Governor Babatunde Fashola Says Oduah’s Armoured Cars Will Buy 51 Police Patrol Vehicles

 

Lagos State governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, has said that the two armoured cars bought at the cost of N255 million for the Minister of Aviation, Mrs. Stella Oduah, will purchase 51 patrol vehicles for the Nigerian Police.
The governor said this at the 7th annual Town Hall Meeting on Security, themed: ‘Sustaining Local Responding To Rising National Security Challenges,’ held at the Civic Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos.
“It is sad to know that the Federal Government that allocate three patrol vehicles for one state police command of 370, 000 police men, is unable to resolve how N255 million was used to purchase 2 saloon vehicles for one officer. It is a very grave irony.
“The cost of average vehicle needed to patrol the state is just N5 million. And with such fund, we will have put at least 51 patrol vehicles on the road, patrolling the streets of Lagos.”

“In spite of all this, they resist the idea of a state police. The money from the fund was in the last one year used to provide vehicles for the Nigerian Prison Service, National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, NDLEA, Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS, National Security and Civil Defense Corps, NSCDC and indeed the airport wing of the Nigerian police, is funded from this money. And it is the same aviation ministry that manage the airport that we had this very odious car scandal of N255 million.”
 
The governor noted that the upshot of central Government’s failure to confront security has continued for the past seven years.
“The residents of Lagos have borne the burden of that neglect, and there is no indication that anything will change soon, in spite of endless reform deliberation and proposals.”
On the crime rate in the state, Fashola said “Our crime data base now has record content of 92, 488 which helps us to keep track of all those who have been arrested, prosecuted, jailed or have any contact with the criminal justice system.”
He added that the state is preparing for a future of crime prevention, saying “it will be technologically driven, scientifically grounded and result assured.” 
By Jamiu Yisa       

Nigerian Judge Frees Two Lebanese Terror

An Abuja  Federal High Court judge today sentenced Talal Ahmad Roda, one of the three Lebanese nationals  arrested in connection with  illegal possession of weapons and Hezbollah connection to life imprisonment which, the judge ordered must be run concurrently.
Two other co-accused person, Mustapha Fawaz, the owner of a popular Amigo Supermarket and Abdallah Tahini were set free by the judge.
 Giving the ruling today Justice Ademola Adeniyi said that there was no room for judicial discussion as to the first and second accused persons, he subsequently ordered that they should be released immediately with their personal belongings  released to them.
 Regarding the third suspect, the judge ruled that the he was guilty of all the five counts of illegal possesion of weapons and conspiracy as he was found at the location of the arm cache in Kano.

Samsung aims to double its smartphone sales in Africa in 2014

Samsung Electronics expects to supply half of the smartphones sold in Africa this year and aims to double these sales on the continent in 2014, an executive said.

Africa has a growing young population that is increasingly tech savvy and urbanized. This is attracting foreign sellers of consumer products like smartphones, especially as markets stagnate or shrink in more developed nations.

Although smartphones are gaining popularity across the continent, they are still a novelty. At the end of 2012, sub-Saharan smartphone penetration was 4 percent, compared with a global average of 17 percent, according to industry body GSMA.

"Samsung this year will ship 50 percent of all the smartphones in Africa," Thabiet Allie, head of content and services for Samsung Electronics Africa, told a telecoms conference in Cape Town late on Tuesday.

Out of the 100 million or so mobile phones sold in Africa this year, 20 million are smartphones and slightly more than half of those are models made by the South Korean company, he said.

"Next year we are looking at doubling this number and the year after probably doing a substantial increase," Allie said at the annual AfricaCom conference.

GSMA forecasts smartphones will constitute 20 percent of the Africa market by 2017 as devices priced at below $50 become a reality.

Smartphone use in South Africa is already slightly above the global average, with Blackberry a market leader.

One South African company plans to start assembling a $260 smartphone for the African market in 2014.

(Reporting by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura; Editing by Pascal Fletcher)

HARD Ways to Make Your Life Better

     Some of the most worthwhile things in life aren’t easy. One of the things I dislike most about “power of positive thinking”-style personal development philosophies (such as “The Secret”) is the implication that if you just have the right attitude and the right state of mind, the rest will just fall into place. I think it causes a lot of hurt and disappointment in people who invest their time, effort, and of course, money into these systems and find themselves, one or two or five years down the line, exactly where they were before.

“You must not have wanted it badly enough,” the authors of these philosophies seem to be saying. “There must still be something wrong with you.”

I don’t think that, ultimately, God or the Spirits or the Universe or the world “provides”. I think a lot of times the world puts obstacles in our way, and no amount of positive thinking makes them go away. And I think that a lot of the people who are “successful”, by whatever standard you want to use, have as much “wrong” with them as a lot of the ones who aren’t successful. Maybe more.

In any case, wherever the motivation comes from, the things that really make our lives worth living can be quite difficult. (And who knows, maybe thinking positively helps take some of the edge off of doing the hard stuff?) What’s more, they can take a lot of time to do, and even more time to get right. But I think that doing is the important thing, not the result — throwing yourself into something with all your heart, mind, and soul is the success, not the “growing rich” part.

Here, then, are ten things that are really hard to do but which have an incredible power to make your life better: