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Iluyomade set for Arise Women

The organiser of ARISE Women, Pastor Siju Iluyomade, is set for this year’s edition of the programme.

With the theme, ‘IMPACT,’ ARISE Women is billed for between October 31 to November 1, at the Oriental Hotel, Victoria Island, Lagos.

In a statement, Pastor Iluyomade said: ”This year’s gathering is being positioned as more than another conference, with emphasis on practical transformation, leadership, empowerment, service and social impact.

‘It is designed to challenge women to reflect on their individual contributions to society and ask a critical question: ‘What impact am I making?’

She added that the programme would be ‘Transformational. Monumental. Unstoppable. Impactive,’ saying that the objective is to inspire participants to translate ideas and inspiration into tangible results.

She said the event would also provide opportunities for inspiration, networking, knowledge sharing and empowerment.

ARISE, she noted, has evolved from a yearly gathering into a movement committed to inspiring women, empowering communities, supporting vulnerable people and encouraging women to use their influence for positive change.

Last year, Iluyomade said, it provided an atmosphere of celebration, inspiration and networking, adding that this year’s would build on that foundation.

A highlight of ARISE’s intervention remains the Pink Buckets initiative, through which assistance has been provided to the less privileged and vulnerable.

According to the cleric, the initiative demonstrates that the true value of a movement should not be judged by the size of its audience or the publicity surrounding its activities, but by the number of lives positively affected.

‘True impact is not measured only by applause or headlines. It is measured by lives touched,’ she stated.

WSCIJ Hails PRNigeria For Sustaining Young Communication Fellowship Beyond Grant Funding

The Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ) has lauded PRNigeria for sustaining its Young Communication Fellowship (PYCF) for three consecutive years despite the expiration of the grant that helped launch the academy.

Executive Director of WSCIJ, Motunrayo Alaka, gave the commendation while delivering the keynote address at the closing ceremony for the Ilorin cohort of the 2026 PRNigeria Young Communication Fellowship.

Alaka recalled that the Centre supported the initiative at its inception through the Collaborative Media Project (CMEDIA), with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, expressing delight that the learning lab continues to flourish.

‘We were there when it started with our support from the Collaborative Media Project, and we are happy to see that despite the end of the funding cycle in 2024, PRNigeria has sustained the programme at its three centres in Abuja, Kano and Kwara States,’ she said.

The director noted that the fellowship had not only survived beyond the initial grant but had expanded into a fully residential programme, with accommodation facilities supporting participants across its three locations.

Alaka urged the young communicators to make integrity and professionalism the foundation of their careers, identifying integrity, loyalty, excellence, courage and curiosity as essential attributes for success in the communication industry.

She further encouraged the fellows to combine professional competence with leadership and business knowledge, emphasising that continuous learning and curiosity are crucial in a rapidly changing media environment.

Representing the Chairman of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations (NIPR), Kwara State Chapter, DSP Sani Suleiman of the Nigeria Customs Service, hailed PRNigeria for creating a platform through which young professionals could acquire practical communication skills.

Suleiman urged the fellows to build on the knowledge and experience gained and uphold values in their respective careers. He praised Mr. Yushau A. Shuaib, Managing Director and CEO of Image Merchants Promotion Limited (IMPR)-publisher of PRNigeria and Economic Confidential-for preserving the initiative.

‘He has established himself as a true giant in the industry, paving the path for others to follow seamlessly,’ Suleiman said, describing the fellowship as an important component of the organisation’s corporate social responsibility, which invests in the next generation of media and communication professionals.

Speaking at the ceremony, PRNigeria Fellowship Coordinator and Head of Innovation and Special Projects at IMPR, Mohammed Dahiru Lawal, said the programme’s sustainability had also benefited from partnerships and institutional support.

Lawal cited the contribution of the Adamu Abubakar Gwarzo Foundation, which provided a facility to PRNigeria in Abuja, enabling the fellowship to accommodate participants throughout the two-week intensive training.

