Gov. Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State has clarified his stance on the fate of the immediate past governor of the state, Ayodele Fayose.

Fayemi spoke with State House correspondents after a closed-door meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Fielding questions whether he would probe his predecessor, Fayemi explained that there was never a time he said he would probe Fayose.

According to him, reports of such probe are on the table of anti-graft agencies.

“Well, I am sure I have never said anything about probe, and I do not say anything about probe.

“Looking into books is the duty of any new governor, you need to know what you found in place, I just talked about visitation panel into the education sector in the state.

“There are other sectors in the state, and it will be remiss of me not to check what we found when we came into office and share that with the citizens of the state.

“It is just accountability not probe. I am not EFCC I am not ICPC, there are institutions that are charged with the responsibility to do that and its entirely up to them if they want to probe the governor or not.

“ It is not my business, I leave Fayose to God, I have said that before.’’

Fayose is presently being prosecuted by the EFCC over an 11-count charge of conspiracy and money laundering.

Speaking on the state of education, Fayemi said that Ekiti had a tradition of being the intellectual capital of the country but it seemed to have lost that edge lately.

He said that his government was working toward repositioning the sector, particularly at the basic and tertiary levels.

The governor said that he had set up visitation panel in all the tertiary institutions in the state to review and recommend what the critical and challenging issues were and how government should respond to the yearnings of the sector.

He said the government was taking specific steps to address access to education in the basic education sub-sector.

“Before now, Ekiti used to be the leading state in terms of school enrollment in the country but the latest figures we received from the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) makes it clear that we are lagging far behind.

“We have moved from 96 per cent enrolment in the entire country to about 45 per cent meaning that about 55 per cent of our school age children are of school.

“That is unacceptable in a state like Ekiti and we need to find out what has happened between 2014 and 2018 leading to this appalling figure in terms of school enrolment.

“And one of the very first things we are doing to improve enrolment is to make sure that all fees and levies in the primary and secondary sector are removed, so we have removed that.

“We have returned free compulsory and qualitative education to our basic education sector.’’

Fayemi said that the government was also doing all it could to encourage more students to come into school.

He said that the state government would commence the school feeding programme in Ekiti State in order to ensure that kids that did not have the opportunity to be in school were enrolled.

“We are also ensuring that we pay salaries regularly because you cannot expect parents who have not received salaries for six to 10 months on the one hand and the children are being asked to pay education levy on the other hand to have the capacity to send such children to school.

“So, it is a double whammy for such families, we need to make sure that education which we see in our party as a right and not a privilege at least at the basic level should be free, compulsory and qualitative and that is where we are returning Ekiti to,’’ he said.

The governor dismissed insinuations that he was having disagreement with the labour union in his state.

Sourced From: The Sun Nigeria

Rose Ejembi, Makurdi.

Air Officer Commanding Tactical Air Command, AVM Oladayo Amao, has given reasons for the temporary closure of the Nigerian Air Force (NAF) airfield housing the Makurdi Airport, in Makurdi, the Benue State capital.

AVM Amao, in a chat with newsmen, on Saturday, allayed fears that the airfield might have been closed for unjustifiable reasons saying the closure was to allow repairs and maintenance of the runway which had started giving way.

“The runway, as you may have been aware, has been closed for some time now for repairs.

“The sealants that were used to hold the runway together have given way and grasses are growing on it already which is very dangerous.

“The work would have been completed before now but the problem we have is getting the sealants itself.

“For now, because of the scarcity of sealants, we cannot tell when the work would be completed and the runway opened for use. But I can assure you that the runway will be opened as soon as work is completed.”

He said it was because of the closure of the airfield that the fourth quarter route march of the Command could take place on the runway.

“Today, unlike other similar exercises, we had the privilege to march through the runway.

“Our airfield here has been closed for a while due to the ongoing repairs at the runway and this afforded us this opportunity,” AVM Amao stated.

Sourced From: The Sun Nigeria

Timothy Olanrewaju, Maiduguri.

The Nigerian Army has dismissed a video purportedly released by Boko Haram showing gruesome killings of scores of soldiers at a military base in Borno State last weekend.

Army headquarters, in its first reaction to the last weekend attack on a military base at Metele, Guzamala Local Government, contained in a release on its official web, said the video was part of the propaganda of the terrorists’ group to “misinform the populace and portray themselves as what they are not.”

“The spurious circulation of some of these videos only contribute to further propagate the propaganda intent of the terrorists; to misinform the populace and portray themselves as what they are not. So far, the situation is that the location is under control as reinforcing units have been able to repel the terrorists and stabilize the situation,” the army said.

It said the video trending was an “inaccurate and false” account of the incident, urging Nigerians to disregard the video.

Scores of officers and soldiers died in an attack on 157 Army Task Force Battalion at Metele, Guzamala Local Government in the northern part of Borno by Boko Haram last Sunday. The Nigerian Army did not confirm or comment on the attack for a week even as media reports claimed about 100 troops died in the attack which lasted for about three hours.

The army said it was following “laid down procedures for reporting incidents that involve its personnel who fall casualty in action.” It said families of the slain personnel are usually first contacted as a form of respect before it releases information to the public “so as to avoid exacerbating the grief family members would bear, were they to discover such from unofficial sources.”

The army thanked government agencies, other sister security organizations and Nigerians for sympathizing with the force over the incident.

Boko Haram has stepped up attacks on communities and military base in recent times, leading to the killing of over 100 troops and civilians in three months.

Sourced From: The Sun Nigeria

Gunmen kidnapped 79 school students yesterday in the English-speaking region of Cameroon where separatists are fighting an armed campaign for independence, security and government sources said.

The abductions, the worst incident so far in 13 months of unrest, came just a day before longtime President Paul Biya was to be sworn in for a seventh term in office. “Seventy-nine pupils and three supervisors” were seized, Communications Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who is also government spokesman, told AFP.

A government official said the three comprised the school’s principal, a teacher and a driver. A source close to the school said the abducted students “are mainly boys.”

A six-minute video seen by AFP, but which could not be immediately confirmed independently, showed 11 boys apparently aged about 15 giving their identity and name of the school in English, and adding that they were abducted by the “Amba Boys”, the name for anglophone separatists.

The first mass abduction in Cameroon follows two major such incidents in neighbouring Nigeria, where the Islamist group Boko Haram snatched more than 200 schoolgirls from the Borno state town of Chibok in April 2014.

Some 107 girls have since been released or found, but the Islamist group abducted scores more schoolgirls from neighbouring Yobe state in February this year. The students kidnapped Monday were enrolled at the Presbyterian Secondary School in Bamenda, capital of Cameroon’s Northwest Region, one of two regions hit by attacks by anglophone militants that have met with a brutal crackdown by the authorities.

“The search for the hostages has been launched, every man has been called in,” the government source said, speaking after a crisis meeting. Elsewhere in the region, a high-ranking local official was also seized, a security official told AFP.

The school’s website said that the student body numbers more than 700, drawn from “all the religious and linguistic origins of Cameroon.” The kidnappings coincide with an upsurge of political tensions in the majority French-speaking country.

It comes after elections on October 7 in which 85-year-old Biya, who has ruled the country with an iron fist for 35 years, was credited with 71.3 percent of the vote. The polls however were marred by allegations of widespread fraud, low voter turnout and violence.

Sourced From: The Sun Nigeria