Flood Alert: NEMA orders immediate evacuation of communities along River Niger

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) on Monday ordered an immediate evacuation of citizens living along the River Niger plains.

In a press statement issued by the agency’s head of relations, Yushau Shuaib, NEMA said the order “comes because the dams have attained their highest water levels in 29 years which is unprecedented in the history of Jebba and Kainji hydroelectric power dams.”

Mr Shuaib said the threat has created a high risk of imminent flooding in the downstream of the river.

NEMA asked the residents of the communities along the river plain to move to higher grounds for safety.

The states at risk of the flood are Niger, Kogi, Kwara, Kebbi, Anambra and Delta.

The statement reads: “Already the agency has notified the affected states to take the necessary precautionary measures by relocating people from the flood prone areas and activated the National Contingency Plan as well as alerted all stakeholders to take necessary actions in line with their various mandates.

“The states are to ensure compliance with the threat in order to avert imminent loss of lives and properties that would certainly arise in the event of flooding.

“Furthermore, information available indicates that the gauge for monitoring the flow of water in the river has already exceeded the maximum height by over one meter.

“A rapid assessment team comprising officers of NEMA and the stakeholders has left for Jebba and Kainji to further inspect the situation.”

'Shocked' Williams wins U.S. Open final thriller

Serena Williams battled back from the
brink of defeat to claim her 15th grand
slam title and win the U.S. Open for the
fourth time with a 6-2 2-6 7-5 victory
over world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka on
Sunday.
The American added to her 2012
Wimbledon and Olympic crowns after
being pushed to the limit by the
Australian Open champion, who forced
the 30-year-old to drop her first set of
the tournament.
"I honestly can't believe I won. I was
preparing my runner-up speech
because she was playing so well,"
Williams said courtside after the match,
which lasted two hours 18 minutes.
"I'm so shocked. It's remarkable."
It was the first time in 17 years that the
women's final went the distance in New
York, and it ended Azarenka's run of 12
successive victories in matches lasting
three sets.
"Serena deserves to win. She showed
how true a champion she is," Azarenka
said. "I definitely gave it all today.
Stepping off this court I will have no
regrets."
Williams won the hard-court tournament
for the first time as a 17-year-old in
1999, but has not enjoyed much
success since her third win in 2008.
She lost in an ill-tempered final last year
and was also fined in 2009 after being
involved in another incident during her
semifinal defeat.
The former world No. 1 won the opening
set in just 34 minutes as she
threatened to steamroller Azarenka as
she has all opponents since bouncing
back from her first-round defeat at the
French Open.
However, unlike in their Wimbledon
semifinal clash in July, her 23-year-old
opponent picked herself up and
dominated the second set with some
power play of her own.
Azarenka broke to lead 2-1 in the
deciding set but was immediately
pegged back by the fourth seed.
A break to love in the seventh game put
her in the position of serving for the title
at 5-4, but Williams rallied to win the
next three games and leave Azarenka in
tears after missing a golden chance to
win her second grand slam title.
Williams took her record in grand slam
finals to 15-4, becoming the first 30-
something to win a major since Martina
Navratilova at the 1987 U.S. Open as
she claimed the $1.9 million first prize.
It was the first time since 2002 that a
woman has won Wimbledon and the
U.S. Open in the same year, when
Williams also won the French Open.
She joined her older sister Venus and
Steffi Graf as the only women to win
Wimbledon, the Olympics and the U.S.
Open in the same year.
It has capped a remarkable comeback
for Williams, who spent almost a year
out of the game following her 2010
Wimbledon triumph.
She needed surgery after cutting her
foot in a freak accident at a restaurant,
and then suffered life-threatening
complications when blood clots formed
on her lungs.

Man Stabs Girlfriend To Death For Lying About Her HIV Status

A man confessed to stabbing his girlfriend to death because she did not tell him she was HIV positive before they had sex. ‘She killed me, so I killed her’, Larry Dunn Jr, 36, told officers in Dallas, Texas, after the body of Cicely Bolden, 28, was found by her two young children returning home from school.

The 28-year-old was lying unclad from the waist down on her bedroom floor bleeding from two stab wounds in her neck. Ms Bolden and 36-year-old Dunn had recently started dating. He later told police that when she confessed to having the virus she then told him it was ‘not that bad’. He became upset and walked to the kitchen to get a knife which he used to kill her with, according to police.

