President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday expressed optimism that improvement in relations between Nigeria and South Africa would speed up the process of development on the African continent. Speaking in concurrence with the Chairman of the African National Congress (ANC) and South Africa’s Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Gwede Mantashe, who came to the State House, Abuja on Friday as Special Envoy of his country, President Buhari cited his last trip to South Africa during which he and President Cyril Ramaphosa worked together in resolving the migrants’ crisis between two brotherly nations. The President in a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu said, “There was this ‘small problem’ between our countries. I went there and we resol...
An Ondo State High Court sitting in Akure, the State capital, has sentenced a man, Olusola Alo, to life imprisonment for raping his own daughter. Alo, it was reported, had been having sexual intercourse with his biological daughter since she was 10-years-old. The mother of the girl was said to have left him when the daughter was six-months-old. According to the police prosecutor, the secret was exposed when the girl claimed at a students’ fellowship meeting that somebody was already having sex with her. The girl explained that her father would demand sex anytime she requested money from him for school fees and personal upkeep. The convict pleaded not guilty to the one-count charge of rape preferred against him. Justice Samuel Bola in his judgement held that the evidence of the victim that ...
U.S. warns Pacific islands about Chinese bid for undersea cable project
The United States has warned Pacific island nations about security threats posed by a Chinese company’s cut-price bid to build an undersea internet cable, two sources told Reuters, part of an international development project in the region. Huawei Marine, which was recently divested from Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and is now majority-owned by another Chinese firm, submitted bids along with French-headquartered Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN), part of Finland’s Nokia, and Japan’s NEC, for the $72.6 million project backed by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), the sources with direct knowledge of the project details said. The project is designed to improve communications to the island nations of Nauru, Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Kiribati. Washington sent a diploma...