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Obaseki, Rema Perform Groundbreaking For 6000 Capacity Edo Arena

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The Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki and afrobeats sensation, Divine Ikubor, popularly known as Rema, on Wednesday, performed the groundbreaking ceremony for the Edo Arena, a state-of-the-art conference hall and event centre.

The Edo Arena which is to be called ‘The Dome’ is sited at former Garrick Memorial School Ground, Ekehuan Road, in Benin City, the Edo State capital.

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Rema arrived in his hometown of Benin, Edo State, on Tuesday, ahead of his highly anticipated homecoming concert scheduled for Friday, August 30, 2024.

Obaseki and Rema were joined by the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Asue Ighodalo and the Commissioner for Tourism, Arts, Culture and Diaspora Affairs, Uyi Oduwa Malaka, among other top government functionaries.

READ ALSO: Obaseki Inaugurates LG Autonomy Implementation C’tte, Chaired By Edo Attorney General

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The elated music sensation thanked the people of the State for their relentless love and support, commending Governor Obaseki for his bold reforms and projects that have improved the lives of the people and transformed the State in the last eight years.

I am happy to be here. I thank Edo people for their prayers and support. I am proud of the State, especially the growth recorded so far. I am proud of the togetherness, passion and zeal to make it greater.”

Commending the governor for the project, Rema said, “I am proud of the youths and ready to take part in anything that will give a drive to the youths, strengthen and motivate them. This is a blessing and I will see to it that this project is finished well.”

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On the idea behind the development of the project, Governor Obaseki stated, “When we came into government in 2016, we didn’t have a venue for events but rather we were hiring canopies for events and renting places for large events, especially when we invite people out of the State. It became clear that we needed to have a venue where we could host large events.

READ ALSO: Obaseki Swears In Two Permanent Secretaries, Charges On Quality Service

“In the course of our planning, we realized that Edo has a unique advantage. They don’t call us the heartbeat of Nigeria for nothing. Edo enjoys tremendous traffic as most Nigerians move through Edo State and we noticed that it’s a huge economic advantage for us.

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“We have the capacity to host national events and attract all Nigerians here. We made strategic plans as we began to sell our culture and position ourselves to attract more people to our State.

“We are using sports to attract people to our State as we remodeled the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium into a world-class sports center. We can boast today of the best sporting facility in Nigeria. To host cultural and entertainment events, we used the old Observer premises into a world-class sound stage that can host about 2,000 to 3,000 guests.”

He continued: “This is limiting because we can’t hold events larger than 3,000 people. So, we saw the urgent need to create a larger venue to host events, be it concerts, conferences, symposiums, or conventions. This has been the driving force behind the government acquiring this piece of property 5 years ago from the Garrick family.

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READ ALSO: Obaseki Hosts Victorious Edo Queens, Champions Of WAFU Zone B

“This premises, which is about 5 hectares of land, is supposed to be an entertainment hub, hosting many events, from concerts, to national conferences, symposiums and other larger events.”

Noting that the Dome will drive the influx of people into the State in line with the government’s vision to make the state a tourist destination, the governor said: “The number of large people that will come will enjoy the culture and what the people of the State can offer. Hotels will spring up in different locations in the State, creating room for the employment of more youths.

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“This is what many countries in the world live on, not petroleum or crude oil but tourism. These countries don’t have the fraction of what we have in the State in terms of tourism. What they have is the infrastructure to support tourism as this is what we have started to build in Edo State.

READ ALSO: JUST IN: FG Reveals Identity Of Woman Threatening Mass Killing Of Nigerians In Canada

“When completed, this will be one of the biggest and largest spaces that would attract events into the State. This project is important to us as most of our projects embarked on by our administration have opened the State for more investors to come in.

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“The ones we have built are fully occupied as the government has no doing business but creating the enabling environment for businesses to thrive in the State. It will be made available to citizens who want to run them. Just like we did with the Radisson Hotel.”