Neighbor Latoya Arnett, who called 911, told Kens5: ’All I know is, she didn’t deserve it and her kids didn’t deserve to see her like that.
‘She was a good mom. Loved her kids to death. I can’t imagine my kids seeing me like that. I know it hurt them.’

During a recorded interview he admitted the crime and revealed he burned his clothes afterwards and dumped the knife in the garbage at a waffle house.
Police later recovered the weapon.

The father of Cicely’s son, Jeff Busby, told Fox that Bolden had contracted HIV within the last couple of years. He is currently looking after her son and daughter.

Speaking about Dunn, who is being held on $50,000 bond, he said: ‘I hope he rots in prison. She did not deserve this.’ Ms Arnett said she went inside the apartment and found Cicely lying on the bedroom floor.

Earlier that day, she claimed, she had seen Dunn arriving at the apartment. Stuffed teddy bear toys have been laid outside what’s now a boarded-up apartment in Highland Village Drive with candles lit in memory of Ms Bolden.

The President’s performance contract – Eze Onyekpere

In late August, President Goodluck Jonathan was reported to have signed performance contracts with his ministers. The underlying philosophy according to the Minister of National Planning, Dr. Shamshudeen Usman, is that the performance contract system focuses on three parameters: “what gets measured gets done, if you cannot measure success you cannot reward it, if you cannot measure failure, you cannot correct it”. The President said that the performance contract system are aimed at improving the quality and accelerated delivery of services to the citizenry through enhanced productivity and accountability. The idea is for the President to hold ministers to account for responsibilities assigned to them through bi-annual reports on the performance of the ministers and to gauge their performance against the background of established Key Performance Indicators. The Ministries, Departments and Agencies are to develop detailed documentation to guide the implementation of the KPIs. Undoubtedly, this is a good practice which has been deployed in many countries successfully to improve governmental performance.

However, there is a challenge in the approach adopted by the President and the ministers. The posers that quickly come to mind are; where is the public in this performance measurement initiative? How is this initiative related to the Service Delivery Initiative of the previous regime? How do we link this up to Vision 2020 and its first National Implementation Plan or even the purported Transformation Agenda of the President? What penalties will be meted out to ministers who fail to meet the cut-off point of the evaluation criteria?  It may be difficult to hazard answers to these posers because there is scanty information available to the public from official sources beyond the fanfare of the signing ceremonies covered by the media. The discourse below will focus on suggestions that will make the performance contracts effective and deliver value for money to Nigerians.

It is imperative to state that this initiative should have commenced at the swearing-in of ministers immediately after the 2011 elections. The consolation is in the adage that it is better late than not taking the step at all. For an initiative of this nature to succeed, ministers must not only be given tasks and marching orders to deliver on the assignments, they must also be provided with commensurate resources in terms of human, material, technological and financial resources. A very important part of the human resource is the political will of the President to fight corruption in high places and entrenched interests. This will provide the enabling environment for the success of the assignments given to the ministers. The President must frontally lead the fight against corruption if the ministers are to meet their targets.

Linked to the foregoing is that the performance contracts should be anchored on clear policies that Nigerians can relate with. For instance, it is expected that national targets in Vision 2020 and its First National Implementation Plan should drive the KPIs. These KPIs must find resonance in the medium term financial plans in the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and the Medium Term Sector Strategies and be properly reflected in the annual budget.

The second issue is that there must be sanctions incorporated into the performance contracts. If there are no sanctions, then the basis of the evaluation is defeated from the beginning. The normal human system rewards good performance and sanctions poor results. This is the law of nature and anything to the contrary will be a cruel joke on the people. Poor performance should lead to removal from office. The management of the evaluation by the President must remove extraneous considerations such as ethnic, religious and political sentiments, including loyalty to the party as the deciding factors in who gets sanctioned or acclaimed.
In trying to locate the Nigerian citizen in this new scheme, it is imperative that performance targets set for ministers are made known to Nigerians. We can all recall that the Obasanjo administration set a target of delivering 10,000 megawatts of electricity by 2007 under the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy. The administration failed to deliver same and every Nigerian was in a position to evaluate whether success had been achieved. There must be targets for the short, medium and long term – timeline divisions based on the time left between now and the terminal date of the administration which is 2015. The indicators of success and performance must be realistic and time-bound and could be as simple as how many kilometres of new roads we expect from the Ministry of Works in 2013 and beyond.

Since the signing of these contracts, one had expected to see copies of these contracts in the media or through any reasonable means. The contracts as they stand today are simply the President’s contract with his ministers and not popular documents that Nigerians can buy into. Indeed, it could possibly be seen as part of the family affair of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, on whose platform, the President was elected. The administration should engage the media to disseminate information on the details of the KPIs and the general evaluation criteria.

