Governor Ahmadu Fintiri of Adamawa State has appointed the Emir of Fufore, Muhammadu Ribadu, as the Amirul-Hajj and leader of the government delegation for the 2025 Hajj trip to Saudi Arabia.

A press statement to this effect said the appointment is based on Ribadu’s hard work, experience, and commitment to religious matters.

The statement, signed by the Chief Press Secretary to Fintiri, Mr Humwashi Wonosikou, named five other members of the delegation.

The members include Muhammad Buba Jidjiwa, Ahmed Shehu, Alhaji Ibrahim Abba, and Alhaji Abubakar Murtala

The secretary of the delegation is Alhaji Mohammed Dabo.

“Governor Fintiri charged the committee to be dedicated to their assignment, ensuring a hitch-free 2025 Hajj operation,” Mr Wonosikou stated.

[DailyPost]

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has temporarily suspended several types of visas for citizens of Nigeria and 13 other countries, as part of measures to curb unauthorized pilgrimages ahead of the annual Hajj.

According to Saudi authorities, the suspension aims to prevent unregistered individuals from attempting the pilgrimage without official permits, which poses safety and logistical challenges.

While Umrah visa holders will still be allowed entry until April 13, the broader visa suspension is expected to remain in place until mid-June, when Hajj concludes.

Under Saudi Arabia’s quota system, each country is allocated a limited number of Hajj permits, typically distributed via a lottery. 

However, due to the high cost of official packages, many resort to unauthorized travel arrangements.

Such unregistered pilgrims often lack access to essential amenities such as air-conditioned tents, healthcare services, and emergency medical care—making the physically demanding journey even riskier.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry stated that the visa restrictions are intended to streamline travel procedures and enhance safety during the Hajj.

It also warned that individuals found residing illegally in the Kingdom could face a five-year entry ban.

During the 2024 Hajj season, at least 1,301 pilgrims died – most from heat-related causes. The majority of the deceased did not hold official Hajj permits.

Here’s the list of the 14 countries affected by Saudi Arabia’s temporary visa suspension ahead of the 2025 Hajj:

1. Nigeria

2. India

3. Pakistan

4. Bangladesh

5. Egypt

6. Indonesia

7. Iraq

8. Jordan

9. Algeria

10. Sudan

11. Ethiopia

12. Tunisia

13. Yemen

14. Morocco

[TheNation]

President of Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, said the country is undergoing a “popular, progressive revolution” and not operating under a democratic system.

He added that it is difficult to pinpoint a country that has developed practising democratic rule.

Traore made the disclosure during a flag-raising ceremony at the Koulouba Palace last week.

He said, “If we have to say it loud and clear here, we are not in a democracy, we are in a popular, progressive revolution. 

He criticised the notion that democracy is a prerequisite for development, saying it is “false” to believe any country has developed under a democratic system.

“It is impossible to name a country that has developed in democracy. Democracy is only the result,” Burkina24 quoted him.

He maintained that his government would continue to communicate, explain, and make people understand what revolution is.

Traore has been notable for his decisions after his emergence as the President of the West African country.

The 37-year-old President who assumed office in September 2022 through a coup de’tat that ousted interim President Paul-Henri Damiba recently rejected Saudi Arabia’s offer to build 200 mosques in his country.

He urged the Islamic country to rather invest in essential infrastructure projects that would directly benefit his people.

[Punch]

Mikel Arteta has no doubt that Arsenal can upset Real Madrid on the “biggest night” of his career in the Champions League quarter-finals.

The Gunners have never been crowned European champions and face the 15-time winners in a quarter-final at the Emirates on Tuesday with the return leg in Madrid next week.

The two sides have met only twice in European competition, in the last 16 of the 2005/06 Champions League where Arsenal came out on top.

“It is 100 percent the biggest night of my career,” Arteta, in charge at the Emirates since 2019, told reporters on Monday.

“That’s why I came into football, and that’s why I came into management and especially to this football club.”

The Spaniard, who also captained Arsenal, added: “It’s been 20 years since we had this type of game and for us, it’s a great opportunity to build our own story and this is what we’re here for.

“The excitement around the club, the people, and the magnitude of this match. This is the stage we want to be at, and where Arsenal has to be consistently. We are very proud to be there, and now be very ready tomorrow to deliver.

