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EndSARS: Vehicular Movement Grounded As Protesters Take Over Lagos – Benin Highway
Published
5 years agoon
By
Editor
Vehicular and human movement were grounded for several hours on Thursday along the Benin – Lagos highway as thousands of young people took over the road, protesting against activities of the Nigeria police and humongous salaries for political office holders.
The carnival-like procession took over the entire highway and the flyover opposite the University of Benin with DJs blasting popular revolutionary songs of Fela Kuti, Femi Kuti, Idris Abdlukareem and several other popular artists.
Among the protesters were student union leaders of the University of Benin who were seen coordinating the demonstration.
Some stranded commuters also became part of the protesters pledging their support for reforms.
READ ALSO: EndSARS: Protesters Lower APC Flag, Replace It With EndSARS Flag In Osun Assembly
Some policemen who came to the scene stayed away from the protesters who conducted themselves peacefully for the almost five hours it lasted.

The carnival-like protest along the Benin-Lagos highway on Thursday
The President, Students Union Government of the University, Comrade Egwu Benjamin said they decided to add their voices to the protest going on across the country, just as demanded an end to SARS.
“We are adding our voice to what has been happening across the country, and we are demanding an end to SARS. We are saying end SARS and they are giving us SWAT.
READ ALSO: Just In: ‘SARS Must Go’ Protest Went Sour In Edo
“What we are saying is that we want police reforms. The government can do better; it should bring in more intellectuals into the police. More graduates and other intellectuals should come into the police, more persons will become interested. We were told Nigeria is the giant of Africa but now I can’t say our height. What we are saying is end SARS, end SWAT and give us a reformed police”, he said.
On his part, the SUG Public Relations Officer, Comrade Destiny Uanzekin said “This is a new generation and the beginning of a new order. It won’t just be end SARS now because our next point of call is the politicians.
“We are not just fighting just because we want the end of SARS neither are we fighting because we want the end of SWAT, we are fighting for a Nigeria that we believe in; we are fighting for a Nigeria that we trust is going to be happening very soon. We are in the street as youths because we know we have a higher stake in the Nigerian society; we are in the street as youths because we know we have the right as legitimate citizens to air our views.

The protesters on Thursday
“This is not illegal, this protest is legal, what they have been doing to us is what is illegal. Killing our youths, killing our sisters and brothers extra-judicially is wrong. The salaries of the people that we vote into government to represent us are being overpaid, let them earn the same salary like civil servants.”
A traveller who identified himself as Osarobo said he couldn’t help but join in the protest, adding that he was consoled with the fact that it is for the right course hence he joined the agitation.
READ ALSO: Confusion As SARS Kills Seven Police Robbery Suspects In Delta
“I may be stranded right now but I am not frustrated because this is an overdue cry to reform the police force and not just SARS. Let police be well paid and see whether POS won’t stop on highways”, he added.
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NSE Pledges To Mentor Young Engineers, Elects New EXCO Members In Bauchi
Published
1 hour agoon
August 31, 2025By
Editor
The Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Bauchi State branch has pledged to mentor young engineers in order to advance the engineering profession in the state.
Engr. Shehu wakili, the newly elected Vice Chairman of NSE in the state, made the pledge in an interview with newsmen on Sunday after the announcement of the election results of the newly elected Executive Council Members during the 2025 Annual General Meeting of NSE.
“The election was free and fair as the election was held and the results were announced where we became victorious.
“We will try and strive to make the society move forward. We have so many agenda to achieve, we want to increase our membership by so many activities and we want to carry our young ones and mentor them as and when due.
READ ALSO: Bauchi Govt Gifts N2.6m To 5 Elders For Selfless Service
“There are so many ways to attract members and number one is by activities where you engage members and also by knocking their doors and invite them.
“I want to call on all of us that were elected to work hard for the progress of this society in general,” he said.
According to him, the year 2025 is the election year but not for the branch Chairman but for other EXCO members.
READ ALSO: Bauchi One Of Most Educationally Disadvantaged States In Nigeria – Expert
The positions, he said, included the Vice Chairman where he was the winner, Engr. Ibrahım Adamu won the General Secretary position, Engr. Abubakar Isah got the Asst. General Secretary’s position while Engr. Mohammed Sulaiman got the Financial Secretary position.
He explained that Engr. Abdulkadir Abdullahi won as the Treasurer, Engr. Adamu Chinade, Technical Secretary, Jawahir Hashim, Asst. Technical Secretary, Salis Kabir, Publicity Secretary, Engr. Ibrahim Lawal, Internal Auditor and Fatima Adamu as Asst. Publicity Secretary.
