants have continued firing rockets into Israel, including toward its commercial hub, Tel Aviv.

The aid warehouse break-ins were “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza,” said Thomas White, Gaza director for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA. “People are scared, frustrated and desperate.”

UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma said the crowds broke into four facilities on Saturday. She said the warehouses did not contain any fuel, which has been in critically short supply since Israel cut off all shipments. Israel says Hamas would use it for military purposes and that the militant group is hoarding large fuel stocks for itself in the territory. That claim couldn’t be independently verified.

One warehouse held 80 tons of food, the U.N. World Food Program said. It emphasized that at least 40 of its trucks need to cross into Gaza daily just to meet growing food needs.

President Joe Biden in a call with Netanyahu on Sunday “underscored the need to immediately and significantly increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to meet the needs of civilians in Gaza,” the U.S. said.

Israeli authorities said they would soon allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.

But the head of civil affairs at COGAT, the Israeli defense body responsible for Palestinian civilian affairs, provided no details on how much aid would be available. Elad Goren also said Israel has opened two water lines in southern Gaza within the past week. The AP could not independently verify that either line was functioning.

Meanwhile, crowded hospitals in Gaza came under growing threat. Residents living near Shifa Hospital, the territory’s largest, said Israeli airstrikes overnight hit near the complex where tens of thousands of civilians are sheltering. Israel accuses Hamas of having a secret command post beneath the hospital but has not provided much evidence. Hamas denies the allegations.

The Palestinian Red Crescent rescue service said nearby Israeli airstrikes damaged parts of another Gaza City hospital after it received two calls from Israeli authorities on Sunday ordering it to evacuate. Some windows were blown out, and rooms were covered in debris. The rescue service said airstrikes have hit as close as 50 meters (yards) from the Al-Quds Hospital where 14,000 people are sheltering.

Israel ordered the hospital to evacuate more than a week ago, but it and other medical facilities have refused, saying evacuation would mean death for patients on ventilators.

“Under no circumstances, hospitals should be bombed,” the director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Robert Mardini, told CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

About 20,000 people were sheltering at Nasser Hospital, emergency director Dr. Mohammed Qandeel said. “I brought my kids to sleep here,” said one displaced resident who gave her name only as Umm Ahmad. “I used to be afraid of my kids playing in the sand. Now their hands are dirty with the blood on the floor.”

An Israeli airstrike hit a two-story house in Khan Younis on Sunday, killing at least 13 people, including 10 from one family. The bodies were brought to the nearby Nasser Hospital, according to an AP journalist at the scene.

The military escalation has increased domestic pressure on Israel’s government to secure the release of 239 hostages seized by Hamas fighters during the Oct. 7 attack.

Hamas says it is ready to release all hostages if Israel releases all of the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons. Desperate family members of the Israeli captives met with Netanyahu on Saturday and expressed support for an exchange. Israel has dismissed the Hamas offer.

“If Hamas does not feel military pressure, nothing will move forward,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told families of the hostages Sunday.

The Israeli military has stopped short of calling its gradually expanding ground operations inside Gaza an all-out invasion. Casualties on both sides are expected to rise sharply as Israeli forces and Palestinian militants battle in dense residential areas.

Israel says it targets Hamas fighters and infrastructure and that the militants operate among civilians, putting them in danger.

The violence has inflicted serious damage on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. The territory’s sole power plant shut down shortly after the war began. Hospitals are struggling to keep emergency generators running to operate incubators and other life-saving equipment, and UNRWA is trying to keep water pumps and bakeries running. As water ran short, some Gazans bathed in the sea.

The fighting has raised concerns that the violence could spread across the region. Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have engaged in daily skirmishes along Israel’s northern border. Hagari said Israel on Sunday struck three militant cells that fired from Lebanon into Israel and killed militants who were trying to enter. Hamas said its forces in Lebanon fired 16 missiles at the Israeli city of Nahariya. Hezbollah, a Hamas ally, said it also fired missiles at several sites.

The Israeli military said early Monday that its aircraft hit military infrastructure in Syria after rockets from there fell in open Israeli territory.

Roughly 250,000 Israelis have been evacuated from their homes because of violence along the border with Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon, according to the Israeli military.

AP

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Russia's Shoigu accuses West of seeking to expand Ukraine war to Asia-Pacific

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the West wants to expand the conflict in the Ukraine to the Asia-Pacific region, Russian state media reported, citing comments made at a Beijing defence forum on Monday.

Speaking at the Xiangshan Forum, China's biggest military diplomacy event, Shoigu said NATO is covering up a build-up of forces in the Asia-Pacific region with an "ostentatious desire for dialogue", Russia's TASS news agency reported.

Shoigu said NATO countries were promoting an arms race in the region, increasing their military presence and the frequency and scale of military drills there.

U.S. forces will use information exchanges with Tokyo and Seoul on missile launches to deter Russia and China, Shoigu said. He also accused Washington of trying to use climate change and natural disasters as an excuse for "humanitarian interventions".

Shoigu said the emergence of new security blocs such as the Quad and AUKUS undermined the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and nuclear non-proliferation efforts in the region.

At the same time, he said, Russia's move to revoke its ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty did not mean the end of the agreement, and Russia was not lowering its threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

"We are only seeking to restore parity with the United States, who has not ratified this treaty," Russia's RIA news agency quoted Shoigu as saying. "We are not talking about its destruction."

Shoigu said that Moscow was ready for talks on the post-conflict settlement of the Ukraine crisis on further 'co-existence' with the West, but that Western countries needed to stop seeking Russia's strategic defeat.

Making clear the conditions for such talks were not in place yet, Shoigu said: "It is also important to ensure equal relations between all the nuclear powers and permanent United Nations Security Council members who carry special responsibility for upholding peace and global stability."

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

West using Ukraine as a ‘battering ram’ against Russia – Shoigu

The United States has completely subjugated the Western camp, focusing all their political and military resources on preserving its slipping global dominance by any means necessary, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu told the 10th Xiangshan Security Forum in China.

The Russian defense chief arrived in Beijing on Monday on a working visit, during which he delivered a keynote address at a plenary session on ‘Responsibility of large states and cooperation in the field of global security.’

According to Shoigu, Washington has been undermining and destroying the foundations of international security in its quest for overwhelming geopolitical and military-strategic superiority. The US-led NATO bloc has for years ignored Russia's legitimate security interests, stubbornly pursuing the expansion, and eventually forcing Russia to implement “countermeasures” in Ukraine.

“In response, the West openly took a course on inflicting a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia in the hybrid war unleashed against us. Ukraine was cynically chosen as a battering ram, and assigned the role of merely expendable material,” Shoigu said.

However, despite Western arms and support, Kiev’s much-touted counteroffensive has failed, Shoigu reiterated, noting that Ukraine lost “over 90,000 troops, some 600 tanks and almost 1,900 armored vehicles”since June 4 alone. The Russian armed forces will continue to methodically and steadily carry out their tasks, while ensuring the safety of civilians, Shoigu added. 

“Modern cataclysms in international relations are directly related to the opposition of individual states to the inevitable strengthening of the multipolar world,” the Russian defense chief added. 

“Countries that oppose Western neocolonial dictatorship and defend the principles of equality, polycentricity and indivisible security are subject to fierce pressure, including attempts at political and economic strangulation,” Shoigu said.

Reuters/RT

It is a well-worn tradition for our colleagues in the Judiciary to use the occasion of their retirement to make fine speeches full of platitudes that hardly anyone notices thereafter. At his valedictory speech on retirement at 70, Musa Dattijo Mohammed of the Supreme Court decided to take matters beyond the next level. He spoke from the heart, on Thursday last week, giving us a peep into the rot pervading in the Judiciary. The speech became an immediate sensation. Daily Trust called it a bombshell that set the internet on fire. Indeed, it did, as what he said furiously dominated discussions in the media throughout the weekend.

I took note of the speech for two reasons. Firstly, Dattijo is the last of my ABU 1976 set on the Supreme Court after the retirement of Abdu Aboki last year. The ABU graduates from the Faculty of Law of that year would arguably be some of the most distinguished in the annals of the Nigerian Judiciary becoming predominant here and there. Only in the last few years had they begun to fade away one after the other. Ibrahim Bala Mairiga retired as Chief Judge of Kebbi State in 2017 followed closely by the exit of Ibrahim Auta, the Chief Judge of the Federal High Courts, and Abdu Aboki of the Supreme Court who retired last year.

Secondly, the speech reminds me of another, some 30 years ago, that caused the same stir among the Nigerian public. I refer to the speech made by Salihu Ibrahim, Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army when he was retiring in 1993. Maybe some readers might recall that 1993 was probably the nadir the military regimes reached in our history when a free presidential election was cancelled outright leading to widespread protests. Salihu’s valedictory speech was full of regrets at what he saw as the falling standards, lack of professionalism, and all that in the Nigerian Army. His famous one-liner, ‘the Nigerian Army has become the army of anything’ is still widely quoted today to denote an extreme institutional failure.

