A civil society group, Empowerment for Unemployed Youth Initiative (EUYI), has petitioned the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) over fraud against Nigeria by General Electric (GE) International and Rockson Engineering Nigeria Ltd.

Mr Solomon Adodo, the National Coordinator, EUYI said on Thursday in Abuja that the petition was sequel to the investigation by the House of Representatives’ findings by its Ad-hoc committee investigating GE and Rockson Engineering Ltd.

Adodo said that the group was pained at the deafening silence accorded the reports of investigation into the huge sums spent on power generation, transmission and distribution between 1999 and 2007 without commensurate result.

He said that more disturbing was that most of the companies that played key roles in the taking over of the power sector were indicted by the report chronicling the greatest heist against the Nigeria economy and its people.

Adodo in the petition said that those people had resurfaced under a new consortium to continue their unfettered looting and defrauding of the Nigeria government, while posing as Nigeria technology partner in the power sector.

According to the petition, it is saddening to note that General Electric International and her Nigeria partner, Rockson Engineering Ltd. now hide under the nest of a corruptly contrived consortium with GE.

The petition stated that the deliberate sabotage committed against Nigeria as revealed by the House of Representatives reports specifically recommended that GE Rockson Engineering and their cronies must be subjected to thorough investigation and prosecution.

“It is therefore imperative that the EFCC expedites action to halt the decimation of our economy while hounding the individuals or entities behind these crimes.

“The avowed stand of President Muhammdu Buhari-led administration not only to fight corruption and economic crimes to a standstill but also to right the compounded wrongs of many years perpetrated against Nigerian,” he said.

According to the petition, these wrongs cannot be shoved aside, to this extent this GE/Rockson Engineering consortium fraud presents a clear litmus test and the EFCC is hereby called upon to do the needful.

The petition stated that since 1999 the federal Government had invested over 20 billion dollars to ensure there was stable supply of electricity, adding that inspired of the huge investment, the country’s power continued to wobble.

This, according to the petition is due largely to the deliberate activities of GE and its conspirators who had sabotaged the effort of the Federal Government.

The House of Representatives had in 2008 constituted an Ad-hoc committee to investigate the power sector expenditure; the outcome of the reports berated the fraudulent and sordid acts of GE and its allies.

The reports recommended that GE, Rockson and their cronies should be subjected to criminal investigation and prosecution.

NAN

Nigerian Government has declared Monday, 1st October as public holiday to commemorate the country’s 58th Independence Anniversary.

The federal government made the declaration in a statement issued by the Minister of Interior, retired Lt.-Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau, on Thursday in Abuja.

The statement was signed by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, Dr Mohammed Umar.

Dambazau, who congratulated Nigerians on the anniversary, urged them to sustain President Muhammadu Buhari Administration’s efforts at maintaining and strengthening the unity and peace of the country.

He emphasised government’s commitment to promoting national unity, economic growth, social and political development based on democratic principles.

The minister added that in the past 58 years, Nigeria had made a lot of progress and positive impact not only on the lives of its citizens but also on infrastructure development as well as international relations.

NAN

President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana on Thursday urged African leaders to ensure their industrial policies reflected national interest in order to achieve the collective desire of industrialising the continent.

Akufo-Addo made the remark at the Annual Lecture of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) with the theme: “Mainstreaming Policies to Catalyse Industrial Renaissance” in Lagos.

Akufo-Addo, represented by Mr Samuel Yaw Osafo-Maafo, Senior Minister, Ghana, decried the apparent inability of African countries to transform their abundant natural resources into opportunities for creation of jobs and wealth.

He also emphasised the need for African leaders to fast-track the creation of the environmental framework to make industries succeed in creating wealthy people in Africa.

“The continent boasts of young, determined and highly educated people across all sectors.

“Yet we have not been able to get the right mix of policies to fully unearth and develop the entrepreneurial talents that abound in Nigeria in particular and on the continent.

“In addition, the approach of rushing to the international markets to sell our resources in their raw state which fetches peanuts must be stopped,” Akufo-Ado said.

According to him, It is far better to leave the resources untapped for the future generations to rise up to the challenge of conscientiously developing the best policy mix that prioritises Industrialisation.

He said that was the most convenient means to drive the much needed effects in Africa’s socio-economic development.

He advised African governments to collaborate to develop common trade platforms and innovative ways of assisting local industries without breaking the WTO, ECOWAS rules and other conventions.

“Africa must begin to trade among ourselves, concentrating on areas of comparative advantage.

“We must begin to break the trade barriers among ourselves and form alliances with the various countries Associations of Industries and Chambers of Commerce of the various countries.

