FROM THE TABLE OF FASHTY BLOG PLUS WISHING U
HAPPY NEW YEAR IN ADVANCE
Tuesday, 31 December 2013
LIB list: Nigerian Entertainer of the Year 2013 is?
If your entertainer of the year is not listed, mention their name/s...
Nigeria: Top 10 Newsmakers in Lagos in 2013 By Ben Ezeamalu
The capacity of Nigeria’s
commercial capital to always be in the news has never been in doubt. But
a string of characters and institutions, in 2013, carved a niche for
themselves for their ingenuity at always finding their way into the news
and staying put for extended periods. We present the top 10 News makers
in Lagos in 2013 in no particular order:
1. Adeyemi Ikuforiji
When the ebullient Speaker of the Lagos
State House of Assembly was not superintending affairs at Lagos House,
he was at the Federal High Court, Lagos, where he is embracing a crowd
of friends and political hangers-on who had come on solidarity over his
fraud trial.
Mr. Ikuforiji is facing a 54-count
amended charge of laundering over N600 million instituted by the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.
Earlier in the year, the Speaker, who is
charged alongside Oyebode Atoyebi, his Personal Assistant, had asked the
court to strike out the fraud charges against him for “lack of diligent
prosecution.”
By the middle of the year, Okechukwu
Okeke, the trial judge, retired from the bench paving the way for the
two year old trial to be transferred to another judge and proceedings
starting afresh.
The new judge, Ibrahim Buba, needing to
stamp his feet in the case began the trial by imposing a N1 billion bail
bond on the Speaker and directing security agencies to hound him into
jail if he fails to come up with the sum in 48 hours.
The Speaker delivered.
After the initial delays and adjournments
– similar to what transpired before the previous judge – the trial
commenced. So also was the visit of a retinue of legislators,
legislators’ aides, politicians, hangers-on, friends and families to the
Federal High Court premises every time the speaker was billed to make
an appearance.
The crowd – and their Speaker – will return to the court on January 7, 2014.
2. Lagos State government
In February, the Lagos State government
made negative headlines across the world. One swing of the blade of the
state government’s bulldozer rendered thousands homeless in the Badia
slum. The local media feasted on it. The foreign media joined the
bandwagon. Months later, Amnesty International made public its report
stating that over 9,000 people were left without roofs over their heads.
A frantic Lagos State government
organized a series of damage-control press conferences, one in which it
stated that the slum was demolished to make room for a modern 1004
flats. But it was too little too late.
Reports of the state government sending
children to prisons surfaced in August, embarrassing the governor and
forcing the state to free some of the under aged inmates.
In July, the state government was in the
news again over an ‘unlawful’ deportation saga. The state governor had
sent some destitute people packing from the state back to their homes in
Anambra State, a move which sent the Anambra governor into a fury.
Two weeks later, Orji Kalu, former Abia
State governor, dragged Lagos State into the news again, accusing the
government of witch-hunting him by sealing his Lagos home because he
condemned the deportation of the destitutes.
Other incidents such as buying back the
concessioned Lekki-Epe Expressway, commencement of tolling on the new
Lekki-Ikoyi link bridge, and heading to the Supreme Court to reverse
Major Hamza Al-Mustapha’s acquittal ensured that Lagos was a regular
feature in news reports in 2013.
3. Lagos State Police Command
In the early hours of one Wednesday in
March, a group of police officers opened fire at fellow security
officials – men of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, NSCDC,
on their way back from arresting some pipeline vandals in Ikorodu,
Lagos.
Two NSCDC officers were killed.
But the state police command quickly
absolved its officers of wrongdoing in the incident, instead, insisting
that the NSCDC officers disarmed and arrested its officers.
In June 2013, a secretly recorded video
where a police officer was soliciting for a N25,000 bribe from a
motorist was uploaded to the web. The video went viral within minutes.
Days later, the culprit, Sergeant Chris Omeleze, was dismissed from the
Force.
The public were ecstatic.
A month later, another secretly taped
video surfaced, this time involving two female police corporals
demanding for a bribe from another bus driver.
Again, the officers were promptly shown the door.
The public were delirious.
And so in November, when some police
officers who were harassing a commercial bus driver noticed Abragahou
Aminu filming them with his camera phone; the hapless French language
teacher was made to pay for the sins of the previous camera men.
