The Federal Ministry of Health has confirmed ten new cases of Covid-19 19 in Nigeria, 4 in the FCT and 7 in Lagos.
The cases in Abuja are being treated at the University of Abuja teaching Hospital.
All ten cases are Nigerian Nationals. Nine of them had traveled to Canada, France, Netherlands, Spain and United Kingdom and returned in the past week.
According to a statement signed by the Minister of Health, Osagie Ehanire, all ten have between Mild to moderate symptoms and are being treated
Young people are not immune from coronavirus and must avoid socialising and communicating it to older, more vulnerable people, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.
The choices made by the young can be “the difference between life and death for someone else”, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
Over 11,000 patients have died from the Covid-19 respiratory illness worldwide.
Nearly 250,000 patients have tested positive overall.
The WHO chief’s remarks follow reports that young people in many countries are being complacent about health warnings, because of the greater susceptibility to the virus among older patients.
Speaking at an online news conference from WHO headquarters in Geneva, Mr Tedros said: “Although older people are hardest hit, younger people are not spared.”
He added: “I have a message for young people: You are not invincible, this virus could put you in hospital for weeks or even kill you. Even if you don’t get sick the choices you make about where you go could be the difference between life and death for someone else.”
Mr Tedros welcomed developments from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, which reported no new cases on Thursday.
He said this provided “hope for the rest of the world that even the most severe situation can be turned around”.
Source: BBC
In a bid to stop the spread of the Coronavirus, the Federal government has ordered the closure of all institutions of learning, from tertiary to primary in Nigeria.
This follows a rise of confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Nigeria from 3 to 12 with the Index case being an Italian man who is reported to have recovered.
Sporting events like the National sports festival Edo 2020 have also been cancelled while there is a restriction on social and religious gatherings with more than 50 persons.
International flights ,from tomorrow will be allowed into just two airports, Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja and Murtala Mohammed international Airport Lagos.
Details later.
Beyoncé, Blue Ivy & WizKid won Best Music Video for “Brown Skin Girl” at the Premiere Ceremony of the 63rd GRAMMY Awards.
The Best Music Video award is given to the artist, video director and video producer.
Their video bested fellow nominees Future with Drake, Anderson .Paak, Harry Styles, and Woodkid.
Though the Grammys will not have its usual audience due to the pandemic, each performance stage will be surrounded by performers, nominees and guests, all of whom will be regularly tested for COVID-19. A fifth stage will be used by the show’s presenters, many of whom are venue personnel from the Apollo in New York, the Station Inn in Nashville, and the Troubadour and Hotel Café in L.A.
Beyoncé leads this year’s nominations with nine, including for record of the year for “Black Parade” and her feature on Megan’s “Savage.” Swift, Roddy Ricch and Lipa follow with six nods each, and Brittany Howard picked up five nominations. Those with four noms include Eilish, Megan, Phoebe Bridgers, Justin Bieber, DaBaby, jazz musician John Beasley and classical composer David Frost
Source: Bra..y.com, Variety
LAGOS – Diekoye Oyeyinka, 33, has been billed as one of the most promising Nigerian writers of his generation.
He went to some of the finest schools in his West African homeland but says that, like the majority of his classmates, he “didn’t know about Biafra until I was 14.”
When he did begin to find out about the brutal civil war that nearly tore Nigeria apart, it was not in the classroom. Instead it was a schoolmate in his dormitory who showed him a separatist leaflet demanding Nigeria’s southeast break away from the rest of the country.
Before then, Oyeyinka had known nothing about how leaders from the Igbo ethnic group declared the independent state of Biafra in 1967.
He knew nothing of the conflict that resulted and the 30 months of fighting and famine that are estimated to have cost over a million lives before the secessionists surrendered 50 years ago in January 1970.
“We’ve had a very brutal history, the older generation went through a lot of trauma,” Oyeyinka said. “We just sweep it under the carpet, pretending nothing happened. But without knowing our history, we will repeat the same mistakes. Our history is a succession of deja vu.”
It was to try to break this cycle of ignorance that Oyeyinka wrote the novel “Stillborn” — a historic epic about Nigeria from the days of British colonial rule in 1950 to 2010. In it the civil war is the pivotal event.
Unlike other famed Nigerian writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with her novel “Half Of A Yellow Sun,” or Chinua Achebe’s memoir “There Was A Country,” Oyeyinka is one of the few non-Igbo writers to have dwelt on the conflict.
“An Igbo friend got angry at me and said ‘You can’t write about us, it’s our conflict,’” he recounted.
But Oyeyinka insists that all Nigerians need to be made aware of what happened.
“We need to address these traumas ourselves, as a country, otherwise we are a tinder box ready to explode.”
While in the rest of Africa’s most populous nation many know little about the history of Biafra, in the former capital of the self-proclaimed state at Enugu the memory of those years lives on.
Biafran flags — an iconic red, black and green with a rising golden sun — make appearances on the front of buildings and hard-line separatists still demand independence.