According to him, “The role of government is to be an enabler to allow things to happen. This property is prime in the city. We want to make it attractive by beginning this development. We are using this opportunity to create the awareness that this facility exists and using the opportunity to have our global superstar, Rema to be part of this event.

“When you have people like Rema associated with a project like this it becomes a global project.”

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OPINION: Ahmadu Bello Children’s Territorial Politics

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By Festus Adedayo

There was territorial tension in Nigeria last week. Like in the famous fable where animals gathered in the forest to delineate their individual boundaries, last Tuesday, Northern Nigeria regrouped in Kaduna in aid of its territory. Western Nigeria Awurebe music lord, Late Ibadan, Oyo State-born Dauda Epo Akara, has the patent of a folklore that captures this fictional animal gathering. Epo sang about a quartet of animals comprising Lion, Fox, Cobra and Tortoise which can be extrapolated into a human gathering. It was a power show and territorial delineation. The animals did not only gather to flex muscles but to have a mutual understanding of the power in their pouches. In a July 17, 1995 article published in the Nigerian Tribune, authored by late Dr. Omololu Olunloyo, ex-governor of Oyo State, the famous mathematician and politician looked at that same fable from a power calculus prism. Ace columnist, Dr. Lasisi Olagunju, in an Olunloyo memorial symposium recently, uprooted the folklore from the archive and situated its essence.

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Each of the animals was embittered by past territorial usurpation. As they complained, they also criminalized any further attempt to take one another for granted. This they curated in form of taboos, the irreducible minimum of their tempers’ elasticity, a violation of which would bring the beast out of them.

For Cobra, he could tolerate his head or even the back being stepped upon in elementary power duel. However, anyone who trod on his tail in power contestation should be ready to meet Asarailu, Muslims’ angel of death. Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) Board Chairman, Bashir Dalhatu, would seem to represent the Cobra in the folklore. Like a reptile ready to sting with its deadly venom, Dalhatu spat out the north’s grouse. President Bola Tinubu, he said, had underdeveloped the north. Rising insecurity, poor infrastructure, declining agricultural support, neglect of education and healthcare of the children of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, were the president’s 26-month infractions.

In territorial politics, the north has always been unexampled of the two old Nigerian regions. Highly savvy and purposeful in its romance of power, the North acts like the proverbial hollow-eyed whose tears stream out in a long course. The north’s entitlement, said Dalhatu, was its demographic contribution to Tinubu’s emergence. What gave Tinubu the temerity to trifle with Ahmadu Bello’s progeny who gave him 64 per cent of the total votes that crowned him?

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Convened at the instance of Uba Sani, Kaduna state governor and one of Tinubu’s political sidekicks, the undisguised raison d’être of the gathering was to dissolve mounting perceived undercurrents of the north’s dissatisfaction with the Tinubu government. In the last 26 months, the children of the Sardauna of Sokoto have bickered in ones and groups. The North, they claimed, has been severely marginalized in federal allocations, project execution, and key appointments. Of greater fundament, they complain, is the ravaging pestilence of insurgency. Don’t our fathers say, before the Sòbìyà, a guinea worm parasitic infectious disease, becomes a painful wound is the appropriate time to call for its doctor, the Olúgànbe?

Fox, Lion and Tortoise were also at The Sir Ahmadu Bello Memorial Foundation (SABMF)-organized event which drew participants from across the 19 Northern states and the FCT. For these three animals, their anger and prognosis for stopping further territorial hurt was without equivocation. Fox spoke next. It was abominable for his deadly face to be looked at by anyone, he said. It was then the turn of the Lion to speak. If anyone impugned this animal’s dignity, reputed for scarifying his victims without a scalpel (akom’oní’làláìl’abe), the recompense was bloodbath for the transgressor, he spelled the word audibly. Tortoise told the conferees that he was aware of his own bitchy ugliness, especially the amoebic shape of his splintered carapace, but it was not the remit of anyone to mock him. Anyone who engaged in such body-shaming would have to endure a “very lethal punishment” from him.