‘The Ilorin cohort is the second batch in 2026, having completed the first cohort of 10 fellows in Abuja in August, using the facility donated by the founder of Maryam Abacha American University of Nigeria, Prof. Adamu Abubakar Gwarzo. The third cohort will be at the Kano Centre. Fellows are now hosted residentially,’ he added.

Lawal said the 2026 fellows were competitively selected from nearly 700 applications and confirmed the fellowship to be held in Kano in October would be the final cohort of the year. He advised the participants to maximise the opportunities and professional networks developed while together.

Adegbite Anuoluwapo Rafat emerged as the Best Fellow of the 2026 Ilorin Cohort. Fashola Abayomi Olawalarami was recognised as Team Lead, while other fellows received commendations for their performance and contributions during the programme.

For two weeks, the participants underwent training combining classroom sessions, practical exercises, field excursions, institutional engagements, individual and group assignments, and project-based activities designed to prepare them for careers in media and strategic communication.

The curriculum covered journalism, public relations and strategic communication, newsroom and editorial practices, feature writing, solutions journalism, data journalism, fact-checking, investigative journalism and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), among other areas.

As part of the experiential component, the fellows visited prominent newsrooms and media organisations in Kwara State and undertook institutional tours designed to expose them to professional practices beyond the classroom.

The Ilorin cohort also paid a special visit to the Emir of Ilorin, Alhaji Ibrahim Sulu-Gambari, as part of engagements connecting the fellows with traditional institutions and community leadership.

Pay yourself first but protect working capital, business leaders advised

Business owners across all scales have been advised to prioritise paying themselves a fixed salary while re-investing the majority of their profits back into their operations to ensure long-term sustainability and growth.

The call was made by Venkatesh Kumar, the Chief Executive Officer of Mandela Group, while speaking to over 500 clients during the Linglong Business Conference held at the Mandela Mass Complex on Sixth Street, Industrial Area, on Thursday night.

Delivering the fifth rule in his presentation on the “five rules of money every business person must know,” Mr Kumar cautioned entrepreneurs against conflating revenue with personal wealth.

‘Pay yourself a set salary first or business will eat your capital and personal peace,’ Mr Kumar said. ‘Protect your working capital. If you eat your inventory or use the money to buy personal luxuries, your business will quietly starve.’

He added that preserving capital requires continuous discipline, warning against complacency once a business becomes profitable.

‘The profit you make is not all yours. It’s just a harvest from the seed you sowed. So, get just a portion of it as your salary and plough back the rest into the business to boost your capital. That is how businesses grow from one scale to another,’ Mr Kumar explained.

He further discouraged entrepreneurs from relying solely on personal interest when starting ventures.

‘Nobody cares about your passion. Customers look for businesses that solve their problems,’ he noted, adding that strategic expansion is critical once a local market is established. ‘After solving the problems in the area where you started, spread your wings elsewhere to tap into new markets. That is how Linglong reached Uganda, among over 70 countries across the world. Of the 45 million people in Uganda, how many consume your product?’

Mr Kumar cited Mandela Group’s own diversification-expanding from tyre distribution into fuel stations, food hospitality, and regional growth with Café Javas outlets in Kenya-as an example of strategic market expansion.

Highlighting the necessity of business literacy, Twaha Mahad, a senior manager at Mandela Group, underscored the high mortality rate of commercial enterprises globally.

‘It is a serious concern that globally, only 33 percent of the businesses live to celebrate their 10th anniversary. So, we hold such conferences basically to share our blueprint with our customers because their survival is our survival,’ Mr Mahad told Daily Monitor.

Attending entrepreneurs noted the practical relevance of the session. Emmanuella Mawanda, a Café Javas client and perfume and jewellery retailer at Acacia Mall in Kamwokya, shared her key takeaway:

‘When you have done a business for some time, it’s easy to think you know it all. But trust me, whenever you interact with someone outside your circles, you learn something new. For example, I was considering trying event décor because it’s my passion. But now I know I must do it where it’s needed, not because it’s my passion.’

Electric vehicle handover

The conference culminated in the handover of a brand new Wuling Cloud Electric Vehicle (EV) to Rodgers Kizza, the grand prize winner of the Linglong Tires EV Promotion.