“Policies like the Africa Continent Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) are critical to our economic development.

“Much as the benefits are huge, it is important that we do not rush into taking decisions that will not have the buy-in from all critical stakeholders who drive business growth in Africa.

“Our countries share common values but there are country-specific issues that we need to critically integrate into our intra-Africa trade policy-initiatives so that we all will be comfortable with what we ascribe to.

“Therefore, our focus in all trade policy development should be a win-win approach,” he said.

The Ghanaian president advised that policy-makers should handle long term corporate agenda of the industries and businesses aimed at industrialisation.

“Let us therefore begin to be circumspect with those we put at the helm of affairs as board members to advise us on the productive application of our investment.

“Weak board of governors create weak institutions that do not offer any relevant engagement on the industrial field to enhance policy initiations, development and implementation for any effective industrial renaissance,” he said.

He said agricultural policies must be formulated to fit into the industrialisation policies of every  country.

He said the government of Ghana was  implementing the Policy of Planting for Food and Jobs to produce enough to feed the people.

He said the policy would also enable the local industries to maximise their operational capacities and then export to earn higher values as part of the country’s Agricultural Transformation Agenda.

He reiterated his government’s commitment towards initiating industrial policies which had been mainstreamed into his administration’s governance structure, from the local to the centre.

“On this note, we instituted holistic industrialisation policies for our private sector driven by  one district, one factory (1D1F) programme in ensuring decentralisation to communities.

“This way, we will reverse the rural-urban drift and migration of our able and energetic skilled labour to foreign countries with their attendant problems,” he said.

NAN

The Country Director, Google Nigeria, Mrs Juliet Ehimuan-Chiazor says the social and economic tool known as Google Search has attained 20 years.

Ehimuan-Chiazor in a statement in Lagos said that apart from Google Search being a way of finding information, it had proven invaluable in helping people find jobs, start businesses, and even save money.

“This month marks a major milestone for the world’s most popular search engine, as Google Search turns 20.

“Founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with the aim of organising the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful, the Search Index now contains hundreds of billions of web pages and is well over 100 000 000 gigabytes in size.

“It is by some distance, the world’s number one search engine. This is in no small part, thanks to its efforts to ensure that users can instantly access information that is contextually relevant to them and their surroundings.

“From humble origins in a Stanford University computer lab, Search has evolved to become a vital part of most people’s lives.

“People use it for everything ‒ from looking at the weather to plan their outfit the next day, to searching for life-saving procedures in the middle of a medical emergency.

“Search is a very different product from what it was in 1998, far from simply being a way to find information; it has become a crucial social and economic tool.

“This is especially true in Africa, where it has proven invaluable in helping people find jobs, start businesses, and even save money,” she said.

The country director said that even though technology had changed, people’s tastes have remained largely consistent over the past decade, considering the most searched for people on Google in Nigeria since 2008 with many of them still relevant today.

She listed some of them as: Linda Ikeji, Wizkid, Olamide, Muhammadu Buhari, Davido, Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj and Phyno.

She said that in Nigeria, Google was constantly working on giving people the best possible search experience, listing the latest efforts to include Google Go, Job Search, Recipe Search and Health Symptoms Search.

She also listed some fast facts on search saying in 2017, Google launched more than 270,000 experiments and made more than 2, 400 improvements to its algorithms, and continued to launch new features to make search more useful for everyone.

“When Google began, a new index was rolled out roughly every month. Today, Google generally indexes popular content from news sites and blogs within seconds or minutes of publication. For more static content, Google still updates a large fraction of its index every few days

“15 per cent of searches every day are new, more than half of searches come from outside the U. S., Brazil, India and Indonesia are in the top 10 countries with the highest search volume.

“Nearly one-third of searches came from Next Billion User (NBU) countries like Indonesia, India, Nigeria and South Africa in 2017 and 20 per cent of users in NBU countries search in two or more languages.

“The Knowledge Graph is available in 46 languages: English, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (LatAm), French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Polish, Turkish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, Hebrew and others.

“Every year, there are trillions of searches on Google and over half of those searches happen on mobile and Google has indexed over 130 trillion web addresses so far.

“The Knowledge Graph maps out how more than 1 billion things in the real world are connected, and offers over 70 billion facts about them and Google’s average query response time is roughly a quarter of a second.

“Looking forward, there’s little doubt that the evolution of Search over the next 20 years will be as dramatic as the past 20, and with an online population of 103 million, there’s every chance that Nigeria will be at the forefront of that evolution,” she said.

NAN