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'I Don't Believe My Husband Committed Suicide'

Wife of  late Dr Nev Orseer Orkuma, a Nigerian doctor who was said to have allegedly committed suicide at Cairo International Airport due to frustration and financial constraints, Dr (Mrs)  Ejiro O. Nev, yesterday said she did not believe the report, describing it as "ridiculous" and untrue.

She told LEADERSHIP yesterday in Jalingo that her husband couldn't have committed suicide due to inability to pay his air fare as reported by the Egyptian online newspaper, Al Ahram News.

The Al Ahram news site reported early Friday last week that, "A Nigerian man committed suicide at the Cairo International Airport early Friday morning.

"The man, identified as Nev Orkuma, jumped from the top of the airport arrival hall building.

"Airport security sent ambulances, but the man died soon after hitting the parking lot grounds facing the airport building.

"Preliminary investigations by Egyptian police suggest the man was intending to travel to Abuja but was facing financial troubles and asked several travellers for loans to purchase air ticket", reports Al-Ahram Arabic news site.

Debunking the report,  Mrs Nev said her husband had already obtained and printed out his flight ticket with number MS877 and was supposed to board the flight which was scheduled to leave Cairo for Abuja by 8.30am Nigeria time that fateful Friday.

According to her, the issue of not having enough money could not be true, as she had earlier on Wednesday deposited the sum of N80,000 in his account to enable him get to the family house in Jalingo upon arrival in Abuja.

Mrs Nev said her husband left Nigeria on January 28 for Egypt to carry out his registration processes, having been offered admission to run a Masters programme in Urology at the University of El-Mansouri, World Urology Centre in Egypt.

She wondered what could have lead her husband to commit suicide by reportedly jumping from the top of the airport arrival hall building, adding that her husband does not take alcohol or any substance to her knowledge neither did he have any previous records of mental problem.

Also speaking, cousin to the late doctor, Mr. Samuel Chiahemba  Nev, said the news came to the family as rude shock, adding that a family friend, Oliver Shimave had earlier been detailed to pick up the doctor from Abuja International Airport on arrival.

He maintained that Oliver was shocked when the Egyptian airline eventually arrive Abuja Airport but Dr Nev was nowhere to be found.

"When he did not see him, he met with some customs officials at the airport who went through the manifest but the name of Dr Nev was not found", he explained.

Mr Samuel narrated further that a friend, Dr Ali, later called him to confirm a report posted on an Egyptian online medium and he got curious to find out the true situation of things.

"When the report started filtering in, I got across Professor Elsherbiny, a consultant with El-Mansouri University Egypt, who facilitated the admission processes of Dr Nev into the university, and he confirmed the death of the doctor, saying that investigations were ongoing to unravel what really happened."

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Original Page: http://www.leadership.ng/nga/articles/50877/2013/03/26/i_dont_believe_my_husband_committed_suicide.html

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Anenih, Others Beg Lamido To Rescue PDP From Collapse

The chairman, Peoples Democratic Party's Board of Trustees (BoT), Chief Tony Anenih has urged Governor Sule Lamido of Jigawa State to use his connection and political experience to rescue the party which is facing its most difficult period from collapse.

He said people like Governor Lamido had vital role to play in tackling the challenges militating against the party and begged him to come on board to achieve the desired goals.

"You are an important stakeholder, and you have moral responsibility not to allow the party to lose its glory in this critical period," he said.

The  BoT chairman made the plea yesterday during a courtesy visit  to the governor at the Jigawa State Government House.

Chief Anenih who was accompanied by top members of the PDP said they were in the state as part of their nation wide tour to find a lasting solution to the crisis bedeviling the party.

"The challenges we have now in the party made me feel that I needed you more than ever", declared Anenih.

He said contrary to a publication in one of the national dailies that Lamido had been hobnobbing with the opposition parties, "I know the Sule I know would not do so even on the face of the firing squad, he is a person that I know that stays where he has the conviction that it is the right place to be."

