The Nation Newspaper

Tag: floor

  • Rivers: Amaechi, Peterside floor Abe, Odike, supporters

    The Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, and the Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), Dr. Dakuku Peterside, yesterday floored the lawmaker representing Rivers Southeast Senatorial District, Senator Magnus Abe; the Deputy Chairman of All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers State, Chief Peter Odike; and their supporters.

    Odike, Abe and their teeming supporters across the 23 local government areas of Rivers State, on Friday, celebrated the motion on notice, in a suit filed by Felix Mboi, an ally of Abe, to stop yesterday’s ward congress of the APC in Rivers, with APC; the National Chairman of the ruling party, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun; Rivers Chairman of the APC, Chief Davies Ikanya; and the state Secretary of the party, Chief Emeka Beke, as defendants.

    Amaechi, who is the leader of APC in Rivers and the Southsouth zone, and Peterside, the deputy leader of the party in the state, who was the 2015 governorship candidate of the APC, however declared in separate interviews in Port Harcourt that they were not aware of any court order or injunction retraining Rivers APC from conducting yesterday’s ward congress.

    Our reporter who monitored the ward congress in Port Harcourt and some parts of Rivers confirmed that the election (ward congress), using Option A-4, took place peacefully and orderly across the 319 wards in the state, with impressive turnout of members.

    Abe, yesterday evening in Port Harcourt, in an online statement by his Spokesperson, Parry Benson, however, claimed that there was no ward congress of the APC in the 23 LGAs of Rivers State yesterday.

    He also stated that there was no stakeholders’ meeting before the scheduled ward congress, as promised by the leadership of APC in Rivers.

  • 500,000 pupils sit on floor in Kaduna, says commissioner

    Kaduna State government has offered explanation on the declaration of state of emergency in the education sector.

    It said it was necessitated by 16 years of neglect.

    The Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Dr. Shehu Usman Adamu, said the government adopted six-week emergency measures to rescue the sector from collapse in the interest of stakeholders and the future of the state.

    He lamented in a statement issued in Kaduna and made available to reporters that about 80 per cent of the 4,200 public primary schools were in a dilapidated condition.

    “More than half of the 1.106 million pupils sit on bare floor and the teaching force, which is understaffed, consist of over 40 per cent non-qualified teachers. The 349 public secondary schools are not in a better condition,” Adamu said.

    He said the Malam Nasir El-Rufai administration waded in with reforms capable of standing the test of time by recruiting about 2,226 teachers in English language and the sciences.

     

  • Alexander lies on the floor most times

    •Parents of boy suffering from cerebral palsy seek financial assistance

    Parents of Master Alexander Denwosu, a three-year old boy suffering from cerebral palsy, a form of paralysis caused by injury to the brain, have appealed to Nigerians for financial assistance to help save the boy. His father, Prince Ikenna Denwosu, an unemployed graduate, said Alexander cannot hold his neck upright, unfold his palms, sit down, crawl or walk, and lies on the floor most of the time.

    “It was when he was four months old that we noticed that he was a bit dull and not playful as expected of a new born child,” Denwosu recalled. After visiting the Primary Healthcare Centre in Iju, near Agege, Lagos, the Denwosus were referred to the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Idiaraba, Lagos, where the boy’s ailment was diagnosed as cerebral palsy. “We were advised to keep coming for physiotherapy and that it would take some time to get him to start moving his muscles voluntarily and gradually learn to begin to do those things he cannot do like keep his head upright,” the boy’s father said.

    But, after six months of taking Alexander to LUTH weekly and there was no change in his condition, the family stopped going. Subsequently, Denwosu and his wife, Peculiar, who are from Osisioma-Ngwa, in Abia State, decided to relocate to Aba, the Abia State commercial nerve centre, to ease the burden of taking care of the boy.

    Denwosu went on: “At Aba, we continued the therapy at the Abia State University Teaching Hospital. This was when we began to feel the weight of the financial cost of the treatment. This was when they asked us to do a Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) test on the boy, to determine if there is any damage to the brain. As we speak, we have not been able to come up with N100, 000 for the test”.

    He said they were spending N10, 900 for the physiotherapy and about N1, 000 for transport per visit to the hospital every fortnight in Aba.

    They have spent about N6, 000 weekly for six months in Lagos before moving to Aba, he said.

    What makes the situation particularly tasking for the Denwosus is the fact that Alexander does not eat solid food. So, taking care of him is becoming a challenge for the couple who have no reliable source of income. “He takes only tea and bread or pap. We’ve tried giving him other types of food such as rice, beans, yam and eba, but he would cry and refuse to take any other type of food given to him,” he said.

    Since they could not source N100, 000 for the MRI test, Alexander’s treatment has been suspended.

    Meanwhile, a relative told the Denwosus that another boy with a similar case was treated successfully in India. Consequently, they contacted the hospital in India where the said boy was cured and tried to find out what could be done for Alexander. “The hospital said it can handle it, but it gave us a bill of N2.5 million for everything, including the cost of air transportation and living expenses in India for the boy and his mother. Since then, we’ve been looking for how to raise the money to cure our son,” the father said, appealing to Nigerians for help to save Alexander.

