More than 100 people, including women and children, were abducted when gunmen raided four villages in Zamfara State on Sunday, residents and the Commissioner for Information in the state, Ibrahim Dosara, said on Monday. According to them, more than 40 people were abducted from Kanwa village in Zurmi Local Government Area. Another 37, mostly women and children were taken in Kwabre community in the same local government area, a local resident added, declining to be named for security reasons. “Right now, Kanwa village is deserted; the bandits divided themselves into two groups and attacked the community. They kidnapped children aged between 14 to 16 years and women,” the Kanwa village resident said. In Yankaba and Gidan Goga communities of Maradun Local Government Area, at least 38 people were kidnapped while working on their farms, residents said. The Commissioner accused the gunmen of using abductees as human shields against air raids from the military.
The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal brought before it by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on the lingering legal battle about the nomination of its governorship candidate in Ogun. The apex court ordered that the suit instituted by Jimi Lawal, a governorship aspirant be remitted to the Federal High Court for a fresh trial. Delivering the judgement, Justice Ibrahim Saulawa held that the Federal High Court was wrong in declining jurisdiction in the matter of Jimi Lawal. The apex court agreed with the Court of Appeal in Abuja that the Federal High Court had jurisdiction under section 285 of the 1999 constitution and section 84(14) of the Electoral Act 2022 to hear the matter of Lawal on its merit. The Federal High Court in Abuja has voided the nomination of two House of Representatives candidates in Jigawa and Zamfara. The court, in two judgments, sacked Aminu Kanta as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for Babura/Garki Federal Constituency of Jigawa and Sani Umar Dan Galadima as the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for Kaura Namoda/Birnin Magaji Federal Constituency of Zamfara. The court ordered that Alhaji Isa Dogonyaro be declared as the lawful candidate of the APC for Babura/Garki and the PDP conduct a fresh primary to elect its candidate for the Kaura Namoda/Birnin Magaji. Justice Inyang Ekwo, while sacking Galadima, in a judgement on Monday, held that the serving House of Representatives member was an APC member when he participated in the primary election held by the PDP. Justice Ekwo held that Galadima, having not resigned, defected or cross-carpeted from the APC to PDP within the time stipulated by law, was not a lawful member of PDP and cannot stand for any election on its platform.
The average price of 5kg cooking gas rose by 0.21 per cent from ₦4,474.48 in September to ₦4,483.75 in October. The increased price is contained in the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) “Cooking Gas Price Watch’’ for October 2022 issued on Monday in Abuja. It said stated that on a year-on-year basis, the increase was 70.62 per cent from ₦2,627.94 in October 2021 to ₦4,483.75 in October 2022. A state-by-state profile analysis showed that Kwara recorded the highest average price at ₦4,955 for 5kg of cooking gas, followed by Niger at ₦4,950 and Adamawa at ₦4,940.29. It stated that Abia recorded the lowest price at ₦4,045.45, followed by Kano and Delta at ₦4,100 and ₦4,139.29, respectively. An analysis by geopolitical zones showed that the North-Central recorded the highest average retail price at ₦4,726.07 for 5kg cooking gas, followed by the Northeast at ₦4,577.86. “The South-South recorded the lowest average retail price at ₦4,275.92,’’ the NBS stated. The report showed that the average retail price of 12.5kg cooking gas increased from ₦9,906.44 in September to ₦10,050.53 in October, indicating a 1.45 per cent increase on a month-on-month basis.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has said that nearly 150,000 children displaced by the conflict in Mali do not have birth certificates and are at risk of exclusion and disenfranchisement because they cannot prove their identity. “Thousands of children are excluded from society when they should be in school,” said Maclean Natugasha, NRC’s director for Mali, in a statement released by the NGO to AFP. These 148,000 children are among the 422,620 people displaced by the war in Mali, according to August figures from a joint UN and Malian monitoring tool. These 148,000 children have either lost their birth certificates when they fled their homes or “never had them because of the limited functioning of civil registry services in some regions”, says the NRC. If this problem of civil status “is not resolved before these children reach adulthood”, the NRC warns, “they risk being deprived of their freedom of movement, the right to vote and the possibility to own or rent property.”