Save the date: November 2 is World Right to Die Day

The World Federation of Right to Die Societies has designated November 2 as World Right to Die Day. The date is already crowded with significant commemorations. Catholics and Anglicans celebrate the second day of November as the Feast of All Souls, when prayers are said for all departed souls.

In Mexico, Catholic doctrines embellished with indigenous beliefs have given rise to the Día de Muertos, a festival of death celebrated with great gusto. In the United States there has been an effort to nominate it as National Plan Your Epitaph Day. And the United Nations has designated it as the rather mysterious International Day to End Impunity.

Corps member impersonates three Ministers, dupes foreigners of N30m

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has arrested seven suspected fraudsters, including a serving corps member, who specialized in stealing the identities of influential Nigerians and duping foreigners, Daily Post reports. The internet fraud syndicate was arrested in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital, for duping foreigners of over N30m.

The suspects were accused of impersonating a former Attorney-General of the Federation, Mr. Bello Adoke (SAN); the immediate past Chairman of the EFCC, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde; the current AGF, Abubakar Malami (SAN) and the Minister of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun.

The EFCC made this known in a statement signed by its spokesman, Mr. Wilson Uwujaren, on Thursday. According to the statement, the corps member, Prosper Onukagba, is currently serving in the Tai Local Government Area of Rivers State. Onukagba was allegedly involved in online dating scam, also known as romance scam.

According to the anti-graft agency, he defrauded unsuspecting foreign widows, mostly from Europe and America. Also, one of the suspects, Promise Nwalozie, allegedly posed as Lamorde using the former EFCC chairman’s identity card to send scam mails to foreigners, mostly Europeans and Americans. In the process, Nwalozie reportedly extorted sizeable amount of foreign currencies from them.

The statement read in part, “Besides, he also posed as Barrister Peter Jackson, a spurious lawyer working with the National Judicial Council. “As a ‘lawyer’, he was allegedly defrauding his victims by assuring them that he would help in the recovery of money lost to different Nigerian cyber fraudsters.

“To do this, Jackson was collecting various sums of money as service charges from his victims. Some of his victims are: Betty. G. E, an American and Georgina M, an Australian. “In addition to all these, Nwalozie had multifarious electronic scam documents in various folders in his email box, ostensibly for the payment of a spurious N12,500,000 to one Robert Giese, an American, by the ‘Office of the Presidency, Federal Republic of Nigeria, Abuja.’

“To further deceive Giese, he swore to a fictitious ‘Affidavit of claim of Federal High Court of Nigeria’ deposed to by a fake Justice Ibrahim Auta, OFR, on behalf of Giese. “The ‘affidavit’ was signed by a former AGF, Bello Adoke. To achieve his fraudulent schemes, he had several e-mail addresses suchas:sirpeterjackson@gmail.com, promisenwalozie@gmail.com, bigenoughforcare@gmail.com among others,” the statement added.

Nigeria set to revise petroleum sector laws

Ibe Kachikwu

Ibe Kachikwu, minister of state for Petroleum has said that Nigeria is now in the process of reviewing all petroleum sector laws and in a few months, government is set to come up with comprehensive roadmap for the sector. Delivering a keynote address at the 2016 edition of National Association of Energy Correspondents conference, with the theme: The Urgency of Now, Kachikwu said that a review of the regulations affecting the oil and gas sector in Nigeria is now nearing completion.



According to Businessday, Ibe Kachikwu said that a sector roadmap which his ministry has created has policies such as National Gas Policy, National Oil Policy, Fiscal Policy and National Downstream Policy embedded in them and are now almost completed. “We need consistent policies or else we will lose out to competitors,” Kachikwu said.
He noted that oil production by OPEC members has shrink to 30 percent hence the ability of member countries of the cartel to call the shots has been reduced as non members who control 70 percent production have a stronger say in the determination of oil prices.

Nigeria’s petroleum sector laws has come under intense focus in recent times as experts say the powers granted the President to award oil acreages based on discretion does not encourage transparency. Nigeria’s fiscal regime also suffers from weak regulation and outdated laws. Kachikwu said that it is now urgent to review these laws in view of the challenges bedevilling the sector, top of which he said is militancy which has reduced production from about 2.2 million barrels per day to about 1.5million barrels, crimping gas to power plants and contributing to polluting the environment. “The solution to the agitation in the Niger Delta is not militancy and bombing campaigns, what we need is extensive dialogue,” he said.