Anenih assured Sule Lamido that even as his support is paramount at this crucial time, "we do not use people and dump them."

In his remarks, Governor Sule Lamido said, PDP was the only political party with the capacity to maintain the existence of Nigeria as a single entity, therefore they  cannot take the risk of allowing the country to be in the hands of the smaller political parties.

Others in Chief Tony Anenih's entourage include the secretary BoT, Senator Wali Jibrin, Barnabas Gemade, Ahmadu Ali, Senator Ken Nnamani, Hassan Halliru, Chief Ebenezer Babatope and Air Vice Marshal Larry Konya.

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Original Page: http://www.leadership.ng/nga/articles/50879/2013/03/26/anenih_others_beg_lamido_rescue_pdp_collapse.html

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Cashless: CBN Cheque Truncation System Goes Live In Lagos, Abuja

As part of ongoing efforts by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to shorten the settlement cycle of a cheque to one day, the apex bank has worked with Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement Systems (NIBSS) and financial services software provider, Precise Financial Systems (PFS) to implement live cheque truncation system in Lagos and Abuja.

PFS and NIBSS have enabled the CBN to execute the project, as the cheque truncation platform, now live in Lagos and Abuja, will see other branches of the CBN concluding it by the end of March. The cheque truncation system would allow all branches of the CBN to capture all cheques in the respective branches and maintain them in a central server in Lagos, it then allows all captured cheques from the bank to be transmitted to the clearing house from Lagos.

According to the Managing Director/CEO of PFS, Mr Yele Okeremi, the system is responsible for the processing of all inward cheques and Nigeria Electronic Financial Transaction (NEFT) of banks. While it would address all required management reporting, its controls are guided "as the system implements all required maker checker rules of the banks," he said.

With the activation of cheque truncation regime through iTeller platform in Nigeria, one important challenge the system has addressed is the ability of the CBN to meet the deadline for cheque truncation nationwide.  Aside this, the platform has also assisted the CBN to reduce cost, time and the stress involved in its cheque clearing operations, as the system removes all "logistics costs associated with clearing."

While further enumerating the benefits of the cheque truncation system, he said that before the new regime, Nigerian banks would have to send their outward cheques to respective central clearing departments by dispatch riders or bullion vans. But with this, there would not be any need for that again as cheques can be truncated directly at the branch of deposit.

"This removes time-wasting collation and photocopying exercises usually carried out at the bank branches. It also removes the need to post-encode cheques, and this provides the platform to use more agile cheque scanners for image and magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) capture."

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Original Page: http://www.leadership.ng/nga/articles/50895/2013/03/26/cashless_cbn_cheque_truncation_system_goes_live_lagos_abuja.html

Chris Ihidero Unedited: How my father ruined my life

Like every sensible mother with a problematic child on her hands, my mother needed to get me out of the house quickly. I was just 7 years old but I had, in her opinion, committed enough atrocities to warrant banishment to a distant place.

Just the other day, I was caught in the bath tub with Bose, our neighbour's daughter. We were both naked, as people who are having a bath should be. The problem was that we were not having a bath but rather trying to make babies. See, I don't know how you grew up, but Bose and I were Father and Mother and we were doing what fathers and mothers did. Earlier in the day we had cooked meals in used Milo and Bournvita tins on imaginary fires. We had served our children their meals (sand, mostly) on newspaper plates and retired to our bedroom, beneath the covered table, as parents do. The bath tub was an afterthought, a need for more space, I think. Before the bath tub incident, my mother had been wondering about my constant disappearance most late afternoons.


