The Coalition of Public Interests Lawyers and Advocates, COPA, has called for the arrest of popular Nigerian artiste Mr. Oladapo Oyebanjo, aka D’Banj, following an allegation of rape against him by Miss Seyitan Tayo, NAN reports.
Recall that Tayo had accused the singer of sexual assault which according to her, happened in 2018.
Following the development, the ‘Koko Master’ corona who denied the allegation describing it as “lie from the pit of hell” slammed Tayo with an N100 million defamation suit demanding an apology in four national dailies or risk legal action.
However, on Thursday there were varying reports of Seyitan allegedly arrested and threatened by Dbanj’s camp.
This did not go down well with some Nigerians who accused Dbanj of obstructing justice and intimidation on social media and equally prompted the Inspector general of Police l Mohammed Adamu, to order an investigation into the case.
Reacting, Mr. Patrick Odey, Director, Human Rights and Gender, at COPA in a statement released on Wednesday urged the Nigeria Police to allay the fears of ordinary Nigerians in its handling of rape matters in the country.
According to him, the coalition wondered why Tayo (the victim) should be detained instead of D’Banj, the accused.
He also commended the timely intervention of the Inspector General of Police, IGP, Mr. Mohammed Adamu, noting that time had come for every Nigerian to rise up to the challenge and bring rapists to justice.
“We welcome the forthright and timely intervention of the Inspector General of Police, who has since ordered a comprehensive investigation into this matter.
“This directive is timely given the individuals involved and the peculiarity of the issues therein, as well as the ugly times we live in as a nation where incidences of rape and other gender-based crimes are rampant.
“The intervention of the IGP is satisfying and assuages risen public fear before now that the instrumentality of the Nigeria Police Force had been hijacked by the bourgeoisie class of the Nigerian polity to protect the musician.
“Speculations of manipulation and partiality in the investigative process especially given the status of the alleged offender in comparison to the victim, but the directive of the IGP is, to say the least, reassuring and highly welcomed,” he said.
Odey further stated that the delay in inviting the alleged offender for the purpose of interrogation in pursuance of the investigation ordered by the Inspector General leaves much to be desired as regards the public perception of the process.
He noted no one should enjoy special treatment over any other especially within the sector of crime detection and justice delivery in the country.
“Justice must not only be done but must also be manifestly seen to be done, and for us at COPA, the manifest path of justice extends to the conduct of investigations and the treatment of the parties.
“It will be a fair play if there will be a transparent and visible investigation to ensure that a proper, dispassionate and comprehensive investigation into the allegations was conducted without considering the personality involved,” he added.
The All Progressives Congress has dissolved its National Working Committee.
The decision was reached at the National Executive Council meeting held on Thursday.
Bashir Ahmad, an aide to the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), tweeted, “Following the recommendation of President Muhammadu Buhari, the National Working Committee (NWC) of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has been dissolved.”
A 43-year-old father has been arrested for allegedly raping his 3-year-old daughter while his wife was in the hospital to deliver their child.
Mr Ikechukwu Ekenta, from Ikeduru- Ogwah, Mbaitolu Local Government Area of Imo state, is accused of defiling his daughter, Kamsiyochukwu Ekenta on 28th of April 2020, when her mother put to bed.
Narrating her ordeal, little Kamsimyochukwu, who is 3 years and 10 months old, said her daddy put his “komkom” (Penis) inside her private part while she was asleep. She said the pain woke her up.
Speaking at the Professor Dora Akunyili Women Development Center, Awka, the alleged rapist Mr Ikechukwu Ekenta said he was pushed by an evil spirit to commit the act.
He said whenever the spirit possesses him, he starts behaving abnormally. He said that on that fateful day, he used his finger to defile the girl as the urge came.
The wife of the alleged rapist, Mrs Uzoamaka Ekenta, while explaining how she found out, said that on her return from the hospital, she noticed her child was acting like she was in pain while bathing her. She questioned the girl and she accused her dad of penetrating her.
Mrs Ekenta said she asked her husband what transpired and he admitted committing the crime but claimed he used his finger. They took the girl to the hospital where it was noticed that he used his penis, not his hands as he claimed.
She stated that she complained to her husband’s parents but they threatened to deal with her if she tells anyone.
The Commissioner For Women And Children Affairs, Lady Ndidi Mezue reacted to the incident. She said it is an abominable act, condemnable in all ramifications. She added that the child is still in pains.
Lady Ndidi said that on receiving the information from the whistleblower, they rushed to the residence of the rapist at 33 area near Onitsha and apprehended him together with the help of the men of Department of State Services. She said he will face the full weight of the law.