To qualify for the draw, customers were required to purchase two Linglong tyres. Mr Kizza, a surveyor who currently drives a Subaru Outback, entered after purchasing four tyres at once.

‘At first, I thought these were conmen calling me and blocked some of their numbers. I had never won anything in my life. So, telling me ‘you’ve won a brand new car’ sounded unreal,’ Mr Kizza said after receiving his car keys from Tina Wang, the Linglong sales executive manager for the Middle East and North Africa. ‘I’m extremely happy. This car will save me a lot in terms of fuel. And being new, it comes with lots of advantages.’

Mr Kizza is the fifth customer to win an electric vehicle under the promotion. Commenting on the drive toward green energy, Mr Mahad noted:

‘The world is going green. Many EVs are being imported, and Linglong foresaw it and joined the trend by gifting five EVs to our customers, so that as the world goes electric we are not left behind as City Tyres and Uganda in general. Though expensive to buy, EVs are cheaper due to lower operational costs compared to conventional vehicles.’

Commending the company’s customer engagement strategy, Sarah Rubanga Kaggwa, the Honorary Vice Consul at the Consulate of Canada, noted that Mandela Group has maintained a long tradition of client appreciation-tracing back to its early days at Gapco fuel stations where customers received soap and detergent with purchases, to modern promotions featuring trips abroad, financial literacy seminars, and vehicle giveaways.

‘You’ve trained us about doing business while making friends with your clients through giving back to the community,’ Ms Kaggwa said.

Kwara APC replaces deputy governorship candidate

Kwara State All Progressives Congress’ (APC’s) governorship candidate for the 2027 general election, Yakubu Salihu, now has a new running mate.

He is Oluwaseun Ogunniyi aka Adato. Ogunniyi represents Ojomu/Balogun Constituency in the House of Assembly.

He hails from Offa in Offa Local Government.

Initially, Independent National Electoral Commission INEC (INEC) listed Bello Salau as the deputy governorship candidate of APC.

Bello’s replacement by APC, it was gathered, is to calm opposition to Muslim-Muslim ticket, as the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has Muslim-Christian governorship and deputy governorship candidates.

But a youth group named the 52-Youth Coalition (52-YC) has kicked against the move.

It described the ‘move as one of the most unprecedented democratic aberrations in Nigeria’s recent political history.’

In a statement, coalition’s Secretary, Bashir Amid, alleged: ‘Governor AbdulRaman AbdulRazaq and APC leadership have imposed the current Speaker, Danladi, as the APC governorship candidate, with Ogunniyi, the member representing Ojomu/Balogun State Constituency, as his running mate, while another loyalist from the same House is being positioned to take over as Speaker.

‘But what has never happened, from Sokoto to Bayelsa and from Lagos to Borno, is a party nominating two serving colleagues who sit together in the same chamber, raise hands together, shout ‘Aye’ together and approve executive memos without scrutiny, as governorship and deputy governorship candidates at the same time.

‘Even the most desperate party understands that you cannot build executive capacity from a legislature that has none, and no serious party fields legislative apprentices for executive leadership at once.

‘The APC in Kwara has now created that ugly history. After eight years in power, the best it can offer is its classroom prefects.’

The statement added: ‘It is also a slap on the face of accomplished ‘Kwarans’. There are thousands of refined, accomplished ‘Kwarans’ in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, London, Toronto and New York, technocrats who run multinationals, professors who run research labs, entrepreneurs who employ thousands. The message from the Government House is that none of them is good enough.

‘The contrast with the PDP makes the APC’s failure even more glaring. The PDP has gone for substance, with Kale Kawu, an engineer, as governorship candidate, an accomplished technocrat, philanthropist and humanitarian with a private sector track record of creating jobs and delivering projects without public funds; and Rev. Fawenu as his deputy, a grassroots mobiliser, who is held in high esteem by the Christian community and beyond for his integrity, humility and long years of community service.

‘One party is presenting an executive team ready to govern from day one with a clear blueprint; the other is presenting an attendance list from a failed Assembly.