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Chairman of the Northern Elders’ Forum (NEF), Prof. AngoAbdullahi, for that moment, became one of the animals. He was angry about recent relocation of key Central Bank departments from Abuja to Lagos, a move he condemned as “suspicious and divisive”. He equaled the so-called marginalization of Northern Nigeria as a threat to Nigeria’s unity and development. Abdullahi told the president that there was a growing number of out-of-school children in the north, a figure he put at 80 per cent of Nigeria’s estimated 20 million out-of-school children. As the animals proposed conditions for armistice, Abdullahi also proposed the allocation of N7.5 trillion each to education and roads in the North.

Amity reigned in the animal kingdom after this “Memorandum of Association”. It was the same peace that reigned after, I reckon, this same northern bloc met Tinubu before the 2023 election. What must have given the Abdullahis and Dalhatus of the north the weapon to show this kind of entitlement? My guess is that there must have been a breakdown of agreement between them and Tinubu. Not long after the animals signed their own Memorandum, a rupture soon came. One fateful day, Tortoise, with his wobbly weight and unsightly limbs, walked into the gathering of his colleagues. His gait immediately provoked laughter among them.

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Miffed by this rank rupture of a gentlemanly agreement, Tortoise, notorious for his trickster traits, reached for his pouch of trickery. He immediately hid himself behind a twig of trees not too far from the animals. From there, he dug his limb into the soil and spattered loose soil on the fur coat of Fox. Angered, Fox spat on the Lion whom he wrongly believed was responsible for this. Lion roared, his mane fluffing in indescribable fury as the whole forest shook in a seismic burst. He then charged at Fox who he assumed was responsible for breaking this taboo. In the pandemonium that ensued, Lion and Fox mistakenly stomped on the tail of the Cobra, breaking his spinal cord. As a last minute revenge, Cobra spat his venom which immediately temporarily blinded the two. The fight was so intense that both Fox and Lion inflicted fatal wounds on each other’s jugular. In no long a time, the bodies of the three giants of the forest lay in a heap, in a mutually assured destruction.

In the folklore told by the trio of Epo Akara, Olunloyo and Olagunju, the eventual tragedy of the quartet was similar. Olagunju explains the tragedy thus: “As to cause of death, Lion died from a fatal snake bite, Fox from being torn to pieces by His Royal Majesty, the Lion, whilst Cobra had his vital backbone crushed in the scuffle. The battered tortoise hobbled away quite amused but not before having his back shell broken when the lion squashed it, in a mad rush after receiving a snake bite.”

Since the 1914 amalgamation of the Southern and Northern protectorates by Lord Lugard, the two regions have worn their fatal flaws on their lapels. While the south, first port of call of white colonialists, took its Westernism to the extreme, the north prides itself in how it weaponizes its magisterial understanding of the calculus of power.

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Why did Dalhatu, Abdullahi and other sons of Ahmadu Bello who railed at Tinubu last Tuesday feel they were entitled to their bile? The north always feels it holds the ace in Nigeria’s murky and voodoo demographic politics. The crisis from the 1962 census was part of what eventually led to the military putsch of January 1966.

The territorial politics that happened in Kaduna last week is the type the north has always used to transform ethnicity into an identity. It does this for the sake of aiming to gain political power. The weapon of actualizing this is demographics. This was hoisted a few weeks ago when the rump of CPC in the APC hoisted a nebulous 12 million votes with which it hoped to whip Tinubu into line. Since the British began attempts at a nationwide population census, it had always faced the accusation that it planned to favour its northern quisling ahead of the south. The south claims that the whole population exercises in the north is a sham, buoyed by the amorphous Purdah system where enumerators are forbidden from entering delineated harem homes wherein is written “Baa siga, gidanaore ne” – entrance barred because it is inhabited by married women.

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Accusation of sudden inflow into Nigeria of nationals of Niger, Chad and contiguous countries surrounding the north is also rife in enumeration time. The aim of doing this is to bloat population numbers for the sake of securing more government funding and political representation.

