I’m getting ahead of myself. Father’s Day is still next Sunday. But after the Executive Editor of LeVogue, LEADERSHIP’s Fashion and Lifestyle magazine, Nikki Odu-Khiran, asked me if I could write a piece to mark the day, it got me thinking. 

If my father, who passed on May 28, 2000, ever had to write on Father’s Day, what would he have written? Of course, he wouldn’t have written anything. A pensioner who worked as a storekeeper at the Apapa (Lagos) Quays of the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) before he retired in 1996, Robert could barely write. 

But my, oh, my, he could hold a crowd with his speech. And if you wanted to get him going, then talk politics, especially about Nigeria’s Civil War.

I can imagine what he would have said about Father’s Day back then. Being a father in his time is different from being a father today. And if my children have to write about Father’s Day two and a half decades from now, they’ll probably be using the same lens of wistful contemplation. Every generation thinks its burden is the heaviest. 

My father would not be surprised, for example, that I didn’t know his real age and never once asked him until he passed. Of course, I wrote 84 in his obit because I had to write something. I got that from asking several sources I thought would know. Not from him. For the over four decades that he lived and as far back as I can remember, I never could ask him his age.

What it meant to be a father was for the son to stay in his place. Father’s authority was final, unquestionable. Mucking about asking him about his age would have been crossing a line. 

Fast forward 2023. My children not only ask me to “surrender” my PIN number and God-knows-what-else, my four-year-old granddaughter asks me my name, my mother’s name, and once teased her own mother to call my wife by name. And that, of course, is woke.

I’m not sure my father would have thought so. Perhaps if he had lived to see his great-granddaughter, he would have half-jokingly, half-embarrassingly dismissed such precociousness as a regrettable 

consequence of the new-age bug.

If my father wanted me to become anything other than a journalist, I’m not sure there was much I could have done about it. You studied what you were told, which was often either law, medicine or engineering. Being a father at the time meant laying down the rules about virtually everything from your child’s hairstyle to their course of study. And being a son meant one thing: obedience. 

Fortunately, my father wasn’t really interested in my career choice. All he wanted was for me to be the best in any career I wanted, a concession which I still find hard to explain, given his dominance in my life. 

My father believed that staying away from booze, parties and girls was the beginning of wisdom and kept a long cane to enforce it. You really couldn’t blame him. Ajegunle, where I grew up, was one of the most congested slums of Lagos at the time. Booze was cheap, parties rampant, and girls plenty. 

Of course, boys being boys (and occasionally with the connivance of my mother), I sneaked off to parties a few times, stayed out late and swigged a few bottles of beer. I even wrote frothy love letters with lines from James Hadley Chase. 

However, when I crossed the line like when I went off on my own to see a football match at the National Stadium where dozens died in the post-game stampede, my mother gave me the full measure of a fan belt hung on the door lintel until I was covered in welts and near passing out, while my father turned a blind eye.

Of my many transgressions growing up, bringing a girl home, even when I was over 21, would have been considered a cardinal sin. It didn’t matter that I was out of secondary school and in higher school for my HSC, my father often warned, sternly, that hanging out with a girl when he was still responsible for me meant that I was in a hurry to relieve him of any further fatherly responsibility. His favourite phrase was, “If you get any girl pregnant, you’re done for!”

I’m sort of stuck in that groove. Tried as I have to be a modern-day dad, my children — all in their adult years — still know I felt a bit awkward, especially in the very early stages of their relationships. I think psychologists call it conditioning. 

It’s futile, isn’t it? I mean for a father, these days, to worry too much about the social life of their grown-up children? You worry as they grow up, hoping they will pass every stage of growth when they should. Then you worry when they start making friends, hoping they will survive peer pressure. 

Then you worry when they start going out, hoping they will keep the right company; you worry when they start going to school hoping that for all the huge bills you pay (and for their own sake) they will make good grades and turn out well. 

Then when they finish, you also worry about how they will get a good job; how they would marry and who they would marry; and perhaps when they would have children. And when the grandchildren come, the worry cycle starts again. 

I guess my father had all these worries, too, maybe less so in many ways than my mother had them. Yet, in a way, he had far more control of things than I could ever hope to have over my own children. If he didn’t want me to go out to a party, to see Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me or any of Amitabh Bachchan’s hit movies, for example, which I rarely did, he only needed to say the word and, very often, that was that.

As a father today, however, if I don’t want my child to go to a party, he could bring the party home by phone. And if I don’t want him to go to the movie, he could watch Netflix on a speed dial.

If I told him that too many bananas and sweets could unleash the village masquerades on him, which was what my mother told me obviously for my own good, he could simply ask Google. And I’ve just been told that if I give my son a timeout, thanks to the next big thing, Apple’s Vision Pro, he could simply recreate his own new world indoors.

I wasn’t a sheltered kid. Back in the day, my father was happy to put my school “chop money” into my hand every school day and off I went, either alone or with other students, covering a distance of at least 25 kilometres to and from school through shortcuts and winding street corners on foot. We didn’t have to worry about kidnappers.

It’s a different world today. Being a father when my children were much younger also meant being their driver for school runs, popping up on Open Day and fretting about what age they should get a phone, things my father would have considered helicopter parenting. 