In his valedictory speech, reminiscence of the famous Salihu Ibrahim’s put down of the Nigerian Army under his command, Dattijo, did not spare the Nigerian Judiciary which in his view has fallen far from grace. He could easily have used the same one-liner to say, ‘The Nigerian Judiciary has become the judiciary of anything’. Dattijo began his speech by wistfully recalling when he joined the Supreme Court things were tolerable, ‘The journey was calm and fulfilling until about halfway through my Supreme Court years when the punctuating turbulent cracks made it awry and askew.’ From thence onwards it was an avalanche of things that have gone amiss.

Starting from the overarching powers of the Chief Justice (CJ) which made other justices of the court, particularly Dattijo who was the second in command, mere onlookers in the administration of justice. The consequence of the CJ’s enormous powers became an opportunity for abuse.

Dattijo said, ‘This needs to change. Continued denial of the existence of this threatening anomaly weakens effective judicial oversight in the country’. He made many other scathing remarks on the poor funding of the Judiciary, deficient salaries of the judges, the corruption in the process of appointing judges, and the quality of judgements of the bench which has become unpredictable due to unnecessary interference.

At a time, in 2022, aggrieved judges of the Supreme Court, including the incumbent CJ had to petition against the shabby treatment meted to them by the head of the court and the Chief Registrar, which ostensibly led to the resignation of Chief Justice Ibrahim Tanko Muhammad.

It was a legion of complaints from the retiring judge. But what galls from what Dattijo said is the refusal to fill up the seats vacated by the death or retirement of judges that eventually left some zones of the country without anyone within the confines of the Supreme Court. This might not have impeded the workings of the court nor the quality of its judgement. However, in times of political contestations such as we had this year and matters reaching the Supreme Court for adjudication, these lapses could be willing tools in the hands of conspiracy theorists whenever some judgement of the Supreme Court did not favour them.

In the long run, Dattijo laments leaving the Supreme Court dissatisfied. He moans, ‘My lords, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, it is obvious that the judiciary I am exiting from is far from the one l voluntarily joined and desired to serve and be identified with. The institution has become something else’. There is yet a ray of hope as Dattijo alludes that the situation can be turned around if we all put our heads to it. He said, ‘The duty to revive the institution remains a collective one. We must persist.’

Dattijo’s valedictory speech is a sad commentary on the Nigerian judiciary. It is even sadder that as it is constituted it cannot help itself.

Short-term measures could include the immediate filling of the vacated seats in the court and increased funding for the running and upkeep of the court.

The longtime venture capital investor honed it through decades of experience helping early-stage tech companies like YouTube and Instagram grow into industry giants. He repeatedly watched CEOs get stuck when trying to choose between two options, and it taught him a lesson.

“If you find yourself deciding between only two choices, maybe you need to widen the aperture,” Botha said on Sequoia’s “Crucible Moments” podcast, in a recent episode featuring billionaire entrepreneur Jack Dorsey. “Is there a third or fourth option that you haven’t even considered that you need to throw into the mix to really test whether that is the right path?”

He cited Dorsey’s own payments business Block, where Botha sits on the company’s board, as an example. In 2011, the business was known as Square, and it was struggling to expand past its namesake product — a credit and debit card scanner that could plug into a smartphone’s headphone jack.

One of the company’s first attempts to broaden its customer base was an app called Square Wallet, which customers could use to pay Square merchants. Another was a $25 million deal with Starbucks: The coffee giant invested in the company, and in return, carried out all in-store transactions with the startup’s technology.

Both ideas were meant to help the company reach more people. Merchants may have known about its credit card scanner, but everyday buyers didn’t need it, Dorsey said.

Neither garnered much initial traction. Dorsey could have waited for a larger sample size of results — but instead, he chose to toss another initiative into the mix, tasking a group of Block employees with brainstorming new options.

One of those ideas was to develop a low-cost way for people “to send money as easy as sending an email,” Dorsey said. The company officially launched Square Cash, now known as Cash App, in October 2013.

The payment service, a competitor to PayPal and Venmo, proved stronger than the other options: Block pulled Square Wallet from the store six months after Cash App was released, and let its Starbucks partnership expire at the end of 2015. The company later discovered that it’d lost $71 million paying transaction costs to credit card companies while processing Starbucks payments.

Block now has a market cap of $26.82 billion, as of Wednesday afternoon, and Cash App is responsible for half of its revenue, Botha said. Having a third option helped Block cut what wasn’t working, and invest in projects that helped make the company profitable.

This method is backed by science: On average, people are 22% more likelyto choose the strongest option when they compare all their options at once, rather than examining each one sequentially, according to 2017 research.

That holds true for both big and small decisions — whether you’re choosing between colleges, laptops or pizza restaurants, the study found.

CNBC