I had, of course, responsibly lied that I was spending time at our neighbour's house, doing after school stuff. In truth I had been going to Ansarudeen Secondary School football field to watch rams fight. My favourite was the most popular ram in Oshodi, named Black Power. He had a cult following and was rumoured to have beaten over a thousand rams to stupor. He was huge, looking more like a cow than a ram. He was 13 years old and black from head to toe, with not a single strand of white hair anywhere. He ate loaves of bread for breakfast. While I should have been engaged with mundane stuff like home work, I was the 7 year old kid running after Black power as he annihilated his competitors, screaming and singing: Black Power, Black Power, Black Power!!! And taunting the defeated rams: Kuru ta kuru, o ni sebe mo, Kuru ta kuru, o ni sebe mo! (You dwarfish ram, you won't dare to try this again!). When Black Power passed on some years later, nobody in Oshodi dared to eat his meat. His meat refused to cook anyway: it stayed tough even after repeated boiling, such that the people who were foolish enough to cook it in the first place gave up with apologies. I wailed for days at the death of my childhood hero.

My mother had had enough, so she suggested to my father that it probably would be better if I joined my eldest brother in the boarding house. The school was in Ogun State, a whole hour away from Lagos, enough space for my mother to breathe easy. My father said: 'No problem. But we have to ask him if he wants to go'. Boom! That single statement is responsible for EVERTHING that has gone right/wrong in my life ever since. Who asks a 7 year old for his opinion about a decision such as sending him to a boarding house? You just bloody tell him that he is going to the boarding house next term and that's it! But in an attempt not to be seen as being despotic, my father ensured that today, decades after that incident, I'm entirely incapable of obeying an order. Some things happen at certain periods in our lives and these things change the course of our existence in such a way that we can't fathom how else we could have been…a life changing twist plants our feet firmly on our destined path. That incident was it for me, and it has come with equal amount of pain and pleasure.

Teachers, lecturers, friends, lovers, bosses and family members have all had to learn the hard way: You cannot give Chris Ihidero an order that he'll obey. To get him to do anything, you will have to get his buy in by appealing to his sentiments or convince him by presenting a superior argument. Perhaps this is why I have never been able to work in a formal setting or do work that requires obeying orders from superiors. It is also perhaps why I am not yet rich.

Of course I agreed to go to the boarding house, not because I truly appreciated my father's democratic principles though.  I had witnessed my eldest brother packing his provisions whenever he was returning to school at the beginning of a new term: 24 tins of Carnation milk. 24 tins of Sardine. 24 tins of Geisha. One big babasala Bournvita…there was no force under the sun that going to stop me from going anywhere I was going to be accompanied by such largesse, even if it was to a concentration camp, which is more or less what my boarding house turned out to be.

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Original Page: http://ladunliadi.blogspot.com/2013/03/chris-ihidero-unedited-how-my-father.html

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News

This is our first state pardon, says Diya

• 'Clemency different from state pardon'

A FRESH dimension has been added to the controversy over the state pardon granted by President Goodluck Jonathan on March 12, 2013 to the former Chief of General Staff (CGS), Gen. Oladipo Diya (rtd). Diya also served as the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) in 1993.

Contrary to insinuations that Diya and others who were implicated in the phantom coup of 1997 during the regime of Gen. Sani Abacha were granted pardon by the Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar-led administration, the former CDS said he was only given clemency.

During a press conference in Lagos on Thursday, Diya said: "Some people mix up the meaning of clemency and state pardon. What Gen. Abubakar granted us was clemency, which was different from the state pardon President Jonathan granted to others and me on Tuesday, March 12, 2013."

According to him, "the clemency was the authority vested in the Head of State to release us from our various places of detention. I was released from the Potiskum Prison. If there were no clemency, the sentence would still have been on, which was execution. Our ranks were not restored, nor our entitlements. If what Abubakar granted us was pardon, immediately we were released from prisons, all payments due to us would have followed but that was not done. Even my personal security, the one for my family and my house would have been returned through pardon and not clemency."

Several newspapers as well as some human right activists and legal practitioners reacted to the pardon, describing it as a "double pardon."

Diya, however, cleared the issue, saying: "As a former CDS and that, by interpretation, is the highest you can attain professionally in the armed forces. Up till now, policemen are still guarding me and not soldiers. Even the security meant for my house and my family, as a former CDS, has not been restored but now that a pardon has been granted, I would not be surprised if a formal letter is written to me as a former CDS and everything will take proper and official shape from the very date the letter stipulates."