Sometimes, being a modern-day father can feel like the Chartterjees in the legal drama Mrs. Chartterjee Vs Norway, only in the domestic sense, where your own grown-up children take the place of the Norwegian authorities. 

Today’s children have a completely different code of how they want their own children raised, nurtured and treated, different from what your mother or father taught you!

And increasingly, a number of them relate to you differently. On this Father’s Day, for example, if you’re nice, your son might even offer you a bottle of beer! The mere thought of it would make my father turn in his grave. I can almost hear him say, “this generation is done for!” Is it?

** Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP

After scraping flour from her hands with a large, sharp knife, Vera Putina went through the photographs. A very small child with a velvet cravat and smart strap shoes. A boy equipped for winter, in a balaclava and scarf, and for summer, with just a pair of shorts. A pupil in the back row at the Metekhi village school, the brightest in his class. All had the same blond hair, weak chin and sulky bottom lip; all had pale eyes, Russian eyes, like hers. Most also had the wary, sidelong look of an unhappy child. Yes, Vladimir Putin had been unhappy. And it was partly her fault. But there was no mistaking him when, in 1999, he left the shadows to become the president of Russia. What mother would not recognise her own son? Besides, he walked as he always had: like a duck.

The photos were only copies now. Soon after she made her claim, the KGB came to her house, took the originals away and told her not to talk. But this was the most exciting happening in the village for years. Metekhi was a dirt-poor farming place at the foot of the Caucasus in Georgia, on the Kura river. The houses were shoddy brick and patched cement, with rusty fences. The roads, though grandly named after Stalin, were mostly dirt. Vera’s own house was peeling everywhere, though she kept it nice with lace curtains and had a bower of green vines for a garden. She was Russian, not Georgian, but with her hearty laugh and can-do attitude she was popular; and soon everyone, even the boys plucking frogs out of the river, knew that Vera was the mother of “the king of Russia”.

She was 73 when she came forward, having seen him on her new television on the news. Until then, she had kept quiet. But she was convinced that Vladimir Putin, “Vova” as she called him, was her lost, special child. He was the result of a college affair, a mad fling after a dance with another student, Platon Privalov. When she later learned Platon was married, she broke it off the next day. But by then she was pregnant with Vova. She kept him for the moment, and when she met Giorgi Osepashvili, a Georgian soldier, in Tashkent and married him, Vova was part of the arrangement.

The marriage lasted, but it didn’t go well. They argued all the time. Giorgi said he had money, but his parents’ house in Metekhi, where he took her, was a half-ruined hut. He made a peasant out of her. And then Vova set them fighting. Not because he was a nuisance; he liked fishing and reading, especially Russian fables, and did beautiful calligraphy. True, he could get furious when he wrestled, refusing to lose, and he tormented the neighbours’ chickens with his catapult, which she still kept. But he was mostly a quiet boy. Giorgi never beat him, just cut him dead, and talked loudly of kicking the “bastard” out. In the end, when Vova was nine, Vera sent him to her parents. But they were too ill to cope with him, and sent him to a military boarding school. After that she lost touch until she heard, somehow, that he was in the KGB.

This, of course, was not the origin-story Vladimir Putin told. The president’s parents were given in his autobiography, “First Person”, as Vladimir Putin senior and Maria Putina, who lived in Leningrad. During the siege of the city in 1941-44 their two infant sons died of starvation; Vladimir’s father found his mother laid out with the corpses, but rescued her. Vladimir was born in 1952, exactly two years after the day, October 7th, when Vova was born to Vera. That was the president’s story. Vera’s was that Vova had to repeat first grade in his Leningrad school, because his Russian was not good enough; that accounted for the birth-year discrepancy. But Vladimir and Maria were only “foster-parents”.

That idea did not fly in Russia, where the president ignored it and it sounded like Georgians making mischief. But beyond, and abroad, journalists were intrigued. They noted that Mr Putin gave almost no details of his childhood up to the age of ten. It was likely, too, that he would hide any Georgian connection, which made him half-foreign and invoked Stalin’s ghost. Some facts stacked up: in 2008 the Daily Telegraph found that a Vladimir Putin had indeed attended Metekhi school for three years. Other events raised suspicions. In 2000 two journalists investigating Vera’s story, a Chechen and an Italian, were killed in separate “accidents”. At one point strangers, two men and two women, came to Vera’s house and took blood for a DNA test. She never heard the result.

For as long as she could, until her daughters stopped her, she kept the story going. In 2003, when she was 77, she opened her house and her heart to a Dutch film-maker, Ineke Smits. In “Putin’s Mama” she showed the rigours of her life in Metekhi, which after 52 years she had never really taken to. In Russia, she had sung and danced. Now, scarf tight on her head, boots laced on her legs, she trudged through mud, chopped firewood with a vigorous axe, fired piles of straw in an orchard, hoed the weeds from Giorgi’s railed-off grave. (“Hi, how’s things?” she casually asked him.) She drank bright red local wine, filtering it past her toothless gums.

