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List of Biggest Political Casualties of the General Elections

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The April 11 Gubernatorial and State Assembly elections have come and gone, bringing to an end over 12 months of rigorous electioneering and scheming.

Winners have emerged and the also-rans are counting their financial and political loses. Some losers, however, were obviously worse affected than others.

Carlhz Chinedu, a sociopolitical commentator and a social justice activist in this compilation, lists the biggest casualties of the March 28 and April 11 political hurricanes.

Mua’zu Babangida Aliyu:
The Niger State “Chief Servant’s” woeful performance at both the March 28 and April 11 elections has called into question his supposed status as a force to be reckoned with in the Nigerian political equation.
The long-serving Chairman of the Northern States Governors’ Forum (NSGF) not only failed to “deliver” his state to the PDP’s Goodluck Ebele Jonathan in the Presidential Polls and in his bid to ensure that his anointed candidate, Umar Nasko, succeeds him at the Minna Government House, but he also fluffed in his quest to represent the Niger East Senatorial Zone in the 8th Senate.
It’s really been a season of reality checks for the once-influential governor, a politician who was reportedly being groomed by some power brokers in the North to succeed Goodluck Ebele Jonathan come 2019.
He was even widely quoted in the local press few weeks ago as saying that he intends to “mark time” in the Senate while he awaits the 2019 General Elections when he would take a shot at the country’s top job. All that is up in the air now.
As it stands, instead of waiting in the senate, he will be marking time at home while he counts his loses and plans his next political move.

Lagos PDP:
These are not the best of times for the PDP nationwide, more so in Lagos state. The party’s huge losses at the polls is made much worse by the fact that Lagos state is the de facto nerve center of the APC.
Depending on how the APC goes about governing both the country and the state, the once-dominant PDP may be reduced to oblivion.
The PDP’s sudden loss of prominence will definitely instigate a flurry of realignments and defections into the new ruling party.
The losses will be asphyxiating no doubt, but the PDP’s continued survival and robustness in Lagos state is crucial for the democracy over there, else the “Center of Excellence” runs the risk of becoming a one-party state where no-one dares question or check the excesses of the ruling party. Four years is not eternity; 2019 is not as far as it seems. There’s enough time between now and then for the party to rediscover itself and mount a greater challenge.

David Mark and Gabriel Suswam:
Not even the combined might of a two-time Senate President and an incumbent governor could stop the APC from snatching a hard-fought victory in Benue state.
The PDP’s latest defeat in Benue didn’t come as a surprise to many this time around, following its shock loss in the state at the presidential polls.
The party’s overall poor showing at the National Assembly elections will almost certainly cost David Mark the presidency of Nigeria’s Upper Legislative Chamber — a position which he has held since 2007 — while Governor Suswam’s running battle with the Benue state civil servants has cost him both a ticket to the 8th Senate and a governorship ticket for his anointed candidate, Terhemen Tarzoor.
What becomes of both men in the Nigerian political arena come the next administration is anyone’s guess.

Nuhu Ribadu:
The revered former anti-corruption boss’ sojourn into the murky waters of politics has so far not been fruitful. He contested and lost the 2011 Presidential elections on the platform of the ACN to the PDP’s Goodluck Jonathan.
In 2014, he controversially defected to the PDP from what had morphed into the APC with hopes of contesting on the platform of the PDP and probably winning the Adamawa state gubernatorial election. However, it was not to be.
He was gifted the opportunity of running for the office, but he was always doomed to fail, following alleged anti-party activities and sabotage by members of his own party.
This culminated in a comprehensive defeat on April 11, where he finished in an embarrassing third place.

Chibuike Amaechi:
His party may have been victorious at the Presidential polls, but it’s been a pyrrhic victory for the APC chieftain.
His failure to “deliver” his state to the All Progressives’ Congress a fortnight ago was partially overlooked and forgiven amidst the euphoria surrounding their triumph at the national level, but April 11’s heavy defeat will not go unnoticed.
The Director-General of the APC Presidential Campaign Council could do little as his party was trounced in a state where he is the governor, at the hands of the his arch rival, the Dame Patience Jonathan-backed Nyesom Wike of the PDP. Amaechi may be an integral part of the incoming APC-led federal government, but back home in the South South, his influence has been significantly whittled down.

