Daily Watch – Flutterwave accounts in ₦3bn leak, Burkina Faso scraps military agreement with France

Bandits have attacked Maru Town in Maru local government headquarters in Zamfara State, killing a Divisional Police Officer (DPO), one other police personnel and a civilian. The Punch quoted an indigene of the town, who gave his name as Shehu Amadu that ”the bandits who were in large numbers stormed into our town in the night, last Saturday in order to abduct the people.” “Many of us took to our heels and ran into the bush to escape the abduction,” he said. “On getting the information of the attack, the Divisional Police Officer of the Local Government, Kazeem Raheem, mobilised his men and some of the vigilantes in order to chase away the bandits,” he added. “Unfortunately, the DPO, one police sergeant called Rabiu Bagobiri and one vigilante member Shehu Chika, were killed on the spot. Amadu told the paper the bandits abducted some people from the town and carted away some food items.

More than two billion naira (₦2,949,557,867) has been illegally transferred from Flutterwave accounts. According to reporting by Techpoint Africa, while the incident, and the list of recipient accounts, were reported to the police on 13 February 2023, the police could not freeze the funds. According to Flutterwave, some commercial banks allowed the money to be moved to other accounts, widening the money trail. State investigators have filed a suit in a Lagos magistrate court to support Flutterwave’s claims. Per the motion, 107 accounts, including the fifth beneficiaries of those accounts, are to be placed on a Post-No-Debit (PND) instruction. In a statement published by BusinessDay, the company insisted that it “has not been hacked,” adding that during a routine check of its transaction monitoring system, it identified an unusual trend of transactions on users’ profiles. “Our team immediately launched a review (in line with our standard operating procedure), which revealed that some users who had not activated some of our recommended security settings might have been susceptible,” Flutterwave said.

Over 100 children in Ghana’s northern regions are suspected to have contracted measles, according to the President-elect for the Paediatrics Society of Ghana, Dr Hilda Mantebea Boye. This development comes amid a shortage of baby vaccines nationwide. Ghana has run out of essential BCG and OPV vaccines as a result of the Ministry of Health’s failure to procure them since the turn of the year. The BCG vaccine is primarily needed to prevent tuberculosis while the OPV prevents polio infections. Other essential vaccines to prevent diseases such as measles and whooping are also in short supply.  On the back of this, Dr Boye told JoyNews that the cases will likely increase.

Burkina Faso has scrapped a 1961 military assistance agreement with France, a move that comes weeks after it told the French ambassador and troops supporting its anti-jihadist campaign to exit the country. The AFP cited a 28 February correspondence from the Burkinabe foreign ministry to Paris which “denounced the technical military assistance agreement reached in Paris on 24 April 1961, as well as the deal’s two “appendixes.” The agreement was forged between the then newly independent Republic of Upper Volta, as Burkina Faso used to be called, and its former colonial ruler. It is one of the legal bases for French military support in the country. The ministry said Ouagadougou was giving one month’s notice for “the final departure of all French military personnel serving in Burkinabe military administrations.”