As she laboured, she also mused about Vova. She wondered why the “foster parents”, both of whom died in the 1990s, had never publicly talked of him. Presumably they too had been told not to. Then again, men who joined the KGB were supposed to forget their families. Well, Vova had certainly forgotten her.

She had not forgotten him. There were times, especially when he invaded Georgia in 2008, when she felt ashamed of him. But in general she felt more ashamed of herself. She wished he would make just one visit to Metekhi, when she would tell him she was sorry for sending him away, and explain that it wasn’t her fault. Sometimes she actually dreamed that Vova came; but he never spoke to her, and then he would be called away. She thought those dreams occurred because she lit candles for him in church.

When the KGB had come to take the photos they left one behind. It showed a child of three in a short belted tunic. His fringe barely cleared his eyes and his eyes were gleaming, as if he had just stopped crying. He was not instantly recognisable as Vladimir Putin, as the others had been. The whole set-up looked much older. But what she recognised, Vera said, was that gleam in his eyes. Plausibly or not, he was Russia’s ruthless president to her.

The Economist

Meta is rolling out a broadcast-based messaging feature, called Channels, on WhatsApp, similar to a recent update it sent out to Instagram, as the social juggernaut experiments with giving more conversational avenues to its 2 billion users. The company is also aiming to earn money from this feature down the road.

On WhatsApp, Channels messages will show up in a new tab called Updates. It’s a departure from Meta’s approach on Instagram, where channel announcements are communicated via direct messages. On WhatsApp, Meta is focusing on facilitating channels for use by entities such as NGOs, medical research institutions and fact-checking bodies, as opposed to individual creators.

Admins can send text, photos, videos, stickers and polls on these channels, Meta said. Notably, these are one-way conversations, so users won’t be able to reply to those messages.

While users can join channels through an invite link, WhatsApp is also building a directory to find different channels for hobbies, sports teams and local officials. The company said it will introduce tools for admins to turn off discoverability for their channels.

“Today we’re announcing WhatsApp Channels — a private way to follow people and organizations that matter to you, right within WhatsApp. We are starting in Singapore and Colombia, but will roll out to everyone later this year. We’re building Channels to be the most private way to communicate. As a channel admin, your phone number won’t be shown to followers, and following a channel won’t show that to the admin or others following the channel either,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

He added that messages sent on Channels will be deleted after 30 days and the company will not keep any record of them.

Meta is launching Channels in select markets — Colombia and Singapore — with early adopters such as Singapore Heart Foundation and fact-checker Colombia Check. A number of high-profile international partners are also on board, comprising the International Rescue Committee (IRC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and eminent sports teams such as FC Barcelona and Manchester City, the company said. Over the ensuing months, Meta plans to extend the availability of the Channels feature to a broader set of countries, with the ultimate goal of providing any user with the capability to establish a Channel of their own.

The Mark Zuckerberg-led company is also thinking about various possibilities it can explore with this feature.

One of them is to remove end-to-end encryption for large channels to not limit the audience. The company is also thinking of this as a money-making avenue. Meta is exploring inducing payment services for businesses in Channels along with the ability to promote them in the directory. In the last few months, WhatsApp has allowed users to easily pay merchants from within the app in Brazil and Singapore.

Channels are WhatsApp’s effort at facilitating large-group conversations after Communities for its user base of more than 2 billion. The company launched Communities last year to help clubs, schools and resident complexes to have one place for all discussions. With Channels, WhatsApp likely wants to become a platform of choice for organizations and authorities to issue updates and alerts to users.

Tech Crunch

Customer satisfaction is one of the most important metrics you can track as a business owner because, simply put, a business with a low customer satisfaction rating likely won't be around for long. If people are not satisfied with your product or customer service, they won't buy from you again. You also risk users leaving bad reviews online and telling friends and family to avoid your brand. And once enough people take notice that your service is far from preferable, it's next to impossible to grow your lead list or boost sales. 

That said, there are plenty of actionable ways to improve customer satisfaction and build brand loyalty. Here are four strategies to help you create an engaging, seamless experience: 

Ask Users to Share Feedback

Asking casual visitors and customers to share feedback is a great way to keep your satisfaction rating high. People know what they want and are normally more than happy to share their thoughts if asked. As a business leader or marketer, you can discover countless details about your audience's needs and success gaps in your marketing strategy by encouraging visitors to speak up. 

The type of outreach you use to gather feedback will depend on where customers spend their time. For example, we send our email subscribers two sizable surveys a year. Meanwhile, our social media audience is treated to micro-surveys through weekly polls. Our website also has an "always on" questionnaire where users can share feature suggestions, alert us to bugs and more. 

It's worth mentioning that you need to follow through on customer requests if you want to see their satisfaction increase. If half of your audience requests one specific feature, adding it can dramatically impact their feelings about your brand.

Streamline Your Checkout Process

Have you ever left a website mid-order because the checkout process was clunky or slow? In my experience, you're not alone. The checkout process is a crucial part of building satisfaction. Visitors who make it to this part of your site intend to make a purchase, but a poor experience could cause them to leave and seek out a competitor. 

There are a few small changes that can have a tremendous impact on your checkout process:

Use a mobile-friendly theme, template and checkout page builder.  Add multiple payment options so users can pay their way.  Include a progress bar so customers can see how far they are in the process.  Enable "always-on" shopping carts.  Offer free shipping, plus gifts on orders that hit a certain price point. 

Invest in Multi-Channel Customer Support

People often use their experience with support to decide how satisfied they are with a business. It doesn't matter if you have the best product in the world; if your service team isn't responsive and doesn't help users with their problems, they may view your brand negatively. The best way to strengthen your customer service system is to make it easy for users to get in touch, regardless of how they try to contact a support agent. Make it easy for people to reach your brand through your website, social media, email and telephone. When your audience can get fast and friendly support, they are more likely to feel satisfied with their experience. 

Start a Success Team

Finally, let's talk about customer success teams. Success teams are not the same as support agents. The people on this team are responsible for contacting customers after they've made a purchase. Their goal is to find out if there's anything they can do to improve the customers' experience. Sometimes, your new customer may need a hands-on tutorial or a guide to see the value of your product or service. Instead of hoping they will reach out to you, take preemptive action and email them a week or two after receiving their order. 

This gesture shows the people behind the brand are truly committed to helping each customer find success. If someone is on the fence about your product, this outreach may be the deciding factor when it comes time for them to make a purchase.

In conclusion, customer satisfaction is vital to your business. If your audience isn't happy with your service or products, they will turn to one of your competitors. The good news is you can win over prospects and customers alike with these four tips.

Inc

Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, indicated on Wednesday to call three electoral officers to testify for him at the ongoing hearing of the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja.

The three witnesses, who will appear on subpoena, were part of the ad-hoc staff engaged by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct the 25 presidential election.

Atiku, who alleged widespread irregularities and manipulations of results during the election, filed his petition at the court in March to challenge President Bola Tinubu’s victory in the disputed poll.

He asked the five-member panel of the court to either declare him the winner of the poll or cancel it and order a fresh one. Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who came third behind Atiku, who was took the second position, also submitted a petition with similar prayers to the court.

Atiku, whose case came up for hearing Wednesday, called his 11th petitioner’s witness, and was about to call his 12th when the respondents – comprising INEC, Tinubu, and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) – objected to it.

The respondents’ lawyers – Abubakar Mahoud for INEC, Akin Olujimi for Tinubu, and Lateef Fagbemi for APC, became unsettled immediately they were told the witness invited to the box was a member of INEC’s ad hoc staff involved in the conduct of the presidential election.

The lawyers took their turns telling the court they needed time to peruse the witness statement of the subpoenaed witness, which they said was only served on them just before proceedings started on Wednesday.

Mahmoud also said he needed to cross-check the status of the witness from his client’s records.

Atiku’s lawyer, Chris Uche, said the witness was only one among three members of INEC ad hoc staff that had been subpoenaed to testify for the petitioners.

He said there was nothing strange the witnesses were coming to say in court, as he also insisted he needed not to frontload the witness statement of subpoenaed witnesses.

But the respondents’ lawyers insistently called for the postponement of the testimony of the witness to afford them enough time to prepare for cross-examination.

With the defence lawyers’ insistence, Uche conceded to an adjournment of the case until Thursday.

He gave no indication of what the three subpoenaed INEC ad hoc staff members would be coming to say in court.

But the witnesses’ testimonies may be crucial to Atiku’s case, which includes a contention that failing to promptly upload results to the INEC portal, known as IReV, after votes were counted at polling units was detrimental to the whole electoral process. The point is one of the pivotal issues in Atiku’s petition.

The petitioner’s legal team is also expected to try to extract favourable lines of testimonies to support their allegations of manipulation of results and widespread irregularities at various levels during the election.

PT

A witness of Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the February 25th presidential elections, Ndubuisi Nwobu has revealed how his candidate was rigged out by Labour Party’s Presidential candidate, Peter Obi in Anambra state.

Nwobu told the presidential election tribunal, Wednesday that “magic happened to the votes of the PDP candidate at different collation centres.

In the results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission, Peter Obi scored 584,621 votes in Anambra; Atiku polled 9,036 votes in the state and Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress scored 5,111 votes.

During proceedings, Nwobu who is Anambra PDP chairman and also the state collation agent of the party told the court that after the counting of votes, presiding officers refused to upload the results.

He also said he visited about 30 polling units out of the 4,720 polling units in the state on election day.

He said he was forced to sign the result sheet of the election at the state collation centre because he wouldn’t have been given a copy if he didn’t.

“I signed the result sheet when it was obvious that without signing, a copy would not be made available to me,” Nwobu said.

Results were entered at polling units. But every effort made to get the presiding officer to upload it on IREV proved abortive.”

When asked if result sheets were signed by agents of the PDP at polling units before they were taken to the collation centre, Nwobu said “yes”.

“They were taken to the collation centre at the ward level. That is where magic started happening,” he said.

“There were problems at the polling units with presiding officers.”

He said in some instances, he had to intervene to prevent voters and other party agents from attacking INEC officials.

“Even in certain instances, I had to intervene to ensure that some of the polling officers were not attacked by voters and other political party agents,” Nwobu said.

Nwobu was Atiku’s eleventh witness to testify before the five-member panel headed by Haruna Tsammani.

Punch

Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja, on Wednesday, admitted the final presidential election results as exhibits in Peter Obi’s suit seeking to overturn President Bola Tinubu’s victory.

Obi, who was the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, is praying to the court to nullify the victory of Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as Nigeria’s president.

Obi alleges electoral fraud and breach of the constitution and electoral laws against the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and Tinubu during the polls.

At the resumed hearing of Obi’s petition on Wednesday, the five-member panel of the court led by Haruna Tsammani, the Labour Party candidate, tendered the collated final presidential election results relied upon by INEC in declaring Tinubu, winner of the polls.

Obi’s lawyer, Paul Ananaba, tendered the documents before the court on Wednesday.

The court admitted the results without opposition from the respondents, who have consistently objected to the admissibility of election results and other election documents used in the conduct of the election from the states of Nigeria.

The respondents – Tinubu, Kashim Shettima (the vice president), APC and INEC – consented to the admissibility of the final results.

Results from states tendered

Also, at the session on Wednesday, the collated results in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) were tendered and admitted as exhibits.

Obi, his vice presidential pick, Datti Baba-Ahmed, and other party stalwarts have been attending the court’s proceedings since the hearing of the substantive suit began on 30 May.

The court admitted as exhibits ward collated results from 13 States comprising: Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Ebonyi, Edo, Lagos, Niger and Ondo states.

Other states are Oyo, Rivers, Sokoto, Ekiti and Delta.

The Labour Party flagbearer presented collated results in eight local government areas of Bayelsa, 23 in Benue, 18 in Cross River,10 in Ebonyi, 18 in Edo, 20 in Lagos and 25 in Niger States.

Other states include 18 in Ondo, 33 in Oyo, 23 in Rivers, 23 in Sokoto, 16 in Ekiti and 25 in Delta.

Expectedly, INEC, Tinubu, Shetima and the APC objected to the admissibility of this set of election documents.

However, the court admitted them as exhibits and would entertain hearing on written objection by lawyers to the respondents at the close of arguments in the case.

Subsequently, the court adjourned the suit until Thursday for further hearing.

With Obi drawing the curtains on tendering of documentary evidence in the petition, the stage is now set for him to call witnesses in full swing to prove his case.

He has only called one witness since the commencement of the hearing in the substantive suit, though he had indicated his intention to call 50 witnesses to substantiate his claims.

Obi’s lawyer, Ananaba, while speaking to journalists shortly after Wednesday’s proceedings, said his client would now begin to call the rest of his witnesses before the court.

The lawyer explained that witnesses would speak through the admitted documents to establish places where electoral fraud was allegedly perpetrated during the February election.

PT

WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukrainians face homelessness, disease risk as floods crest from burst dam

Ukrainians abandoned inundated homes on Wednesday as floods crested across the south after the destruction of a huge hydroelectric dam on front lines between Russian and Ukrainian forces, with their presidents trading blame for the disaster.

Residents slogged through flooded streets carrying children on their shoulders, dogs in their arms and belongings in plastic bags while rescuers used rubber boats to search areas where the waters reached above head height.

Ukraine said the deluge would leave hundreds of thousands of people without access to drinking water, swamp tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land and turn at least 500,000 hectares deprived of irrigation into "deserts".

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address that it was impossible to predict how many people would die in Russian-occupied areas due to the flooding, urging a "clear and rapid reaction from the world" to support victims.

"The situation in occupied parts of the Kherson region is absolutely catastrophic. The occupiers are simply abandoning people in frightful conditions. No help, without water, left on the roofs of houses in submerged communities," he said.

Visiting the city of Kherson downstream from the dam, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Kubrakov said over 80 settlements had been affected by the disaster, and that the flooding had released chemicals and infectious bacteria into the water.

The Nova Kakhovka dam collapse on Tuesday happened as Ukraine prepares a major counteroffensive against Russia's invasion, likely the war's next major phase. Both sides traded blame for continued shelling across the populated flood zone and warned of drifting landmines unearthed by the flooding.

Kyiv said on Wednesday its troops in the east had advanced more than a kilometre around the ruined city of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, its most explicit claim of progress since Russia reported the start of the Ukrainian counteroffensive earlier this week. Russia said it had fought off the assault.

Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine's national security council, said assaults under way were still localised, and the full-scale offensive had yet to begin.

"When we start (it), everyone will know about it, they will see it," he told Reuters.

Kyiv said several months ago the dam had been mined by Russian forces that captured it early in their 15-month-old invasion, and has suggested Moscow blew it up to try to prevent Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro in their counteroffensive.

Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Ukraine of destroying the dam at the suggestion of Western supporters, saying it was a "barbaric" war crime that escalated the conflict with Moscow. Putin described the incident as an "environmental and humanitarian catastrophe", according to a Kremlin read-out.

Neither side has presented public evidence demonstrating who was responsible. Some experts say the dam may have collapsed due to earlier war damage and poor Russian management.

'THEY HATE US'

Residents on the Ukrainian-controlled side of the flood zone in the south, a fertile, marshy region stretching to the Dnipro estuary on the Black Sea, blamed the bursting of the dam on Russian troops who held it on the eastern bank of the Dnipro.

"They hate us," said riverside villager Oleksandr Reva. "They want to destroy a Ukrainian nation and Ukraine itself. And they don't care by what means because nothing is sacred for them."

Russia imposed a state of emergency in the areas of Kherson province it controls, where many towns and villages lie in exposed lowlands below the dam.

In the town of Nova Kakhovka next to the dam, brown water submerged main streets largely empty of residents.

Over 30,000 cubic metres of water were gushing out of the dam's reservoir every second and the town was at risk of contamination from the torrent, Russia's TASS news agency quoted the Russian-installed mayor, Vladimir Leontyev, as saying.

Zelenskiy said he was "shocked" at what he called the lack of U.N. and Red Cross aid so far for victims of the disaster.

Shortly afterward, President Emmanuel Macron of France said on Twitter that "within the next few hours we will send aid to meet immediate needs".

The U.N.'s humanitarian affairs office said a team was in Kherson to coordinate relief efforts. Access to drinking water was a major concern and around 12,000 bottles of water and 10,000 purification tablets had been distributed so far.

Ukraine expects the floodwaters will stop rising by the end of Wednesday after reaching around five metres (16.5 feet) overnight, presidential deputy chief Oleksiy Kuleba said.

Two thousand people have been evacuated from the Ukrainian-controlled part of the flood zone and waters had reached their highest level in 17 settlements with a combined 16,000 people.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

NATO states may send troops to Ukraine – ex-chief

Former NATO secretary general-turned-Ukrainian presidential adviser, Anders Rasmussen, has claimed that some member states may volunteer to send their soldiers to Ukraine, if the country is not offered security assurances on a wide range of issues at an upcoming summit.

Rasmussen, who has served as an adviser to Ukrainian presidents Vladimir Zelensky and Petro Poroshenko, said Kiev should be given written guarantees before NATO leaders meet in Vilnius, Lithuania next month, including for Western intelligence-sharing, weapons transfers and joint military training.

“If NATO cannot agree on a clear path forward for Ukraine, there is a clear possibility that some countries individually might take action,” he said on Wednesday, according to the Guardian. 

I think the Poles would seriously consider going in and assemble a coalition of the willing if Ukraine doesn’t get anything in Vilnius.

After touring Europe and the United States in recent weeks to help gin up military support for Ukraine, Rasmussen argued that foreign troop deployments would be legal under international law if requested by Kiev.

While NATO’s current secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently confirmed that some security assurances would be discussed at the summit, he stressed that full guarantees could only be offered to member states. The bloc first pledged to grant Ukraine membership back in 2008, and Kiev formally applied to join last September, but little progress has been made on the issue since.

Several NATO members have become increasingly vocal about Ukraine’s future in the bloc, urging other Western countries to outline a clear path to membership. Earlier this week, sub-grouping of Eastern European NATO states known as the ‘Bucharest Nine’ issued a statement urging the bloc to “launch a new political track that will lead to Ukraine’s membership in NATO” at the Vilnius event, as well as a “more robust, multi–year, and comprehensive support package.”

Though Washington has also repeatedly affirmed that Ukraine will someday join the military collective, it has placed greater focus on the current conflict with Russia, hoping to resolve the issue of membership later on. However, US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith told the Guardian on Wednesday that officials are now “looking at an array of options to signal that Ukraine is advancing in its relationship with NATO,” though did not specify what that might entail.

Zelensky rejected any “substitute for NATO” and reportedly told Western partners that he would not attend the summit in Lithuania in July unless the bloc offers Ukraine “concrete” guarantees or a roadmap to full membership. 

Russia views NATO’s continued eastward expansion as a threat to its security and has cited member states' aid to Ukraine as one of the reasons it launched the military operation in the neighboring state in February 2022. Moscow repeatedly said that Ukraine’s neutrality would be one of key conditions for a lasting peace.

** 'Were you aware?': Russia wants US to answer about how its weapons used in Ukraine

The US authorities must give a concrete answer as to whether or not they know how American weapons are being used on the territory of Ukraine, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a briefing in comments on the attack on the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.

Against the backdrop of the recent attack on the Kakhovka HPP, she pointed to a statement made last December by Ukrainian General Andrey Kovalchuk in an interview with The Washington Post, in which he said that the Ukrainian army had already conducted a test strike from a US HIMARS system on one of the dam's gates to punch it and see how high the water level of the Dnieper River rises.

"Now, the question for [White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John] Kirby, [White House Press Secretary] Karin Jean-Pierre, all the people who are in charge of communications at the White House. <...> Were you aware of how American weapons, the weapons that are being supplied to Ukraine, are used?" she asked.

"That trial tests of a terrorist attack against civilian infrastructure in third countries are being made? These are the questions that we directly pose in the public space before the White House; you must answer them," she said, adding that the attack on the Kakhovka HPP "is certainly an act of terrorism."