Namadi Sambo:
Even his status as the incumbent Vice President and a one-time governor of Kaduna could not ward off a heavy loss for his party in his home state.
Though no-one really expected him to “deliver” the North — or even the North West  — to the PDP, the low-key and ever-smiling Vice President should have brought much more to the table in the March 28 and April 11 elections than he ended up doing.

Adamu Mu’azu:
This has been the People’s Democratic Party’s worst performance since its inception in 1998, prior to Nigeria’s return to civilian rule. Every organization has a leader whose responsibilities are to manage its affairs and accept culpability for the outcomes of his managerial decisions and tactics, especially when they are negative.
In this instance, Mu’azu (branded the “Game Changer” by his PDP colleagues) must shoulder the blames for his party’s disastrous outing in the just-concluded polls, though it was not entirely of his own making. Under his watch, the PDP lost several states where it was once dominant, including Plateau, Niger, Adamawa, Benue, Katsina and Kaduna (Abia will also likely be lost to APGA),  and it put up a limp performance in Opposition-controlled states where it was expected to do much better, including Oyo, Ogun, Nasarawa, Kano, Kwara, Sokoto, Lagos and Bauchi, his home state. Considering the amount of resources that was poured into the 2015 general elections by the PDP, the end product has been nothing short of disastrous.

Goodluck Ebele Jonathan:
He’s, without a doubt, the biggest loser here, yet the manner in which he quickly conceded defeat and saved the country another round of senseless bloodshed has made him victorious in defeat.
His political miscalculations, faux pas, misguided appointments and perceived leniency towards corruption all conspired to make him the first incumbent Nigerian Head of State to lose a presidential election.
That notwithstanding, His Excellency deserves our dispassionate commendation for overseeing one of the most peaceful and successful elections in Nigeria’s history, even in the face of intense pressure to manipulate the process.

Carlhz Chinedu is a sociopolitical commentator and a social justice activist.


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EAIF Commits Additional US$30M to Support Indorama’s Expansion with Third Urea Plant in Nigeria

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The Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (EAIF), a Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) company, has committed a US$30 million senior debt facility to Indorama, a leading producer and exporter of fertiliser.

The investment enables the construction of a new plant, port terminal, handling stations, and storage facilities in Nigeria, providing a major boost for the country’s agricultural sector, which is a crucial driver of the country and region’s economic growth.

EAIF acted as a co-lender within a broader debt financing package arranged by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), mobilising US$1.25 billion from a syndicate of impact investors, development finance solutions, and commercial banks.

EAIF’s investment increases the Fund’s lending to the company to $111 million, reflecting a joint-ambition to accelerate Indorama’s growth strategy and Nigeria’s aspirations for diversification and industrialisation.

The new funding unlocks fresh capital to enable the construction of a dedicated port terminal and state-of-the-art urea fertiliser plant, anticipating an increase in its current capacity from 2.8 million metric tons to 4.2 million metric tons per annum.

The expansion leverages the company’s strategic location as a freight-competitive supplier serving the needs of significant urea markets in the southern Atlantic, including Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as West Africa, South Africa and the USA.

The facility bolsters Indorama’s capacity, extending its complex beyond the current two urea fertiliser plants, which is well poised to meet the entire demand of the Nigerian market.

The third urea plant aims to maximise output to meet the food demands of growing populations as disruptions precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine crisis affect food security around the globe.

Global crop production is reliant on the international supply of fertiliser. The landmark project is expected to position Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, as a leading producer of urea among the top 10 producers worldwide.

Contributing to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 9 on Decent Work and Economic Growth, and Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, EAIF’s loan forms part of the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) objective for new infrastructure to drive action on climate and nature.