‘The coalition notes that ‘Kwarans’ are wiser and cannot be deceived. A House that could not make a law to lift ‘Kwarans’ out of poverty cannot produce a governor who will lift Kwara out of underdevelopment.’

Qatar charity approves $10 million for Abuja housing project

Doha-based humanitarian organization Qatar Charity has announced a $10 million investment plan for an integrated housing project in Nigeria.

The Abuja integrated housing project forms part of a major effort to scale up sustainable development and social welfare projects across the country.

Details of the strategic expansion were finalized during a courtesy visit by Nigeria’s Ambassador to Qatar, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, to Qatar Charity’s headquarters in Doha, where he held formal talks with Executive Vice President and Global Programs Officer Nawaf Abdullah Al-Hammadi.

The meeting centered on expanding Qatar Charity’s long-term development presence in Nigeria, prioritizing sustainable community interventions over short-term relief. Central to this plan is the Gaduwa housing development in Abuja, which will feature residential units alongside an on-site health clinic and a school.

Welcoming the investment, Prof. Yakubu assured the organization of the Nigerian Embassy’s commitment to facilitating diplomatic clearances and inter-agency coordination to help replicate the integrated housing model across other regions in Nigeria.

‘Qatar Charity has demonstrated a genuine and practical commitment to the well-being of Nigerian communities.

‘Housing alone is not enough; access to basic healthcare and education must go hand in hand. We see this partnership as contributing not only to development outcomes on the ground but also to the wider framework of Qatar-Nigeria relations,’ Prof. Yakubu said.

Bandits kill Kebbi village head, six others

Gunmen have killed the village head of Lafagu and six others at Boya, Kaoje in Bagudo Local Government Area of Kebbi State.

Sources said the village head, Alhaji Saidu Mujeli, and others were killed when bandits invaded the communities last Sunday.

Governor Nasir Idris during his visit to the communities, said: ‘I received with profound sadness and deep concern the unfortunate incidents that occurred around Kaoje, particularly in the Lafagu and Buya communities, which resulted in the loss of lives, including the death of the Village Head of Lafagu, Alhaji Saidu Mujeli. May Allah SWT forgive their shortcomings and grant them Al-Jannatul Firdaus.”

He assured the affected communities that his administration is working with security agencies to apprehend the perpetrators.

Sipapa, wife have case to answer over Shs1.6b robbery

The High Court in Kampala has ordered socialite Charles Olimu alias Sipapa and his wife, Shamira Namuyimba, to defend themselves against charges of aggravated robbery and money laundering after finding that the prosecution had established a prima facie case against them.

Justice Michael Elubu, in a ruling delivered on Monday, said the evidence presented by the prosecution was sufficient to require both accused persons to enter their defence.

‘Accordingly, both accused persons are called upon to enter their defence,’ Justice Elubu ruled.

Sipapa and Namuyimba are jointly indicted on five counts of aggravated robbery, while Sipapa faces an additional six counts of money laundering, two of which he is jointly charged with Namuyimba.

The couple pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The prosecution subsequently called 23 witnesses before closing its case.

Justice Elubu said that at the close of the prosecution case, the court was required to determine whether a prima facie case had been established against the accused persons.

The judge cited the decision in Ramanlal T. Bhatt vs R (1957), which defines a prima facie case as one upon which a properly directed court could convict if no explanation is offered by the defence.

He also referred to the Court of Appeal decision in Kato Kajubi vs Uganda, which held that a prima facie case is established where a reasonable tribunal might convict on the evidence so far presented.

Justice Elubu emphasised that the finding did not mean the prosecution had proved the case beyond reasonable doubt.

‘I have carefully considered the law governing the offences of Aggravated Robbery and Money Laundering. I have related the evidence adduced by the prosecution to this law, particularly the elements. It is my finding that the evidence adduced at this stage has established a prima facie case, as defined, against both accused persons,’ the judge said.

The prosecution alleges that on August 29, 2022, the couple robbed cash, jewellery and electronic items from a house in Bunga-Kawuku, Makindye Division, Kampala District.

The victims allegedly lost more than $429,000 (about Shs1.6 billion), alongside laptops and iPhones.

