CBN authorizes use of old naira notes, Police arrest 5 human parts dealers in Ogun

CBN authorizes use of old notes

The Governor of Anambra State, Prof Charles Soludo confirmed on Monday that the Central Bank of Nigeria has asked commercial banks to dispense and accept old naira notes as deposits.

DAILY POST reports that Soludo, a former CBN governor, made this known in a statement he posted on his social media handles.

He explained that the Governor of CBN, Godwin Emefiele gave the directive at a Banker’s Committee meeting on Sunday.

He added that Emefiele personally confirmed the directive to him.

According to him, residents should report banks refusing to accept the old notes.

“Commercial banks have been directed by the Central Bank to dispense old currency notes and also to receive the same deposits from customers. Tellers at commercial banks are to generate the codes for deposits, and there is no limit to the number of times an individual or company can make deposits.

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“The Governor of the CBN gave the directive at a Bankers’ Committee meeting held on Sunday, 12th March 2023. The Governor, Dr Godwin Emefiele, personally confirmed the above to me during a phone conversation on Sunday night. Residents of Anambra are therefore advised to freely accept and transact their businesses with the old currency notes (N200, N500; and N1,000) and the new notes”, the statement contained.

Ogun police arrest five human parts dealers

Five suspected human parts dealers have been arrested by men of the Ogun State Police Command.

The suspects, Oshole Fayemi (60), Osemi Adesanya (39), Ismaila Seidu (30), Oseni Oluwasegun (69) and Lawal Olaiya (50) were arrested at their hideouts while planning to carry out an operation.

The state Police Public Relations Officer, SP Abimbola Oyeyemi, disclosed this in a statement on Sunday.

Oyeyemi said the suspects have been exhuming corpses from their graves and removing parts of their bodies for ritual purposes.

He said the gang members were arrested on Saturday following information received by the police at the Odogbolu Divisional Headquarters that they were planning to carry out another round of human parts harvest.

He said the suspects were responsible for many corpses exhumed from graves within the Ososa community in the Odogbolu Local Government Area of the state.

NDLEA nabs chief in midnight raid of cannabis farm

A rehabilitated ex-fighter of the Boko Haram terrorist group, Alayi Madu; and the traditional ruler of Kajola, a border community between Ondo and Edo State, Akinola Adebayo, are among 37 persons arrested over 2.2 tons of illicit drugs seized by operatives of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja, Lagos and in raids across 12 states of the federation in the past week.

PUNCH Metro reports that as part of ongoing operations to mop up illicit drugs across the country ahead of the next round of elections, NDLEA officers in the early hours of Friday, March 10, stormed Kajola Forest in Kajola community where they destroyed three cannabis farms measuring 39.801546 hectares.

The owner of the farms, Adebayo (35), who claims to be the Baale of Kajola, was arrested on the farm at 2.30am, while two other suspects believed to be his workers Arikuyeri Abdulrahman, 23 and Habibu Ologun, 25, were also nabbed in a hut near the farms.

The Director, Media and Advocacy, NDLEA, Femi Babafemi, disclosed this in a statement obtained by our correspondent on Sunday.

In the same vein, 26-year-old Madu, who was said to be a Boko Haram fighter for 15 years before he surrendered to the Nigerian military in 2021, was intercepted by NDLEA operatives on Thursday, March 9 along Abuja-Kaduna Road with 10Kg of skunk, which he said he bought in Ibadan, Oyo State and was taking the consignment concealed in a sack to Maiduguri, Borno state.

Political parties can’t regulate INEC over BVAS, top official fumes

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has slammed political parties intruding into its affairs to dictate on how it should operate on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS.

Mr Festus Okoye, the INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of Information and Voter Education Committee, made this known during Channels TV’s Politics Today on Sunday evening.

Okoye stressed that it is the INEC’s function to regulate the affairs of the political parties and not vice versa.

The electoral umpire’s top official made this remark in a reaction to the Labour Party’s faulting the idea of reconfiguring BVAS after its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, sought to examine the election materials.

Speaking on the matter, Okoye maintained that the request by the LP to monitor the commission’s process of reconfiguring and backing up results on its BVAS devices would not be granted.

Okoye said, “On the issue of a political party saying they want to come and look at our cloud, IReV or into the brain of the BIVAS, the commission will not allow that to happen.

“Every political party that deploys polling agents has a copy of the polling units level results and if a political party now says they want to come into the commission to look at the same thing their agents have already, we won’t allow that to happen because the laws do not allow that.

Bus-train crash: 53 discharged, 43 undergoing treatment

The Lagos State University Teaching Hospital has said there are still 43 victims of Thursday’s train-bus accident on admission in its facilities.

LASUTH had on Thursday said it received 102 victims of the train-bus crash for treatment.

The Ministry of Health, in a statement on Sunday titled, ‘Updates on the Bus-Train Accident in Lagos as at Sunday 12th March, 2023,’ exlplained that 53 victims had been discharged as of March 12.

“The total number of patients/passengers discharged as of today, Sunday 12th March, 2023, is 53. The total number of patients on admission as at today, Sunday 12th March, 2023, is 43. LASUTH has 39, General Hospital Odan, Lagos has two, and General Hospital, Gbagada has two.”

Giving an analysis of the distribution of the passengers to hospitals, the ministry said, “Breakdown of location after triage from the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital; LASUTH had 71, GH, Lagos has four victims, GH, Orile-Agege had 10, GH, Gbagada had six and Tollgate Trauma Centre had five of the victims.”

Furthermore, on the six deaths recorded, two occured at the site of accident and four at LASUTH during resuscitation.