This Blog is by Osbert E. Agho, a Benin City, Edo State based businessman and a prominent politician. On this blog, you will get first hand, and hard to find news items, commentaries and events happening around the World and Nigeria. News about the every day people and their environment. Enjoy reading news will uplift mankind.
In this Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2015, photo, the skyline of lower Manhattan is seen behind 124 Columbia Heights in the Brooklyn borough of New York. This building is one of three large properties being sold by the Jehovah's Witnesses in a crowded area near the Brooklyn waterfront. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
NEW YORK (AP) — The Jehovah's Witnesses, the door-knocking religious group that's been based in Brooklyn for a century, is selling its headquarters and other properties for an expected price tag of $1 billion or more.
The Witnesses' move to a town about an hour north of New York City will likely mean the end of the complex's most well-known feature, the neon "Watchtower" sign advertising the church's flagship publication. But it will free up hundreds of thousands of square feet for businesses and apartments in a now-trendy neighborhood at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
"It's going to be incredibly transformative," said Alexandria Sica, executive director of the DUMBO Improvement District, a business group.
Jehovah's Witnesses spokesman Richard Devine said the move will allow the organization to operate more efficiently. The church had owned 36 separate Brooklyn properties before it began selling them off in preparation for the move upstate to Warwick. The printing plant where the Witnesses produce Bibles and religious tracts moved from Brooklyn to the town of Wallkill in 2004.
"As we've grown as an organization we've had to buy scattered properties wherever we could find them," Devine said. "With a big, scattered campus like that it's challenging to administer and to maintain."
The Witnesses bought their 733,000-square-foot headquarters from Squibb Pharmaceuticals for $3 million in 1969. It was placed on the market this month along with a nearby apartment building and a 135,000-square-foot lot. Despite the prominent "Watchtower" sign, the building has no historical designations that would place restrictions on the buyer.
The church has not announced an asking price but Tucker Reed, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, called $1 billion "a conservative estimate" for the Witnesses' real estate portfolio.
A partnership including Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner purchased a nearby 1.4 million-square-foot complex from the Witnesses in 2013 for $375 million and is developing it as a tech hub, while smaller buildings have sold for varying amounts.
In upstate New York, the Witnesses have purchased hotels and other properties for volunteers building the church's new headquarters.
The Witnesses have more than 8 million active members worldwide and about 11 million more who attend some services, according to church officials.
Witnesses are required to spread their message door to door and are not allowed to vote, receive blood transfusions or serve in the military.
The organization has been in Brooklyn since 1908 but seems culturally distinct from its gritty-meets-yuppie surroundings.
Church members lead English- and Spanish-language tours of the headquarters, decorated with pastel-toned Bible paintings.
Devine said 100,000 people a year visit the Brooklyn headquarters but the Warwick facility an hour north of the city will get more visitors when it opens in 2017.
"To be honest with you," he said, "many people find New York City intimidating."
Sica said she is looking forward to the Witnesses' move in part because the church's properties seem off-limits to non-members, with fenced-in parking lots and no street-level retail. "It's closed off," she said. "You get that sense of 'This place is not for the public.'"
But both Sica and Reed said that before they leave the Witnesses should follow through on a promise to redevelop a neighborhood park, which they agreed to do in exchange for a zoning change.
Devine said the Witnesses will fulfill the commitment to build the park "either through our efforts or through the efforts of the new owner. We won't walk away from it."
IT usually turns out to be an interesting reading, interviews with politicians who readily blurt out funny comments that are not thoughtful and cannot be adjudged to be helpful to communal politics like the recent one of Mr. Orobosa Omo-Ojo (in the Vanguard of Saturday, December 5, 2015.) in which he was described as a journalist, publisher, a frontline All Progressives Congress, APC stalwart and former Commissioner in Adams Oshiomhole government in Edo State.
With the above description, I suppose he is still the same Orobosa Omo-Ojo, who along with one Emeka Ogbeide were assigned by the then Lucky Igbinedion government to turn the state government owned Nigerian Observer newspaper around? We are all living witnesses to the messy sickening situation the paper was abandoned – worse than as the duo met it.
I really find it irritating to read comments by some individuals who were given the opportunity to perform and at the end, loopholes were created for questions to be asked. I equally find it painful to understand, why in this era of journalism, searching questions are never put during interviews bordering on past public performances.
Specifically, the Vanguard reporter who interviewed Mr. Omo-Ojo was, perhaps not aware of Mr. Omo-Ojo’s tenure at the Nigerian Observer, certainly he wouldn’t claim ignorance of Omo-Ojo’s tenure as the State Commissioner for Transport in the present Governor Oshiomhole’s Executive Council. The reporter didn’t find it as a professional responsibility on behalf of his numerous readers to, among other questions, ask the former Commissioner what led to his exit from the State Executive Council.
In any professional calling, individuals are at liberty to create titles for themselves. In journalism, one could carry the toga of a publisher, but the proof in the title is judged by its reputation, regularity on the vendor’s stand and above all, the contents and educative pursuits of such a title. The ruining of any calling could be checked with the realistic defence of such a body by its practitioners, whose reputation has been tested and found not wanting, but the JOURNALISM calling has, for decades suffered a profound set back because of the inability of the various branches to put in place a defensive concrete wall around its image.
In reference to the interview in question, I find it quite uncalled for to dwell on it other than to say this: An individual’s opinion can sway the support of thousands of voters in opposing political parties and this view is based on how seriously such a talker is judged. It’s an open factuality that any realistic registered voter when asked to judge Governor Oshiomhole’s performance in Edo State, would certainly score him HIGH, unless hunger blindfolds such voters to go for the negative side. The “rice man’s” advertorials to a realistic Edo citizen, would point to nothing other than rural Nollywood acting.
What are the researched data that have established that even the Esan people would give him nomination? Sweet talks never create acceptability for a drowning character.
Simply put, the three Senatorial districts of Edo State are in individualistic positions to assess Oshiomhole’s service and certainly not political grammar scripts as beautifully delivered by Mr. Omo-Ojo in the interview.
I had compelled myself to observe elsewhere that both the Esama and Governor Oshiomhole have no personal scores to iron out, other than giving what is due to the government on behalf of the people.
Who creates bounds for people to under-step or over-step? Not Mr. Omo-Ojo. Holding his recent chat with the Vanguard under his armpit to deliver or read to the Esama’s hearing is neither helpful to the issue of rate settlement. Declaring his claimed exchanges with Governor Oshiomhole before the reading public only unveils Mr. Omo-Ojo’s tactlessness in politics. If you are with one in a battle field as your Commander, you either fight along with him as your Commander, or become a run away soldier, but certainly cannot put in place a countering-one sector Commander who will fall in no given time.
I am certainly looking forward to see Mr. Omo-Ojo’s next political level, unlike his past two callings. He should score himself for the public to judge.
The beauty in newspaper interviews is easily oiled with its surface empty coloring. There is still this staining attributes of many on the surface political noise makers who take the readers for granted, they have spoken well, yet, they aren’t aware of the simple truth-building realistic structures for the people to see and for their benefit is more acceptable than being noisy.
Drainage channels and walkways as built by Oshiomhole government are emblems of progressive governance. And for refuse dumps, years back, there were locations in various communities where refuse collections are burnt.
The modern structures throughout the various roads in the state are meant for progressive changes in healthy attitudes and not for nomadic behaviors.
I am certainly looking forward to see Mr. Omo-Ojo’s next political level, unlike his past two callings – to revive the Nigerian Observer titles and most recently, a former Commissioner. He should score himself for the public to judge.
Usman Abudah, a journalist and documentalist, wrote from Benin City, Edo State.
The firing of South Africa's finance minister is worse than it looks
By Elena Holodny
7 hours ago
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(Reuters/Howard Burditt) Not good.
Late on Wednesday, South African President Jacob Zuma fired his well-respected finance minister, Nhlanhla Nene, out of nowhere, and he replaced him with an unknown former mayor, David van Rooyen.
The rand dropped lower still on Friday, reaching 16.018 against the dollar earlier in the day, and yields on the country's 10-year bonds jumped to 10.5%, up from 8.8% two days ago — just a hair below the 10.8% reached during the financial crisis.
"This suggests that the firing of Mr. Nene has not merely startled the markets, but prompted a more fundamental re-evaluation of views towards South Africa's long-troubled economy," wrote Capital Economics' John Ashbourne.
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(Capital Economics) This abrupt announcement comes at a time when South Africa is plagued by falling commodity prices, high unemployment (in particular, high youth unemployment), and ongoing power shortages.
