Author: straightnewsng.com

The Anti-Corruption and Transparency Monitoring Unit, ACTU, in the Presidency Tuesday declared the unit’s willingness to partner with MBA Forex and Capital Investment Limited to improve a culture of accountability and transparency in the country. Chairman of the Unit, Ahmad Sulaiman, stated this in Abuja during a meeting with MBA Forex Chief Executive Officer, Mr Maxwell Odum, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. Sulaiman said: “The company’s objective is in sync with the standing order of the ACTU to improve a culture of accountability, responsibility, professionalism and quality of service in line with professed institutional goals and core values. ‘‘We are…

The Nigerian Customs Service is to conduct a joint exercise with sister security services to perfect strategies at enhancing the effective policing and safeguarding of the country’s borders. The joint exercise, under coordination of Office of the National Security Adviser, ONSA, is to hold simultaneously in four geo-political zones of the country. Comptroller-General of Customs, General Hameed Ali, retired, who disclosed this in a statement signed by the Public Relations Officer, Joseph Attah, in Abuja, said: “As part of measures to secure Nigeria’s land and maritime borders, the Nigerian Customs Service, NCS, and the Nigerian Immigration Service, NIS, in collaboration…

The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, Tuesday, failed to persuade the Supreme Court to compel the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to grant them access to the controversial server they said was used to electronically transmit results of the February 23 presidential election. The apex court, in a unanimous judgment by a five-man panel of Justices led by Justice Datijo Mohammed, declined to set aside a ruling the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal delivered on June 24, which rejected Atiku and PDP’s application to be allowed to inspect INEC’s server. The judgment came barely 24 hours to…

Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service, FIRS, Mr. Tunde Fowler, has attributed the shortfalls and variances between budgeted revenue collections and actual collections since the inception of President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to recession, fall in oil prices, and the agency’s lack of control over oil revenue. On August 8, the Presidency through the Chief of Staff to the President, Mallam Abba Kyari, queried Fowler over the variances and directed him to reply by August 19. The query read in part: “We observed significant variances between the budgeted collections and actual collections for the period 2015 to 2018. Accordingly,…

The World Bank has blacklisted six Chinese companies operating in Nigeria for fraud and corruption. The companies are China Railway Construction (International) Nigeria Company Limited, China Railway 18th Bureau Nigeria Engineering Company Limited, CCECC Nigeria Lekki (FTA) Company Limited, CCECC Nigeria Railway Company Limited, CRCC Petroleum & Gas Company Limited, and CCECC Nigeria Company Limited. All the companies are very active in Nigeria, with ongoing or completed contracts for the construction of railways, highways, housing estates, airport terminals, municipal engineering, water resource, and hydro-power engineering projects for federal and state governments. The World Bank on its website, accused the companies…

Afropop star, Ayodeji Balogun aka Wizkid has become the first African artist to hit eight million monthly streams on Spotify. Spotify is an online, music streaming platform that pays royalties based on the number of artists streams as a proportion of total songs streamed. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that streaming records revealed Wizkid’s popularity on the platform on Monday. The previous record was held by Congolese rapper and singer, Maitre Gims. He had seven million monthly listeners. This win follows Wizkid’s recent collaboration with DJ Spinall and Tiwa Savage on ‘Dis Love’. The singer also featured on ‘Like,’…

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), says the average price for the refilling of a five kilogramme (kg) cylinder  Cooking Gas increased to N2,024.80 in July from N1,995.38 in June. The bureau said this in its “Liquefied Petroleum Gas (Cooking Gas) Price Watch’’ for July obtained from its website on Tuesday in Abuja. The NBS said the price of refilling a five kg cylinder cooking gas increased by 1.47 per cent month-on-month and 0.71 per cent year-on-year in the period under review. According to the bureau, states with the highest average price for the refilling of a five kg cylinder…

By Akanimo Sampson Political and socio-cultural leaders of Eastern Nigeria, the hotbed of the undying Biafra agitation, who have been identified as “enemies’’ of the struggle of Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) are now to be treated as “traitors’’ of the Igbo people, an IPOB source said from Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital. This is coming as Senator Ike Ekweremadu, the immediate past deputy senate president, confirmed a physical assault on him by some alleged IPOB activists in Nuremberg, Germany, on Saturday. In a 64-second video about the attack released by his Media Assistant, Uche Anichukwu in Abuja, Ekweremadu was…

President Muhammadu Buhari has called on ministers-designate to work as a team to lift 100 million Nigerians out of poverty in the next 10 years. Addressing the ministers-designate, the President said the country and the administration would rely on them to implement policies and programmes to lift Nigerians out of poverty. Buhari, who declared open a two-day retreat in Abuja for ministers-designate, stated “We must work as a team. Working as a team demands that we know what the next person is doing. “You must open communication with your colleagues. Lack of communication leads to lack of cooperation and sub-optimal…

By Akanimo Sampson Since the beginning of 2014, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), a United Nations agency, has recorded the deaths of 32,629 migrants, including 1,675 so far as at August 14, 2019. IOM is making efforts to systematically record deaths on migration routes worldwide through its Missing Migrants Project (MMP). But due to the challenges of collecting information about these people and the contexts of their deaths, the true number of lives lost during migration is likely much higher. Missing Migrants Project records should only be viewed as indicative of the risks associated with migration, rather than representative…