The security forces — deployed heavily in the region — are quick to stamp out any clamor for a new Biafra.
At the end of the war in 1970, Nigerian leader Yukubu Gowon famously declared there would be “no victor, no vanquished” as he sought to reunite his shattered country.
The leader of the breakaway Republic of Biafra, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, went into exile for 13 years before being pardoned. He returned to Nigerian politics but was detained for 10 months in prison.
Leading Nigerian intellectual Pat Utomi says that many Igbos — the country’s third-biggest ethnic group, after the Hausa and the Yoruba — still feel marginalized.
One key event was when current President Muhammadu Buhari — then a military chief — seized power in 1983, and stopped the only Igbo to get close to leading Nigeria since the war from becoming head of state.
“In the early 1980s, people had forgotten about the war, but this succession of poor leadership brought bitterness among the new generations,” Utomi said.
Nowadays any incident — from the closure of the only airport in the southeast last year to the sacking of Igbo shops by customs officials in economic hub Lagos — can cause grievances to flare.
“It’s important to deal with history, to write it down. In Nigeria, we try to cover it up,” Utomi said. “We are more divided today than we’ve ever been before the civil war. We learnt nothing from it.”
In order to try to heal the rifts, Utomi helped organize the Never Again conference aiming to bring together key cultural and political figures to discuss the lessons of the Biafra war half a century after it ended.
He is also a patron of the Center for Memories in Enugu, a combination of a museum and library where visitors can come and “dig into history.”
History itself has been absent from Nigerian schools.
The current government reintroduced it only from last term as an obligatory subject for pupils from ages 10 to 13, after more than a decade off the curriculum.
“Teaching history is essential to build our identity as a country, and defend our patriotic values,” said Sonny Echono, permanent secretary at the education ministry.
But schools still remain woefully short of qualified history teachers, and there is no unified narrative about the civil war that does not figure in the lessons.
“We need to teach the war in our schools,” said Egodi Uchendu, a history professor at University of Nsukka, in the former Biafra territory. “Eastern Nigeria is completely different from how it was experienced in other parts of the country. We need to bring in the different angles to it.”
Chika Oduah, a Nigerian American journalist, has crossed the country to collect hundreds of testimonies of the victims and combatants of the Biafra conflict, which she publishes on her website Biafran War Memories.
She says that for many of those she interviewed it was the first time they had retold the horrors of the period.
“A seventy-something former soldier … broke down crying, when he told me how he lost his brother during the war,” she said.
She herself only learned at the age of 17 that her mother as a child spent two years in a camp for displaced people.
“Our parents wanted to move on, not look at the past,” Oduah insisted.
“But we need to talk about it, otherwise we won’t heal.”
Updated: Mar 12, 2020
Africa’s greatest obstacle to attaining the global status that befits her has been the cause of leadership, a major drawback to a supposed impeccable sustainable transformation that the continent deserves.
A wise man simply puts this in real terms “Common sense dictates looking both ways before crossing a street, or risk being hit by a truck,” For the leadership in Africa, they have always looked one way, no wonder the continent experiences so much setbacks at every turn.
How come a continent so rich in terms of natural resources, still fails to provide her citizens basic social amenities?
As the world’s richest continent which has 50% of the world’s gold, most of the world’s diamonds and chromium, 90% of the cobalt, 40% of the world’s potential hydroelectric power, 65% of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland, as well as other natural resources including (crude oil), it’s unacceptable for her to remain home to the world’s most impoverished and abused people on planet earth despite all this wealth.
A Japanese diplomat told me some time last year that he wishes Africans can agree to swap continents where all the people in East Asia will come over to Africa and Africans going the other way which looked odd to me. However, before I could respond, he went further to say if that was to be the case, Africans would not recognize the continent they left in 4 years.
This strikes a chord, making it abundantly clear to me that Africa leadership needs a paradigm shift on a massive scale, based on a shared purpose with a global perspective.
“Leadership for the people and by the people in real terms,” meaning it is time to end this self -centered leadership style driven by greed, obsession, intimidation, oppression and power grab with massive corruptions issues and ethnic under tones which has resulted to so much blood shed because of inter-tribal wars and ethnic cleansing pitching one community or tribe against another.
In relation to Nigeria, we have seen kinsmen, family members and relatives of the then candidate who were begging for transportation fair every now and then during the election campaign, become shareholders overnight in major multi-nationals in the country since he became President with no qualifications, no business experience, a clear sign of corruption yet he says he is fighting corruption.
Intimidating everyone, who dares to criticize them, and even destroying the lives of peaceful agitators like my people of the south eastern Nigeria who are legitimately asking for the right to go their own way and be called Biafrans, because it is obvious that the Nigerian project is not working for everyone which in my view we were forced into in the first place by our colonial masters.
We were labelled terrorist with so many killed or constantly intimidated, their means of livelihood and businesses destroyed, while the ones they created to drive their ethnic agenda Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen are been shielded, committing serious killings and carrying out ethnic cleansing in the process with no consequences for the perpetrators.