For starters, this isn't the first time that something like this has happened in the country. In October, Zuma replaced the minister of mines with an "untested provincial politician." So this latest firing sheds more light on South Africa's increasingly problematic governance issue.
As Ashbourne wrote in a note to clients:
After all, the key concern is not Mr. van Rooyen himself but what his appointment says about governance in South Africa. There are rumors that Mr. Nene was pushed aside because of his opposition to an expensive nuclear deal — a pet project of President Zuma's — and his disagreements with the head of the struggling state-backed airline — the chairwoman of which is, coincidentally, the head of the Jacob Zuma foundation. If true, then Mr. van Rooyen's appointment could mark a significant reduction in the independence of the national treasury, an institution that has been traditionally respected.
The second issue is that it's hard to tell what the relatively inexperienced, virtually unknown finance minister might do next — which, obviously, adds more risk to the South Africa's situation.
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(Capital Economics) Theoretically, the new minister could follow in Nene's footsteps by sticking to more restrained spending, but that's not a given. And then there's South Africa's battered economy that needs help, too.
"Our 2016 growth forecast of 1.3% is already below consensus," writes Ashbourne. "And while it's too soon to adjust this on the basis of this week's events, it is increasingly clear that risks to this forecast lie largely to the downside."
In other words, one thing's for sure:
"This self-induced crisis comes at a very bad time for the country," Ashbourne noted.
Al Hadji Yahya Jammeh, President of the Republic of the Gambia, addresses the 69th United Nations General …
BANJUL (Reuters) - Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh on Friday declared the formerly secular country an Islamic republic in a move he said was designed to distance the West African state further from its colonial past.
The tiny sliver of a country, named after the river from which British ships once allegedly fired cannonballs to fix its borders, joins the ranks of other Islamic Republics such as Iran and Afghanistan.
"In line with the country's religious identity and values, I proclaim Gambia as an Islamic state," said Jammeh on state television. "As Muslims are the majority in the country, the Gambia cannot afford to continue the colonial legacy," he added.
Gambia's population of 1.8 million people is 95 percent Muslim. He said that other citizens of other faiths would still be able to practise.
Jammeh, an animated orator who has earned the reputation for making surprise declarations over the course of his 21-year presidency, pulled Gambia out of the Commonwealth in 2013, calling it neo-colonial. In 2007, he claimed to have found a herbal cure for AIDS.
Despite strong commercial ties with Britain and other European countries whose citizens are regular visitors to Gambia's white-sand beaches, relations with the West have deteriorated in recent years.
The European Union temporarily withheld aid money to the country last year over Gambia's poor human rights record. Gambia, whose main industries are agriculture and tourism, ranks 165 out of 187 countries on the U.N. development index.
"Starved of development funds because of his deplorable human rights record and economic mismanagement, Jammeh is looking towards the Arab world as substitute for and source of development aid," said blogger Sidi Sanneh, a former foreign minister who has become a U.S.-based dissident.
(Writing by Emma Farge; Editing by James Dalgleish)
The obverse of Nigeria’s old hundred-naira banknote, at top, and the reverse of its replacement, above.CREDITHTTP://WWW.NEWYORKER.COM/WP-CONTENT/UPLOADS/2015/12/151214_R27417.JPG
Last year, the Central Bank of Nigeria issued a new hundred-naira note to commemorate the union, in 1914, of the predominantly Muslim North and the predominantly Christian South. The redesigned bill includes a digital code that smartphone users can scan to see a timeline of currency used in the region, set against images of cowrie shells, which were used as currency in Nigeria before 1700, and manilla, a horseshoe-shaped metal bracelet that was historically adopted by Europeans to acquire slaves. These features of the new design were overshadowed, though, by an adjustment to the way the denomination was presented. On past banknotes, the words “Naira dari,” Hausa for “one hundred naira,” had appeared in Arabic script. Now, the Hausa was printed, like the Yoruba and Igbo, in small Roman letters, to the right of the larger centered text in English, the country’s official language. The change proved controversial.
The new bill, which was conceived under former President Goodluck Jonathan, an evangelical from the South, tapped into a deep historical divide and provoked strong reaction from Nigeria’s two major religious groups. Some Christians supported the move as a step toward de-Islamizing Nigeria, while many Muslims called it Islamophobic. Cletus Alu, a member of the Christian Association of Nigeria, in Abuja, told me that he would like to see the script removed from all of the country’s banknotes. “Nigeria is a secular nation,” he said. “It’s not good to give prominence to one religion or another.”
The country’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, a Muslim from the North, has thus far stayed clear of the controversy. And so, this October 1st, on the eve of the fifty-fifth anniversary of Nigeria’s independence, the Lagos-based organization Muslim Rights Concern publicly demanded that the government reinstate the Arabic script. In a statement published on the group’s Web site, its director, Ishaq Akintola, described the change “as an act of hostility taken to spite Muslims” and claimed that some Christians had been “secretly agitating” for it. (Previously, the organization had accused Jonathan of replacing the Ajami with a symbol resembling the Star of David, in a bid to promote Zionism.)
On a drenched autumn evening, I met with Musa S. Muhammad, an archivist in his fifties, at a building in the Arewa House complex, beside the grand Sultan Bello Mosque in the northern city of Kaduna, to get a sense of the historical currents underlying the controversy. Arabic script, he told me, had been printed on nearly every note since the naira was introduced, in 1973, and on previous currency as well. To demonstrate, he instructed a colleague to remove a tenth-of-a-penny coin from a vivid twist of fabric. The piece was minted in 1945, under the British colonial regime, and three languages were stamped on its silvery face: King George VI’s name appeared in Latin, and the coin’s value was spelled out in both English and Hausa, with the latter spelled out in Arabic.
“This is politics between South and North,” Muhammad said, of the current dispute. He spoke with careful deliberation, his deep, raspy voice softened by a lisp. As he ran a finger over the Arabic script on a five-hundred-naira note sitting before him, the evening call to prayer rang out from the mosque, muffled by the rain. The letters on the currency, he said, are as secular in origin as the Roman alphabet used in modern Bibles. “Any non-Arab language written in Arabic script we call Ajami,” he said. “They feel that this is religious, but it’s not.” He leafed through the loose pages of an old manuscript written in Ajami, one of thousands that he is currently digitizing.
Muhammad is the chief archivist of Arewa House, which hosts a collection of thousands of manuscripts, some of them hundreds of years old. The national archives building, a short drive away, holds many more. Collectively, these manuscripts form a record of pre-colonial scholarship stretching from Timbuktu to Khartoum. Arabic script was first brought to Hausaland, as Muhammad calls his part of the North, by traders and itinerant scholars from across the Sahara, and was cemented by the establishment of the Sokoto caliphate in the North, long before Nigeria existed as a nation. He listed the indigenous languages that were first written down in Ajami: Hausa, which is spoken by more than thirty million people across West Africa; Fulfulde, which is spoken by the Fulani, nomadic herdsmen spread across the Sahel; Nupe, spoken by the Nupe people in Nigeria’s Middle Belt; and Yoruba, the language of Nigeria’s second-biggest ethnic group, which is religiously mixed and based mostly in the South.
Ajami later figured prominently in the North’s resistance to European colonialism. At the national archives, some of the earliest transliterations of Hausa Ajami into Roman script were completed by Major Frank Edgar, a British political service officer in northern Nigeria. They date at least as far back as 1911, and their paternalistic overtones are unmistakable. In the margins of “Litafi Na Tatsuniyoyi Na Hausa,” Edgar’s handwritten collection of his Hausa folklore and tales, the phrase “educated Hausas,” for instance, is crossed out with a line and replaced with “words by natives.” Still, despite efforts by the British to move toward Roman script, Muhammad told me, Ajami continued to be used to document everyday life: for tax documents, receipts, correspondence. He recited a few lines for me from a poem, written in Hausa Ajami circa 1917, which warned that Ankwai women from the central Plateau State were “very proud,” and would “chop” a man’s money.
The recent shift away from Ajami began in February, 2007, when the Nigerian government removed Arabic script from some lower-denomination notes; at the time, Mohammed Yusuf, the preacher who founded Boko Haram, had returned from Saudi Arabia and was growing his movement. The Central Bank released a statement that year saying that it had removed the Ajami in order to foster national unity, and to conform to Nigeria’s constitution, passed in 1999, which recognizes four languages for conducting government business, all of them written in Roman script. It also argued that Ajami was no longer necessary, because most Nigerians could now “easily read and write the Roman letters.” But Muhammad told me that millions of children in the North lack access to Western-style schools and can only read and write in Ajami. “How can we tell our children that we are knowledgeable people, that we are literate, if you remove this?” he asked.