In an acceptance speech on behalf of other elected members, Engr. Ibrahim Lawal extended their gratitude to God and members who found them fit to serve the society and promised to serve to the best of their abilities.
News
Nigeria Grappling To Balance Rapid Urbanization, Infrastructure Demands — Don
Published
1 hour agoon
August 31, 2025By
Editor
Dr. Ibrahim Lawal, a senior lecturer at the Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University (ATBU) Bauchi, says Nigeria is still grappling with the challenge of balancing rapid urbanization, infrastructure demands and the need to combat the impact of climate change.
Lawal, who stated this in Bauchi on Sunday during the 2025 Annual General Meeting and Public Lecture of the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE), Bauchi state branch, said this is as a result of the growing population.
The Don, while presenting a paper titled ‘Building an environmentally sustainable and resilient future: The Nexus of climate change, infrastructure and engineering in Nigeria, called on governments at all levels to treat infrastructure as a priority sector for climate action.
The lecturer, who is from the department of Engineering, ATBU, said “Understanding this intersection unveils both the hurdles faced and the Innovative solutions forged to navigate towards a more sustainable future.
READ ALSO: Bauchi Refutes Allegations Of Poor Educational Project Execution
“In Nigeria, the dynamic interplay between climate change, infrastructure development, and engineering practices is critical in shaping the nation’s path towards a sustainable and resilient future.
“For a sustainable and resilient future the nexus of climate change, infrastructure, and engineering practices in Nigeria presents both an opportunity and a challenge”.
He however, maintained that Nigeria has a better chance at an environmentally sustainable and resilient future where communities thrive, infrastructure endures and the environment flourishes despite the challenges posed by an ever-changing climate.
Also speaking, The Emir of Bauchi, Alh Rilwanu Adamu, represented by Alh. Jibrin Jibo, Dan Saran Bauchi, insisted that a call for climate-resilient infrastructure is a call for survival, progress, and continuity in the country.
According to him, it’s a call for engineers, policymakers, traditional rulers, and communities to rethink how they plan, design, and maintain the structures upon which their lives depend.
READ ALSO: Bumper Harvest: Foundation Distributes 6,000 Fertilizers To Farmers In Bauchi
“Engineers must continue to innovate, drawing on global best practices while adapting them to our local realities,” said the Emir.
He charged them to lead the course of transformation, adding that to succeed, they must collaborate with all stakeholders.
In his remarks, Engr. Abdulkarim Hassan, the Chairman, NSE, Bauchi branch, said the branch has made significant strides in advancing the mission and vision of the Society.
He explained that as part of the mandate to promote technical development and professional competence among its members, the branch conducted several technical visits during the year which broadened their technical exposure.
This visits, he said, also created opportunities for collaboration, mentorship, and knowledge exchange between its members and industry personnel.
Also, Engr. Margaret Oguntala, the President of NSE who was represented by Engr. Ibrahim Usman, NSE National Exco, Northeast, called on the members of the society in Bauchi state to encourage visitation to project and construction sites to foster relationships.
News
OPINION: A ‘Corruption-free’ Nigeria And Brazil As Hyena
Published
2 hours agoon
August 31, 2025By
Editor
By Festus Adedayo
Growing up, people of my generation matured into a fiery imagery painted of the wild and the animal world. We were fed on such frightening broths in folktales and fabulous novels like that of D. O. Fagunwa. They taught us that the wild is home of gnomes, predatory animals and human hunters who constitute a trinity in the forest ecosystem. One of the animals thus lionized was Ìkòokò, the hyena, one of Africa’s most merciless predators. He belonged to a family of wild doglike carnivores. The Ìkòokò was a wild, restless animal capable of inflicting so many brands of disasters on its prey. He was deadly, maniacal and daring.
One received ascription of the Ìkòokò is that he could crush meat and bone together with a fiery precision. It is why his faeces is cocaine-white. To fit this description, Yoruba curated a phrasal painting of him as “aje’ranje’gungun”. He was also a flesh devourer who cracked knotty flesh and cranium with his destructive incisors. In the process, Ìkòokò got decorated with a Yoruba honorific title of “Ìkòokò apanirun”. What stands him out is its ugliness and smell. Zoologists say the Ìkòokò, being a territorial animal, gets its pungent smell from marking and patrolling its territories. While doing this, he deposits on stalks of grass along his boundaries a strong-smelling substance produced by his anal glands.
