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Six family members including a couple who got married three months ago, has reportedly pass away in a gas expløsion.

The elders of the family was 54 years while the youngest was 28 all died in the tragic incidence.

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Many times, people have wondered how the kidn+ppers and other bandits who are causing untold mayhem in the country, manage to get away, even after they are captured on videos, recorded on other devices and most of all when they make contact with their victims’ families, Vanguard News is reporting.

Senate President of the Nigerian Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, Henry Okunomo has expressed deep worry that in this age of tech advancement and the height Nigeria has attained in technological development, kidnappers could make contact with a victim’s families without being rounded up by security agents the next minute.

A worried Okunomo who appeared on television recently to discuss the issue of his abducted colleagues, appeared frustrated and clearly expressed dissatisfaction with the way security agencies are handling the matter. He said: “I am not satisfied with the way security agencies are going about the matter. The government cannot tell me there is no other way this kidnapping thing can be nipped in the bud. After all, there are several measures already in place, why are they not working?”

The measures Okunomo was referring to, included the SIM card registration which the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC carried out in 2011; the Nigerian Identity Number, NIN enrolment, which the National Identity Management Commission, NIMC began in 2015; the NIN-SIM Registration exercise which the Federal government carried out in 2020, involving the NCC, NIMC and the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN; and even the NigComSat-1R Communications satellite which the country shot into the orbit since 2012.

These measures, according to the government, were mainly to improve National Security by strengthening the capacity of Law Enforcement Agencies to tackle criminal use of mobile phones by checkmating activities of criminals. They were also to help simplify verification process and thus enable more secure transactions and interactions using mobile devices boosting confidence and participation in the digital economy; and also to improve governance and service delivery by providing accurate data for policymaking, facilitate secure access to E-government services online, as well as aiding in the implementation of social programs

However, despite all these measures, bandits, and kidnappers operate recklessly. Victims’ accounts at different times suggest that either the measures are not effective or someone in a position of taking action is complicit in the crimes.

In Zamfara State, a kidn+p victim, Mallam Yushau Jangeme, was reported to have said security agents in his village, Jangeme, did nothing to trace the telephone calls of the bandits who kidnapped him. According to the publication, Jangeme said, at the time bandits kidnapped seven people in his village and he was contacted to bring ransom before they could be freed.

According to him, when he got to the forest to give kidn+ppers N1.4m out of N3m demanded, they detained him, saying he must bring the remaining N1.6m. All these happened irrespective of him having made available the phone numbers of his kidnappers to security agents before heading into the bush.

One of the reasons the NCC took a hard stance on the deadline for NIN-SIM linkage was to fulfil its objective to clean the country’s SIM ownership database and ensure that criminals could not take advantage of having multiple unlinked SIMs to carry out their nefarious activities. Yet, the situation appeared not to have abated. But the Commission insists the fault is not from its end. A top official at the Commission who craved anonymity told Saturday Vanguard: “Yes, we were adamant on the deadline of the NIN-SIM linkage because of several d+ngerous security trends we discovered. Our resolve hinged on the need to close in on the chaos of untoward ownership of multiple SIM cards with unverified NIN details. We had instances where a single individual had over 10,000 lines linked to his NIN. In some cases, we have seen a single person with 1,000 lines, some 3,000 plus lines. What were they doing with these lines?

From our interim findings, the owners of these lines did not purchase them for decent purposes or to undertake legitimate activities. We gave them enough time to make the decision of which of their lines they wanted to keep and discard the others. They did not. All lines in this category with unverified NINs were barred.

“On the issue of kidnappers making calls to victims’ families without being traced, I don’t think that power is residual in our hands. What we know is that whatever support the security agents have sought from us, as far as the national security question is concerned, we have always given to the best of our ability. Our duty is not to track and arrest people who make calls rightly or Also, a reliable satellite Engineer at the Nigerian Communications Satellite Company, NIGCOMSAT LTD, who didn’t want his name mentioned, told Saturday Vanguard that the onus of taking action on whatever the communications satellite reveals, in terms of crimes, is squarely at the doorsteps of the security agencies, adding that, the door of the company has always been open to them for valuable information that aid their operations ® He said: “One of the misconceptions about our satellite is people believing that it will snap photos or record videos of crime scenes and send them to security agents, but that is not how it works.

“Although NigComSat -1R is a communications satellite, it is not equipped with cameras. It gathers data and digital footprints which on demand, we usually make available to security agencies that can also read and interpret them effectively. So people should not think that because crimes are happening unabated, the satellite is not working or performing its duties” he added.

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Nigerians has shared their opinions about their Igbo male compatriots and their ability to ‘plant their s3eds’ all over the world.

They said Igbo are the one God was referring to when he said, we should go and multiply because there is definitely no country you will not find an Igbo man married to a woman from another woman such as Igbo-Pakistani, Igbo-Japanese, Igbo-Taiwanese, Igbo-Indian, with other married to Russians, Australians and etc.

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The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) has announced plans to hand over the operations and maintenance of the Warri Refining and Petrochemical Company and the Kaduna Refining and Petrochemical Company to private operators.

This decision is geared towards engaging reputable and credible Operations and Maintenance (O&M) companies to manage these facilities more effectively.

This was revealed in a statement released on Friday, August 30, 2024, through NNPCL’s official handle on X.

The Warri Refinery, located in Delta State, was commissioned in 1978 and is a complex conversion refinery with a nameplate distillation capacity of 6.25 million metric tons per annum (MTA), equivalent to 125,000 barrels per day (bpd). The refinery complex also includes a petrochemical plant commissioned in 1988, with production capacities of 13,000 MTA of polypropylene and 18,000 MTA of carbon black.

The facility primarily supplies petroleum products to markets in the southern and southwestern regions of Nigeria.

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Consumers again said they expect price increases to ease in the near future, helping push August’s sentiment survey higher after four months of decline.

Consumer sentiment improved to a final reading of 67.9 in August, more than a point higher than the prior month, data from the University of Michigan showed. Economists surveyed by the and expected the reading to be slightly higher.

Survey director Joanne Hsu said the survey showed a broad improvement in consumers' attitudes about the economy. After hitting an all-time low in the June 2022 survey, consumer sentiment has rebounded by about 36%. 

“Consumers’ short- and long-run economic outlook improved, with both figures reaching their most favorable levels since April 2024 and a particularly sizable 10% improvement for long-run expectations that was seen across age and income groups,” Hsu said. 

Consumers expect inflation in the next year will be 2.8%, their outlook moving lower for a third consecutive month. That optimism comes as the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report on Friday showed price pressures continued to ease in July.

Economists often say the University of Michigan survey is more sensitive to inflation. In contrast, a similar consumer confidence survey from the Conference Board touches more on changes in the labor market. 

Federal Reserve officials follow consumer inflation expectations to monitor pricing trends, as price setters' and wage payers' reactions to these expectations can often be self-fulfilling. Declining inflation expectations could support forecasts that the Fed is prepared to begin cutting interest rates, which may start at the upcoming September meeting.

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