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OPC Warns Self-Serving Northern Politicians Against Blackmailing President-Elect Tinubu, Urges Focus on National Unity and Peace

Published

3 years ago

May 24, 2023

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The Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) has warned those it described as self-serving Northern politicians against blackmailing President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu over the filling of posts in the Tenth National Assembly and the Executive, saying that doing so would overheat the polity unnecessarily and spell doom for the country.

OPC President, Otunba Wasiu Afolabi, made the submission in a statement signed on Tuesday by the Secretary, Bunmi Fasehun.

Instead, OPC urged the Northern politicians threatening fire and brimstones over dividing political offices to turn their attention to the genocide in Benue and Plateau states, stop the killings and bring lasting peace to the people there.

According to Afolabi, inflammatory and provocative utterances being made by these few individuals from the North insisting on commandeering principal offices in the National Assembly were clear indications that they had a sense of entitlement and monopoly over the emergence of Tinubu as President in the February 2023 elections.

Afolabi said: “We want to advise that Tinubu should not be subjected to blackmail by any region over the distribution of legislative and executive offices. There is no single geo-political region where Tinubu scored zero votes; so he was fundamentally elected by all sections of Nigeria, North, South, East and West. He belongs to everybody.

“All regions and religions enjoy equal stakes in the President-Elect. His loyalty must be to all Nigerians and not to any one region or religion.

“It is very funny, curious and contradictory that those who failed to raise a voice to demand equity for other regions when President Muhammadu Buhari was indulging in lopsided appointments and pushing sectional agendas are the ones now clamouring to monopolise positions and offices once more.

“We cannot forget that since 1999, these same people dominated every occupant of the post of President, from Olusegun Obasanjo to Umar Yar’Adua, to Goodluck Jonathan to Muhammadu Buhari. This led these leaders to derail. With Tinubu, it cannot be business as usual.

“It is time for these selfish Northern individuals to release the levers of power and let the occupant of Aso Rock to equally dispense the dividends of democracy so that the entire country will enjoy equity, justice and development.

“Tinubu should not forget that even those who did not vote for him still add great value in terms of the natural resources they contribute to the national treasury.

“The President-Elect must realise that he is inheriting a badly divided country that needs urgent healing from insurgency, insecurity and underdevelopment.

“In this regard, we shall challenge those who are concerned about sharing the spoils of office to urgently fashion out the means to stop the current killing of innocent citizens in Benue and Plateau states and bring the killers to justice.

“OPC shall leave the job of judging Buhari and past administrations to history. But the incoming government has the responsibility to steer the country and the people from the errors of this current government. Tinubu’s failure in this urgent task of forging national unity and economic prosperity means the country might just be doomed –God forbid.

“In line with the direction given by OPC’s late Founder, Dr. Frederick Fasehun, and other visionary national leaders, our organisation shall continue to insist that Nigerians needs to urgently convene a Sovereign National Conference that will fashion out a roadmap for the citizens to live together within one country and under one flag based on peace, equity and justice.

“Organising the Sovereign National Conference, with restructuring and true Federalism as its focal point, will be the greatest legacy of the incoming Tinubu administration. It will address many of the issues driving the dangerous agitations and insecurity that currently bedevil our beloved country.

“Finally, OPC questions the rationale behind the government facilitating fresh loans and appointments in its last days in office, as it appears to be creating unnecessary burdens for the incoming administration.”

Related Topics:OPC OPC Warns Self-Serving Northern Politicians Against Blackmailing President-Elect Tinubu

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Business

FCCPC Mandates Immediate Removal of Unlabelled Consumer Goods Nationwide

Published

10 minutes ago

August 19, 2026

Preport

BY NKECHI BAECHE-ESEZOBOR—The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), on Wednesday directed manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers to immediately withdraw all non-compliant consumer products from the market or face severe enforcement action.

According to statements issued today, that market surveillance and routine inspections exposed an influx of goods lacking basic, mandatory consumer information.

The statement reads:”The Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has observed with serious concern the increasing circulation, distribution, and sale of consumer goods that do not comply with prevailing standards and regulations governing product labelling. Market surveillance, routine inspections, and quality assurance activities have revealed products bearing misleading or deceptive information, as well as products without production dates, expiry or best-before dates, batch numbers, manufacturer details, ingredient lists, allergen information, country of origin, and other mandatory labelling information.