“There are some local ulama”—learned people—“still corresponding in Ajami,” Muhammad said, adding that he sees the removal of the script from the naira as an erasure of Nigeria’s literary and scholarly heritage—one that risks helping Boko Haram to exploit the country’s divisions and further alienate disadvantaged Muslim youth. Though the words “Boko Haram” are often translated to mean “Western education is forbidden,” “Boko,” a Hausa word, can also be interpreted as “Roman script.”
Not long after meeting with Muhammad, I heard a similar message at a public forum held every evening near Unity Fountain in Abuja. The day I attended, about twenty people formed a circle by a tree. Some of the men were dressed in traditional, knee-length shirts, with embroidered prayer hats propped on their heads; others wore polo shirts and baseball caps. A well-heeled woman in a colorful kaftan checked her smartphone as another woman in a strappy black dress, her sunglasses pushed back on her head, spoke emphatically to the crowd. The event is run by the Bring Back Our Girls campaigners, who have been working for the return of the more than two hundred girls abducted by Boko Haramfrom a school in Chibok last April. These daily vigils have evolved, over time, into a platform for citizens to discuss the issues of the day. Raising their voices above the low hum of early evening traffic, the event’s three speakers all emphasized the need to set aside ethnic and religious divides.
Afterward, I spoke with Aisha Yesufu, a mother of two in her early forties, who wore a red abaya printed with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. “This country is full of people from different religious backgrounds and different languages,” she said. “People will always say it will not be easy for Nigerians to be united, but Bring Back Our Girls, we proved that wrong, we’ve been a united force.”
Yesufu is a Muslim from the South, but she’d lived in Kaduna in 2008, as Boko Haram was gaining support. She told me that she was concerned about the implications of Ajami’s removal from the country’s currency. “They took it off, maybe due to fear of Islamization, but that’s just hypocrisy as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “If you still have the English and it’s not Christianizing, why is the one in the Arabic Islamizing?”
SACKING OF THE ENTIRE PDP MEMBERS FROM RIVERS STATE IN THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY ON ACCOUNT OF ELECTORAL FRAUD:
Matter Miscellaneous:
A popular Nigerian adage in Pigin English says that, "No be person wey first call Police dey always win case for Court."
This aptly captures the scenario at the Rivers State Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja.
At the lower Court/Tribunal the three PDP Senators and six out of the seven PDP Members of the House of Representatives from Rivers state won their case at the court of first hearing.
The members of the APC who felt that justice has only being delayed, armed with empirical evidence(s) that there was NO ELECTION in Rivers state on March 28, matched to the Court of Appeal with a singularity of purpose.
What were they demanding??????
That the results of the elections written under "SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES," with a blindfold on the face of the Returning Officer and someone holding his hand to a pen be nullified and the mandate THIEVES be sent packing out of the hallowed chambers of the NASS.
They were demanding that those uncircumcised Philistines purporting to represent the good people of Rivers state with purloined mandates be made to go back to the people and undergo the due process and rites of circumcision in an election that meets with the irreducible minimum of the Abbey Lincoln definition of the word DEMOCRACY! This is so because at circumcision time, a surrogate penis cannot be accepted. Mr George Sekibo, et al did not undergo the due process of circumcision. They forged the Medical Reports from a Doctor and claimed they have undergone the circumcision. But in actual fact, they are COWARDS afraid of the impact of the razor blade on their penises. He who volunteers to represent the people, must test his popularity by undergoing the due process of circumcision. There is no shortcut and nothing else will suffice.
It is on this note that I want to specially commend and congratulate Distinguished Senator Magnus Abe and other resilient agent of #Changefor remaining resolute and firm in the struggle, a conviction that invariably led to the annulment of the SHAM election of March 28th in Rivers state.
This is hoping that in future, the National Assembly shall amend the electoral Acts such that Mandate Thieves will not only be barred from recontesting, but also made to return all salary and allowances they fraudulently earned while illegally occupying their purloin mandates, and also jailed for usurping the people's mandates!
It is our prayers that the disgraced MANDATE THIEVES led by Mr George Sekibo will subject themselves to the ground rules when the Referee (INEC) blows the whistle for a replay.
In the absence of any counter motion, could you please support and second the motion on ground before His Lordship hits the gavel as the AYES have it!