The construction of the port terminal and third plant is set to begin in 2024, with commercial operations expected to commence in 2026. During the construction phase, it is estimated that over 500 jobs will be generated, further contributing to economic development in Nigeria and beyond.

Commenting on the transaction, Olivia Carballo, Managing Director, Emerging Market, Fixed Income at Ninety One, the fund manager of the EAIF, said: “Our continued support for Indorama demonstrates EAIF’s commitment to harnessing the region’s significant economic prospects.

Africa’s potential for industrialisation is tremendous, and this landmark project is a testament to Nigeria’s enhanced ability to produce and export competitively priced, high-quality fertiliser to farmers in regional and international markets, which will remain a priority for years to come.”

Munish Jindal, CEO, Indorama, said: “Indorama will utilise state-of-the-art technology and adhere to stringent environmental standards to ensure optimal efficiency, product quality and sustainability.

We believe that the establishment of this fertiliser will position Nigeria as a key player in the global agricultural market. We are committed to maximising the potential of this project to benefit farmers, communities, and stakeholders across the value chain.

The involvement of esteemed lenders like the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund will not only help Nigeria’s in becoming one of the largest exporter of the fertilisers in the region but will also address the issues of global food security. We extend our sincere appreciation to all our partners, lenders, and stakeholders for their unwavering support and dedication to our shared vision.”

Sérgio Pimenta, IFC Vice President for Africa, said: “Reliable access to high quality fertiliser is essential for food production and food security around the world. IFC’s investment in Indorama, along with African, Asian, European, and American partners, signals our joint commitment to support the agriculture sector, Nigeria’s economy, and the expansion of Indorama, an important supplier in the global food chain.”


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Lifi.net Achieves 500mbps Speed to Rank among Fastest Internet Providers in Nigeria

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Lifi.net, a fast-growing internet service provider, has attained internet speed that is many times faster than the documented average internet speed in Nigeria as at January 2024.

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Latest disclosure by LIfi.net shows that the company now delivers up to 500 megabits per seconds (mbps) internet speed in unlimited services provided to homes and offices. This is higher than the country’s average internet speed of 26.74mbps.

As internet subscriber base increases in Nigeria and hit 161.68 million in January, the quality of internet service provided by operators to their users still constitutes concerns as 2G network which has limited speed dominates the space by covering 57.78%.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) revealed through its latest data that while 3G is responsible for 9.36% of internet users in the country, 4G covers 31.75% of internet access and 5G internet only serves 1.11% of internet users in the country.

This combination explains why Nigeria ranked 93rd on the global mobile internet speed test out of 144 countries tested by Ookla, a U.S-based internet speed analysis firm, in January, putting the country’s median internet speed at 26.74 megabits per second (mbps).

However, Lifi.net (NT/007/22), a licensee of NCC, is among few Internet service providers (ISPs) that deliver fastest internet speed in Nigeria with up 350mbps for homes and 2500mbps for offices while assisting new ISPs with speeds over 5000mbps at the data centre and delivering the capacity to their various hubs at no extra cost.

“For over five years Lifi.net has been a leading network company, providing quality internet solutions at the speed of light and at affordable rates. We have highly technical and hard-working personnel and partners. We are very skilled at managing Cisco and Mikrotik Routers’ deployment, configurations, and integrations, fibre laying, and splicing,” says Abraham Oluwambe, Chief Operating Officer of Lifi.net.

He added that as operators attract more subscribers to their respective networks, they should equally place a premium on upgrading the quality of services to deliver broadband at the fastest internet speed possible.

“Our services are not only widespread but also affordable. We believe in making quality connectivity accessible to all. We understand the importance of budget-friendly solutions. Our cost-effective broadband plans ensure you get the best value for your investment without compromising on quality.

“While providing high-speed and reliable broadband connectivity, operators may choose the floor or the peak performance of its service. At Lifi.net, we always go for the latter,” he said.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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