“As empowered by the Act, the Commission is mandated to promote consumer safety by ensuring strict adherence to labelling requirements in line with applicable standards set by competent regulatory authorities, including the Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON), the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), among others.

The statement added that “Deceptive, incomplete, or misleading product labelling violates consumers’ right to the information required to make informed purchasing decisions andmay expose them to significant health, safety, and economic risks.

Accordingly, the Commission directs all manufacturers, importers, distributors, and retailers to immediately review their inventories and withdraw from sale any consumer goods that do not comply with applicable labelling requirements. Businesses that continue to distribute or sell non-compliant products risk appropriate regulatory enforcement action.

“In light of the foregoing, consumers are advised to carefully examine product labels before purchase and avoid products with missing, illegible, altered, misrepresented, or poor-quality labels, as well as those bearing false claims or misleading information. “

“Suspected cases of non-compliance should be reported promptly through the Commission’s official complaint channels.”

The post FCCPC Mandates Immediate Removal of Unlabelled Consumer Goods Nationwide appeared first on Business Today NG.

News

OpenAI seeks to one-up Anthropic with new customer privacy protections

Published

14 minutes ago

August 19, 2026

Preport

As AI models have become more powerful, the potential for those models to be misused has grown — as has a clamor for safety guardrails that can stop such abuse from happening. AI companies must now walk a delicate tight rope between respecting their enterprise customers’ privacy while also watching usage for possible issues.

Sensing an opportunity to one-up its rival Anthropic, OpenAI just announced a privacy-centric safety approach to monitoring for misuse. The company is previewing a new service to select customers that it calls Private Safety Processing. This is an automated system that watches for potential abuse while simultaneously retaining none of the customer’s data.

This system clearly runs counter to Anthropic’s recently announced data retention policy. The policy, which has aggravated some customers, enables the AI lab to keep user data (all of their sessions — and the conversations therein) for a period of 30 days, when it comes to “covered models.” Those models include all Mythos-class models and “future models with similar capabilities,” the company says.

This policy, which was announced in July, was designed for the purposes of safety allowing the lab to sift and analyze potential impropriety. However, it has deeply concerned some enterprises that handle large amounts of sensitive data and don’t want it harbored (or inspected) by the AI lab.

OpenAI — like most other AI companies — already afford customers a relative level of privacy by adhering to a policy known as Zero Data Retention. ZDR uses agents within the OpenAI API to monitor for abuse on a per session basis. In this way, customer data isn’t retained by the company but companies are still able to scan for bad activity without the need for human intervention. It’s worth noting that Anthropic also largely abides by ZDR — except when it comes to “covered models,” like Fable.

OpenAI says that Private Safety Processing is a new technology that widens ZDR’s scope. It describes it as a form of long-horizon safety monitoring that assesses the inputs and outputs of multiple conversations — not just one. Again, the monitoring is conducted by an agent, which, if triggered, catches interactions and analyzes them across sessions for signs of potential misuse.

The new tech helps OpenAI detect malicious use of AI that takes place over multiple sessions, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. A bad actor — hypothetically someone trying to engineer malware for a cyberattack — may spread out their requests to avoid detection. Private Safety Processing can analyze those multiple conversations for signs of abuse without human review of a user’s conversations.

In the case where the system is triggered, it may send a “narrowly defined signal” to OpenAI that warns of a specific type of activity, the company says. Based on that signal, OpenAI can then decide whether “enforcement is necessary,” it says. If so, OpenAI will reach out to the customer for more context or to work with them on the issue and a customer may choose to share data with OpenAI at their discretion, the spokesperson said.

By contrast, Anthropic notes that human review of customer data can occur, but only “through a controlled access path” that involves “a small set of approved reviewers.” Every one of those review sessions is “recorded in a tamper-proof log that reviewers cannot suppress or modify,” the company says.

The corporate competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is tense at the moment, with both companies looking for any opportunity to gain an advantage on the other. A recent report showed that OpenAI’s Q2 grew more slowly than Anthropic. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate is now reportedly $65 billion. Anthropic investors have said it could IPO at $2 trillion, while OpenAI is also working on its IPO.

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