First, he was given the beating of his
life, and then locked up at Ketu Police Station. And then he was
transferred to Area F Police Command, later to the State Anti-Robbery
Squad. In the end he spent 7 days in various police cells and the police
filed a “breach of public peace” charge against him at the Magistrate
court.
Also, in June, a police officer
identified as Corporal Azukah, in a hurry to get his superior’s mistress
to catch her flight, drove against traffic on a one way road and
knocked down Taskirat Anjolaiya, a nursing mother, and her newborn baby.
After depositing an initial N70,000 for treatment, the officer
disappeared.
4. Fred Ajudua
Watching Fred Chijindu Ajudua standing in
the dock alongside his co-accused, Charles Orie, evokes an uncanny
image of the Philistine’s Goliath standing, blank-faced, side by side
with the diminutive David the giantslayer. Except that this time the
characters were in a court room in Lagos facing criminal charges of
allegedly defrauding two Dutch businessmen of $1.69 million.
After performing the most daring
vanishing act the EFCC had seen since its establishment, Mr. Ajudua
resurfaced early this year, after a seven year hiatus, to resume his
trial before Justice Olubunmi Oyewole.
At every court sitting, the duo would
stand in the dock, with Mr. Orie’s clean-shaven head periodically
bumping against Mr. Ajudua’s beefy arm.
As the year 2013 wore on, Mr. Ajudua’s
huge frame became a common sight at the Ikeja high court. If he was not
before Justice Oyewole denying the fraud allegations against him, he was
filing a bail application before Justice Ganiyu Safari. By the eighth
month of the year, his only surviving kidney had collapsed and he was
rushed to the prison clinic and thereafter to the Lagos University
Teaching Hospital.
While Mr. Ajudua was recuperating in the
hospital, the EFCC began filing, before Justice Atinuke Ipaye, a fresh
set of fraud charges masterminded by him. The commission said that he
duped Ishaya Bamaiyi, a retired army Lieutenant-General, of US$8.395
million between November 2004 and June 2005 while both were incarcerated
at the Kirikiri Prisons.
5. Femi Fani-Kayode
If Femi Fani-Kayode was a fly, the year
2013 would have been one in which he was swathed with a giant sledge
hammer. Such was the persona of the intelligent but controversial former
Aviation minister that when he was not speaking “the bitter truth”
about an ethnic group, he was writing about his “long standing and
intimate relationship” with beauty queens. Or he was explaining to
Justice Rita Ofili-Ajumogobia why Festus Keyamo cannot prosecute him for
an alleged N230 million fraud. Or he was dishing out advice to the
current Aviation minister on how to stop our aircrafts from falling off
the sky. Or he was professing his passion for his new-found love, the
APC.
If Chinua Achebe’s swan song ‘There Was A
Country: A Personal History of Biafra’ provoked a heated backlash from
the Yorubas against the Igbos in 2012; Mr. Fani-Kayode’s diatribe ‘The
Bitter Truth About the Igbos’, in the wake of Governor Babatunde
Fashola’s deportation of some Igbo destitutes from Lagos, had the same
effect, but in the reverse direction, in 2013.
“Igbos have a domineering tendency and
are not accommodating because they never had any history, monarchs or
structured societies,” Mr. Fani-Kayode wrote.
The outrage generated by the article was
such that Nelson Okoli, the National Legal Adviser of the Eastern
Professionals Forum, described his reading of it as an “ugly
experience.”
6. Murtala Mohammed Airport
Lagosians woke up on June 13 to the rare
sight of an aircraft taxing along the road in Mangoro. Since there was
no airport or airstrip in that area, residents concluded that the plane
had fallen off the sky. Within an hour, the social media became agog
with stories of another plane crash in Lagos until the National
Emergency Management Agency waded in to debunk the rumours – a scrap
aeroplane was being evacuated from the Murtala Mohammed Airport en route
Badagry. And since it could no longer fly, it had to be dragged by a
towing truck.
However, exactly four months later, an
actual aircraft, an Embraer EMB 120 conveying 20 people, fell off the
Lagos sky and crashed inside the premises of the Murtala Mohammed
Airport. Six people died on the spot.
7. My Pikin Teething Mixture
When Judge Okechukwu Okeke pronounced the
death sentence on Barewa Pharmaceuticals and sent Adeyemo Abiodun and
Egbele Eromosele, two of the company’s employees, to seven months in
prison; Mr. Abiodun’s blood pressure shot up. A doctor was rushed into
the crowded court room and the judge forced to suspend reading his
judgment for the accused to receive medical attention.
