Dangote PMS now N875/litre - ITREALMS

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Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals has announced another reduction of N15 in the price of its high-quality Premium Motor Spirit (PMS).

As a result of this reduction, Nigerians will now purchase the product at the following prices: N875 per litre in Lagos; N885 per litre in the South West; N895 per litre in the North West and North Central, while it will be sold for N905 per litre in the South East, South South, and North East.

Birthday: Soludo celebrates Sir Emeka Offor, applauds his entrepreneurial spirit - ITREALMS

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The Governor of Anambra State, Professor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, has felicitated with Sir Emeka Offor, a foremost Nigerian entrepreneur and philanthropist, on the occasion of his birthday, Tuesday, February 10, 2025, reports ITREALMS.

In a goodwill message available to ITREALMS, Governor Soludo commended Sir Offor's journey from his humble beginnings in Oraifite to becoming one of Nigeria's most successful entrepreneurs as epitomising the resilient and industrious spirit of the Anambra people. Through his company, Chrome Group, he has created thousands of jobs and contributed significantly to Nigeria's oil and gas sector development.

WhatsApp and FG’s N4.8bn monitoring spirit - ITREALMS

Features@ITREALMS ... making leadership SENSE with digital news!

In this piece, REMMY NWEKE, examines the looming imbroglio over FG’s N4.8bn budgetary allocation to monitor WhatsApp in Nigeria and political expediency.

What about WhatsApp?

The Federal Government (FG) was recently reported to have earmarked the sum of N4.8 billion for the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) to monitor WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging application, and Thuraya, a satellite telephone.

Lai Mohammed & spirit of Dolos - ITREALMS

MondayCommentary@ITREALMS:

You may never have heard of Dolos (Dolus). In Greek mythology, Dolos is the undisputed spirit of guile, cunning craftiness, lies and its many cousins including subterfuge. Dolos is the master of fibs. The spirit of Dolos is in every man. Yes, man always has a tendency to spin a lie. But this spirit finds more expression in some men than in others. Nigeria’s Lai Mohammed has a good share of the Dolos syndrome. Indeed, a bad share, too much for one man. Lai lies. He lies to the nation. He lies to himself. He lies to all. Uncle Lai is a damn good propagandist. All good propagandists lean on lie, live on lies and leave you wondering if you are still a normal being.

Lai has been lying to the nation. But his latest that the Nigerian government spends N3.5 million monthly to feed detained leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) otherwise known as Shiites, Ibrahim El-ZakZaky, beats all. It is a masterpiece from a man afflicted by the spirit of Dolos. In fairness to Uncle Lai, he has to lie to live. He must lie to keep his job. In brand management, it is a tough job trying to sell a bad product. Muhammadu Buhari, once thought to be a good guy that would alleviate the sufferings of Nigerians, has turned a very bad product; a soured soup that needed the best of seasonings to make it taste good again. But never. A soured soup remains what it is: offensive to the taste buds.

Buhari is a very bad product as it now stands. He is a bloody pretender, an impostor who barged into the hallway of governance and made a mess of it. And how odd he looks here. Unfit to lead; ungainly in his actions and brutally divisive in all his ways. Nigeria has had incompetent leaders; the likes of Goodluck Jonathan, Umaru Yar’Adua, and the crowd of military goons who intruded into the nation’s leadership space. But none of them has afflicted the people with pepper and pain more than Buhari. None has divided the nation along ethno-religious lines more than Buhari. And worst of it all, none has manifested worse cluelessness than Buhari. He is not only clueless, he is eternally unaware of the demands of his office.

Perhaps, minders of the President knew what awaited Nigerians and they propped up Uncle Lai as the Minister of Information (Propaganda). And the cap fits. Lai is a good liar. And lies have many variants. The great bard, Mark Twain, referencing former British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, once wrote: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”. Lai has mastered all. On behalf of this government, he has told the nation lies and damned lies. He has trotted out statistics, some standing on the props of absurdity, just to support his often weird claims.

But let’s be fair, Uncle Lai has to lie. This government is full of fraud, scam, perfidy, certificate forgeries and forgers, deceit and grand subterfuge, even dissimulation. Just check this out. Another uncle, Audu Ogbeh, the minister of agriculture who lusts after statistics and latches at any figure to support his spurious claims once came up with what only hybrids of Dolos could spin. He said Rice Mills in Thailand are shutting down because export to Nigeria has significantly declined or even non-existent. He even claimed that the Ambassador of Thailand was in his office to cry like a baby that Buhari government policy on local rice production has dealt a deadly blow to Thailand’s economy by pushing unemployment from 1.2 percent to four percent because Nigeria’s rice import has fallen by 95 percent. Wondrous wonder!

Quickly, the Thailand Ambassador, Wattana Kunwongse, repudiated the toxic lie. He described it as misleading and a distortion of actual conversation between himself and our Uncle Audu. And you just wonder, when will these actors on the nation’s political stage stop lying? But why lie just to look good when the realities on ground speak the contrary.