The prosecution further alleges that immediately before or after the robbery, the victims were administered a substance identified as brallobarbital, which rendered them unconscious.

According to the evidence summarised by the court, the victims woke up the following morning to find their house open, with one of the doors having been tampered with and broken to gain entry.

The matter was subsequently reported to police, while the ‘Find My Phone’ application was activated on some of the stolen phones.

The tracking system allegedly led investigators to a house on Kityo Close in Buwate, Kira Division, where Sipapa and Namuyimba lived together.

Police searched the house in the presence of Namuyimba, who was there when the officers arrived. Several of the stolen phones and laptops were allegedly recovered from the house, alongside cash and motor vehicles.

The prosecution also presented evidence that fingerprints lifted from an envelope recovered at the alleged robbery scene matched those of Sipapa.

The court heard that Sipapa was not at the house when police conducted the search but was later arrested, while Namuyimba was arrested following the search.

The judge said the final judgment would give detailed reasons for the decision.

How Online Casinos Are Transforming the Digital Entertainment Landscape

In 2017 a Swedish supplier put a money wheel in front of a camera and hired somebody to spin it. Evolution’s own company timeline gives that year one line: ‘Dream Catcher launches, creating the Live Game Shows category.’ None of the mathematics was new. A pinned wheel is a fairground device. The decision to shoot it like television was the new part, and it changed the industry behind it more than any software release of the past decade.

Live tables are not written and shipped. They are produced. They need presenters on rotating shifts, camera operators, floor managers, a lighting plan, a control room and an uplink that cannot drop in the middle of a hand. The cost base of a large casino supplier now reads less like a games studio and more like a regional broadcaster with a compliance department.

South Africa’s licensed sites carry the result of that shift. A studio-produced roulette room and a crash title built for a cheap handset sit in the same lobby at Virgin Bet Online Casino, two products that would not have shared a menu a decade ago. The operator names the Mpumalanga Economic Regulator as its licensing authority and gives its licence number as 9-2-1-09938.

What a licence like that covers is narrower than it looks. Bookmaker licences there are granted province by province, no national online-casino licence exists, and the Remote Gambling Bill introduced in 2024 lapsed on 21 May that year without being revived.

The accurate description is not that online casinos are legal in South Africa. It is that named operators hold named provincial licences, and that Parliament has left the broader question where it found it.

Before 2017 the live category was mostly replication. The same timeline dates Spanish Roulette, sold as Ruleta En Vivo, to 2013, ‘streaming live from a licensed land-based casino’, and marks the same year as the one the Riga complex opened its hundredth live table. The camera was a window into a room that already existed. You were watching a casino.

Dream Catcher was not that. Its wheel carries 54 segments separated by pins, 52 of them numbers and two of them multipliers at 2x and 7x, and when the wheel stops on a multiplier the bets stay where they are for another spin. Nobody builds that rule for a casino floor. It exists to make a second spin matter, which is a writer’s instinct, not a mathematician’s.

The slate grew the way a channel commissions a season. Lightning Roulette followed in 2018. Crazy Time, which the supplier’s own game page says was ‘released in July 2020′, brought four bonus rounds under one wheel: Cash Hunt, Pachinko, Coin Flip and a top-up round sharing the game’s name. Funky Time arrived in 2023, Crazy Balls and Lightning Storm in 2024, Ice Fishing in 2025.

The rules page for MONOPOLY Live carries a Hasbro trademark notice covering the board design, the four corner squares and the Mr Monopoly character, stamped 1935 and 2025. The game itself is a 54-segment wheel bolted to an augmented-reality bonus round where a computer-generated character walks a three-dimensional board and collects prizes on dice rolls.

Both it and Deal or No Deal, lifted straight from a television format, went live in 2019. That relationship deepened rather than lapsed: in 2025 the supplier and Hasbro signed an exclusive online live casino and slots partnership.

The alternative is to write your own. Funky Time owes nobody a fee. It has a disco set, a presenter working from a DJ booth, a character called Mr Funky, a 24-segment wheel paying 25:1 by default and four bonus games titled Bar, Stayin’ Alive, Disco and VIP Disco.

