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Lawan: Buhari, is an excellent President *Opposition can’t determine leadership of NASS
On the sidelines of the Sallah homage by FCT residents to President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa Abuja on the backdrop of the Eid el-Fitr festivities, the Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, shares his insight on the twilight days of the current administration, in this interview with State House Correspondents. Excerpts:
What are your thoughts on this year’s Eid el-Fitr celebrations?
It was a very historic, memorable Eid el-Fitr celebration visit to our outgoing President. And the takeaway is this president has served Nigeria so far, for over seven and a half years. And he did tremendously well. The Buhari administration is closing on a very strong note. We have succeeded in reducing, minimising the insecurity that we met in 2015. This administration has provided so much infrastructure across the country, like no other administration did before. This administration, this President, particularly, assented to legislation more than any previous Presidents, especially in the last four years. And we are so proud of this administration, that we have been able to achieve so much, and therefore, it is a thing of joy for all of us to come and celebrate with Mr. President, the Eid el-Fitr today, Friday.
And I want to also add here that the multitude of people from the FCT, those who actually came to see the President and congratulate him, showed the kind of unity that we have in the FCT, people from all walks of life. And of course, the rest of us who are supportive of what the President was supposed to do here came to show our gratitude in another way that we are really happy with the way we have been able to be part and parcel of this administration. The very positive manner is really the ninth National Assembly.
We have done so much to support that administration and the government, and we are so proud of our achievement as an administration. That is what the legislature and the executive arm of government [achieved] and this President will go home by the grace of God after the 29th of May, 2023 a very satisfied person. But of course, there are things that we have not been able to do well. The new administration of Asiwaju Ahmed Bola Tinubu will come in and its going to be a continuity with those areas that we’ve gotten well, and those areas that we have not been able to get well, we’ll rework them. We’ll retool them, we’ll kindle them and ensure that we continue with the progressive APC administration.
It is one administration, it’s one government, so to speak, and we’re proud to be part of everything that has happened in the last seven and a half years.
What in particular would you say the government has done well?
Infrastructure. You tell me, is there any part of Nigeria that today does not have one infrastructural development or the other? The South-East has the Second Niger Bridge. The Second Niger bridge was something that defied all the previous administrations, right from 1999, when President Obasanjo held sway. Then late Yar’Adua of blessed memory, then Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. All the PDP administrations came. They went there, they said they broke ground, or [did] groundbreaking, but that was where it stopped. Nothing else happened until the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari came. Like a joke, people thought it was going to be the same thing. But we have proven everybody wrong.
So, any regrets?
No, no, no, you can’t say regrets. We can only say there are things that we have not been able to satisfactorily deal with. And this is natural, because, one, we don’t have sufficient funds. Two, as human beings, there are areas that, naturally, whatever you do, you may not get it right. But it’s for us to identify those areas, go back and rework them. And this administration, as it winds up a new one, an APC administration is coming in to take over and by the grace of God, it will have a National Assembly that is also APC. So, we will continue to work on those areas that we need to improve. So, I am not going to talk about what areas because the time we have here is very limited.
Regarding the Senate Presidency, are you not going to contest?
I’m not here to answer whether I’m running for Senate President or not.
Okay, well, you’ve praised the administration and the Ninth Assembly for the bills that you’ve passed. However, in the Ninth Assembly, the women’s bills were thrown out. How do you feel about that? And your party is worried about the leadership of the 10th National Assembly? Or are you saying you are not worried?
First of all, when the bills, five of them that concern women, were not voted for by the National Assembly, I think naturally, there are things that we assume could happen. But they didn’t happen the way we wanted them. But remember that even bills that concern the National Assembly were killed. There are bills that concern the National Assembly itself that did not see the light of the day. I felt bad that we could not pass even one. But then we shouldn’t really lose hope, we should continue to campaign. We should talk to more and more members of the National Assembly. And we should also re-strategise. The kind of campaign that was undertaken may not be necessarily the one that will give you the kind of outcome that we needed. But I’m very confident that we should continue to campaign for issues that we have not been able to get right.
Let me give you an example. The mayor for FCT, almost every constitutional amendment period, the mayor of FCT [proposal] will surface. But it has not been passed. Does that mean that we shouldn’t continue to ask for a mayor for FCT, those that feel there should be a mayor? No!