But no matter, I salute Uncle Lai. He deserves an Oscar. He is the reason this government is still looking somehow good even when it is not doing good. Lai is the man for this moment. He makes Hitler’s Joe Goebbels look like an apprentice.

Nevertheless, I still like Uncle Lai. I like his passion for the absurd and the ludicrous. His voluble appetite for spin is matchless. When Lai is on duty and in his element, you can count on him to strike the chord of absurdity in a manner that sends you into a spasm of guttural guffaw. You just can’t stop laughing at Uncle Lai’s many wonders.

Thank goodness for social media, Nigerians now see behind the veil. They see the political actors in their raw, uncut state. I understand the sentiments of some journalists who blamed the TV reporter for transmitting aspect of a conversation with Lai Mohammed that was meant to be off-the-record (not off-record, please). It is unethical to do so. But when ethics clash with national interest (public interest or right of the people to know) it is only commonsensical that public interest wins. It is in the interest of Nigerians to know that a princely N3.5 million of their tax money goes into feeding a very important prisoner monthly.

That’s an average of N116,000 daily in a country still battling to pay N18,000 minimum wage. What does this Shiite leader eat? Even if he moved in there with his household, would they gulp and guzzle this much in food and drinks? It is practically impossible for Zakzaky to eat this much in one day. But with Uncle Lai, everything is a possibility. That’s what happens to those afflicted by the spirit of Dolos. They are like sheep in a salt market: obsessed, fixated and animatedly infatuated.

Our dear Uncle Lai is steeped in the darkest belly of lies and lying. He is afflicted and he needs help. Obviously, he can’t help himself. Like a sheep thrust into a salt dune, Lai needs to be shooed out of the scene. He needs to take the back stage in the fumbling Buhari government. He has caused this nation much embarrassment. The bad thing about lying is that at a point the liar loses his sense of shame. It’s his people, relations and friends who take the shame on his behalf. For Uncle Lai, I’m ashamed on your behalf.

Lai Mohammed obviously has lost his sense of shame. It does not matter to him what he says. He just opens his mouth and belches out statistics and claims too hard to prove and too surreal to be real. He does not need his audience to believe him. He just talks. Whether you are able to make sense of his nonsense is immaterial. It’s the way of all liars. The voice of propaganda consistently rings out: “Tell your lies boldly and persistently and people would be made to believe you.” That is the Lai way.

But we must help him. We must retrieve him from the abyss of absurdity into which he plunged himself. President Buhari should help us redeem our Uncle from the precipice before he recedes irredeemably into the umbra of lunacy.

Courtesy: Ken Ugbechie …gongbeat column/GEE

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One man's meal, 163 children's death per month - NaijaAgroNet

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Pix: Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information & Culture

Amidst spirit of errors and blood baths @Aso Rock

Commentary@ITRealms: 

People tend to be alarmed when the Nigerian Presidency takes certain decisions. They don’t think the decision makes sense. Sometimes, they wonder if something has not gone wrong with the thinking process at that highest level of the country. I have heard people insist that there is some form of witchcraft at work in the country’s seat of government.

I am ordinarily not a superstitious person, but working in the Villa, I eventually became convinced that there must be something supernatural about power and closeness to it. I’ll start with a personal testimony. I was given an apartment to live in inside the Villa. It was furnished and equipped. But when my son, Michael arrived, one of my brothers came with a pastor who was supposed to stay in the apartment. But the man refused claiming that the Villa was full of evil spirits and that there would soon be a fire accident in the apartment. He complained about too much human sacrifice around the Villa and advised that my family must never sleep overnight inside the Villa.

I thought the man was talking nonsense and he wanted the luxury of a hotel accommodation. But he turned out to be right. The day I hosted family friends in that apartment and they slept overnight, there was indeed a fire accident. The guests escaped and they were so thankful. Not long after, the President’s physician living two compounds away had a fire accident in his home. He and his children could have died.

He escaped with bruises. Around the Villa while I was there, someone always died or their relations died. I can confirm that every principal officer suffered one tragedy or the other; it was as if you needed to sacrifice something to remain on duty inside that environment. Even some of the women became merchants of 'Love Machine' because they had suffered a special kind of death in their homes (I am sorry to reveal this) and many of the men complained about something that had died below their waists too. The ones who did not have such misfortune had one ailment or the other that they had to nurse. From cancer to brain and prostate surgery and whatever, the Villa was a hospital full of agonizing patients.

I recall the example of one particular man, an asset to the Jonathan Presidency who practically ran away from the Villa. He said he needed to save his life. He was quite certain that if he continued to hang around, he would die. I can’t talk about colleagues who lost daughters and sons, brothers and uncles, mothers and fathers, and the many obituaries that we issued. 

