The Divine Mandate for a Renewed Hope Campaign Organization of Hon. Esther Bitrus Danboyi has alleged widespread irregularities in the just-concluded APC House of Representatives primary election for Jos South/Jos East Federal Constituency, calling on the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) to investigate the exercise and order fresh elections in affected wards.
Addressing journalists during a press briefing, the Media Director of the campaign organization, Noro Stephen, said the campaign remained committed to democracy, justice, equity, fairness, and the rule of law, but expressed concern over what she described as disruptions and manipulations that marred the primary election process.
Stephen commended President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, APC National Chairman Prof. Nentawe Yilwatda, Plateau State Governor Barrister Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang, party members, security agencies, and electoral officials for their roles in ensuring peace during the exercise despite challenges encountered.
She, however, alleged that reports from voters, ward officials, and evidence gathered from the field indicated that the election was characterized by widespread irregularities across several wards in Jos South and Jos East Local Government Areas.
According to her, elections in Jos South LGA were successfully concluded in only five wards including Gyel A, Gyel B, Zawan A, Kuru A, and Kuru B, while other wards reportedly experienced disruptions that allegedly compromised the credibility of the process.
She specifically mentioned Vwang, Turu, Giring, Zawan B, and Bukuru wards, where political thugs allegedly linked to supporters of another aspirant disrupted the process, snatched result sheets, intimidated voters and agents, and interfered with the collation of results.
The campaign organization further alleged that similar incidents occurred in Du District, particularly in Du and Shen wards, where voting was reportedly progressing peacefully before being disrupted.
In Jos East LGA, the campaign claimed that elections were concluded in only three out of the ten federal wards, while wards such as Shere East, Shere West, Federe, Jarawan Kogi, Maijuju Doss, Fobur A, and Fobur B allegedly failed to conduct credible elections due to disruptions and irregularities.
The group maintained that hundreds of party members were disenfranchised, adding that the outcome announced could not be said to reflect the genuine wishes of party members.
Among the concerns raised by the campaign organization were the alleged manipulation and snatching of result sheets, intimidation and harassment of voters, disruption of voting processes, disenfranchisement of party members, and violations of internal party democracy.
The campaign called on the APC National Working Committee to immediately investigate the reported irregularities, review ward reports and testimonies, sanction those responsible for disrupting the process, nullify results from affected wards, and conduct fresh and credible elections where voters were allegedly denied the opportunity to participate.
The organization stressed that its position was not driven by personal animosity but by a commitment to protecting democracy, justice, transparency, and accountability within the party.
“We remain peaceful, law-abiding, and committed to pursuing all constitutional and party mechanisms in seeking redress,” Stephen stated.
Also speaking, Director General of the Campaign Council, Hon. Daniel Kinbeng Mancha, alleged that Hon. Esther Bitrus Danboyi won the primary election conducted on Saturday, May 16, but claimed the process was manipulated in favour of another candidate.
Mancha said the campaign monitored results from across the constituency and believed the outcome did not reflect the actual votes cast. He disclosed that the campaign had already submitted a petition to the APC Appeal Committee and expressed confidence in getting a fair hearing.
The campaign organization called on the APC leadership to act swiftly and impartially in resolving the matter, insisting that justice, fairness, transparency, and accountability must prevail in the interest of democracy and party unity.
Nigeria has received multiple funding offers from investors and institutional lenders, the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, has said.
Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Mr Oyedele said the current market environment presents an opportunity for the country to refinance some of its existing debt while mobilising additional resources for development.
“We think that the timing is good for us to be able to maybe even refinance some of our expensive past debts, but also to raise more funding for our development at this critical time,” he said.
Responding to questions on whether Nigeria would pursue a Eurobond issuance or other commercial financing options, the minister said any decision would depend on prevailing market conditions, the amount of funding required and the speed at which the government intends to access the funds.
He noted that the country currently has several financing options available.
“We have a lot of offers, there is a lot of interest in Nigeria by investors, which is good for us,” Mr Oyedele said.
He added that Nigeria is also engaging with institutional lenders, including the African Finance Corporation (AFC), the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Afreximbank, alongside financing arrangements involving other countries.