And there are issues that concerned the National Assembly itself that were not really passed. So, I felt bad that we couldn’t pass any of them. But I’m also very optimistic that if we restrategise, look at the way we campaign, we could get either all of them or some of them passed in the next assembly by the grace of God.
The party is not in trouble. This is today’s Sallah, and by the grace of God, and most of those people who have travelled for either Umrrah or one reason or the other will be back in the country, including our president-elect, and I’m sure that our leaders will come together and decide how the leadership of the 10th National Assembly will emerge.
I’m very confident that the APC members and senators-elect will respect whatever our party and our leaders will eventually come up with. We are praying that we are able to deal with it as decisively as possible, and then keep ourselves united and work together with other parties. We have been able to work together with other parties in the Ninth Assembly in a very bipartisan way, smoothly and seamlessly. And I believe that we can repeat that. And it is very, very essential that we have a very united National Assembly. And I’m very confident that we will do that.
Are you not worried the opposition will take over, given the configuration?
I don’t think opposition parties are planning to usurp because it is presumptuous that the APC will not be a united party. APC is a united party and the opposition party will simply work with the APC majority for us to have stability, because there is no way an opposition will decide who should be the Senate President, who should be the speaker. It is our party and other leaders that will decide which zone or whoever, and the rest of us in the party will key in and of course the opposition would have no option but to support.
I don’t see anything wrong in the opposition talking to us, or we’re talking to the opposition to ensure that we’re on the same page, because we need the opposition to ensure that we get most of our constitutional amendments, when the time is right, passed — because we can’t have the 73 in the Senate. You need 73 senators at least for you to have any constitutional amendment. So, you would need the opposition. That’s why it is very, very critical. It is very essential that you work with the opposition right from the beginning. Don’t ever think the opposition should be pushed away. I don’t believe in that, I only believe in the very bipartisan chamber because it is more productive. It is more stable, it’s calm, and it gives you the kind of outcome that you will never get with a very rancourous chamber. And I’ve seen it, we have done it.
Culled from Channels TV
President Bola Tinubu has directed the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) to investigate major technology companies and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) platforms operating in Nigeria over allegations of anti-competitive practices, unlawful exploitation of news content and other potentially unfair market conduct.
The investigation follows a joint petition submitted to the Presidency by the Nigerian Press Organisation (NPO), comprising the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), the Broadcasting Organisations of Nigeria (BON), and the Guild of Corporate Online Publishers (GOCOP).
Announcing the development in a statement on Monday, the FCCPC said the directive was conveyed by the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris.
“The Federal Government’s position was communicated to the FCCPC in a letter signed by the Honourable Minister of Information and National Orientation, Alhaji Mohammed Idris. The investigation promises to open a new vista in Nigeria’s media history.
“In recent years, concerns have been raised by the Nigerian media industry over the growing impact of certain digital platforms on the sustainability of the country’s news ecosystem. Specifically, the NPO is increasingly uncomfortable with major technology companies including Meta, Alphabet, X (formerly Twitter), and certain generative AI platforms, citing practices capable of undermining fair competition, the commercial viability of Nigerian media organisations, and the legitimate rights of content creators and publishers,” the Commission stated.
Reacting to the directive, the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the FCCPC, Mr. Tunji Bello, said the Commission would conduct an independent, transparent and evidence-based investigation.
“We recognise the strategic importance of the media to Nigeria’s democracy and the equally significant role of technology in driving innovation and economic growth. Our responsibility is to objectively determine the facts and ensure that competition within the digital ecosystem remains fair, transparent, and consistent with Nigerian law,” Bello said.
He stressed that the investigation should not be interpreted as a presumption of wrongdoing against any organisation, but as an opportunity to establish the facts through due process.
“Every party will be accorded a fair opportunity to present relevant information before any conclusions are reached. In specific terms, FCCPC will determine whether the practices in question constitute a breach of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPA) 2018 or any other applicable law.
“In the past, FCCPC had investigated META and in 2025, won a landmark case against the tech giant for violations of FCCPA, including data breach, for which the tech giant was fined $220m. Meta has, however, appealed the fine,” the statement signed by Director of Corporate Affairs, Ondaje Ijagwu, added.
According to the FCCPC, the investigation will examine allegations of market dominance and potential anti-competitive conduct by the companies involved.
It will also probe claims of unauthorised extraction, scraping, ingestion or commercial use of copyrighted news articles, broadcast materials and other original journalistic content for developing and training Generative AI models.