“At 8:00 pm (1900 GMT) tomorrow night, 11 players, 60,000 fans, I am really super-convinced that we are ready to win and to beat them. That’s the mindset that I want.”

The Champions League represents Arsenal’s best chance of a trophy this season, with the Gunners 11 points adrift of leaders Liverpool in the Premier League.

Arsenal were beaten at the same stage of the Champions League last season by Bayern Munich.

But Arteta, expected to start Bukayo Saka for the first time in more than three months on Tuesday, said it was time to write a new script.

“There is a massive gap there for so many years when nothing has happened in this football club in relation to European competitions,” he said.

“And we need to change that, and we need to change that quickly. It is just the first leg, but the intention of the team and what we want to achieve tomorrow is very clear. We’re going to go for it.”

Jurrien Timber and Ben White, who played an hour in Arsenal’s 1-1 draw at Everton on Saturday, are both set to be available, with Jakub Kiwior a possibility to line up alongside William Saliba in the absence of the injured Gabriel.

AFP

The largest banks in Africa excel in cross-border operations and lead the way in adopting and adapting to new technologies. Their strong financial foundations and extensive global networks ensure they remain key players in Africa’s Top 100 Banks 2024.

South Africa’s Standard Bank Group has consistently retained its position as Africa’s top bank, with the National Bank of Egypt holding firmly to second place for the fourth consecutive year. Standard Bank also leads in profitability, reporting a net profit of $2.7 billion—an 18% increase from the previous year.

Morocco’s Attijariwafa Bank has made significant gains, rising three places to third position after boosting its Tier 1 capital by 12% to reach $6 billion.

In contrast, many of Africa’s other leading banks have seen declines in their core capital compared to the 2023 rankings. The sharp depreciation of Nigeria’s naira against the US dollar has had a notable impact, as banks report financials in local currency.

Nigeria’s top-ranked bank by Tier 1 capital is FBN Holdings (First Bank of Nigeria), currently in 15th place with $1.9 billion, down one position from last year. It’s followed closely by Access Bank in 16th and Zenith Bank in 17th, the latter having dropped from 12th place, where it had been the highest-ranked Nigerian bank.

The top banks in Africa include Standard Bank Group (South Africa, tier 1 capital of $12.5 billion), National Bank of Egypt (Egypt, tier 1 capital of $7.5 billion), Attijariwafa Bank (Morocco, tier 1 capital of $6 billion), Absa Bank (South Africa, tier 1 capital of $5 billion) and Banque Centrale Populaire (Morocco, tier 1 capital of $5 billion).

Others are Banque Misr (Egypt, tier 1 capital of $5 billion), FirstRand (South Africa, tier 1 capital of $5 billion), Nedbank (South Africa, tier 1 capital of $5 billion), Banque Extérieure d’Algérie (Algeria, tier 1 capital of $3 billion) and Bank of Africa – BMCE Group (Morocco, tier 1 capital of $3 billion).

[Vanguard]

 The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB), on Monday, announced that it has uncovered at least 585 A/Level forged certificates in 2025 alone.

This startling revelation was made by the Registrar, Prof. Is-haq Oloyede, during a virtual meeting with staff of the Board held on 2nd April 2025 in preparation for the 2025 Mock-UTME and UTME.
Prof Oloyede condemned the worrisome prevalence of fake A/L certificates, stating that it was to curb the menace that the Nigeria Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (NIPED) was established.

NIPED is a platform for managing and collecting data related to post-secondary education in Nigeria.

According to the Jambulletin, the Registrar noted that more worrisome and heart-rending was the upload of 13 out of these forged JMB certificates by the Professional Registration
Centres (PRCs) which are being
investigated.
He stated that out of the 13 cases being investigated by the police, four culprits have been apprehended and are currently assisting the police and relevant authorities towards apprehending the ringleaders of these examination cartels.

He, however, added that the investigation  revealed that there were internal collaborators in the institutions aiding cases and abetting this gross misconduct.

The Registrar also disclosed that there were reports from some CBT Centres on extortion of candidates for services expected to be free, adding that this mind-boggling revelation were not too good for the system.

