Connect with us

Nigeria

Anambra 2021: Soludo remains APGA Guber candidate – Ex-CBN boss’ spokesman, Pauly Onyeka insists

Published

on

The camp of former Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Governor Prof. Charles Soludo, has rubbished the recent court orders declaring Chuma Umeoji as the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA ahead of the November governorship election.

Most recently, the Imo State High Court sitting in Owerri, had on Wednesday declared Umeoji as the authentic candidate of the Anambra ruling party.

High Courts in Jigawa and a few other states have also delivered similar judgements in favour of the Jude Okeke-led faction of the party.

The Okeke-faction of the party is challenging the victory of Charles Soludo in the primary election that saw Umeoji’s disqualification during the screening process.

On Wednesday, the Imo State High court dismissed a suit filed before it seeking to nullify the Owerri Convention of APGA which led to the emergence of Chief Jude Okeke as the National Chairman of the party.

Speaking with the media in reaction to the Imo High Court order and other similar rulings from High courts of different states, Hon. Pauly Onyeka, a spokesman to the former CBN Governor said that Jude Okeke, Umeoji and their co-travellers were going about doing what he described as ‘forum shopping.’

By this, he meant that they are moving from one court to the other; courts of the same level of jurisdiction and obtaining judgements from judges who, according to him, may be their friends and in the process making a mockery of the judiciary.

“In any party, you will have those that would not want things to go the normal way; those that would always want to play pranks and such are the people you see parading themselves with Okeke and Umeoji himself,” he said.

“According to the Constitution of this country, every party is to put up a guideline for its primary election. And that’s what APGA did.”

He explained that APGA had followed its guidelines strictly and religiously, leading to the emergence of Soludo as its candidate through a primary election that was shown live all over the world.

“And it was adjudged one of the best primary elections so far in the country. Umeoji himself was disqualified even before the primary,” he continued.

“He (Umeoji) was constitutionally disqualified because he was disqualified by a body that was put up to do the screening process and that body looked at him critically and believed that he does not have what it takes to be the candidate of APGA in such an election and then disqualified him.

“So having been disqualified, he doesn’t even stand any chance of parading himself as a candidate. For me, it is ridiculous that somebody who was disqualified; somebody who believes solely in the leadership of the party that’s as far as Victor Oyeh is concerned…this Umeoji believed in Victor Oyeh as the Chairman of the party and believed in everything he was doing that was why he subjected himself to the screening via that Victor Oyeh’s faction.

“Now immediately you found out that it didn’t favour you, that was the moment Victor Oyeh became for him a non-Chairman of APGA and he started looking for one nonsense or the other and before you knew it, he threw up someone who was a meddlesome interloper; someone who was not known in APGA as a stakeholder let alone being the National chairman and started following him and calling him his Chairman.

“And that was how the issue of Jigawa’s judgement came up. When you look at all these things, you’ll see that it’s somebody who wants to be the governor of a State by all means not that you want to subject yourself to the likeness or hatred of the people over you.

“That’s what a good person would do. Once the people say they don’t like you or they’re not voting for you, you go. Same thing as when the party says it doesn’t want you because you lack what it takes to be its candidate.

“But this time around, because he needs it, by all means, it’s not something that’s being pursued as a matter of reason. He’s pursuing his own candidature and election as a matter of course, not as a matter of reason. Now, they’ve started what we call ‘forum shopping.’ They are moving from one court to the other.

“And they go to courts of same level of jurisdiction. Is it not making a mockery of the judiciary? They had gone to Jigawa…instead of going to Anambra. We have many High Courts in Anambra here both state and federal but you decided to do forum-shopping maybe because you have a friend who is a judge somewhere that will give judgement.

“So you migrated all the way from here to Jigawa, Taraba and now he has also gone to Imo State. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It’s so ridiculous. The Jigawa judgement was a nullity ab initio because it was a default judgement. It was given without proper constitution of the court.

“Soludo, INEC and APGA were not there at the court. It was only Umeoji’s people that came and at best they tried to impersonate INEC and APGA by sending someone who came and did the undoable by mentioning that he was representing the two.

“That is as bad as that. But this is a lot of rubbish that would be killed with only one stone. Once the Appeal Court in Kano starts its sitting on the matter, you’ll see how events would be unfolding.

“You can’t build something out of nothing. It’s not possible. So, immediately this issue comes up in the Appeal Court, it is very clear they’ll nullify all these things these people have been doing in the courts and uphold Soludo’s victory as APGA’s candidate.