Another key area of inquiry is the allegation that Nigerian news publishers have been denied meaningful opportunities to negotiate fair compensation or appropriate commercial arrangements for the use of their journalistic content.
The Commission noted that similar concerns had previously been raised in South Africa, where, following an investigation by the South African Competition Commission, it said Google agreed to compensate South African news media with R688 million ($40 million) annually for three to five years.
Nigerians, intent on getting to the root of the current fake agency scandal raving around the Presidency must start by ascertaining the whereabouts of the N27.5billion, said to have triggered off the entire saga.
Babachir Lawal, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), who weighed in on the scandal surrounding the purported Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council (PFIPC), stressed on Monday night that Nigerians must not forget that the sharing formular regarding the amount, which is said to be the takeoff grant for the body, was the foundation of the dispute.
Recall that Adeniyi Adeyemi, Director General of the agency, after accusing Femi Gbajabiamila, Chief of Staff (CoS) to President Bola Tinubu, of collecting N400 million from him while awaiting a balance of N200million for facilitating his appointment, upped the ante by alleging that disagreement over the sharing formula of the grant triggered off the dispute.
Adeyemi had accused the CoS of demanding 48 per cent of the entire grant for himself, which he refused to part with, leading to the disagreement to the extent that the former Speaker of the House of Representatives now declaring war, which the Presidency relied on to declare the agency non-existence.
Babachir, a guest of Prime Time, a public affairs programme on ARISE NEWS Television, wondered why Nigerians were limiting themselves to the N1.3billion budgeted for the agency by the National Assembly in the 2026 appropriation without talking about the huger amount of N27.5billion.
Hear him: “Nigerians are talking about how 1.3 billion Naira was inserted into the budget. The man himself first said the quarrel came about because he refused to part with 48% of the 27-point-something billion Naira take-off grant. That money has been spent before this budget office was looking for the budget. Who gave him the money? It was not appropriated for; it’s not in any budget, that 27.5 billion Naira for which he says somebody demanded 48%. Who gave him the money? How did the process of generating the request for the release come up? How did it go through?
“We are just talking about the tip of the iceberg here. Down there, before we got to here, 27.5 billion Naira had already been disbursed, according to him, as a take-off grant. How did that money get to him? It was not in the budget. So, this is what should frighten us. If such money can go to a fictitious organisation, we only now begin to see it when we are quarreling about how did it get into the budget. How did that money get to them?
“I think we all know that thieves and armed robbers always fight and they expose themselves during sharing. His complaint was that the Presidency was after him because somebody demanded 48 per cent of the take-off grant of 27.5 billion Naira. And so, somebody was not happy since he refused to part with that money.
“So, you see, that’s how we got to know this to start with. That is the reason why we got to know this on his side of the coin. It’s about the sharing of the 27.5 billion Naira. That’s why the thing came up. So, it didn’t work. It should have worked before that money left the government coffers into the account of the agency.
“It depends on the will of the President. I can use myself as an example. When there was this brouhaha between me and the Senate, remember I was suspended for some time while an investigation was going on. So now, that is best practice.
“It’s already out of their hands. I believe now the thing is on the President’s desk. It is a legislative oversight. This government – this National Assembly – has no interest in scrutinising the budget that comes before them. Most of the legislators just go in there to earn their salaries and collect allowances and go. They don’t scrutinise the budget line by line. We all know how this particular government works. There are some people that when they talk, nobody else has the authority to contravene
“It’s not a one-off thing. The issue of buying appointments is not new. People have been hearing it as rumors, as allegations, all over that. In this government, people buy appointments. We’ve heard it on the streets. And so this is not a new thing. I don’t know in our time. Nobody was buying appointments. No, it’s not to my knowledge. It’s not to my knowledge that people buy appointments. It probably could be, but I wouldn’t know that. It’s not part of our mandate to know such things.
“This government doesn’t take governance seriously. When things like this happen, Nigerians are not surprised. We are only interested in this because we have an opportunity to poke attacks on the government, not because we don’t know that these things happen in this government. It’s so porous.
“There are so many power centers that, you know, nobody does a budget. Nobody implements a budget. Ministers go to the office and sit down and read newspapers. Overheads, maybe if they are lucky, it comes one per quarter, at least paid quarterly. Some governments don’t even get overheads. Everybody’s redundant. But there’s money being appropriated and money being spent, but nobody sees where the money is going to. So that is part of the loopholes.