He, therefore, enjoined staff to be
committed to their duties and shunned those acts that could undermine the integrity of the Board.

[Daily Independent]

The presidency has refuted claims of a shake-up in the leadership of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

A tweet on Monday by Daniel Bwala, special adviser to the president on policy communication, said there is no truth to the rumours that Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman, has been removed from office.

“The story trending across media platforms to the effect that Mr President @officialABAT has either sacked the INEC chairman or has replaced the INEC chairman is not true and should be discountenanced,” Bwala wrote.

“Decisions and or official acts of Mr President are communicated through official channels and not the rumour mill.”

Similarly, O’tega Ogra, senior special adviser to President Bola Tinubu on digital and new media, noted that any official announcement regarding a change in the electoral body’s leadership would be made through proper government channels.

“The Nigerian public should disregard any fake news making the rounds about the replacement of the INEC chairman,” he wrote.

“Any such announcement will come from the SGF’s office or any other appropriate official source.”

The clarification comes amid heightened social media speculation on changes at the electoral commission.

[TheCable]

Speaking ex tempore can be quite challenging especially when the issue you are raising is quite germane, and you might not be able to speak to its nuances on the spur of the moment. Thus, when Professor Antonia Simbine, the Director General of the National Institute for Social and Economic Research (NISER), visited my office as the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission (FCSC) most recently, the cumulation of our discussion veered, not surprisingly, towards policy architecture, local research outputs and Nigeria’s productivity profile.

When I, therefore, made the argument that there is a crucial disconnect between local research outputs and Nigeria’s policy space—that “our experts’ output (are) gradually (becoming) irrelevant and consigned to publications and for individual promotion and professional development and not as input into the public policy making process”—I was not attempting to generate a soundbite that would generate notoriety.

On the contrary, I was simply alluding to a national reality that requires more analysis to unravel its critical nuances. My statement to the press only provides a partial picture of what is really wrong with the policy-research nexus in Nigeria. This contribution is simply a modest attempt to build on my statement as a measure of recognition of the significance of the subject matter.

A significant dimension of my institutional reform concerns has always been the policy-research nexus that could be energised by the town-gown. The policy-research linkage refers to the relationship between policy makers and the academia that strengthen strategic policy intelligence and the need for critical problem-solving in governance.

My policy-engaged research advocacy derived from the belief that Nigeria’s development planning and management has a lot to benefit from a reinvented town and gown symbiotic relationship. This belief has a historical basis in the immediate post-independence period when Nigeria was struggling to put together a development structure that will serve as the basis for good and democratic governance.

This instigated a community of practice that brought academics and scholars into key conversations around the academic and administrative implications of policy designs. The consequence was the development of significant action research hub that stimulate policy intelligence for the government and its policy-making capacities.

This community of practice is what brought the likes of the late Profs. Ojetunji Aboyade and Akinlawon Mabogunje, and Dr Pius Okigbo, into critical policy conversation with Simeon Adebo, Allison Ayida, Ahmed Joda, and the public administration/public service structure into policy-research-industry complementary relationship that government regularly drew upon for its development thinking.

From what we now regard as the golden age of public administration in Nigeria to the present struggle to make sense of democratic governance, a lot has gone wrong both with the policy-making architecture, Nigeria’s higher education dynamics and the significance of research and development (R&D) as the fulcrum for enabling action research and ultimately the policy-research nexus.

There is one obvious culprit that undermine the framework that enables policymakers and researchers/academics collaborate to facilitate policy-research linkage that deploys the trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of public policy research to ground development planning and good governance.

This culprit is the government’s anti-intellectual posture along the line which takes researchers, think tanks and research institutes as interlopers and non-significant actors in the policy process rather than as critical partners and stakeholders. This is a charge that should not be taken lightly. It is one that has been borne out by my entire professional trajectory as a public servant with a significant interest in studying the intellectual basis of public administration in Nigeria, and its interface with academia and other intellectual resources available to the government in terms of its policymaking function and service delivery requirements.

My intellectual and professional tutelage under Aboyade and Mabogunje, for example, also further accentuated how the public service could be rabidly reactionary against every attempt at facilitating collaboration with the academia and research dynamics.

