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Boko Haram insurgents have killed soldiers at a military formation at Mandara-Girau, in Biu local government area of Borno State.

 

Mandara-Girau is located few kilometers away from Biu town.

 

Security sources revealed that the attackers stormed the military location in the early hours of Friday and opened fire on the troops, amidst heavy rainfall.

 

He said the terrorists who came in a very large numbers took the troops unawares and caused a heavy casualty.

 

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“They killed nine soldiers and injured several others, and they were all beheaded,” he said.

 

He said that part of the formation was overrun by the suspected Boko Haram terrorists.

 

In a 1 minute, 38 seconds video clip obtained by this reporter, copses of eight soldiers were seen covered with blankets on the ground.

 

The military is yet to issue an official statement on the matter.

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President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has commended the growing impact of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated Real Estate Investment Fund (MREIF), which has delivered ₦128 billion in affordable mortgages to 1,859 Nigerian families across 25 states under the Renewed Hope Agenda. 

 

The beneficiaries, spread across all the geopolitical zones, have accessed mortgages of up to 20 years at a fixed interest rate of 9.75 per cent per annum with a 10 per cent minimum equity contribution, providing a pathway to home ownership that has largely been unavailable to many Nigerians for almost six decades.

 

According to President Tinubu, one of the biggest barriers to home ownership in Nigeria has been the absence of affordable long-term mortgage financing.

 

"For years, many Nigerians could afford monthly rent but could not access the type of financing required to purchase a home. That reality kept countless families out of home ownership and limited their ability to build lasting assets. The progress recorded by MREIF shows that with the right policies, strong institutions and effective partnerships, we can expand access to home ownership and create opportunities for more Nigerians to build wealth through asset ownership," President Tinubu said.

 

Beyond the mortgages already delivered, the Fund has unlocked ₦221 billion in total property value and supported the delivery of 475 housing units through offtake guarantee projects.

 

With an average mortgage beneficiary age of 42 years old, MREIF reflects strong demand among working Nigerians who have historically faced limited access to affordable long-term mortgage finance. 

 

President Tinubu also noted that MREIF is one of several complementary engines driving a wider housing transformation under the Renewed Hope Agenda, working alongside the Renewed Hope Cities and Estates Programme and the financing interventions and social housing programmes of Family Homes Funds Limited.

 

He stressed that affordable mortgage finance is what converts completed units into genuine home ownership, closing the loop between construction and access.

 

For nearly six decades, Nigeria struggled to build a mortgage market capable of providing affordable long-term housing finance at scale. MREIF, a ₦1 trillion housing finance platform whose pilot phase comprises ₦250 billion in concessionary and commercial funding, was established to help close that gap by mobilising long-term capital for mortgage lending through a combination of government support, private sector management and institutional investment.

 

Building on the Fund's early achievements, the administration expects further capital mobilisation to support increased mortgage lending, deepen participation by institutional investors and expand access to affordable housing finance across the country.

 

MREIF is sponsored by the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and managed by ARM Investment Managers Limited. MREIF's Series 2 commercial issuance is rated AAA by Agusto & Co. and AA by GCR Ratings, reflecting strong market confidence in the Fund's structure, governance and long-term sustainability.

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Nigeria has endured military juntas, oil shocks, and the occasional bout of democratic brigandage. What it has rarely endured, at least not with such consistency, is a government so exquisitely thin skinned that it treats a returning writer as a national security emergency. Yet here we are. Professor Okey Ndibe, acclaimed novelist and academic, arrived in Lagos from the United States, only to be intercepted by the State Security Service (SSS), an agency that increasingly resembles a paranoid concierge desk for the presidency. In a country besieged by bandits, kidnappers, and economic freefall, President Bola Tinubu and his administration has decided that the real threat to national security is a writer whose most dangerous weapon is a well sharpened sentence. This is not governance. It is insecurity with epaulettes.

 

Nigeria has never lacked strongmen. What it lacks, chronically, embarrassingly is strong institutions. And nothing illustrates this better than the spectacle of the SSS, ever eager to impress its political masters, pouncing on Ndibe at the MMIA in Lagos with the enthusiasm of a regime that mistakes intellectuals for insurgents. The SSS’s justification that his arrival was “suspicious” is the sort of bureaucratic gibberish that authoritarian regimes deploy when they cannot be bothered to invent even a convincing lie. Nigeria is a country where terrorists roam highways with impunity, but the security services have decided that the real menace is a bespectacled professor with a carry on bag. This is not a state defending itself. It is a state afraid of its own reflection.