“Why are you interested in 27.5 billion Naira that had already been collected and spent? We are talking about an agency that we are claiming doesn’t exist. Maybe it exists, but it doesn’t have a legal framework for its existence. But it exists. And there are a lot of powerful people that make sure it exists in that form. Those are the people we need to expose. The Chief of Staff, in particular, is so powerful. The SGF is there, just reneging on his responsibilities. And nothing has happened now.”
Explaining official procedures for documenting new agencies, the former SGF, said: “If an agency is received, processed, and forwarded without somebody asking in the SGF’s office exactly who these people are, it means there’s a dereliction of duty on the side of the SGF.
“The act setting up that agency will sometimes say the position has to be advertised, interviewed, and shortlisted names sent to the president for approval. Some, you just write and he just approves. So, the SGF will go through the file, and in that process of due diligence, will be able to find out whether such an organisation exists. If there is no record for it in the SGF’s office, he will raise a red flag on it.
“What we used to do is if there’s a new agency that either the President or a minister proposes to handle some specific assignments or duties, he will first of all raise a memo to the president, who will approve that such be created. And then a memo will be sent to the Federal Executive Council on that particular agency, and we’ll debate it.
“Now, sometimes it will require some legislation to give that agency a legal mandate to operate. Some will just be within the presidential approval, and then the agency is created. Because really, you cannot appropriate funds to an agency that has not been legislated for.
“There has to be a legal basis for its existence. But first of all, it is the executive that raises such an agency, makes the proposal, debates it, and the Attorney General of the Federation will normally put an opinion on it. Then, if the Federal Executive Council approves, it’s sent to the legislature for legal establishment.
“It should not have arisen in the first place if it is not a legally approved agency. It should not exist. And the SGF would know that if it doesn’t exist on any basis, why is he forwarding a request? If it doesn’t exist, such will not happen in our time.
“I’m sure the President would assume that such an entity has gone through all the checks and balances before it is established, and therefore, not every communication from that agency needs to be verified. But as far as it is coming through the office of the SGF, due diligence must be done first before it is forwarded.
“This SGF has been sidelined in a lot of things from what we hear. He has been sidelined in a lot of things. It’s institutional compromise, because in this, I sense there’s quite a big racket going on somewhere along the line. If the agency was created by maybe one big man alone, and then he wants to go through the budget process, the budget office assigns the budget code according to the chart of accounts in GIFMIS. So, how did they manage to assign the budget code for this agency that does not exist? Who inserted it?
“Because first of all, the budget office issues a budget call circular to MDAs, and everybody starts to prepare his budget according to the budget line. They give you ceilings, and you prepare your budget and forward it to the budget office as an agency or ministry. Now, the Ministry of Budget and Planning would, in our time, call every MDA to come and defend its budget. Now, if you don’t exist, how did they recognise that you are a genuine entity? Who gave out the budget code and allowed their budget to pass?
“That’s what oversight is. The SGF should be able to know, because before it gets to the National Assembly, that budget goes through the SGF. “Unless there’s a dereliction of duty by the SGF’s office, the responsibility to flag that this is a fake agency would have come from them.”
Sepp Blatter is unhappy with a situation where Donald Trump, would pick up his phone and call on the Federation of Internation Football Associations (FIFA) to change its established rules as has now emerged in the case of Folarin Balogun, a strike in the United States squad currently at the World Cup.
Balogun, a Nigerian-US citizen, is supposed to miss a match between his country and Belgium in the Round of 16, on Monday, following a red card he picked in the last encounter of the team between Bosnia and Herzegovina.
However, it has now been revealed that the intervention of the President of the United States, who reportedly called Gianni Infantino, current FIFA President to review Balogun’s automatic one-game suspension, saw to the world’s footballing regulator acquiescing by shifting the implementation of the ban by a year.
Railing on the development, which would now make the 25-year-old eligible to file out against Belgium in the last 16 of the World Cup later on Monday, Blatter, disgraced out of the FIFA Presidency in 2015, wrote on X: “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls,” scandal-hit Blatter said on X.
“They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. If a US President intervenes with the FIFA President — and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match — the question is unavoidable: Quo vadis (Where are you going), FIFA?”
The 90-year-old former FIFA boss, a usual critic of Infantino, who once told Bild, German newspaper in February that the new FIFA had become a “dictator,” added: “Football must never become a playground for political power.”
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