Currently, a lot of communities have been sacked by these people and even renamed while the real owners are now displaced, and the security apparatus infiltrated by these folks, that is why they are hardly caught, instead the military had the greatest causality in this fight. To quote one of the top general in the military “ANY BOKO HARAM member who decides to give up their evil ways has the right to become the Nigerian President of Nigeria one day.” Not to mention, the hijacking of the judiciary which is supposed to be the defender of the people.
Furthermore, most recently using the resources from the south eastern part of the country (our motherland) which is crude oil as equilateral to get loans from China to develop the north at the expense of the region. What betrayal to the oath of office of the President!
Besides so much insecurity across the country, the height that the country has never experienced before with so many killed, thousands, this past year, record numbers mostly those of the Christian faith by herdsmen and Boko Haram terrorist.
However, instead of fixing the problem they created as a result of their policies and deliberate actions, the leaders in Nigeria just like others in the continent result to the quickest avenue to shift the narrative by blaming it on others “so called foreign influence or interference” and will be very confident to have the support from their new master China who will be ready to veto any resolution in the security council that will affect them aside other dimensions like, culture, climate and bio-geographic factors as the explanation to the why? of Africa’s problems.
Quoting Nkrumah, I can confidently state that the independence of one country in the continent is meaningless unless the rest of Africa is free from bad leadership, meaning we will be running around in circles, because when one is up the rest of the bad bunch will pull them down. Our rise as a continent to being genuine influencers in the global scheme of things is long overdue and Africa deserve better.
2020 must be the beginning of this new dawn, let’s build our continent with selfless and visionary leadership. It is not too much to ask, for the sake of our children, so the efforts of great African freedom and independence fighters will forever live on, let’s not destroy all they have sacrificed and lay down their lives for.
Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenneth Kaunda, Patrice Lumumba, Nnamdi Azikiwe, and many more, so much a perfect fit to describe African leaders then, What about now? Where are the Donald Trumps of Africa that will drive the Africa first agenda, and a continental self- reliance government for the people and not for their selfish interest?
President Donald Trump signaled Tuesday he may put a “very powerful hold” on funding to the World Health Organization as he lashed out at the United Nations specialized agency and accused it of “being very China-centric” amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Reiterating his complaints from a tweet earlier in the day, the president said that the WHO “has been wrong about a lot things.” Trump has been critical of the WHO for opposing the travel restrictions from China and Europe.
“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” Trump said during the daily press briefing of the White House coronavirus task force. “They seem very China centric.”
He added: “We’re going to put a hold on the money sent to the WHO.”
Trump, however, backtracked when questioned on that statement by members of media, saying he was “going to look into” cutting off funding to the WHO and denying his earlier statement.
The WHO has praised China for its transparency on the virus, even though there is reason to believe that more people died of COVID-19 than the country’s official tally.
WHO has increasingly been the focus of questions about its response to the coronavirus pandemic, including information it tweeted in January that quoted “preliminary” findings from Chinese authorities that downplayed the seriousness of the virus that has since turned into a pandemic, shutting down daily life around the globe.
Source: Fox News
HOLLYWOOD A-listers have rushed to support Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson after they tested positive for coronavirus.
The Castaway actor, 63, said the couple started to feel tired and suffered from “body aches” while filming in Australia before the diagnosis.
The couple sought medical advice and tested positive for the deadly bug. T
hey are now in isolation in a Gold Coast hospital.
After telling Instagram and Twitter about their diagnosis, some of Hollywood’s biggest stars have rallied around Tom and Rita to offer their support.
His brother Colin, 42, took to Twitter shortly afterwards to thanks fans for their support.
The actor wrote: “We are so grateful for the outpouring of support from everyone.
“My parents are receiving excellent care in Australia and are doing well (and in good spirits) given the circumstances.
“Despite the fact that I’m in LA and haven’t seen them in over three weeks, we have been in constant contact and am confident that they will make a full recovery.”
Tom has been in Australia filming an upcoming Elvis Presley biopic when he started experiencing symptoms of the virus.
He said he felt like he had a cold, while his wife Rita, also 63, suffered from chills. They have both tested positive for coronavirus, he said on Instagram.
In a statement, he added: “Well, now. What to do next? The Medical Officials have protocols that must be followed. We Hanks’ will be tested, observed, and isolated for as long as public health and safety requires. Not much more to it than a one-day-at-a-time approach, no?’
“We’ll keep the world posted and updated. Take care of yourselves!”
Tom, a two-time Oscar winner and star of films including Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan and The Post, is the highest profile Hollywood figure to be diagnosed with the Covid-19 virus, which is sweeping the world.
Moments before Tom posted to Instagram, Donald Trump addressed the US and announced a host of new measures, notably suspending all travel from Europe, excluding the UK, for 30 days starting from Friday.
The entertainment industry is also reeling from the outbreak and a host of major events have been cancelled.
Source: The Sun
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