Tuesday, 2 February 2016

Nigerian News of 2015 That Broke Social Media [2]

More of the Nigerian news that broke Social Media i 2015.

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Herold Ekeh broke Nigerian Social Media


At a time when tens of thousands of American students are getting turned away from their first-, second- and even third-choice college picks, Harold Ekeh, of Long Island, N.Y., has an enviable quandary: deciding which of the eight Ivy League colleges he will attend next year, according to CBS New York.

Harold, whose family immigrated to New York city eight years ago from Nigeria, told the station that he credits his academic success with his family’s humble beginnings, thirst for education and a strong desire to make a meaningful mark on society.

Nigerians Online were super excited by his achievement and it created a lot of buzz.


Tuesday April 14, 2015. Marked 365 Days after the kidnapping of the Chibok Girls and I wrote a poem for them on this blog

Malala Speaks To Missing Nigerian Girls in Letter Titled 'To My Brave Sisters'


Detailes below

"One day your tragic ordeal will end, you will be reunited with your families and friends, and you will have the chance to finish the education you courageously sought," Malala Yousafzai said Monday to the girls in Nigeria who have been missing for a year.

Last April, Boko Haram abducted several hundred girls while they were at school. On the eve of the abduction's anniversary, Malala wrote and recorded a solemn letter to her "brave sisters." She said, "we will never forget you. We will always stand with you, today and every day."

Like the missing girls, Malala was targeted by militant extremists. The Pakistani teen was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012 while advocating for girls' right to education.

Campaigners marched Monday in Nigeria's capital of Abuja during a silent protest to raise awareness about girls and boys abducted by Boko Haram.

In her letter, Malala recounted her meeting last July in Nigeria, on her 17th birthday, with the families of the kidnapped girls and five girls who had managed to escape. Malala said she wept during the meeting, but she was also impressed by the students' resolve to continue going to school.

More than 200 girls are still missing, and on Monday, Malala assured them that she has urged Nigeria's outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan, to meet with the victims' families — which he did a few days afterward.

Then in her letter, Malala voiced her frustration with the rescue efforts. "Still in my opinion, the Nigerian leaders and the international community have not done enough to help you," she said. "They must do much more to help secure your release."

Many advocates with the group #BringBackOurGirls agree with Malala: The government has done too little, too slowly for these girls.

But there are reasons for optimism, Malala told the girls. "Nigerians are regaining territory [from Boko Haram] and protecting more schools," she said. "Nigeria's newly elected president, Muhammadu Buhari, has made securing your freedom a top priority."

Malala Yousafzai, the well-known Pakistani activist, met with Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on Monday to discuss the plight of more than 200 kidnapped girls.

Malala promised all the girls that when they return home, her organization, the Malala Fund, and their partners will offer full scholarships and other forms of support.

The organization has also started #DearSisters, a project asking others to write their own messages to the missing girls. In two days, they've received more than 2,000 letters from around the world, says Louis Belanger, a spokesperson for the Malala Fund. He says they'll print out all the messages — some translated into the Kibaku language — and deliver them to the victims' families.

Malala's own letter ends with a final message to the kidnapped girls: "Stay strong and never lose hope. You are my heroes."

Source: NPR

Nigerian Programmers Win Big at 2015 NASA Space Apps Challenge


After a weekend of intense coding at the 2015 NASA Space Apps Challenge that held simultaneously in three Nigerian cities; Lagos, Calabar and Ilorin, the winners of the challenge have surfaced.

At the pitch event that held at the City Hall, Lagos on Sunday, three top teams emerged out of a total of 12 teams who pitched at the event final.  Teams developed solutions in four categories; earth studies, space exploration, human health research and robotics.

First Prize Winners – Team Akatsuki

Prize Money – $3000

Team Members – Alayaki Bilqis, Akingbade Ayobami and Morris Yewande.

Challenge – Robotics

The first prize winners, Team Akatsuki designed a robot, ROCKID using the LEGO Mindstorm NXT. The proposition according to team lead, Yewande Morris, was to design an astronaut assistant that can pick rock samples in space and return them to space lab.

The ROCKID, Rock IDentifier, prototype for event was programmed to identify barriers, pick color-coded cardboard payloads and follow a path of pickup and delivery.

1st Runner Up – Team Gear

Prize Money – $1, 500

Team Members – Gideon Ewa, Uduak Essien, Emem Brownson, Reuben Aniete

Challenge – Earth Studies

Team Gear designed a mobile app, AgroCast, a crowdsourced agric information portal that is publicly accessible. AgroCast, according to the team lead Gideon Ewa, allows farmers report disease outbreak, view disease, their symptoms as reported by other farmers and possible control measures. AgroCast also features an open source API than can be built upon and also the data curated from the app can be mined and deployed for forecasts.