The former CDS said the President did not err by granting them pardon as  "what we were granted before was clemency."

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Original Page: http://ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117253:this-is-our-first-state-pardon-says-diya-&catid=1:national&Itemid=559

Fresh worry over PDP's unity as peace tour ends

• Jonathan, Anenih, govs, others absent

• Tukur rules out candidates' imposition

• 'Opposition governors to defect to PDP'

UNLIKE a fresh sense of hope that the reconciliatory tour of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) was expected to engender, it rather raised the fear of a persistent crack in the party Sunday.

This fear was borne out of the absence of the leaders of the party from the reconciliatory tour grand finale, which took place in Abuja yesterday. The event recorded poor turn-out by public officers elected on the platform of the party.

The event, which was also used to celebrate the one year anniversary of the Bamanga Tukur-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the party, was done without the physical presence of President Goodluck Jonathan who is the leader of the party.

The Chairman of the party's Board of Trustees (BoT), Chief Tony Anenih, was equally absent.

Akwa Ibom State Governor and Chairman of PDP Governors' Forum, Godswill Akpabio and Idris Wada of Kogi State were the only governors in attendance.

Senate President David Mark and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Emeka Ihedioha, are currently in Ecuador to attend the 2013 meeting of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA).

Only four deputy governors from Gombe, Niger, Kwara and Rivers State were in attendance too.

Vice President Namadi Sambo, who represented President Goodluck Jonathan, commended the party leadership for embarking on the reconciliation, saying that the strength of PDP had continued to be the unity of its members.

He noted that with unity and peace, the party would be strong enough to tackle the opposition.

"The decision to embark on the reconciliatory tour is to properly position the party to face future challenges," he said.

PDP National Chairman, Bamanga Tukur, said that his leadership of the party had continued to ensure that party manifesto was fully translated into reality.

According to him, the drive to ensure greater performance by PDP government was part of what informed the reconciliation.

He pledged that the PDP would be made to adhere to the dreams and vision of its founding fathers. Tukur ruled out imposition of candidates for the next general elections.

Akpabio dismissed allegations of a silent crisis within the party that could cause the defection of some of its governors to other political parties soon.

"I must say that the peace in the party now is remarkable. The PDP governors are totally and fully behind our party's national chairman and the NWC. Also, PDP governors are solidly behind President Goodluck Jonathan and the party.

"The peace in the PDP is sending jitters to the opposition and that is why they are busy spreading falsehood in newspapers that eight governors are planning to defect from PDP to other parties. I have personally spoken with 22 PDP governors and they have all denied the story. To the contrary, the opposition parties will be shocked when some governors elected on their platforms will defect to PDP," he said.

He said the formation of the PDP Governors' Forum had clearly created political problems for opposition parties, pointing out that that was why the forum was receiving media attacks from the opposition.

The party began its reconciliatory tour to the six geo-political zones on March 15, 2013. It was meant to facilitate the unity of the party. It began from the South-West in Ibadan.

The National Publicity Secretary of the party, Olisa Metuh, had said: "The reconciliatory tour is meant to reconcile all interests, groups and contending issues in the party that posed threat to party's unity and cohesion."

Metuh, however, declared that there was no condition attached to the reconciliatory programme, adding that it would be strictly restricted to the party's constitution.

On whether the exercise would address the issue of alleged refusal of some state chapters of the party to re-admit some former members, the party's spokesman said there was no plan to discriminate against anybody intending to be re-admitted.

Meanwhile, the reconciliatory tour was the PDP leadership's response to a plethora of crises that were ravaging the party in almost all the states of the federation.

Among the knotty issues had been the question of authentic party executive in Alhaji Bamanga Tukur's home-state, Adamawa, the controversial removal of former scribe, Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who was allegedly foisted on the National Working Committee (NWC), and the perceived ambition of some governors who may threaten President Jonathan's interest in 2015, as a result of which there now exists a PDP Governors' Forum.