“Even the obstacles on my way, I predict them before those that will bring them will start to think about them. I plan for betrayal, I plan for backstabbing, I also plan for reunion & forgiveness long before they happen.I expect nothing, I expect anything, I expect everything”- Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
My dearest Jagaban,
You know very well that I have always liked and respected you. You will also recall that a few years ago I warned you that everything that is being done to you today would eventually be done to you given the choices you made at the time.
I bear you no malice or ill-will but in view of what is happening in your political party and given the fact that your good friend, co-conspirator and collaborator, President Muhammadu Buhari, has finally thrown you under the bus and dumped you, I am constrained to write the following.
The bitter truth is that you predicted NOTHING and you saw NOTHING. The only thing you saw were your own vain delusions and insatiable greed and the only thing you felt and that moved you was your blind ambition.
You sold your body, spirit and soul to the enemy and betrayed your people even though we warned you over and over again that those you were dining with were far smarter and far more astute than you.
Yet even though all the signs were there you dismissed our concerns, vilified us, treated us with contempt, demonized us and sought to destroy us.
Now the chickens have come home to roost and the writing is on the wall. The signs are there for all to see. You betrayed and sold Lagos. You betrayed and sold the South West. You betrayed and sold the South East. You betrayed and sold the South South. You betrayed and sold the Middle Belt. You betrayed and sold the North East. You betrayed and sold the North West. You betrayed and sold the Muslims and you betrayed and sold the Christians.
Simply put you betrayed and sold EVERYTHING and EVERYONE in Nigeria just to feed and satisfy your psychotic obsession and compulsive ambition.
Like Icarus the Greek, you flew too high and too close to the sun with your wax wings, puffed up and fuelled by your hubris and pride and now you shall meet your nemesis. The spiritual wound that has been inflicted on you is irreversible and terminal and there is no going back.
The dark clouds that lie ahead of you are thick, ugly, frightful, violent and impassable: you cannot make it through them safely or survive them. Your enemies have dug a pit for you and you have already fallen into it.
They have finally stripped you naked, grabbed you by your balls and taken everything from you.
You have lost your mystique, honor, glory, self-respect, following, clout, pride, reputation and so much more. You have also lost control of the political party that you conceived, formed, nurtured and built. The APC was your baby and now they have taken it from you and are set to kill it.
They fooled you, used you, dimped you and humiliated you and now they are going to expose you, rubbish you, malign you, break you, crucify you, investigate you and utterly crush you.
You dreamed of being Vice President in 2015 and you failed. You are dreaming of being President in 2023 and you will fail.
In all your plans what you failed to appreciate is that God alone rules in the affairs of men. You refused to acknowledge or accept the fact that the Presidency of Nigeria can only be given by God and He gives it to whom He deems fit by prophecy and divine decree.
It is not about money and power and if it were Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’adua, Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari, who had neither of the two before being respectively elected as President, would never had made it.
It is about God and God alone. It is for Him alone to give. It is about His purpose, His will, His counsel, His plan and His glory.
He OWNS the Presidency and the minute any man or woman attempts to usurp His role and think that he or she can buy it or manoeuvre his or her way into it by the usage of political intrigues, guile, sagacity, wisdom, power, knowledge, money or anything else, the Lord disqualifies and rejects him.
Such a person will fail woefully and may even end up losing everything he or she values and cherishes in his futile quest.
God will never share His glory with anyone and He will never support a man or woman that is prepared to mislead, betray and sell his own people down the river just to satisfy his vaulting and insatiable ambition of becoming President.
Yet the signs were there but you refused to acknowledge or accept them.
They refused to give you a formal position in the National Executive. They ensured that some of your key loyalists in the South West turned against you and opposed you.
They refused to accept even ONE of your Ministerial nominees both in 2015 and 2019. They humiliated your protegee who you nominated as Vice President and turned him into a pliant and pathetic little errand boy with no testicular fortitude or shame.
They drove your nominee at FIRS out of office unceremoniously and have placed him under criminal investigation.
They have divided the ranks of your loyalists and turned even your hitherto most trusted lieutenants against you.
They insulted, undermined, marginalised you openly and worse of all they made it clear to you privately that they would NEVER give you power.
All this meant nothing to you and you shamelessly continued to support their evil ways and toe their satanic and murderous line.
Yet if you did not care about what they subjected you to you ought to have at least cared about what they did to Nigeria.
For the last five years our nation and people have suffered because of the calamitious choices that you made and the inexplicable and unconciable alliances that you forged.
You propped up and supported a ruthless, heartless, corrupt, bloodthirsty and cruel regime and tyrant and a President that is clearly beside himself and whose mental and physical faculties reside in another realm and in another world.
Consequently our nation has been utterly and completely destroyed, our economy ruined and our people decimated.
