The Court of Appeal has upheld the election of Ekiti Governor Biodun Oyebanji as the winner of the 18 June 2022 governorship election. The appellate court in a judgement delivered virtually on Tuesday, dismissed the appeal filed by the defeated Social Democratic Party (SDP) governorship candidate, Chief Segun Oni and resolved all the four issues against the appellant. In the judgement delivered by the Chairman of the three-member panel, Justice Hamma Barka, the court upheld the decision of the Election Petition Tribunal of 29 December 2022 which held that Oni’s petition failed woefully on all fronts where he was challenging Oyebanji’s return as the poll winner. The same court also on Tuesday, removed a House of Representatives member, Micheal Enyong, as the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for Akwa Ibom. In his place, the court restored Mr Umo Eno, a former lands commissioner whose nomination by the party was set aside by the Federal High Court in Abuja on 20 January. In its judgement, Justice Barka said the lower court judgement was predicated on errors. The appellate court held that the issue of statutory delegates who voted at the primary election is an internal affair of the party and that the lower court ought not to have inquired into it.
On Tuesday, the Kogi state government confirmed the detonation of an explosive device suspected to be a bomb at the local government secretariat in Okehi. The State Security Adviser, Duro Jerry Omodara, who confirmed the development in Lokoja, said the intention of the saboteurs may be to cause panic during the election to prevent people from coming out to vote. Omodara said no life was lost and that security men have been deployed to the area to see that normalcy is restored. Vanguard reported that some yet-to-be-identified gunmen stormed the council on Monday night and blew up the administrative office.
Ghanaian banks operating wrote-off about ¢5.9 billion as bad debt in December 2022. According to the Domestic Money Banks income statement, this is an 184.2 percent increase over the previous year. Though the Bank of Ghana did not give reasons behind this bad debt, it is believed that a difficult economic environment that triggered a high cost of borrowing may be the main reason. According to the Bank of Ghana, the industry’s Non-Performing Loan stock increased from ¢8.2 billion in December 2021 to ¢10.4 billion in December 2022. This is partly reflecting the revaluation of foreign currency NPLs and the deterioration in some domestic currency loan portfolios. The private sector accounted for a larger stock of NPLs though its share of total NPLs declined from 96 percent to 92.4 percent between December 2021 and December 2022, while the share of public sector NPLs increased from 4 percent to 7.6 percent. Construction remains the sector with the highest NPL ratio of 29.1 percent. The Mining and Quarrying sectors maintained the lowest NPL ratio of 4 percent in the period under review.
Facebook parent company Meta has filed an appeal in Kenya challenging a ruling that said the company could be sued in the East African country even though it has no official presence there. A Kenyan labour court earlier this month ruled that Meta could be sued in the country after a former content moderator filed a lawsuit alleging poor working conditions. In the appeal, seen by Reuters on Tuesday, the U.S. company disputed the court’s finding that Kenyan courts had jurisdiction over Meta. Meta outsourced its content moderation work via Sama, a U.S.-headquartered company with operations in Kenya. Sama said last month it would no longer provide content moderation services for Meta.