 

The Tinubu government, which came to office promising renewal, has instead revived the oldest tradition in Nigerian politics: the criminalization of criticism. The civic space is shrinking not by accident but by design. Journalists are harassed, activists surveilled, and critics treated as if they were plotting a coup rather than writing an op ed. The SSS behaves less like a domestic intelligence agency and more like a hypersensitive palace guard, forever scanning the horizon for insults. The SSS has embraced this new ethos with missionary zeal. Its officers now behave like nightclub bouncers, deciding who may enter the country without offending the president’s ego. Their methods are crude but effective: detain first, justify later, apologize never. The arrest of Ndibe is merely the latest entry in a long and embarrassing ledger. He has been detained under Jonathan, under Buhari, and now under Tinubu. The governments change; the insecurity of the Nigerian state does not.

 

The arrest of Ndibe is not an aberration; it is a policy signal. Nigeria’s rulers have always been allergic to dissent, but the Tinubu administration has elevated this allergy into a governing philosophy. The president’s supporters insist he is a democrat. His security services behave like they missed the memo.

The logic is depressingly familiar: a journalist publishes an uncomfortable truth; arrest him. An activist organizes a protest; detain her. A writer returns home; detain and interrogate him. This is not the behavior of a confident government. Tinubu, once a self styled defender of civil liberties, now presides over a republic where the state’s first instinct is coercion. His administration has discovered that it is easier to intimidate critics than to govern competently. And so, the SSS, that relic of military rule, has become the blunt instrument of a government that mistakes fear for authority.

 

The SSS claims that Ndibe’s repeated detentions, stretching back over a decade, are the result of an outdated watchlist. This explanation is as insulting as it is implausible. Nigeria can redesign its currency overnight, but it cannot update a spreadsheet? The country can deploy soldiers to polling stations, but it cannot delete the name of a harmless professor from a database? The more credible explanation is that the Nigerian state maintains a mental blacklist of its critics; and that list is updated with far more diligence than any official record. Ndibe’s real crime is not subversion but memory. He remembers too much, writes too clearly, and refuses to flatter power. In a country where amnesia is a political virtue, this is unforgivable.

Authoritarian regimes have always feared writers. They fear the permanence of the written word, the stubbornness of ideas, the refusal of truth to stay buried. Nigeria is no exception. The state’s hostility toward intellectuals is not ideological; it is psychological. A government that cannot govern resents those who can articulate its failures. Tinubu’s Nigeria is becoming a place where criticism is treated as sabotage, dissent as destabilization, and intellectual independence as a national security threat. The arrest of Ndibe is a warning shot, not at him, but at the entire Nigerian intelligentsia. The message is simple: think carefully before you think aloud.

 

Nigeria still holds elections, but the substance of democracy is evaporating. A free press cannot function when journalists are arrested. Civil society cannot thrive when activists are surveilled. Intellectual life cannot flourish when writers are detained at airports like smugglers. Tinubu inherited a fragile democracy. He is now presiding over its suffocation. The tragedy is not merely political; it is civilizational. A country that treats its thinkers as threats is a country that has given up on progress. Nigeria’s problems: insecurity, unemployment, corruption, institutional decay, require ideas. Instead, the government is busy intimidating the people who produce them.

 

The detention of Okey Ndibe is not about him. It is about a government that has lost confidence in its own legitimacy. Strong governments tolerate criticism. Weak ones fear it. Tinubu’s administration has chosen fear. Nigeria deserves better than this thin skinned authoritarianism. It deserves a government that understands that democracy is not maintained by silencing critics but by earning their respect. Until then, the SSS will continue to detain writers, and Nigeria will continue to detain itself; trapped in a cycle of insecurity, paranoia, and intellectual impoverishment.

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“Thank God it is over” 

“Yes oh. Now, Arsenal players and their fans can now allow all of us to rest. They have their Premier League trophy. PSG have taken the Champions League. History made on both sides. Heroes made.” 

“Who is talking about Arsenal or PSG? Why is it that you, Nigerians are always so unpatriotic? Before you think of your own country, you are more concerned about what is happening in other parts of the world. When I say it is over, I am referring to the party primaries that have just been concluded in Nigeria’s political space. The INEC deadline expired on May 30.”

“Oh, I see. But it is not correct to say it is over. The correct thing to say is that Nigeria is now on a path to a new beginning, a return to high-wire politics that could have serious implications for the future. The end of the primaries is merely the commencement of warfare which Nigerian politics is.” 

“Yes. Yes. I know that there will be fall-outs. After all, there have been very loud complaints about the mode of the primaries, consensus arrangements that marginalized many eligible participants and direct primaries that were openly rigged, shamelessly too. And I dare say, no party is innocent.” 