Now, I find some similarities in the Ìkòokò and the bilateral meeting between Nigeria and Brazil which took place in Brazil last Monday. Itemizing similarities between the two countries can be likened to the aphorism which says that if the farmer’s okra plantation is within his reach, his okra cannot become too ripe for harvest. In other words, finding the countries’ similarities is handy. As in Nigeria, corruption in Brazil is a cankerworm permeating all strata of both societies. You do not need a telescope to see it; it meanders in an open dirty pond. It involves the highest echelon of political power in the two countries, to the smallest municipalities.
Operation Car Wash, a landmark anti-corruption probe that took place in Brazil in March 2014 uncovered slimy crippling maggots in the Brazilian central government. It began from a seemingly unobtrusive investigation of a small Brasilia car wash on allegation of money laundering. Conducted by an anti-trust team of federal prosecutors headed by Deltan Dallagnol, proceedings revealed a humongous corruption scheme. Of greatest revelation was a combine of sleaze that involved state-owned enterprises. A judge, Sergio Moro, heard how government officials took pleasure in deploying the prerogatives of their public offices in pursuit of rent-seeking activities. These range from siphoning funds from state-owned corporation for individual gains, to brazenly stealing public money. Nigeria can see itself in this mirror.
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One illustrations of Brazilian corruption was also shown in The Mensalao scandal. Therein, in exchange for vote support in congress, taxpayer funds were hemorrhaged by government officials to pay monthly allowances to members of congress. As Nigeria’s NNPCL is a cesspit of corruption wherein president after president dips their hands into for personal and group enrichment, Brazil’s Petrobas, a state-owned and state-run oil company, is a paradise for maggots where uncountable small maggotry of the political elite and the private sector raise hundreds of millions of Reals to fund personal fancies and political campaigns. In Nigeria recently, a roiling mess whose putrefaction is comparable to a hyena’s excrement hit the airwaves. An NNPCL top boss allegedly mentioned a top Aso Rock official in an EFCC investigation. Nigeria has since moved on. No word since then and there is calm on the home front.
The same way Nigeria battles a serious challenge of violence and crime, Brazil wears same pair of sloppy shoes. It is estimated that the country witnesses roughly 23.8 homicide cases of robberies, kidnappings, muggings and other gang violence per 100,000 residents. Like here, in Brazil, cases of police brutality are as widespread as poverty in an IDP camp.
Recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers drilled deep down into the Brazilian own involvement with corruption. In the country, there is a complexity of corruption networks flavoured by mafia, drug traffic networks and terrorist activities. In Nigeria, the hyena excrement is sustained by access to government office. Invoice-padding is notorious in both countries. Known in Brazil as superfaturamento, its notoriety is buoyed by padded invoices and grand-scale inflated construction projects. Brazil’s Olympics and FIFA World Cup stadia and Nigeria’s coastal highway are examples. In a damning October 13, 2020 report, Transparency International said Brazil had a “progressive deterioration of the institutional anti-corruption framework” and lamented what it called a fatal setback in Brazil’s fight against corruption.
In both countries, politicians, in dalliance with corrupt private sector persons, are their countries’ top predators. Primarily scavengers of their nations’ common patrimony, like hyenas, a huge chunk of the two countries’ political class’ diets come from feeding greedily on direct and indirect kills. As hyenas’ feeds range from animals of various types and sizes, carrion, bones, vegetable matter, and other animal droppings, so is the gluttonous feeding habits of the political class of Brazil and Nigeria. For over a century, these human carnivores’ eating jaws have been strengthened to become as strong as hyenas’. It makes their political class fit to be ranked among the strongest national patrimony-devouring humans in the world.
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As the Chief Hyenas of Brazil and Nigeria met, Nigeria’s boastfully proclaimed that there was “no more corruption” since he took office. This provoked cynics’ snigger. In a chorus, they say the Nigerian Chief Hyena was in a domain similar to his, where lying to the citizenry is a governmental culture, a walk in the park. There, Lie lies to Lie (Iróńpa’rófún’ró). It can be compared to Olupona’s cult of secrecy where devotees create the needed aura of sacredness to sustain a long tradition.
The truth that both Nigeria and Brazil shied from as they met last week was that, in both countries, corruption is as prevalent and destructive as an affliction of AIDS. Though a universal problem which afflicts the economies of developing and developed nations, corruption has far more debilitating effects in Africa, South and Latin America. It is even more precarious in Nigeria for the sake of her security. Since the September 11, 2001 bombing in America, corruption has been ostracized as a major pivot for transnational terrorism in the world.