The judgment, however, drew the curtains
on the activities of the pharmaceutical company whose deadly product, My
Pikin Teething syrup, killed over 80 children across the country in
2009.
8. Baba Suwe
On the last day of May 2013, Babatunde
Omidina, a.k.a Baba Suwe, lost his N25 million. Two years after a Lagos
High Court had awarded him the millions for his illegal detention by the
NDLEA, the Court of Appeal upturned the judgment. The Yoruba movie star
has since headed to the Supreme Court to recover the money.
9. NEMA
The National Emergency Management Agency,
NEMA, spent the better part of 2013 re-enacting the historical federal
government-Lagos State feud with the Lagos State Emergency Management
Agency, LASEMA.
Every time a building collapsed in Lagos
(and there were lots of them in 2013), journalists were always treated
to the cold war festering between the two emergency management agencies.
If both agencies were not dishing out
different casualty figures, they were bickering over who was the first
to arrive at a rescue site.
It was at one of the sites, in Surulere,
that the animosity blew into the open. Ibrahim Farinloye, NEMA
South-West Spokesperson, was addressing journalists at the site of the
building collapse when Wale Ahmed, Commissioner for Special Duties,
ordered him out of the scene. Police officers attached to the
commissioner enforced the order and bundled Mr. Farinloye out of the
site. Mr. Farinloye later informed his superiors in Abuja that the
police officers “chased” him out of the rescue site. But headquarters
told him to let “peace reign.”
However, when contacted by PREMIUM TIMES, Mr. Ahmed insisted he did not ask Mr. Farinloye to leave.
“I only told him it was quite premature
to start granting interview when we were yet to know what was still
under the rubble,” Mr. Ahmed said.
Twice in 2013, there were rumours of a
vehicle veering off the Third Mainland bridge and plunging into the
lagoon. And twice, NEMA officials raced across the 11.8 kilometre bridge
only to discover it was a hoax.
In January however, a Sports Utility
vehicle skidded off the Adekunle junction of the bridge and plunged into
the lagoon. The driver survived.
10. Wale Babalakin
If ever there was one individual who
tried to exploit all the loopholes in the Lagos State criminal justice
system in 2013, it was the billionaire business man and Senior Advocate
of Nigeria, Olawale Babalakin. After performing a series of court room
disappearing acts towards the end of 2012, amongst which was occupying a
bed at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Mr. Babalakin was
finally arraigned on January 17, 2013.
The EFCC alleged that he aided the
convicted former Delta State governor, James Ibori, to loot N4.7 billion
from the state’s treasury.
After the arraignment, Mr. Babalakin’s
lawyers, which included at least three senior advocates went to work.
First, they filed an application to quash the charges, arguing that the
EFCC did not obtain a valid fiat from the AGF to prosecute him. Then
they filed another one urging the court to adjourn the matter sine die
(indefinitely). There was also a pending application at the Court of
Appeal. Next, he began filing applications to travel abroad for medical
check-up (twice in three months) and Judge Adeniyi Onigbanjo granted him
the leave on both occasions.
At a court hearing in July, Mr. Babalakin
was nowhere near the court room after the judge said that he needed
more time to finish writing his rulings on all the applications he filed
– four in all. Mr. Babalakin’s lawyer, however, told the judge that his
client was “within the vicinity” of the court but was using crutches
and would require a wheelchair to be moved into the court room.
Eight months after his arraignment, the trial judge was still adjourning to rule on the plethora of applications before him.
Earlier in the year, about one month
after he was arraigned for fraud at the state high court, Mr. Babalakin
was at the federal high court, this time as a counsel to Femi
Fani-Kayode who was being prosecuted for a N230 million money laundering
allegation.
By December, after Mr. Babalakin’s trial
had been transferred from Justice Adeniyi Onigbanjo to Justice Lateef
Lawal-Akapo, his lawyers began filing a different king of application.
They urged the judge to grant their client the leave to stay away from
the dock pending the determination of the charges against him. Mr.
Lawal-Akapo agreed with them and “excused” the defendants from the dock.
By the time 2013 drew to an end, Mr.
Babalakin had made history as the first individual to have stood in the
dock, as a suspected criminal; sat at the bar, as a senior advocate; and
sat at the gallery, as a spectator in one judicial year.