They have been slaughtered, butchered, pauperised, emasculated, humiliated, marginalised, insulted and impoverished.
Hundreds of thousands of them have been murdered in cold blood in their homes, towns, villages and farms and millions have been displaced.
Millions more have been ruined and economically destroyed whilst our country remains weak, divided and the butt of cruel jokes all over the world.
Because of your choices Nigerians are being subjected to persecution, physically attacked, enslaved, humiliated, lynched, scorned, maimed, killed, disgraced, evicted and declared persona non grata both at home and in distant foreign lands whilst our foreign Embassies are being demolished by miscreants and local criminals even in supposedly friendly countries.
I sincerely hope thet one day you will reflect on all this and consider the damage you have done to your kinsmen and compatriots.
Whether you do or not is left to you but one thing that is clear: for the choices you have made, for all you have done and for the sheer wickedness and greed that resides in your insensitive and dark heart you will pay a heavy price both in this world and in the world to come and the Lord will hand you over to your political enemies.
Permit me to conclude by quoting the instructive words of a tweet that I posted just yesterday after I heard about the latest developments in your party. I wrote,
“First Oshiomole is kicked out by the Court of Appeal. Then his preferred replacement, Ajimobi, falls into a coma. Then his arch rival, Giadom, is recognised by Buhari as National Chairman.
Conclusion: it is over for Tinubu. He has been thrown under the bus and retired from politics!”
I stand by those words. Happy retirement my dearest Jagaban: may you live long to see the glory of our country restored and the damage that you have done to our people repaired. Shalom.
A US court has upheld a verdict that talcum powder sold by Johnson & Johnson caused ovarian cancer and ordered the pharmaceutical giant to pay $2.1 billion in damages, AFP reports.
The decision by the Missouri Court of Appeals cut by more than half the $4.4 billion a jury had awarded 22 people in 2018.
The court agreed that some of the plaintiffs should not have been included in the case as they were from outside the state. But the Tuesday decision upheld the awarding of damages for the company “knowingly selling products that contained asbestos to consumers.”
“Because defendants are large, multi-billion-dollar corporations, we believe a large amount of punitive damages is necessary to affect this case,” the judgement said.
“It is impossible to place a monetary value on the physical, mental and emotional anguish plaintiffs suffered because of their injury caused by defendants.”
A spokeswoman for Johnson & Johnson said the company would appeal the decision in the Supreme Court of Missouri, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Johnson & Johnson has faced thousands of lawsuits across the United States alleging it failed to warn consumers of the risk of cancer from asbestos in its talc-based products. I
In 2019, a California jury became the latest to award millions in damages to a plaintiff who said the company’s baby powder had given her terminal cancer.
Last month the firm announced it was discontinuing production of its talc-based baby powder in the US and Canada, in part due to the “constant barrage of litigation advertising” over the product. It will continue to sell the product in the rest of the world, it added.
Novak Djokovic is the world’s best tennis player. Indeed, he is probably the best the game has ever seen.
Yet his credibility as the leader of the men’s tour is shot to pieces after the catastrophe of the Adria Tour where as at yesterday, four attendees had tested positive for Coronavirus.
The four people were Djokovic’s personal trainer, a coach and two high profile players, Borna Coric and Grigor Dimitrov.
Despite the outbreak of the virus resulting from the controversial tour, Djokovic returned home without taking a test to confirm his status because he showed no symptoms.
Grigor Dimitrov positive test on Sunday night however led to emergency testing of players who participated in the tour in Croatia. Results released today reveal that Novak Djokovic tested positive for the Coronavirus.
The men’s world number one tennis player confirmed the diagnosis in a statement.
In April, Djokovic had revealed he was an anti-vaxxer – and that it could get in the way of his return to competitive tennis once the sport resumes after the coronavirus pandemic.
Following the increasing cases of coronavirus in the country, the federal government has warned the state governments against the reopening of schools because of pressure from the children and parents.
Nigerian Tribune reports that the minister of state for education, Chukwuemaka Nwajiuba, who spoke on Monday, June 22, while reacting to questions at the daily briefing of the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID-19, also said the Federal Ministry of Education did not give Oyo state any guidance to reopen schools.
It was gathered that Nwajiuba said he was particularly concerned about the spike in the confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Oyo state, saying it was Ogun state under lockdown that was actually the concern of the government.
He, however, announced that the final year students preparing for the West African Examination Council (WAEC)’s Senior Senior Secondary School Examination (SSCE), National Examination Council (NECO) and National Business and Technical Education Board (NABTEB) examinations would soon be allowed to resume for revisions.
He appealed to parents and other stakeholders to continue to bear with the government while the situation is being monitored so as to guarantee the safety of children when the schools are eventually reopened.