Since 1999 when the 4th Republic commenced, as each election cycle is afoot, the north takes Nigeria into inter-ethnic tensions while hoisting the primacy of its ethnicity. This politicized ethnicity made Goodluck Jonathan run from pillar to post to satisfy the region in 2015. It was all to no avail. Jonathan flew to Sokoto to establish the nomadic school. I doubt if that school ever functioned till today. His fatal nudge was to think education was the problem of the North. He was wrong. Continuation of a feudal hold on the Talakawas is it. Jonathan brought on board his government elites of the Ahmadu Bello’s progeny. It failed to rouse the region in his support. The north was rather obsessed with bringing its most vacant-minded son to administer Nigeria. From 2015 to 2023 of Muhammadu Buhari’s administration, he kept on nourishing that same barren path of prejudicing northern elite ahead of rescuing northern children from ignorance of Almajiri. The result is the metastasis we have today of insurgency. The roam-abouts of yesterday have come of age, equipped with burning fury against their elite captors.

I agree absolutely with Kaduna State governor, Uba Sanni, that it will be unfair for the north to blame its backwardness on Tinubu. From July 28, 1966 when it took over power, except for the accident of history that produced Olusegun Obasanjo in 1976, northern leaders have consistently and woefully failed to provide a future for the north. It was the lack of the will to combat the vermin of roam-about, born-trowey children – apologies to Mrs. Patience Jonathan – that birthed and energized the incubus of Boko Haram and allied insurgent activities in the north. How can Tinubu be victimized for this? On this violence affliction which the north brought upon Nigeria, this country has spent trillions of Naira of annual budgetary allocations, as well as martyred thousands of its soldier children, in service of decades of this elite fatal flaw.

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I am interested in knowing how northern son, Buhari, fared in taming insecurity in his eight years rule, as compared to Tinubu’s two years, to warrant Dalhatu’s blame. Dalhatu’s allegation is that, under this government, “the North remains under siege, with insurgent groups multiplying and attacks becoming increasingly deadly.” How much of Dalhatu’s “widespread violence — including massacres, bombings, kidnappings and cattle rustling” which he said “has crippled economic and social progress across the region” did Buhari tackle? What was the percentage of Buhari government’s funding of agriculture, education, infrastructure and healthcare, and implementation of policies that promote equitable development across the country? When Buhari sat in Aso Rock for eight years picking his teeth, how much of this territorial politics did the north play? Only statistics can trump the mashed potato of rhetoric and impassioned arguments of the north.

Like the intense fight of Fox, Lion, Cobra and Tortoise and its attendant mutual infliction of fatal wounds, the north’s card of politicized ethnicity has a potential of a mutually assured destruction. As the bodies of the three giants of the forest lay in a heap, the moment Tinubu finds a way round the north’s territorial politics, he will, like Tortoise, though bruised, walk away from its self-inflicted wounds. When some of Ahmadu Bello’s progeny’s brown-noses argue that since 1999, the north has spent less years in the Villa than the south, as rationalization for the region to again be in office in 2027, they make one want to puke. It is a self-serving argument. The question to ask is, is the period from 1966 to 1999 no longer part of Nigeria’s history? In other words, did Nigeria start in 1999?

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UNICEF Urges Women To Breastfeed Babies Within One Hour Of Birth, Warns Against Breastmilk Substitutes Usage

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The United Nations Children’s Fund has called on pregnant women in Borno State to initiate their newborns into breastmilk consumption within one hour of birth

Speaking during the flag-off event of the 2025 World Breastfeeding Week on Saturday in Maiduguri, the state capital, the UNICEF Chief of Maiduguri Field Office, Francis Busiku, stated that only 35.5 per cent of children in Nigeria were initiated to breastmilk within one hour of birth, and only 28.8 per cent were exclusively breastfed

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According to him, this year’s theme, “Prioritise Breastfeeding: Create Sustainable Support System”, highlights the urgent need to prioritise actions and systems leading to equitable access to breastfeeding, especially for vulnerable women in rural and conflict-affected areas.