But for esprit-de-corps and hypocrisy, nothing should have made Nigeria’s Chief Hyena hoist self up for the global mockery that followed. This is because the world is in possession of statistics of the mutating and multiplying cancerous cells of corruption in Nigeria. A few days ago, I was guest of Oyo State’s and Western Nigeria’s oldest television station, the BCOS. The discussion centered on damning verdicts of two frontline Nigerians, President Olusegun Obasanjo and Sultan of Sokoto, Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar III. As guest speaker at the Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) Annual General Conference in Enugu last Sunday, a day before the Nigerian Chief Hyena made that statement of zero corruption in Nigeria, the Sultan had warned that justice in Nigeria was increasingly becoming a “purchasable commodity”. He said, “Today, justice is increasingly becoming a purchasable commodity, and the poor are becoming victims of this kind of justice, while the rich commit all manner of crime and walk the streets scot-free”.
As if choreographed, Obasanjo too, in a new book entitled Nigeria: Past and Future, also lamented that Nigeria’s judiciary had been “deeply compromised”, and warned that judicial corruption had turned Nigerian courts into “a court of corruption rather than a court of justice.” A circulating August 19, 1976 New Nigerian newspaper’s lead story which screamed, “Judge arrested over N20 bribe”, where a judge was arrested and jailed for corruption in Benue State, tells how the internal mechanism for judicial correction has died in today’s Nigeria. What is the National Judicial Commission (NJC) doing today?
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My submission during the interview was that, except we want to play the ostrich, there is indeed an erosion of judicial integrity in Nigeria. A huge percentage of litigants are sceptical that they could get justice in our temple of justice. But isolating the judiciary and leaving the media, the banks, civil service and so many other corruption-blossoming institutions in Nigeria will be unfair. Nigeria is one huge ball of corruption. However, all of us – the judicial system, civil society, media, etc, must get involved in re-calibrating this perception. This is because, the moment the courts suffer such rout in perception, we can as well call it a day as far as a country is concerned. We can afford to have everything perceived as dirty – the executive, the legislature – but not the river, the judiciary. It is the source of our national value. This is because, when anything is dirty, it is taken to the river to wash but when the river itself is dirty and you take your dirt to it for cleaning, you will be washing your dirt with the dirty. What you get therefrom is deep filth and disaster reminiscent of the AyiKwei Armah’s 1968 debut novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born hue.
It takes boldness and leadership sincerity to own up that things aren’t looking up. Nigeria is not anywhere corruption-free, whether at the micro or macro level. Corruption is pervasive here and its ubiquity is legendary. If Nigeria’s Chief Hyena based this sweepingly boastful claim on a recent Transparency International (TI) ranking and the few arrests made by the EFCC, he fell into the argumentative pitfall called fallacy of excluded middle. The law of excluded middle frowns on oversimplification. It is against forcing a complex situation into a false dichotomy while ignoring nuanced possibilities or state of affairs that are indeterminate. The fallacy of excluded middle occurs when you apply “true or false” situations to complex social issues and subjective judgments in situations where the predicate is ambiguous and not easily captured in a Yes or No situation.
So, it is true that TI, in its 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), placed Nigeria 140th as against earlier 145th position in corruption in the world. It scored 26 out of 100, as against previous 25 out of 100. It is also true that Ola Olukoyede, the EFCC chair, recently succeeded in arresting some mushroom and tilapia of corruption, with a 2024 conviction figure of 4,111, the highest thus far. Two problems arose. One, where are the sharks and behemoth (the Arogidigba) of Nigerian corruption, most of whom attend the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and National Economic Council (NEC) meetings weekly and periodically? Second, to use these two – TI index and EFCC convictions – as indices of Nigeria’s zero corruption is deceptive.
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Economists say that systemic poverty is a harbinger of macro corruption. This variant of corruption is on the ascendancy in Nigeria today. Recently, the World Bank aggregated Nigeria’s systemic corruption as being on the ascendancy. In a widely publicized interview, a lawyer, Ndidi Edeogbon, also disagreed with Nigeria’s Chief Hyena. She said, “I found out yesterday that 60 to 70 % of Nigerians paid bribes for police help. 53 paid to avoid trouble with the police. 56 percent paid bribes to get government documents… And on the level of perceived corruption, 70% of Nigerians say the police are the most corrupt. This is followed by the Presidency with 62%, then parliament with 65%, local government councilors with 55% and judges with 54%.”
So, why play the ostrich by making such untrue statement of zero corruption in Nigeria? Can the hyena deodorize himself even thousands of kilometers away from home?
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