A wheel built around a licensed character buys instant recognition and pays for it annually. Television has been making that trade for decades.

This is the part the coverage keeps missing. The studio network lists eighteen locations: Latvia, Georgia, Malta, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, Armenia, the Czech Republic and Lithuania in Europe, four American states, British Columbia, the Philippines, Argentina, Brazil and Colombia. The company says it operates over 2,000 live tables across that network. There is no African entry on the list at all.

Audience size is not the reason. The published explanation is regulatory: studios get built in markets whose ‘national licensing requirements that require a local operational presence’ demand it. Production follows licence conditions. Brazil received its first studio in 2025 and a localised version of Crazy Time in 2026, in that order, and the sequence tells you which came first.

So when a player in Johannesburg or Lagos loads a live table, the dealer facing the camera is working a shift somewhere else. Tbilisi is described as the largest studio hub, Riga as the place where new games are built and tested before release, and Malta as the base for presenter teams running native-language tables for markets including Denmark and Sweden.

Danish and Swedish players get a table in their own language because their regulators made that worth doing. African players get the English-language feed built for everybody.

That asymmetry will probably hold until a licensing regime somewhere on the continent makes a local studio a condition of entry rather than a courtesy.

While one half of the industry was building television, the other half was throwing it out. Spribe was founded in August 2018 and signed its first partnership that September with Adjarabet, the largest Georgian online casino. Aviator went live in January 2019.

The company’s product page calls it ‘a new kind of social multiplayer game consisting of an increasing curve that can crash anytime’, with a stated return to player of 97%, and notes that the format ‘became popular in crypto casinos’ before regular operators picked it up. There is no studio, no host, no set and nothing to light.

What replaced all of that is other people. Aviator’s social layer is an in-game chat, a live bets panel showing what everyone else has staked and won, and leaderboards running daily, monthly and all-time.

The same page says the game was built to work ‘with budget devices in low bandwidth environment’. That is not a marketing line. It is a design brief, and it explains why crash titles spread across African, Asian and Latin American markets faster than any studio feed could have.

The expensive end of the business then followed the cheap end. Balloon Race and Stock Market went live in 2024, and a crash game called Red Baron in 2025.

One caution belongs here, because it is routinely glossed over. A supplier holding licences is not the same thing as a game being licensed everywhere it turns up. Spribe’s own licences page, as it read on 18 September 2026, listed a Malta B2B licence numbered RN/189/2020 and recorded its British remote operating licence as suspended. Certification is granted per jurisdiction and it moves.

Latency is the tell. Pragmatic Play publishes a ‘glass-to-glass latency output of as low as 1.5-2 seconds’ for its live tables and supports 28 interface languages, with its roulette broadcast from a studio in Bucharest. Nobody was quoting those figures in 2013. They exist because the reference point for watching something live stopped being a casino floor and became a stream, where two seconds of lag reads as a fault rather than a feature.

The clip economy arrived behind it. Evolution bought Livespins in 2024, a product whose pitch to operators is betting alongside a streamer and, in its own words, ‘Ready-to-share clips. No editing required.’ Short-form video logic, pointed at a casino round: the hand is the content and the clip is the distribution. Whether that is healthy for the people watching is a separate argument, and a real one.

Here is where I think the honest tension sits. A live table produced to broadcast standard, fronted by a presenter, licensed from a toy company and cut into shareable clips, is built to be enjoyed as entertainment. The rules governing it were written for gambling. In South Africa that machinery remains provincial and, on the online-casino question specifically, unfinished.

Most writing about this reaches for audience figures. The production side is the more useful thing to watch, because it forecasts what will exist next: where the next studio opens, which television format gets optioned, and which supplier decides that a mid-range phone on a weak connection is the primary device rather than the fallback.

Gambling is for over-18s only. The licences named above are South African ones, and a licence issued in one country does not travel to the reader’s. Nobody should stake money that is owed somewhere else, and anyone who finds the losing mattering more than the watching should stop and speak to a recognised problem-gambling support service.

Licence details, studio locations and game dates in this article were checked against the companies’ own published pages on 18 September 2026.