On Tuesday night, Ukrainian forces delivered a strike on the Kakhovka hydropower plant, presumably from an Olkha multiple launch rocket system (MLRS). The shelling destroyed the hydraulic sluice valves at the HPP’s dam, triggering an uncontrolled discharge of water. In Novaya Kakhovka, the water level exceeded 12 meters at one point, but is now receding. There are currently 15 population centers in the flood zone; residents of nearby towns and villages are being evacuated. The collapse of the hydro plant's dam has caused serious environmental damage. Farmlands along the Dnieper River have been washed away, and there is a risk that the North Crimean Canal will become shallow.

Reuters/RT/Tass

Massive fire as Sudanese factions battle for control of arms factory

A massive fire broke out on Wednesday near a military complex containing an arms factory in southern Khartoum that Sudan's army has battled to defend in some of the fiercest fighting for weeks in its conflict with a rival faction, witnesses said.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), in the eighth week of a power struggle with the army, attacked the heavily protected, sprawling Yarmouk complex on Tuesday, witnesses said. The group on Wednesday posted videos in which it claimed to have taken over a warehouse filled with weapons and ammunition as well as several entry points to the site.

The army used air strikes to try to repel the RSF advance, witnesses said.

Fighting across the three cities that make up Sudan's greater capital region - Khartoum, Bahri and Omdurman - has picked up since a 12-day ceasefire between the army and RSF formally expired on June 3 after repeated violations.

"Since yesterday there has been a violent battle with the use of planes and artillery and clashes on the ground and columns of smoke rising," Nader Youssef, a resident living near Yarmouk, told Reuters by phone.

Due to the proximity of fuel and gas depots, "any explosion could destroy residents and the whole area", he said.

A fire that began in the morning suddenly grew in size before sunset on Wednesday as explosions were heard, another resident living close to the depots said.

Local activists said the fires were caused by the bombing of the fuel and gas depots, and that houses in the area had been hit by shells and stray bullets.

Residents in Omdurman and Bahri, about 15 km (9 miles) away, reported that towering flames were visible after nightfall from Yarmouk.

The RSF quickly seized swathes of the capital after war erupted in Khartoum on April 15. Army air strikes and artillery fire have not dislodged them, but the RSF may face a challenge restocking with ammunition and fuel as the conflict drags on.

The violence has derailed the launch of a transition towards civilian rule four years after a popular uprising ousted strongman President Omar al-Bashir. The army and RSF, which together staged a coup in 2021, fell out over the chain of command and military restructuring plans under the transition.

WATER SHORTAGES

The conflict has wreaked havoc on the capital, reignited deadly violence in the long volatile western region of Darfur and displaced more than 1.9 million people.

Most health services and the banking system have collapsed, power and water is often cut and looting has spread. Food supplies have been dwindling.

UNICEF said on Wednesday that some 297 children were evacuated from Khartoum's Mygoma orphanage, which has been in the midst of heavy fighting. Reuters previously reported that dozens of babies had died there since the war began due to dehydration and malnutrition, and that the orphanage had housed about 400 children before the conflict started.

In Bahri, north of the Blue Nile from Khartoum, local activists said that more than 50 days of water cuts had driven many people from their homes and that they could be caught in the crossfire if they searched for water.

More than 1.4 million people have been displaced within Sudan and a further 476,800 have fled into neighbouring countries, most of which are already struggling with poverty and internal conflict, according to estimates from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Sudan's health ministry has recorded at least 780 civilian deaths as a direct result of the fighting. Hundreds more have been killed in the city of El Geneina in West Darfur. Medical officials say many bodies remain uncollected or unrecorded.

In Jeddah, a mediation source said negotiations were continuing in an effort to ensure safe passage for humanitarian assistance. Saudi Arabia and the United States brokered the ceasefire that ended on Saturday in talks there.

Consultations for a new truce deal, which had been reported by Saudi TV station Al Arabiya on Tuesday, were at an early stage and complicated by continued fighting, the source said.

"We urgently call on the warring parties to adhere to their commitments ... and to return to the Jeddah dialogue to resolve issues around violations and reach a ceasefire that is respected fully," countries including the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the European Union said.

The United Nations says some 25 million - more than half Sudan's population - are in need of humanitarian assistance and that aid that could help about 2.2 million people had been delivered since late May.

Reuters

No matter how we pare it, the 2012 #OccupyNigeria protests will remain pivotal in our sociopolitical history. Its significance lies in how much the pushback against government insensitivity resounded nationwide and even among the Nigerians in the Diaspora. It started as protests against the fuel subsidies removal, but it soon culminated in other disquieting issues such as government profligacy. #OccupyNigeria was the crucial juncture where the “breath of fresh air” that supposedly ushered in the Goodluck Jonathan administration—elected less than a year then—was putrefied. Nothing else he did afterward could stop the doomsday clock of his administration that started ticking. He got stuck with the label of corruption, and it defined his image all through.

In light of the present administration of Bola Tinubu’s removal of the same fuel subsidies, but with far less dramatic effects, it is understandable that people would question why the public intellectuals, social advocates, labour unions, and other third-sector activists who turned the tables against Jonathan have been nearly mute this time. How did it happen that Jonathan was “wicked,” but Tinubu’s doing the same in the tardiest manner is an exhibition of “leadership”?