“Mind you, courts don’t go into the internal issues of any political party, the only thing court does is to make sure you follow your guidelines and the constitution. And once the court sees that APGA followed its guidelines and the constitution in coming up with Soludo as its candidate, there is nothing any court can do about it.

“It’s something that is very fundamental as far as judicial issues are concerned in this country and even all over the world. The Imo State judgement falls into the same forum shopping.

“So how do you build something on nothing and you want it to stay? What would Imo State High Court do that is different from the one Jigawa has done?

“They’re courts of competent jurisdiction and no one can counter what the other has said and even if they did, the only court that will make such decisions strong is the Appeal Court. So we’re waiting for the Appeal Court. Just mind you that till tomorrow, Soludo remains the duly elected candidate of APGA in Anambra State.

“Don’t mind these jamborees the so-called Umeoji’s camp is throwing up. In fact, that guy is trying to popularise himself but in doing so, he’s ending up notorising himself. “

Culled from the Daily Post Nigeria

Lifestyle

Kaduna Governor Commissions Nigeria’s First 100-Building Prefabricated Housing Estate

Published

on

Kaduna, Nigeria – November 6, 2025 — In a major milestone for Nigeria’s housing sector, the Governor of Kaduna State has commissioned a 100-unit mass housing estate developed by Family Homes and executed by Karmod Nigeria, marking the first-ever large-scale prefabricated housing project in the country.

Completed in under six months, the innovative project demonstrates the power of modern prefabricated construction to deliver high-quality, affordable homes at record speed — a sharp contrast to traditional building methods that often take years.

Each of the 100 units in the estate is designed for a lifespan exceeding 50 years with routine maintenance. The development features tarred access roads, efficient drainage systems, clean water supply, and steady electricity, ensuring a modern and comfortable living environment for residents.

According to Family Homes, the project represents a new era in Nigeria’s mass housing delivery, proving that cutting-edge technology can accelerate the provision of sustainable and cost-effective homes for Nigerians.

“With prefabricated technology, we can drastically reduce construction time while maintaining top-quality standards,” said a spokesperson for Family Homes. “This project is a clear demonstration of what’s possible when innovation meets commitment to solving Nigeria’s housing deficit.”

Reinforcing this commitment, Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State emphasized the alignment between the initiative and the state’s broader vision for affordable housing.

“The Family Homes Funds Social Housing Project aligns with our administration’s commitment to the provision of affordable houses for Kaduna State citizens. Access to safe, affordable and secure housing is the foundation of human dignity. We have been partnering with local and international investors to frontally address our housing deficit,” he said.

Also speaking at the event, Mr. Ademola Adebise, Chairman of Family Homes Funds Limited, noted that the project embodies inclusivity and social progress.

“The Social Housing Project also reflects our shared vision of inclusive growth, where affordable housing becomes a foundation for economic participation and improved quality of life.”

Karmod Nigeria, the technical partner behind the project, utilized its extensive expertise in prefabricated technology to localize the process, employing local artisans and materials to enhance community participation and job creation.

Industry experts have described the Kaduna project as a blueprint for future housing initiatives nationwide, capable of addressing the country’s housing shortfall more efficiently and sustainably.

With this pioneering development, Kaduna State takes a leading role in introducing modern housing technologies that promise to reshape Nigeria’s urban landscape.

Continue Reading

Books

The Pioneer’s Burden: Building the First Private Network in a Vacuum of Power

Published

on

  • Book Title: The Making of Bourdex Telecom
  • Author: David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex
  • Publishers: Bourdex
  • Reviewer: Emeaba Emeaba
  • Pages: 127

In the history of Nigerian entrepreneurship, stories of audacity often begin with frustration. A man waits hours in a dimly lit government office to place a single overseas call, his ambitions held hostage by bureaucracy. From that moment of exasperation, an empire begins. Such is the animating pulse of The Making of Bourdex Telecom, David Ogba Onuoha Bourdex’s sweeping autobiographical account of one man’s effort to connect the disconnected and to rewrite the telecommunications map of Eastern Nigeria.

At once memoir, corporate history, and national parable, the book reconstructs the emergence of Bourdex Telecommunications Limited—the first indigenous private telecom provider in Nigeria’s South-East and South-South regions—against a backdrop of inefficiency, corruption, and infrastructural neglect. Its author, a businessman turned visionary, narrates not merely how a company was built but how a new horizon of possibility was forced open in a society long accustomed to closed doors.