Abuja School Gets Uniforms, Learning Materials

The Rotaract Club of Lugbe Federal Housing Authority (FHA), Abuja, has donated school uniforms, sandals, socks and learning materials to pupils of the Local Education Authority (LEA) Primary School, FHA.

The initiative, which also included a quiz competition for pupils from different classes, was organised as part of the club’s activities to promote education and community development.

President of the Rotaract Club of Lugbe FHA, Terna Abraham, said the intervention was aimed at addressing some of the challenges faced by pupils and encouraging them to remain committed to their education.

Abraham said the school was selected because it was located within the club’s adopted community.

‘This is where our club is; this is where our community is. This is our adopted community and this is our adopted school,’ he said.

He said the club procured 50 school uniforms, 50 pairs of sandals and 50 pairs of socks, while school bags, dictionaries and writing materials were also provided, particularly for pupils who participated in the quiz competition.

Abraham said the items would be distributed based on an assessment of the pupils’ needs to ensure that they reached more beneficiaries.

He said providing basic school necessities could make a difference to children from families facing financial difficulties.

‘Imagine a student that came to school without a school uniform and is going back with a brand-new school uniform, school socks and sandals. I think that will go a long way in giving that child a message,’ he said.

The project chair of the Rotaract Club for the 2026/2027 Rotary year, Goodness Biniolise, said the intervention was based on the belief that education plays an important role in determining a child’s future.

She said the club wanted the project to have a lasting impact on the pupils rather than being a one-off activity.

‘Education is a pivotal part of life. Without education, it limits how far you can go. We don’t just want to do something that would come and go and they forget. We want to do something that creates an impact,’ Biniolise said.

She said the quiz competition was also organised to encourage pupils to appreciate the value of hard work and learning.

Biniolise urged the participating pupils to remain committed to their studies, saying their participation in the competition demonstrated their potential.

A teacher at the school, Salako Iyabode, commended the club for the intervention but appealed to the government and private organisations to help address the school’s infrastructure and learning-material needs.

Iyabode said some sections of the school’s roof were in poor condition, while some classroom boards were inadequate for effective teaching and learning.

‘We urge the government and the private sector to help us renovate our building and provide learning materials such as markers and cardboard. Some of the boards in the classrooms are not good enough, and some pupils cannot see them clearly,’ she said.

She said improved facilities would provide a more conducive learning environment and encourage pupils to take their education seriously.

The pupils who benefited from the programme expressed appreciation for the donations and the opportunity to participate in the quiz competition.

One of the beneficiaries, Richi Iwenachi, said he was happy after winning the competition and appreciated the organisers for giving the pupils an opportunity to showcase their knowledge.

Another beneficiary, Quators Helen, who received books and a mathematics learning aid, also thanked the organisers for the support.

Police Trust Fund pledges support for election security

The Nigeria Police Trust Fund (NPTF) has committed to bolstering the operational capacity of the Force through targeted interventions in training, equipment, and mobility ahead of upcoming electoral cycles.

The pledge was made by the Executive Secretary, Mohammed Seidu, during the Conference and Retreat for Senior Police Officers (CARSPO 2026), held at the Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu International Convention Centre, Owerri.

Delivering a goodwill message, Seidu emphasised that adequate capacity must back operational planning to guarantee peaceful elections.

The retreat, themed ‘Developing a Nigeria Police Roadmap for Effective Management of Security During Elections,’ seeks to establish a practical, coordinated blueprint for national election security.

‘Our role at the NPTF is clear: we must continue to support the Force in three critical areas- training, equipment, and mobility,’ the Executive Secretary stated, highlighting that procurement interventions will align directly with the primary operational needs identified by police leadership.

Key focus areas outlined by the NPTF included targeted training, essential equipment, and enhanced mobility.

Beyond logistical support, Seidu noted the connection between police conduct and public trust, noting that officers at polling units represent the most visible face of election security.

Senior officers were urged to enforce strict standards of professionalism, impartiality, and legal compliance to foster voter confidence.

He reminded command leaders that long-term capacity building must extend beyond a single election cycle to permanently strengthen the nation’s security architecture.