This is despite the cogent evidence of the role of the town and gown in molding the successes of the Adebo-Udoji up to the era of the Gowon’s super-permanent secretaries in public administration—a situation that got to a height during the IBB era and still subsisted under the Abacha administration with the National Economic Intelligence Committee (NEIC), headed by the late Prof. Sam Aluko. Unfortunately, the commencement of Nigeria’s democratic experiment in 1999 has failed to undermine this anti-intellectual posture and ignite this policy-research collaboration.

There are several consequences deducible from this posture. The first is that the many research institutes, think tanks and tertiary institutions have no visible influence on Nigeria’s policy articulation in ways that qualitatively transform the policy intelligence of government.

A recent study carried out on Nigeria’s sixty-six research institutes paints a very dismal picture of systemic, operational and structural challenges that undermine the contributions that these institutes could make to policymaking. The same can be said for the over two hundred and fifty public and private universities in Nigeria.

This state of affair leads to the second implication of the government’s anti-intellectualism: the failure to ground the framework and protocols of their policymaking practices on economic and statistical rationalities. This implies that successive Nigeria governments plan economic and developmental processes without the benefits of statistical analyses and scenario intelligence that the action and empirical researches of the research institutes, think tanks and tertiary institutions could have provided. This was the crux of Prof. Wolfgang Stolper’s stricture regarding his development experience in Nigeria between 1962 and 1968.

In his book, Planning without Facts: Lessons in Resource Allocation from Nigeria’s Development (1966), Stolper decries the situation where the government articulated development plans within framework of a weak data and statistical culture that could make the development process an evidence-based practice.

Development therefore becomes an arbitrary process of depending on a series of short-run decisions and planning that limits the extent of scientific prediction. This paucity of statistical and data parameters is one of the most singular reasons why the trajectory of Nigeria’s development planning, from the first NDP (1962 to 1968) to the 1992-1994 rolling plan, has impacted good governance for Nigerians. 
To be continued tomorrow.

Prof. Olaopa is chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission.

The House of Representatives has issued a reminder to Rivers State Sole Administrator, Vice Admiral Ibokette Ibas (retd.), emphasizing that he lacks the constitutional authority to make laws or draft a budget for the oil-rich state.

Naija News reports that the House’s stance follows Ibas’s announcement of plans to prepare a new budget after the declaration of a state of emergency in the state in March.

In an interview with Punch on Sunday, the Deputy Spokesman for the House, Philip Agbese, clarified that the Sole Administrator does not have the mandate to perform legislative functions under the current circumstances.

“The Sole Administrator does not have the authority to carry out the National Assembly’s function of making laws under the current circumstances.

“The Speaker of the House, Tajudeen Abbas, is consulting with the leadership of the House to establish a committee to oversee the administrator’s activities and ensure that the interests of Rivers State are represented,” Agbese said.

Agbese further explained that the House of Representatives had already communicated their position on the administrator’s appointment and mandate to President Bola Tinubu.

He warned that if the Sole Administrator oversteps his constitutional boundaries, the House would take necessary actions, including the possibility of a vote of no confidence, to ensure adherence to the rule of law.

The political situation in Rivers State, stemming from a crisis between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and the Rivers State House of Assembly, prompted President Tinubu to declare a state of emergency in March. This move resulted in the suspension of the governor and the state legislature for an initial period of six months.

In place of Governor Fubara, Tinubu appointed Vice Admiral Ibas as Sole Administrator. Last week, Ibas revealed his intention to formulate a new budget to manage the state’s affairs for the next six months.

While hosting a delegation of the Rivers State National Assembly caucus, Ibas reiterated his commitment to the people of the state and outlined his plan for the new budget.

He said, “Since the Supreme Court verdict on the state’s budget, we have acted swiftly and decided to put together a new budget that reflects our commitment to healthcare, education, social services, and continued infrastructural development.”

Ibas emphasized that the new budget would focus on creating job opportunities and investing in key sectors such as agriculture, infrastructure, and technology.

“We understand the urgency of this initiative, and we are committed to ensuring that they are implemented without delay,” he added.

The Sole Administrator stressed that the budget would be transparent, inclusive, and expedited to improve the lives of the citizens. He also assured that the process would not lose any more time in making the necessary investments in the state’s future.

[NaijaNews]