2nd Runner Up: Team Landmark Replug

Challenge – Earth Studies

The third prize winners, Team Landmark Replug, also developed a location-based crowdsource-based Agric application, Cropinator. There was no prize money for the third position.

Event lead and partner at African Technology Foundation, Oluseye Soyode-Johnson said the next frontier is to track the projects and guide the teams in the coming years. “African Technology Foundation and a couple of our partners will be looking at how we can build a pipeline,” Soyode-Johnson said. “We are looking to getting into them into programmes like DEMO Africa which will give them more visibility and putting them into trade missions that can take them to other countries. We’ll be keeping tabs on them to build their applications more into commercially viable things.”

The 2015 Space App Challenge offered up 947 projects from 12780 participants across 133 cities worldwide.

Source: Techcabal

Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme's After vision of Christ, Says Rosary Will Bring Down Boko Haram


A Nigerian bishop says that he has seen Christ in a vision and now knows that the rosary is the key to ridding the country of the Islamist terrorist organization Boko Haram.

Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme says he is being driven by a God-given mandate to lead others in praying the rosary until the extremist group disappears.

“Towards the end of last year I was in my chapel before the Blessed Sacrament… praying the rosary, and then suddenly the Lord appeared,” Bishop Dashe told EWTN News April 18.

In the vision, the prelate said, Jesus didn’t say anything at first, but extended a sword toward him, and he in turn reached out for it.

“As soon as I received the sword, it turned into a rosary,” the bishop said, adding that Jesus then told him three times: “Boko Haram is gone.”

“I didn’t need any prophet to give me the explanation,” he said. “It was clear that with the rosary we would be able to expel Boko Haram.”

The bishop said he didn’t want to tell anyone, but “felt that the Holy Spirit was pushing him to do so.”

He started with the priests of his diocese, and then told participants in the April 17-19 #WeAreN2015 congress in Madrid, Spain. The event is being sponsored by the Spanish Catholic sister groups hazteoir.org and CitizenGo to gather ideas on how to preserve the Christian presence in nations where they are most persecuted.

Bishop Dashe leads the Diocese of Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria's Borno State. In 2009, there were around 125,000 Catholics under his guidance. After a surge in violence from the Islamist extremist group called Boko Haram, today “there are only 50 to 60 thousand left,” he said.

Most of those who fled sought safer areas in other parts of Nigeria, he said. Some of the same families are now returning home as armed forces from Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon liberate their homes.

In 2014, Boko Haram became known worldwide when members kidnapped nearly 300 girls from a school in Borno State. On March 7, 2015, five suicide bombers killed 54 and wounded nearly three times as many in the capital city of Maidaguri, where the bishop lives and works.

The group has killed 1,000 people across Nigeria in the first three months of 2015, according to Human Rights Watch, which reports that more than 6,000 have died in Boko Haram-led violence since 2009.

Just last month, the group pledged its allegiance to ISIS – also known as the Islamic State – which launched a bloody campaign in Iraq and Syria last summer.

Meanwhile, Bishop Dashe has just completed a “consolation tour” to communities in his diocese, promoting forgiveness and continued faith. He believes he was asked by Jesus to spread devotion to the rosary in order to aid them as they do so.

“Maybe that’s why he did it,” said the bishop, referring to Jesus in his vision.

Bishop Dashe said he has a strong devotion to Christ’s mother, and that “I never joke with ‘Mamma Mary.’ I know she is here with us.”

And he is not the only Nigerian bishop putting the future of the country in the hands of Mary. The nation’s bishops’ conference has consecrated the country to her twice in recent years.

Bishop Dashe believes that one day his diocese will completely recover and grow thanks to her intercession.

“These terrorists… think that by burning our churches, burning our structures, they will destroy Christanity. Never,” Bishop Dashe told several hundred people from the dais of the #WeAreN2015 congress.

“It may take a few months or a few years … but ‘Boko Haram is gone.’”

He later told EWTN News that “prayer, particularly the prayer of the rosary, is (what) will deliver us from the claws of this demon, the demon of terrorism. And of course, it is working.”

Source: EWTN News/CNA

Nigerian Army Frees 234 Women and Children



The Nigerian army has released this photo of some of the former captives

It said the operation took place on Thursday 30 April, in the vast Sambisa forest - a militant hideout - in the north-east of the country.

It was not immediately clear if any of more than 200 girls abducted from a school in Chibok in April 2014 were among those freed.

Nearly 300 women and children were freed by the army in the same week.

In a tweet, the Nigerian military wrote: "FLASH: Another set of 234 women and children were rescued through the Kawuri and Konduga end of the #Sambisa Forest on Thursday."

It said the freed hostages were being screened to establish their identities.

UNFPA Report Says 214 Rescued Chibok Girls are Pregnant


FOLLOWING—THE latest rescue of additional 234 women and children by the Nigerian Army from the Sambisa Forest in Borno State, indicated, yesterday, that a sizeable number of the rescued girls were visibly pregnant, even as unofficial reports put the latest number of pregnant girls in one of the camps in Borno as at last Saturday at 214.