Bourdex begins with a stark diagnosis of pre-deregulation Nigeria: a nation of over 120 million people served by fewer than a million telephone lines. Through a mix of statistical precision and personal recollection, he paints a portrait of communication as privilege, not right—of entire regions condemned to silence by state monopoly. His storytelling thrives in such contrasts: the entrepreneur sleeping upright in Lagos’s NET building to place an international call; the Italian businessman in Milan conducting deals with two sleek mobile phones. That juxtaposition—between deprivation and effortless connectivity—serves as the book’s moral axis.

From these moments of contrast, Bourdex constructs the founding myth of his enterprise. What began as an irritation became a revelation, then a crusade. “I saw a people left behind,” he writes, “a region cut off while others dialed into the future.” His insistence on framing technology as a means of liberation rather than profit underscores the moral ambition that threads through the book. The Making of Bourdex Telecom reads not like a manual of business success but like an ethical manifesto: to build not simply for gain, but for dignity.

As the chapters unfold, Bourdex’s narrative oscillates between vivid personal storytelling and granular technical detail. He recounts his early business dealings in the 1980s and ’90s, the bureaucratic mazes of NITEL, and the daring pursuit of a telecommunications license under General Sani Abacha’s military government. There is a cinematic quality to his recollections—the tense midnight meetings in Abuja, the coded alliances with military officers, the improbable friendships that turned policy into possibility.

These sections recall Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria in tone and intention: both works diagnose the systemic failures of governance but find redemption in individual initiative. Yet Bourdex’s narrative differs in form. Where Achebe offered moral critique, Bourdex offers demonstration—an anatomy of perseverance in motion. He documents the letters, negotiations, and international correspondences with Harris Canada, showing how an indigenous company emerged through sheer force of will and global collaboration.

Such passages risk overwhelming the reader with acronyms, specifications, and telecom jargon—R2 signaling, SS7 interconnection, E1 circuits—but they also lend the book an authenticity rare in corporate memoirs. What might have been opaque technicalities become, under Bourdex’s hand, instruments of drama. The machinery of communication becomes metaphor: wires and waves as extensions of faith and tenacity.

To situate The Making of Bourdex Telecom within Nigeria’s socio-political history is to confront the paradox of private enterprise under public decay. The book chronicles the twilight of NITEL’s monopoly, the hesitant dawn of deregulation, and the emergence of entrepreneurial actors who filled the void left by government paralysis. In this sense, Bourdex’s story parallels that of other indigenous pioneers—figures such as Mike Adenuga and Jim Ovia—whose ventures in telecommunications and banking transformed the national economy from the late 1990s onward.

Yet Bourdex’s tone is less triumphant than reflective. He does not romanticize deregulation; he portrays it as both opportunity and ordeal. The government’s inertia, the labyrinthine licensing process, and the outright extortion by state agencies form the darker undertones of his tale. His clash with NITEL’s leadership—recounted with controlled indignation—stands as one of the book’s most gripping sequences. When a senior official demanded an illegal payment of ₦20.8 million for interconnection rights, Bourdex’s defiant reply, “You are not God,” rang out like an act of civil disobedience. In such moments, the narrative transcends the genre of business autobiography and enters the moral theatre of national reform. The entrepreneur becomes citizen-prophet, challenging a corrupt establishment with the rhetoric of justice and self-belief. That blending of economic narrative with civic conscience is perhaps the book’s most compelling feature.

Stylistically, The Making of Bourdex Telecom occupies an intriguing space between oral history and polished memoir. The prose is direct, rhythmic, and often sermonic, reflecting its author’s background as both businessman and public speaker. Anecdotes unfold with the cadences of storytelling; sentences sometimes pulse with the energy of spoken word: “Amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic.” The repetition of such aphorisms imbues the work with a sense of conviction, though occasionally at the expense of subtlety.

Where the book excels is in its evocation of atmosphere—the dusty highways between Aba and Lagos, the sterile corridors of power in Abuja, the crisp air of Calgary where the author first glimpsed technological modernity. These scenes transform what could have been a linear corporate chronicle into a textured work of memory.

Still, the narrative structure is not without flaws. The absence of an external editor’s restraint is occasionally felt in the pacing; digressions into technical exposition or moral reflection sometimes interrupt narrative flow. Readers accustomed to the concise storytelling of international business memoirs—Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog or Elon Musk’s authorized biography—may find the prose dense in places. Yet such density mirrors the complexity of the terrain Bourdex navigated. His sentences, like his towers, are built from layers of persistence.

Beyond its entrepreneurial chronicle, the book doubles as social history—a record of Eastern Nigeria’s encounter with modernization. The chapters on “The FUTO Boys,” a cadre of young engineers recruited from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, offer a microcosm of the new Nigerian professional class emerging in the late 1990s: educated, idealistic, and determined to prove that technical expertise could thrive outside the state. Their improvisations—installing antennas by candlelight, building networks amid power outages—embody the collective grit that sustained Bourdex’s vision.