While the difference in the responses then and now can be easily chalked down to factors such as tribalism, a sheer dislike for Jonathan, or even the benefit of hindsight, the critics make a strong case by raising the issue of the moral contents of public advocacy. Do the class of opinion entrepreneurs—from the public intellectuals, social advocates, social commentators, and even the so-called influencers—even have a moral anchor, or do they merely speak just so they too can be heard? Given that Tinubu himself was one of the several opportunists who hijacked the mood of dissatisfaction driving that protest to flaunt his own populist credentials, what does it say about his character that he would be the one to eventually remove the fuel subsidies without as much as creating a cushioning effect for the people who would expectedly be diminished by the multiplier effects of higher fuel prices? Tinubu, by writing that infamous letter to Jonathan to criticise him on the fuel subsidies, created a document that now testifies to his moral unscrupulousness.

But it has become typical that when the history of that moment is told in recent times, people redact the larger context and allege that the whole #OccupyNigeriaaffair was sponsored by politicians like Tinubu. That misattribution is unsurprising because our society does not put enough premium on memory, whether personal, collective, or even institutional. The #OccupyNigeria protests were far more spontaneous. They were instigated by reports of parliamentary investigations that revealed startling corruption in the payments between 2009 and 2011 (about $6.8bn). It was also the era of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Protests where protesters in different regions of the world were taking on their governments.

For us in Nigeria, it also seemed like the right time to question our government on its profligacy. The fuel subsidy issue under Jonathan could not have evaded the unrest that was roiling the rest of the world (just like the former President Muhammadu Buhari administration that succeeded him also took a hit from the #BlackLivesMatter protests that became #EndSARS in Nigeria). Each time someone points out to me that nobody has tried to organise another fuel subsidy protest like #OccupyNigeria since then, the question I ask them is if they would join such a gathering. If we were asked to go to Ojota now and protest, would you go? So much water has passed under the bridge of Nigerian sociopolitics since 2012; even the bridge has been carried away. What will be the point of investing energies into protests when the best the last one achieved was to catapult the same politicians who routinely suck Nigeria dry into Aso Rock?

Merely writing off the chicanery of the 2012 players as part of the game of politics will not do. The seeds of discontent that those dissemblers sow eventually grow into distrust and disquiet. The manner some elements in the South-West and the northern regions of the country were quick to opt out of any planned protests of the fuel subsidy removal itself was also disturbing. I should also recall that in 2012, those who opted out of the #OccupyNigeria protests were groups from the South-East and the South-South. That people could persuade themselves to suppress any dissent that threatens their kinsman’s political legitimacy shows how much Nigerians overly invested in the symbolism of the presidency. People will give up on advocating their own interests just so their tribesman in Aso Rock can survive. Getting Nigerians to form a multi-ethnic and multi-religious coalition and insist on the government working for us will require another level of political savviness.

That said, whatever is wrong with the implementation of the fuel subsidies removal is no argument for their retention. Whatever hypocrisy Tinubu and his minions in the so-called civil society might have manifested on this issue does not justify the payments. Outing these people as charlatans does not vindicate escalating the error of retaining the fuel subsidies. It is not worth matching hypocrisy for hypocrisy simply to point out the crookedness of our social commentators.

For one, it does not take much to see that every description of dystopia that will be occasioned if the fuel subsidies were ever removed happened even when it was sustained. We were told that the costs of goods and services would shoot up if they ever removed fuel subsidies, and the prices of everything did so immensely even without the removal. They said many people will fall into poverty if fuel subsidies were to be removed, but Nigerians fell into multi-dimensional poverty even though the costs of fuel subsidies rose astronomically. So what else can possibly go wrong that has not, many times and over?

Those who argue that even the USA gives fuel subsidies tend to overlook that what that country subsidises is production, not mere consumption. Besides, one cannot glibly compare an economy that is diversified, productive, and coherent with Nigeria’s voodoo capitalism that produces nothing yet consumes everything! As for those who argue that Tinubu should fight corruption in the sector instead of ending the subsidies, I hope they know how ridiculous that proposal sounds? If Buhari, who got into power by pretending to be the very embodiment of incorruptibility could not fight corruption, how do you expect Tinubu to fare better? How?

Tinubu himself knows he does not have the moral legitimacy to challenge anyone on corruption. The few times he opened his mouth to talk about corruption, he induced serious laughter. I am sure he is smart enough to not overreach himself by pursuing his fellow politicians on corruption. Doing so quickly opens him up to many vulnerabilities. He will promptly face another battle from those who have his dossier. They will not hesitate to tank whatever moral legitimacy he still has by producing the sordid revelations of his untoward affairs. He cannot fight the corruption in the fuel subsidies. The best he can afford is to seize the opening between two government transitions and cut off that umbilical cord forever.

If there is an important lesson to take away from the moral clarity that defined the fuel subsidy protests in 2012 and which is now hazy in post-Jonathan Nigeria, it is how much even the enterprise of truth-telling through social commentary is tainted with ethnic and religious sentiments. Going forward, some people will rightly be more cynical while others will show more circumspection in listening to the class of public intellectuals, activists, and the so-called social advocates, especially those whose ideas of right and wrong are dictated by how closer their opinions can get them to Aso Rock.

Punch