At the last court hearing for the year,
Mr. Babalakin, dressed in a navy blue suit and white shirt, sat at the
public gallery, alongside journalists and trainee lawyers, yelling “As
the court pleases” to the judge’s pronouncements.
Monday, 30 December 2013
TheMoneyList! Meet The top Ten Richest Pastors In The World!
1. Bishop T. D Jakes: Bishop Jakes lives in a $1,700,000 mansion, he has been called America's best preacher and has been featured on the cover of TIME magazine. He is a writer, preacher and movie producer. Thomas Dexter "T. D." Jakes, Sr. is the bishop/chief pastor of The Potter's House, a non-denominational American mega church, with 30,000 members, located in Dallas, Texas. T.D Jakes wears custom made suits and sports a diamond ring the size of a coin. This man of God has been endowed with a $150 million net worth.
2. Bishop David Oyedepo: Bishop David Oyedepo is a Nigerian Preacher, Christian Author, Founder and Presiding Bishop of Winners Chapel known as Living Faith Church World Wide. Has been hailed as the wealthiest preacher in Nigeria with a total net worth of $150 million and properties like 4 private jets and homes in the United States and England. After the foundation of the Living Faith Outreach Ministry in 1981, it has evolved to be one of the largest congregations in Africa and has a flourishing mission in Nairobi.
3. E A Adeboye: This messenger of God was listed in an African magazine, NEWSWEEK, as the most powerful man in Africa and one of the top 50 global power elites in 2008/2009, among others such as President Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy. Pastor Adeboye heads the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), something he has done for the last 28years.Amongst his posessions are private jets.
4. Benny Hinn: Israeli televangelist,Toufik Benedictus “Benny” Hinn has an estimated net worth of $42 million. He is best known for his regular “Miracle Crusades” – revival meeting/faith healing summits that are usually held in large stadiums in major cities, which are later broadcast worldwide on his television program, “This Is Your Day”. Hinn was born on December 3, 1952.
5. Chris Oyakhilome: This is the man behind Believers’ Loveworld Ministries, a.k.a Christ Embassy.His church has an estimated net worth of $30 million – $50 million last year, the charismatic preacher was at the center of a $35 million money laundering case in which he was accused of siphoning funds from his church to foreign banks.
6. Creflo Dollar: American Bible teacher, pastor, and the founder of World Changers Church International, Creflo Dollar, has an estimated net worth of $27 million. As his name suggests, this preacher’s “manna” comes in form of the green buck.
7. Kenneth Copeland: He runs Kenneth Copeland Ministries, was one of several televangelists whose finances were investigated from 2007 to 2011 by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.
According to an article by the Associated Press that ran in 2008, "His ministry's 1,500-acre campus, behind an iron gate a half-hour drive from Fort Worth includes a church, a private airstrip, a hangar for the ministry's $17.5 million jet and other aircraft, and a $6 million church owned lakefront mansion.
The article later added that while Copeland has not released up-to-date salary statements, "the church disclosed in a property-tax exemption application that his wages were $364,577 in 1995; Copeland's wife, Gloria, earned $292,593. It's not clear whether those figures include other earnings, such as special offerings for guest preaching or book royalties.”
8. Billy Graham: American evangelical Christian evangelist, William Franklin “Billy” Graham, Jr., has a net worth of $25 million. The Southern Baptist evangelist rose to celebrity status as his sermons started getting broadcast on radio and television. Graham was born on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina in 1918, he has conducted many evangelistic crusades since 1948 . He is now a world renowned televangelist raking in millions of dollars.
9. Matthew Ashimolowo: Ashimolowo, the owner of Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC) gets an annual income of $200,000. Having his humble beginnings as a priest in Foursquare Gospel Church, a Nigerian church that sent Ashimolowo to open a satellite branch in London. Pastor Matthew had other ideas and decided to set up his own church instead. Today, his Kingsway International Christian Center is reportedly the largest Pentecostal church in the whole of the United Kingdom.
10. Temitope Joshua: Synagogue Church Of All Nations (SCOAN) has an estimated net worth: $10 million – $15 million Nigeria’s most controversial clergyman is also one of its richest and most philanthropic. T.B Joshua heads the Synagogue Church of all Nations (SCOAN), a congregation he founded in 1987, which accommodates over 15,000 worshippers on Sundays.
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