READ ALSO:How UNICEF’s Initiative Changes Narrative Of Access To Healthcare Services In Bauchi

He said, “Only 35.5 per cent of children in Nigeria were initiated to breastmilk within one hour of birth, and only 28.8 per cent were exclusively breastfed.

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“Every child born in Borno State deserves to be initiated to breastmilk within one hour of birth, exclusively, breastfed for the next six months of life and continue breastfeeding for up to two years and beyond”

Francis also warned against the use of breastmilk substitutes and unsafe water, while noting that it poses a serious health risk to infants

The use of breastmilk substitutes and unsafe water in our communities can pose serious risks to the health of infants. It is therefore critical that the state enacts, enforces, and monitors the International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes to protect children and promote breastfeeding,” he advised.

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READ ALSO:Polio: UNICEF Engages Traditional Rulers To Ensure Vaccine Compliance

He emphasised that breast milk provides all essential nutrients infants need in the first six months and offers maximum protection against illness and supports health growth and development

The UNICEF boss further called on the Borno state government and stakeholders to strengthen maternal protection polices, increase funding support, revitalise baby-friendly initiatives and prioritise community-level nutrition interventions.

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“Together, through strategic partnerships, innovative approaches, and sustained commitment, we can transform breastfeeding practices across Borno state. UNICEF remains steadfast in its support to the government and partners in this vital vision”, he concluded.

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NBA Slams Niger Gov Over Shutting Down Of Radio Station

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The Nigerian Bar Association has called on the Governor of Niger State, Mohammed Bago, to immediately withdraw what it described as an unconstitutional order shutting down Badeggi FM in the state.

The NBA President, Afam Osigwe, SAN), in a statement on Saturday, emphasised that only the National Broadcasting Commission had the legal authority to regulate or shut down broadcasting operations in the country as anything contrary will amount to press gagging.

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The Association urged the governor to rescind his directive ordering the immediate closure of the privately owned Badeggi 90.1 FM.

It stressed that the action, reportedly carried out through instructions to the State Commissioner of Police and the Commissioner for Homeland Security, allegedly involved profiling the station’s owner and marking the premises for demolition.

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The statement read, “This constitutes executive rascality of the highest order. It is a blatant abuse of power that undermines constitutional democracy and the rule of law. The Governor lacks the constitutional or legal authority to revoke broadcast licences or shut down any media establishment. In Nigeria, only the National Broadcasting Commission has the statutory mandate to regulate broadcasting, including the suspension or revocation of licences, subject to due process.

“It is imperative to state that the Commissioner of Police or any security agency must not act on unlawful executive directives. Security agencies are bound by law to act within constitutional limits and not as instruments for political intimidation or media suppression.

“The Nigerian Constitution guarantees freedom of expression under Section 39, including the right to own, operate, and access media. No person, regardless of office, has the right to arbitrarily restrict or shut down a media house without due process of law. This unlawful closure, without regulatory sanction or judicial backing, is a dangerous assault on press freedom and democratic governance.”

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The NBA further stated that Governor Bago’s directive is entirely unlawful and of no legal effect.

READ ALSO:What May Change As Lagos Tenancy Bill Passes Second Reading

Osigwe maintained that the Commissioner of Police and other relevant authorities must refuse to implement illegal orders that infringe on constitutional rights, reiterating that media regulation must follow due process through established statutory mechanisms, not arbitrary executive action.

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The Association also noted that the actions taken against Badeggi FM constitute a direct affront to press freedom and violate Nigeria’s democratic norms.

We call on Governor Bago to immediately withdraw this directive and refrain from further unconstitutional acts. The NBA also urges all levels of government to uphold the rule of law, respect constitutional boundaries, and protect the freedom of the press. A free and independent media is not a privilege – it is a constitutional right and a cornerstone of any democratic society,” the statement read.

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