The party had been factionalised in states like Ogun, Lagos and Abia, among others, where it has worked to woo back the aggrieved members ahead of 2015 general elections.

The crises had at one time so taken up political discourse that the Political Adviser to President Goodluck Jonathan, Ahmed Gulak, admitted: "Yes, there are challenges in the party, but Mr. President is trying his best to resolve them in the interest of the party and the nation.

"I can assure you that Mr. President will not allow the crisis in his party to affect national interest and well-being of Nigerians. The President is on top of the situation and is already achieving results. I want to tell you that soon, this party's problem will be a thing of the past."

Meanwhile, Kwara State Governor, Abdulfatah Ahmed, has denied a report published in a national newspaper (not The Guardian) that he planned to leave the PDP alongside seven other governors ahead of the 2015 elections.

Speaking through his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Communications, Dr. Muyideen Akorede, Ahmed said there was no iota of truth in the report and dismissed the publication as the handiwork of mischief-makers bent on causing disaffection in PDP.

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Original Page: http://ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117255:fresh-worry-over-pdps-unity-as-peace-tour-ends-&catid=1:national&Itemid=559

Achebe family set to announce burial plan

PROF. Chinua Achebe's burial plan may be announced this week by his family in Ogidi, Idemili North, Anambra State.

And as at Sunday, The Guardian observed that the gate to the family home of the literary icon at Ikenga Ogidi remained locked.

Despite several knocks at the huge entrance of the family residence located along the Ogidi-Abatete-Ezi Owelle highway, there was no response.

But Rev. Emmanuel Obianagha, a cousin to the Achebe who spoke with The Guardian disclosed that the late novelist's family was preparing for the announcement of his death officially in line with the Ogidi tradition.

According to him, though the news is everywhere, Ogidi elders and the kinsmen have to tell the public in their traditional way before other ceremonies could follow.

Obianagha who lives very close to Achebe's country home at Ogidi, also appealed to the Federal Government to give the literary icon a state burial for his role in bringing Nigeria to the international scene.

"The red cap chiefs, our regent, the president-general, Ogidi Town Union and other prominent indigenes of the town are rallying round to plan for the burial arrangement. Between now and Easter, I am sure there will be an announcement on the burial arrangement", he said.

Paying Achebe tributes, he said the late writer was a man of the people who inspired the indigenes to go to school.

He said Achebe was former president-general, Ogidi Town Union and that he was also a titled chief  "Ugo bee n orji" (the eagle that perches on an iroko tree), and that the community witnessed ample peace and felt the impact of his leadership.

The cleric who lamented that his death had left Ogidi community devastated, added: "We have lost a precious gift from God. You cannot discuss Nigeria without mentioning Achebe. He left a very big vacuum that will take a lot to be filled."

A close neighbour to the Achebe family at Ogidi, Julius Obidike, said the death had thrown the town into deep mourning.

"A great iroko has fallen, Ogidi community has lost a great son and the loss is irreparable.

We cannot have another Chinua, even though there are many other members of the Achebe family", Obidike noted.

He recalled that Achebe was involved in a motor accident in the 1980s while travelling in a chartered Peugeot 504 wagon, which left him crippled.

The Head of Department, Economics, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka in Anambra State, Dr. Uche Nwaogwugwu, in his tribute said his death was a great loss to the Igbo nation.

"Achebe laid the foundation for Igbo anthropology, culture and history, so we should move on to the next level. The job is now left to the Igbo to continue from where he stopped", Nwaogwugwu, said.

According to the Chairman, Igbo World Assembly (IWA), Nwachukwu Anakwenze, Achebe was to be honoured this weekend at the CISA/IWA retreat at Staunton Virginia.

Anakwenze described Achebe as a great man and academic star who was fearless to tell the truth as he saw it.

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Original Page: http://ngrguardiannews.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117254:achebe-family-set-to-announce-burial-plan&catid=1:national&Itemid=559