Giving this indication in Lagos, Executive Director, UNFPA, Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin, also disclosed that in the last one year, the organization had taken deliveries of over 16,000 pregnancies in the troubled North East part of the country.

Osotimehin, while giving update of the response to the rehabilitation of the rescued women and children,  said the organization, in anticipation of the magnitude of

the problem on hand, had put in place a formidable team in collaboration with the Federal and state governments, to first restore the dignity of the girls, who, he said, are facing severe psychosocial trauma.

On the state of the girls, he explained that most of them, due to the long period spent in captivity, required a special set of services that would facilitate their integration into society.

“What we found is that some of the women and girls that have come back actually have much more in terms of the stress they have faced, so the counselling has to be more intense and working with them one-on-one.

“I’m glad the communities are not excommunicating them and are taking them back. That is an important therapy too. We anticipate this is going to escalate because the military intervention is continuing, we find that more people are now needing our services and we will continue,” he stated.

Further, he explained that the UNFPA had earlier collaborated with the Federal and state governments to train 60 counsellors to offer psychosocial services to the affected women and children. He noted that those trained were people from the communities, who understand the context and sociology of the people.

“UNFPA is providing dignity for women. In conflict and disasters, most people would only think of water and sanitation, provision of tents and housing, and food, which are all important. But women and girls have specific needs that nobody else looks after; it is only UNFPA that is doing this. We are giving psychosocial counselling.

“Beyond that, in the growing young people, we will always have pregnant women, but nobody segregates the needs of the pregnant women which are very important and different from the needs of the average community. We look after them, and ensure they get antenatal care and that they deliver properly and that they even get Caesarean Section when necessary.

purportedly shows a member of the Nigerian Army standing next to a group of women and children rescued in an operation against the Islamist group Boko Haram. Boko

Source: Vanguard

Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote still keen on Arsenal takeover


The 58-year-old, Africa's richest man, failed in a bid to buy the Gunners in 2010 and says that he will concentrate on his own business before submitting a new offer.

African billionaire Aliko Dangote admits that he remains keen on buying Arsenal.

The 58-year-old Nigerian, who is worth an estimated £10.3 billion - which makes him Africa's richest man - explored the possibility of purchasing the club in 2010 but his approach was rejected.

"I still hope, one day at the right price, that I'll buy the team," Dangote told Bloomberg Business. "I might buy it, not at a ridiculous price but a price that the owners won't want to resist. I know my strategy."

Dangote, who has made his fortune through various operations including cement manufacturing, sugar supply and oil investments, says that he will concentrate on expanding his own business before launching a new offer for Arsenal.

“We have $16bn-worth [£10.5bn] of investments in the next few years. Right now I want to take my own business to a certain level. Once I finish on that trajectory, then maybe [an offer will follow]," he continued.

Dangote is an Arsenal fan but has criticised Arsene Wenger, claiming that the 65-year-old "needs to change his style a bit" and warning that the club "need new direction".

Source: Goal.com


Ufot Ekong, A Nigerian Student Solves Historically Difficult Maths Equation in First Semester at University


A Nigerian student achieved the highest grades at a university in Japan for 50 years and solved a maths puzzle in his first semester that was unsolvable 30 years ago.

Ufot Ekong, who studied at Tokai University in Tokyo, achieved a first class degree in electrical engineering and scored the best marks at the university since 1965, the Flotilla Magazine reported.

He began his success early at the university, solving a 30-year-old maths equation in his first semester.

Throughout his university career Mr Ekong won six awards for academic excellence.

The mathematician worked two jobs alongside his studies to pay his way as a student.

Mr Ekong also speaks English, French, Japanese and Yoruba and won a Japanese language award for foreigners. He is currently working for Nissan and already has two patents for electronic car design to his name.

Tokai University is a prestigious private university based in the Japanese capital, which was founded in 1924. It is focused on the sciences and technology and roughly 60 per cent of all students are enrolled in these schools.

Source: Independent UK


***** Very Hot! Nigeria Bans Female Genital Mutilation. Hot News! *****


The news of Nigeria did not only made history, it almost shunt down the whole of Social Media with Bloggers, Influences, Companies and internet enthusiasts sharing and ranting about it.

Unlike other Nigerian news that performed well on one network without gaining attention on other networks. The issue of female genital mutilation being criminalized in Nigeria made big headline in main stream media and broke Social Media.

The ban falls under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act 2015 that was passed in Senate on May 5 and enacted into law. One of the last acts by the outgoing president, Goodluck Jonathan who left office on Friday, May 29, 2015.

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is the act of either partially or totally removing the external female genitalia or causing injury to the female genital organs for non-medical purposes.


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