Mr Oyedele explained that the government would carefully evaluate the cost, risks and suitability of available funding sources before deciding on the most appropriate financing strategy.
According to him, the objective is to ensure efficient use of resources while supporting the country’s development priorities.
“The goal is to get the best results from every dollar or every naira that we spend,” he said.
Mira Murati isn’t a natural creature of the conference stage. As the CTO of OpenAI, she was present but rarely the public face of the company. As CEO of her own company, Thinking Machines Lab, she has been even harder to find. So when she sat down with Bloomberg in San Francisco on Thursday — her first major media appearance in roughly 18 months — it was worth paying attention, even if she was careful not to say too much.
The timing makes sense. Thinking Machines has spent the better part of a year and a half operating largely in the background: raising capital, hiring researchers, and shipping one product, Tinker, an API for fine-tuning open-source AI models.
In the meantime, the companies competing for the same talent, customers, and headlines have only grown more omnipresent. OpenAI, where Murati spent six years as CTO, is constantly in the news cycle. Anthropic’s momentum is all that anyone can talk about right now. And xAI, Elon Musk’s AI venture, has been folded into SpaceX ahead of what is expected to be its massive public offering, generating its own gravitational pull on attention and investment. In that environment, staying heads down has diminishing returns; at some point, you have to make some noise just to remind the market you exist.
Murati used the Bloomberg appearance to do exactly that and not much more. She previewed what Thinking Machines is calling “interaction models,” which she described as a fundamentally different kind of AI interface. Rather than the turn-based, prompt-and-response dynamic that defines most AI products today, she told interviewer Emily Chang, the company’s models are designed to process continuous streams of audio, text, and video in 200-millisecond intervals. The idea is that they can pick up on the texture of human communication — the interruptions, the mid-thought corrections, even pauses to think — in something closer to real time. But Murati was careful to frame it as a first step, not a finished product, and she declined to put a specific release date on anything.
She also answered questions about the episode that first put her more squarely in the public eye: the chaotic week in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman and she became interim CEO. Inside OpenAI it came to be called “the blip.” Murati said she felt clear about her decisions in each moment — that protecting the mission and the team was the through-line that made the choices feel obvious even as the situation appeared to be falling apart from the outside. She said the company would have “imploded” if not for her involvement through that strange five-day stretch and its immediate aftermath. But she acknowledged that clarity of intent is not the same thing as clarity about consequences. In retrospect, she said, she would have pushed harder for more information, a better transition plan, and more transparency. What she did not say, at least not directly, is whether she thinks things turned out well.
Asked whether she still trusts her former boss, she sidestepped the question, steering the conversation toward a larger concern that she returned to several times: the concentration of consequential decisions in too few hands — not just at OpenAI but across the industry. Her worry, she said, is less about the character of any individual leader (though she acknowledged that matters) and more about the absence of structural checks. Good people make bad calls. Well-intentioned organizations drift. Too much attention has been paid to virtue and too little to governance, she suggested.
Chang also politely pressed her on the departures of several high-profile researchers from Thinking Machines in recent months , a subject Murati has largely avoided in public and that she downplayed on Thursday. First, she said, building a frontier AI lab from scratch compresses years of normal organizational volatility into months. She also acknowledged that compensation — the nine-figure packages that have become standard currency in the war for AI talent — captures people’s imaginations, but she suggested it isn’t usually the whole story. To some audience laughter, she said of her own competitive instincts, “When I wake up in the morning, I am not thinking about how to kill the competitor.”
Naturally, Chang asked about what comes next for AI broadly, including for the humans who AI companies once said would be empowered by AI but who’ve more recently grown scared by talk of mass job displacement, not to mention a future where AI is used to create chemical weapons.
Murati, who was born in Albania and speaks with a slight Eastern European accent, was measured in her response. She pushed back on the framing of inevitable dystopia or inevitable utopia, arguing that neither outcome is predetermined and that the period we’re in right now is the one that will determine which way things go. Still, she said — and not for the first time during the interview — that if humans take their hands off the wheel too soon, the future will look very different, and not better.
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