    His words: “I want to appeal to Nigerians to assist Alexander, so that he can live a normal life. The challenge is that he lies on the floor most of the time. We can no longer take him out always because he is growing. The implication is that he is sometimes isolated. He wears diapers all the time because he urinates frequently and his mother is tired of washing his pants. So, buying diapers is another challenge.”

    Denwosu can be contacted on 08080788963. Well wishers have also been urged to donate generously, by paying into his account: Prince Ikenna Denwosu, First Bank 2008385275 or Diamond Bank 0046435478 or into that of his wife, Peculiar Denwosu, Ecobank 1661198616.  

  • Blood on the political floor

    Blood on the political floor

    Dynamites. Bombs. Guns. These are instruments of war. The men who made them did not have love in mind. They had strife in mind. They were designed to cause destruction of unimaginable magnitude. Try presenting a girl with gun and professing love to her on your knees and see her reaction. She will most likely be horror-stricken and pleading with you to spare her or she will simply run and assume you are mad. Really, only a mad man should profess love with gun. There is nothing romantic about it.

    Flowers, candies, chocolates and all manners of gifts are instruments of professing love. Guns, bombs and dynamites are symbols of war.

    So, when in a state, bombs go off at one spot and dynamites are evacuated from another spot, then war has either started or is about to start.

    I am afraid for Rivers State, which is home to prominent Nigerians. It has been in the news in the last few months.

    Before the recent hulaballo in the port state, calm and civility made it home after the mad moments when kidnappers and militants operated from its confine and made nonsense of security arrangements. Fear walked on all fours and it was as though the end was here.

    But a Supreme Court verdict declaring Rotimi Amaechi governor brought in an era of calm and civility and companies, such as the Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) Limited, attributed their relocation from Lagos to Port Harcourt to the security wonder wrought by Amaechi.

    But the honeymoon is over. Rivers is on the boil and there is blood on the political floor. Fire has relocated from the mountain. It has secured for itself a place on the ground and it is raging like a wounded lion.

    The recent strife became pronounced as a result of a struggle between Amaechi and some chieftains of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the control of the party structure. A court ruling eventually took the party’s structure from the governor and gave it to a group led by Supervising Minister for Education Nyesom Wike, who until he became minister was Amaechi’s Chief of Staff. He also served as Amaechi Campaign Organisation’s Director-General.

    The governor was obviously sad about the development and he made his position clear.

    The crisis got so bad to the extent that the House of Assembly erupted in violence when the minority tried to impeach the governor. Heads were broken and blood stained white garments and stained the floor.

    It got to a head when Amaechi declared for the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) and he has not stopped urging the people to vote out the PDP. We knew the battleline has been drawn, but we were not prepared for what followed next.

    Last Sunday and Monday ended on bloody notes in the state. First, a high court was bombed. Then the police the day after said it had removed an explosive device, suspected to be dynamite, at the premises of the Ahoada High Court in the state.

    The police said the device was uncovered at the court’s premises following a tip-off.

    What is significant in this is the fact that the court was expected to sit that Monday to determine the ex-parte motion filed by Otelemba Amachree, the speaker of the House of Assembly.

    Amachree, who represents Asari-Toru constituency in the assembly, filed the application last November, seeking to stop Evans Bipi, a member representing Ogu/Bolo constituency, from parading himself as Speaker of the House. Bipi, who calls Dame Patience Jonathan his god, has addressed himself as speaker since the failed attempt to impeach the governor.

    The Rivers High Court in Okehi, the headquarters of Etche Local Government Area, was also razed on Monday, with vital documents burnt and valuable property destroyed.

    Since the Sunday and Monday incidents, the PDP and APC have renewed their battle, with APC saying the PDP was working to get emergency declared in the state.

    The PDP, in turn, has blamed the agents of the Rivers government for the arson.

    Significantly, last December 18, a judge’s office and the car park in the Ahoada High Court were hit by explosions.

    Now, men speak the language of blood. Love seems old-fashioned. For those of us too young to have memories of the Biafran/ Nigerian civil war, we have read books and seen documentaries. The late Sikiru Ayinde Barrister also sang about his experience and warned that “only he who does not know war calls for strife”.

    One thing is clear though, disturbances, whether of military or civilian hue, have never brought good. No war or disagreement has ever been concluded at the battleground. The roundtable has always ended it all.

    The gladiators in Rivers must check it. No innocent blood must be shed. No head must be broken again. Democracy allows for disagreements. Go ahead and disagree, but keep the guns away; keep the dynamites away. Make Port Harcourt a romantic city, where flowers, candies and their likes are seen all over. After all, you all claim the fight is for the benefit of the people.

    But, I must add, from the look of things, my advice will not be taken. Heads will still be broken. Innocent blood will still be shed. And guns and dynamites will still be used to express the weird kind of love that Rivers is experiencing.

    My last take: God will punish whoever uses violence against the people. He will make things difficult for agents of destruction. He will destroy the plans of the evil ones and ultimately clean the blood on the political floor and make the people smile and express love with flowers and candies. And end the reign of guns and dynamites. All the people need is love! It is not too much to ask.