“Well, well, well, I have not heard of any complaints from the African Action Congress which chose Omoyele Sowore by popular acclamation, Accord Party which announced Gbenga Olawepo-Hashim, the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) that selected former Governor Donald Duke, Governor Seyi Makinde’s Allied People’s Movement, Action Democratic Party where you have Aliyu Bin Abbas, and of course the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) which produced Peter Obi. In these parties, the choice of the flagbearers has been relatively peaceful. It is only in the APC, the PDP, and the ADC that we have had controversies.”

“Not true. There have been issues in all the parties. And this is the point that Minister Wike was making during his media chat on TV yesterday. He said those politicians in ADC and NDC who claim they know how to run Nigeria are all liars, because ordinary party primaries they could not even organize successfully.”

“Are you still taking that one serious?” 

“But he has a point. No opposition party has been able to show that their party is better than the APC. We are faced with the same of the same.  Wike is right to laugh at them.”

“Peter Obi, the ADC Presidential candidate has promised to generate 10, 000 MW of electricity in 4 years of the single term that he is proposing. He will also empower MSMEs and address youth unemployment. That is something different.” 

‘I beg. Is power generation the problem? Electricity is a value chain. How about transmission and distribution? How about tariffs, liquidity? Leakages, wastages. And where were you when failed aspirants in the Democratic Leadership Alliance (DLA) and the Labour Party (LP) were asking for a refund of monies paid into the party’s coffers. In Imo State, one APC aspirant wept openly and on social media claiming that he had spent over N100 million to buy forms for the House of Representatives slot only for the party to impose a woman who never bought any form. He said it will never happen.”

“Did you say an APC aspirant?” 

“Yes, from Owerri”

“If he knows what is good for him, he will keep quiet and sulk in silence. The ticket belongs to the party. Even the aspirant that challenged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for the APC Presidential ticket is now singing his praise. And what does your Imo friend want the 14 lawmakers in the Lagos State House of Assembly who have been sent away to do, and all the Ministers who resigned their positions to run for one elective office or the other. Maybe only one of them succeeded. The Godfather system that they run in the APC simply means you have to obey and accept whatever you are given by the powers-that-be.”

“But that is not democracy. That is tyranny.” 

“Who told you there is a universal model of democracy?”

“There are principles.” 

“I know. Take the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) founded by countryman Senator Seriake Dickson. The party is now the beautiful bride. That is why Peter Obi and Dr Kwankwaso left the ADC and ran there.”

“Wike says Peter Obi is a food-is-ready politician! He will run to any party that others have worked hard to build.” 

“Don’t mind him. They are all the same. What I am saying is that for you to join the NDC, you have to go to Seriake Dickson’s house. To get an expression of interest form, you also have to go to his house. Major meetings are also held in his house, except may be the party’s convention and that must have been due to reasons of space. That too is democracy. And look at Wike. He gave a directive to events owners and hoteliers in Abuja not to allow any “illegal political groups” to use their premises, otherwise their licenses and land titles will be revoked. The David Mark faction of the ADC fought back but the Turaki faction of the PDP ended up holding their event at an open field. I guess that too is democracy.” 

“No, that is against the principles of fair play and equal access. But what do you think will happen now?”

“To be honest, I see a lot of confusion. So much uncertainty. Out of 22 registered political parties, only 11 have announced their Presidential candidates. I doubt if anyone has made any submissions to INEC 

by the deadline of May 30.  The deadline for moving from one political party to the other was set at May 10. Long after that deadline, we have now seen politicians moving from one party to the other.  Babachir Lawal for example has dumped the ADC. Senator Ovie Omo-Agege has moved out of the APC in protest to join the NDC.”

“I believe this is because of the two conflicting judgements in the Federal High Court. Abuja Division. Youth Party vs INEC by Justice Mohammed Umar and SDP vs INEC by Justice James Omotoso. INEC has since gone to the Court of Appeal and has applied for a stay of execution. Meanwhile, everything is in abeyance. Even the lawyers are taking one side or the other, offering conflicting interpretations.”

“Whether we like it or not, Nigeria’s 2027 general elections will be determined by the courts, not by the voters. Look at the confusion in the parties, especially the ADC which has three factions, three Presidential candidates – the Nafiu Bala Gombe faction with Chris Uba, the Kachikwu faction with Dumebi Kachikwu and the David Mark-led faction with Atiku Abubakar. Then the PDP with two factions, two Presidential candidates – the Wike faction with Senator Sandy Onor and the Kabiru Turaki faction with President Goodluck Jonathan.” 

“I don’t even understand why President Jonathan will allow anybody to drag him into this state of confusion. He is an international statesman. He is a man of stature, widely respected locally and internationally. He should stay above partisan politics.” 

“Wike says nobody drags anybody into politics. It is only when you show interest that people will come and offer you what they think you want.”