The minister said: “The ministry of education did not give guidance to Oyo state to reopen schools. We also think that is a little bit of contradictory because if you look next to them is Ogun state that actually had a lockdown.
Lagos governor reveals when schools will likely resume “So, there is no reason why there should be more numbers in Oyo state than there are in Ogun state, where we thought we had the problem. Something is not okay in that respect.
However, Oyo state like all other sub-nationals have Governors and under our Constitution, governors are responsible for their states. “You may have heard from our interactions with you that out of 774 local governments in Nigeria, there are actually few LGs with a lot of this burden.
Therefore, it is very easy to get perception from the edges of the country that some things are not happening, because it is not happening within your immediate locality.”
Nwajiuba, however, said that the primary purpose of government is the security of its citizens, stressing that public health was key and primary in the security delivery.
He said this was why the government has been extremely conscious of making any pronouncement around the reopening of schools.
He insisted that the education sector owns the largest number of infrastructure in the country with 138,000 primary schools around the country.
The minister noted that Nigeria has not even gotten into optimal testing and could not even forecast the hazard the pandemic is most position at, saying the least government could do was to keep the children he described as the most pride and future of Nigeria under lock and key.
He added that when the government was sure to release them, it would gladly do so.
The Lagos state police command has released an official statement on the murder-suicide incident that happened in the state on Sunday, June 21.
Spokesperson of the state police command, Bala Elkana, in the statement released, said the state Commissioner of Police, Hakeem Odumosu, has ordered a thorough investigation into the matter.
Read the press statement below
On 21/06/2020 at about 1600hrs, Ilasan Police Station received an information that, a couple identified as, Olamide Alli ‘f’ 25 years old and Chris Ndukwe ‘m’ 39 years old were found dead in the man’s residence at road 5, House 16a, Victory Point Estate, Ilasan. A team of homicide detectives was deployed to the scene and the crime scene was preserved for forensic analysis.
The woman was found laying in the pool of her blood with deep cuts on her head. The man’s mouth was foaming with whitish substance. It is alleged that the man stabbed the woman to death with kitchen knife and thereafter drank some poisonous substance suspected to be insecticides Two blood stained kitchen knives, two empty bottles of the poisonous substance, three empty cans of red bull energy drink and a pair of pliers were recovered from the scene. The two corpses were removed and deposited in a public mortuary for autopsy.
Information gathered from some family members revealed that the couples were in relationship for over seven years, though not married, have two boys, ages 7 and 3. The relationship is described as complicated, as the couples were on and off over the years. While the man lives in Victory Point Estate Ilasan, the woman lives in Ogba. The woman is said to have visited the man alongside her 22 years old sister, a night before the incident, on his invitation. Her sister was the first to have noticed that the couples were dead and raised alarm.
In her statement, she was woken up by a loud music from the room where the corpses were found, as herself and the kids slept in a different room. It is not yet clear what might her triggered the murder.
The Commissioner of Police Lagos State, CP Hakeem Odumosu psc has ordered a thorough investigation into the case.
The Federal Government has summoned the Chargè d’ Affaires of the High Commission of Ghana to Nigeria, Ms Iva Denoo, over the demolition of parts of the Nigerian embassy in Ghana.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, made this known on Monday.
The minister noted that Nigeria had asked the envoy to give an “urgent explanation” on the recent attacks on apartments in the country’s High Commission in Accra.
He tweeted, “Summoned the Chargè d’ Affaires of the High Commission of #Ghana to Nigeria, Ms Iva Denoo to demand urgent explanation on the recent attacks on a residential building in our diplomatic premises and reinforcement of security around diplomatic premises and staff.”
The PUNCH had earlier reported that some unidentified armed men attacked the building in Accra, the capital city on Friday, demolishing some apartments under construction.
The building was being constructed to house staff and visiting diplomats to the High Commission.
Both the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments had condemned the attack.
In its reaction, the Ghanaian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration in a statement said unidentified individuals allegedly breached the premises of the Nigerian High Commission and demolished the property under construction at about 10.30 p.m.
“The Ministry views with concern this development which is a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.
“Investigations are ongoing to unravel the facts of the matter and bring the perpetrators to book.
“Meanwhile, the Ghanaian government has beefed-up security at the said facility and the situation is under control.
“Whilst expressing regrets over the incident the Ministry wishes to reassure the Diplomatic community in Ghana and the Nigerian High Commission in particular that Ghana remains a law-abiding country.
“Ghana upholds the principle of the rule of law, where due process is followed at all times.
“The government will, therefore, not relent on its primary obligation to guarantee the safety of members of Diplomatic Corps in Ghana,” the statement said.