The narrative’s cumulative effect is generational. Through the story of one company, we glimpse a society in transition—from analogue isolation to digital awakening. The book captures that liminal moment when the sound of a dial tone became a symbol of freedom.

Running through The Making of Bourdex Telecom is a persistent theology of success. Bourdex attributes every turn in his journey to divine orchestration: friendships “placed by the Invisible Hand,” setbacks reinterpreted as “divine redirections.” Such language, while characteristic of Nigerian entrepreneurial spirituality, acquires here an almost literary force. It recasts corporate history as providential narrative, where the invisible infrastructure of grace mirrors the visible architecture of towers and transmitters.

For some readers, this piety may feel excessive; yet it provides the emotional coherence of the book. The author’s faith is not ornamental—it is constitutive. Without it, the story of Bourdex Telecom would read as mere ambition. With it, it becomes vocation.

The foreword by Abia State Governor Alex Otti and the preface by former Anambra Governor Peter Obi frame the book as both inspiration and instruction. They read Bourdex’s career as parable: the triumph of private initiative over public inertia. Yet their presence also situates the work within Nigeria’s broader discourse on nation-building. The Making of Bourdex Telecom is not only the autobiography of an entrepreneur; it is a treatise on indigenous agency—on what happens when Africans cease to wait for imported solutions and begin to engineer their own.

In this respect, the book extends its influence beyond its immediate industry. Its lessons—about courage, timing, friendship, and faith—extend to any field where innovation must contend with adversity.

Judged as a work of literature, The Making of Bourdex Telecom is direct and sincere. Its prose favors clarity over ornament, and its authenticity gives the story a compelling sense of truth. Bourdex writes not to embellish, but to bear witness—to a time, a struggle, and a conviction that technology could serve humanity. The result is a hybrid work: part documentary, part sermon, part memoir of enterprise.

As a contribution to Nigerian business literature, it deserves serious attention. Few firsthand accounts capture with such detail the messy birth of private telecommunications in the 1990s—a revolution that reshaped the country’s economic and social fabric. In its pages, we hear both the crackle of the first connected call and the larger resonance of a people finding their voice.

Bourdex’s central message endures: progress begins when frustration becomes purpose. His journey from the backrooms of NITEL to the boardrooms of international telecoms is not merely personal triumph; it is a chapter in Nigeria’s unfinished story of modernization.

In the end, The Making of Bourdex Telecom stands as more than the history of a company. It is an ode to enterprise as nation-building, and to the stubborn optimism of those who refuse to let silence define them.

See the book on Amazon: >>>>>

_________

♦ Dr. Emeaba, the author of “A Dictionary of Literature,” writes dime novels in the style of the Onitsha Market Literature sub-genre.

Continue Reading

Houston

Houston and Owerri Community Mourn the Passing of Beloved Icon, Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie

Published

on

Houston was thrown into mourning on September 19, 2025, following the sudden passing of businessman and community advocate Lawrence Mike Obinna Anozie, who peacefully joined his ancestors. Immediate family member in Houston, Nick Anozie, confirmed his untimely death and expressed gratitude for the outpouring of love and condolences from both the Houston and Owerri communities.

Lawrence was born to Chief Alexander and Lolo Ether Anozie of Owerri in Imo State, Nigeria, and will be dearly remembered by family members, friends, and the entire Houston community.

An accomplished accountant, the late Lawrence incorporated and successfully managed three major companies: Universal Insurance Company, LLC, Universal Mortgage LLC, and Universal Financial Services. Through these enterprises, he not only built a thriving business career but also created opportunities for countless individuals to achieve financial stability. His contributions to entrepreneurship and community development will remain a lasting legacy.

According to the family, arrangements for his final funeral rites are in progress and will be announced in due course.

Lawrence will forever be remembered as a loving and compassionate man who dedicated much of his life to uplifting others. He helped countless young Nigerians and African Americans overcome economic challenges by providing mentorship, financial guidance, and career opportunities. His generosity touched the lives of many who otherwise might not have found their footing. A devout Catholic, he was unwavering in his faith and never missed Mass, drawing strength and inspiration from his church community. To those who knew him, Lawrence was not only a successful businessman but also a pillar of kindness, humility, and faith whose legacy of service and compassion will continue to inspire generations.

For more information, please contact Nick Anozie – 832-891-2213

Continue Reading

Trending