“The way you keep quoting Wike this, Wike that, I hope there is nothing.  You better don’t waste your time. Wike no send anybody oh. But I agree with you on President Jonathan. He is legally eligible, constitutionally and by all means as recently decided by the Federal High Court of Justice Peter Lifu. But it is not advisable for him to get involved in the PDP crisis. There are two Federal High Court cases in contention: the Court of Justice Uche Agomoh in the Ibadan Division, and the court of Justice Joyce Abdulmalik at the Abuja Division on the basis of which INEC recognized the Wike faction. Wike served President Jonathan as Minister of State over 10 years ago. No. No. No. He cannot be seen to be dragging anything with his own subordinates. He is too distinguished for that.” 

“But in the United States, President Trump left office and he still came back and was re-elected. In Ghana, President Mahama left and returned.”

“The situations are not so similar. President Tinubu vs President Jonathan. It will look too messy. It will be too complicated. There is also the constraint of time. We are just about seven months to the elections. Not enough time to mobilize.”

“I think that there is even more than enough time. With the right momentum, 24 hours is a long time in politics. I imagine that with the seven months gap ahead, many politicians will even run out of cash. Many will sell their grandparents homes to keep up with the unrelenting pressure of campaigns and politicking. I even hear that it is Tinubu sponsoring Jonathan. But if I were President Jonathan, and I want to dare everything, I will choose a man like Nasir El-Rufai as my running mate.”

“Stop making suggestions that will not work and do not make sense. Why would President Jonathan want to dare everything? He is not that kind of person. He will not do anything to disorient the country because of personal ambition. He is a leader, not a food-is-ready politician.” 

“Then let him issue a strongly worded statement to dissociate himself from partisan politics. No, thank you are three simple words in English. Let him come and say that he is not running for office in 2027.”

“Okay then, let us just sit down and look. But by the way, did you go to Ijebu Ode for the Ojude Oba after Sallah?”

  “No. But I followed everything on social media. Very impressive as usual. The colour. The Equestrian displays, the pageantry and the paraphernalia, even in the absence of the Awujale. I like the fact that the festival is community-based and family-based as well and many families stood up to be counted: the Adesoyes, the Kukus, the Adeshiles, the Ashirus, and there was enough space for the traditional societies, the Regberegbes to promote Ijebu nationalism. The good thing is that other Ijebu communities are beginning to have similar celebrations: in Ososa, Ijebu Igbo, and Ago-Iwoye for example. Nigerians have a way of stealing laughter from the jaws of despair. Think of the Durbar in Ilorin and the Bariki Sallah celebration in Bida All good.” 

“I also enjoyed the Ojude Oba, I liked seeing the King of Steeze, Farooq Oreagba and his son in action. But what I could not figure out was one woman who showed up this year, Toyin Olushile, whom they called the Queen of Steeze, all the way from New York City. She had a big tobacco pipe in her mouth and she was puffing smoke into the air like a locomotive train.  I did not find that funny. The Ojude Oba should not be used to promote smoking of any type. There are children involved and they are watching.” 

“Well, it was all part of the show. But talking about children, this past weekend was a sad one for me.” 

“Me too.  I watched the video of Mrs Alamu pleading for help, from captivity, and my heart sank. I saw her husband, a Professor, kneeling down and pleading with the Oyo State Government to do something to rescue all the 46 children and teachers in captivity, and I felt for him. In Borno state, Askira Uba Local Government, 45 students were also abducted. Same day, May 15, in the same coordinated fashion. Something sinister is happening.”

“Governor Seyi Makinde has tried. He went to the community to empathise with the people. The Federal Government has also sent a delegation. What I do not understand is why the state and the Federal Government had to respond separately. They could have co-ordinated their efforts. Nobody should play partisan politics with human lives. Governor Makinde went to the community on Saturday. The Federal Government delegation showed up on Sunday in a helicopter. The politics was too obvious.” 

“Yes. Both the states and the Federal Government should always work together. Human lives are at stake in Oyo, in Borno and other parts of the country.” 

“I really couldn’t enjoy the UCL Champions League final.”

“Forget about Champions League. The Super Eagles were playing in the Unity Cup finals against Jamaica at the Valley Stadium in London, the same day. They defeated Jamaica, 4 -0. You are here talking about Arsenal and PSG.”  

“Congratulations to the Super Eagles. Gunners ForEver!”

“How about Enugu Rangers?”.

“Rangerrs. Who are they?” 

“They won the Nigerian Football League.”

“Oh. Sorry. Never heard of them.” 

“Of course”.  

 

 

 

   

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Buhari to Speak at Chatam House on Thursday, 26th February

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The presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), General Muhammadu Buhari has confirmed that he will honour his speaking engagement at the Royal Institute Of International Affairs, Chatham House in London scheduled for Thursday 26th February.

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