Even the President was multiply bereaved. His wife, Mama Peace was in and out of hospital at a point, undergoing many surgeries. You may have forgotten but after her husband lost the election and he conceded victory, all her ailments vanished, all scheduled surgeries were found to be no longer necessary and since then she has been hale and hearty. By the same token, all those our colleagues who used to come to work to complain about a certain death beneath their waists and who relied on videos and other instruments to entertain wives (take it easy boys, I don’t mean nay harm, I am writing!), have all experienced a re-awakening.

Everyone who went under the blade has received miraculous healing, and we are happy to be out of that place. But others were not so lucky. They died. There were days when convoys ran into ditches and lives were lost. In Norway, our helicopter almost crashed into a mountain. That was the first time I saw the President panicking. The weather was all so hazy and he just kept saying it would not be nice for the President of a country to die in a helicopter crash due to pilot miscalculations. The President went into a prayer mode. We survived. In Kenya once, we had a bird strike. The plane had to be recalled and we were already airborne with the plane acting like it would crash. 

During the 2015 election campaigns, our aircraft refused to start on more than one occasion. The aircraft just went dead. On some other occasions, we were stoned and directly targeted for evil. I really don’t envy the people who work in Aso Villa, the seat of Nigeria’s Presidency. For about six months, I couldn’t even breathe properly. For another two months, I was on crutches. But I considered myself far luckier than the others who were either nursing a terminal disease or who could not get it up.

When Presidents make mistakes, they are probably victims of a force higher than what we can imagine. Every student of Aso Villa politics would readily admit that when people get in there, they actually become something else. They act like they are under a spell. When you issue a well- crafted statement, the public accepts it wrongly. When the President makes a speech and he truly means well, the speech is interpreted wrongly by the public. When a policy is introduced, somehow, something just goes wrong. 

In our days, a lot of people used to complain that the APC people were fighting us spiritually and that there was a witchcraft dimension to the governance process in Nigeria. But the APC folks now in power are dealing with the same demons. Since Buhari government assumed office, it has been one mistake after another. Those mistakes don’t look normal, the same way they didn’t look normal under President Jonathan. I am therefore convinced that there is an evil spell enveloping this country. We need to rescue Nigeria from the forces of darkness. Aso Villa should be converted into a spiritual museum, and abandoned.

Should I become President of Nigeria tomorrow, I will build a new Presidential Villa: a Villa that will be dedicated to the all-conquering Almighty, and where powers and principalities cannot hold sway. But it is not about buildings and space, not so? It is about the people who go to the highest levels in Nigeria. I really don’t quite believe in superstitions, but I am tempted to suggest that this is indeed a country in need of  prayers. 

We should pray before people pack their things into Aso Villa. We should ask God to guide us before we appoint ministers. We should, to put it in technocratic language,    that the people should be very vigilant. We have all failed so far, that crucial test of vigilance. We should have a Presidential Villa where a President can afford to be human and free. 

In the White House, in the United States, Presidents live like normal human beings. In Aso Villa, that is impossible. They’d have to surround themselves with cooks from their villages, bodyguards from their mother’s clans and friends they can trust. It should be possible to be President of Nigeria without having to look behind one’s shoulders. But we are not yet there. 

So, how do we run a Presidency where the man in the saddle can only drink water served by his kinsman? No. How can we possibly run a Presidency where every President proclaims faith in Nigeria but they are better off in the company of relatives and kinsmen. 

No. We need as Presidents men and women who are willing to be Nigerians. No Nigerian President should be in spiritual bondage because he belongs to all of us and to nobody.

Now let me go back to the spiritual dimension. 

A colleague once told me that I was the most naïve person around the place. I thought I was a bright, smart, professional doing my bit and enjoying the President’s confidence. I spelled it out. But what I got in response was that I was coming to the villa using Lux soap, but that most people around the place always bathed in the morning with blood. Goat blood. Ram blood. Whatever animal blood. I argued. He said there were persons in the Villa walking upside down, head to the ground. I screamed. Everybody looked normal to me. But I soon began to suspect that I was in a strange environment indeed. Every position change was an opportunity for warfare. Civil servants are very nice people; they obey orders, but they are not very nice when they fight over personal interests.

The President is most affected by the atmosphere around him. He can make wrong decisions based on the cloud of evil around him. Even when he means well and he has taken time to address all possible outcomes, he could get on the wrong side of the public. A colleague called me one day and told me a story about how a decision had been taken in the spiritual realm about the Nigerian government. He talked about the spirit of error, and how every step taken by the administration would appear to the public like an error. He didn’t resign on that basis but his words proved prophetic. I see the same story being re-enacted. Aso Villa is in urgent need of redemption. I never slept in the apartment they gave me in that Villa for an hour.

Source: The Guardian - The Spiritual Side Of Aso Villa By Reuben Abati 

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