Apparently, the President distrusts the media, judging by his statement that; “ You will not depend on what the newspapers will want to write because the media today is highly politicised. Before, the media used to be the voice of the ordinary people but now, the media is the voice of those who own the media houses and those who own the media have private jets and those who have private jets are not ordinary people. So, the media is now the voice of the powerful people. So, we have to have a way of assessing ourselves.” Despite its misgivings, the administration cannot reach out to Nigerians except it engages the media. Nigerians are entitled to be in a position to evaluate the President while he is evaluating his ministers. His sense of judgement in taking decisions based on the performance contracts will definitely influence public perception of the success of his administration.

For this initiative to succeed, the administration must take budget planning, implementation, reporting and evaluation more seriously. The New Year budget must be ready for implementation on or before January 1 of every year and capital budget releases should no longer be at the discretion of any minister or authority. The administration must also fast-track reforms that have been recommended by a rash of committees it has set up and stop foot-dragging on white papers that demand urgent implementation. On the part of non-state actors, we must help the government to succeed by holding it accountable to the myriad of promises it has made. We must come to the realisation that impunity and governmental performance are not and cannot be twins. We must begin to demand ceaselessly for the removal of ministers who have failed in the tasks assigned to them. We must revisit and insist on the prosecution of all economic saboteurs. We must also insist on due process in all its ramifications in every facet of public life.

- Eze Onyekpere, a lawyer,  is the Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice, Abuja. He wrote in via censoj@gmail.com

Behold, Nigeria`s True National Heroes and Heroines | List of 2012 Olympic Champions – Eno Hanson

The Olympic and Paralympic games
have come and gone; below is the list
of our heroes and heroines who, made
our country proud:
Yakubu Adesokan (WR) – Gold,
Esther Oyema (WR) – Gold,
Joy Onaolapo (WR) – Gold,
Folashade Oluwafemiayo (WR) – Silver,
Grace Anozie – Gold, Ivory Nwokorie –
Gold,
Loveline Obiji – Gold, Ifeanyi Nnajiofor –
Silver,
Ikechukwu Obichukwu – Silver,
Anthony Ulonnam – Silver,
Lucy Ejike – Silver,
Eucharia Iyiazi – Bronze and
Victoria Nneji – Bronze.
Our Paralympics team set 4 new World
Records; won 6 Gold, 5 Silver and 2
Bronze medals. 13 medals in total.
I humbly call on all corporate
organizations in Nigeria; the MTNs,
Glos, Airtels, Etisalats, Guiness,
Dangote, Banks et al to celebrate these
heroes and heroines, the same way
they have celebrated our stars like P-
Squared, Genevieve, Davido; and
legends like Kanu Nwankwo.
I also plead with celebrities, politicians,
bloggers, friends and aides to top
executives in the corporate world, to
assist us, through endorsements and
sponsorship, to celebrate our heroes,
for they have shown us that we can
excel irrespective of our physical,
mental or emotional challenges.
To these heroes and heroines, I HAIL
THEE and pray that the God of my
fathers give you the honor, respect and
recognition you deserve. God bless

South Korean film Pieta wins at Venice Film Festival

South Korean film Pieta, about a brutal debt collector, has won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

The best actor award was split between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix for The Master.

Inspired by Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard, the film also picked up the Silver Lion prize for best director.

Directed by Paul Thomas Andersen, The Master tells the story of a sect leader who takes a war veteran under his wing.

Hoffman, who also collected Phoenix's award, said: "Joaquin Phoenix is a life force in this film ... and I kind of rode that life force and that was my performance.

"It was really riding his life force because it was something that was untameable and my job was to try to and it was almost impossible, which is kind of the movie."

He also praised Anderson, who was not at the ceremony, calling him: "Friend first, collaborator second. And he happens to be one of the great film-makers."


Philip Seymour Hoffman collected all the awards on behalf of the film
Pieta, directed by Kim Ki-duk, centres on a debt collector who is forced to examine his life when a woman turns up claiming to be his mother.

On accepting his award, Ki-duk sang a song to the audience while thanking the jury.

Speaking after, he said: "This is a song that we Koreans sing when we are sad, when we feel alone, when we feel desperate, but also when we're happy."

The Venice jury, which was headed by US director Michael Mann, picked Hadas Yaron for best actress for Fill the Void, a film delving into the life of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.