Spider Clues

  President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the submission of the country’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) to address climate change to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Nigeria’s INDC was approved by the president on November 26 and submitted to the UNFCCC on November 28, ahead of yesterday’s (Monday) opening in Paris of the UN Climate Change conference, widely known as COP 21. A statement by the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina said the federal government’s policy to address climate change, as espoused in the country’s INDC, committed to 20 per cent unconditional and 45 per cent conditional Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emission reduction post 2020. He said the action plan announced by the federal government represented a fair and meaningful contribution to address climate change and equally reaffirmed Buhari’s commitment to economic transformation which he said placed inclusive, green growth...

    150 world leaders have gathered in Paris in a bid to stave off the worst effects of climate change. The accompanying risks include worsening conflicts over resources, as events in Nigeria indicate. Clashes between nomadic herdsmen and farmers over land claim hundreds of lives in Nigeria's central region every year. In one such incident, gunmen killed at least five people and burnt several houses in Kadunung village in Nigeria's Plateau state, in September 2015, police said. The largely agrarian Christian communities in the state maintain the predominantly Muslim Fulani herdsmen are engaged in a prolonged battle to take over land from the areas of so-called indigenous people. Fulani leaders counter that their people face discrimination as "foreigners" in Plateau and are deprived of basic rights, including access to land, education and political office, even though they have lived in the area for generations. There is the worry that this problem is being exac...

    At the time when the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) imposed a hefty $5.2 billion (R74.57bn) fine against telecoms giant MTN, the country was open to foreign direct investments, Minister of Trade and Investment Okechukwu Enelamah said. Speaking on the sidelines of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation (Focac) to enhance ties between China and African countries, Enelamah said Nigeria was one of the most open economies on the continent. “We are more open to investment and it is going to get better. We are working on improving numerous aspects of our country, including the rule of law and national security,” Enelamah said. MTN was slapped with the fine after failing to cut 5.1 million subscribers with unregistered SIM cards by the NCC’s August deadline. The fine was reduced by 35 percent to $3.4bn according to an NCC statement released last week. However, in an embarrassing statement on Friday, the NCC made an about turn and said it had made a typo error, and ...

  In a Saturday statement, the Department of State Services (DSS) said those arrested had traveled from the restive northeast of the country to the capital, which is located in central Nigeria, and were planning to carry out attacks in Abuja during the year-end festivities. "Boko Haram ... has continued to establish and operate sleeper cells whose mandates are to conduct surveillance and carry out subsequent attacks," the DSS statement said. The suspects were carrying out surveillance to “map out soft targets for attacks,” it added. The statement also listed the names of 12 alleged Boko Haram members, including a Niger national, who had been arrested in Abuja and the neighboring towns between October 29 and December 1. At least 20,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million made homeless since the beginning of the Boko Haram militancy in Nigeria in 2009. The militants have recently pledged allegiance to the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group, which is primarily oper...