The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has called on the Federal Government and Inspector General of Police (IGP) to intervene in the ongoing violence over Hijab policy in Kwara.

The appeal is contained in a statement by the General Secretary, CAN, Mr Joseph Daramola, in Abuja.

After learning of the governments planto open the schools without resolving the crisis CAN noted that wisdom was required by those in leadership to handle sensitive issues such as that of religion so as not to precipitate war.

CAN however urge AbdulRazaq to give peace a chance in the state by ordering his hoodlums to stop attacking mission schools and churches before the situation degenerated into an unprecedented religious crisis.

The parents of the 39 abducted students of the Federal College of Forestry Mechanization, Afaka, Kaduna, have staged a protest, demanding the release of their children.

The protest took place on Thursday at the school premises located along Airport road, Kaduna.

Some of the students of the school also joined in the protest in solidarity with their colleagues who have been in captivity for the past seven days.

Gunmen had invaded the school last Thursday at about 11:30pm, kidnapping 39 students.

They carried a banner with photos of all the abducted students, as well as placards demanding the release of the students.

They also offered prayers in the church and mosque located within the school premises for divine intervention from God.

Some of the parents, who spoke with journalists, lamented that since the abduction, they had not heard any information from the government and the school authorities about efforts being made to free their children.

One of the parents, Sunday Musa, whose daughter is among the abducted students, urged the government to do everything possible to free the students.

Chief Executive Officer of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency, Buba Marwa has called for integrity drug tests for students and politicians, especially those contesting for public offices in Nigeria.

The NDLEA boss made the call on Wednesday at a meeting with the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in Marina.

He asked the government to lead the way with the integrity drug test for students in the state, adding that the youths are most affected when it comes to drug abuse, making it necessary for students, especially those in tertiary institutions to take the integrity tests.

In his remarks, the Governor assured the NDLEA chief that the government would continue to collaborate with the agency to address the scourge of drug crisis in the country. Governor Sanwo-Olu said that his administration has put in place some measures, among which was building a full-fledged mental health rehabilitation hospital to tackle drug crisis in Lagos

In December 2020, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) instructed mobile network service providers to deactivate, within a two-week period, SIM cards that were not linked to National Identity Numbers (NIN), an announcement that was met with uproar from citizens.

The deadline has been shifted at least twice, and it is now set for 6 April 2021.

It took eight years to register about 42 million people on the NIN database. Nigeria has about 100 million mobile network subscribers, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) would need to register over 57 million subscribers within a four-month window to meet this target.

Granted that as many people have more than one SIM, the actual number of new registrations could be fewer. Nevertheless, many of the 57m unregistered active SIM card owners will be largely in underserved, rural and urban poor areas without the requisite access to the systems to enable registration.

These people are also the ones who will be most impacted negatively, by being disconnected from network services after the deadline set by NCC has lapsed.

NIMC says that they have instituted an online system that only allows pre-booked persons to attend their offices for registration on any particular day and they have encouraged pre-enrolment via their portal.

This move is definitely laudable; however, it does not take into consideration how many people have access to internet connectivity or internet-enabled devices.

This delivers an interesting Catch 22: the people who are able to take advantage of these online registration platforms are likely to be the people who are already registered or can be registered with ease and therefore do not need assistance or support in facilitating the process. If the costs and barriers associated with the identity registration process appear to outweigh the benefits of actually having a registered identity, how will success be achieved?

The Federal Government recently approved the extension of the tenure of NIN enrolment agent licenses for Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) by five years; a good step that incentivises MNOs to apply their considerable infrastructure to remove some of the existing bottlenecks and achieve the scale required in what is a very intensive process.

Irrespective of this, meeting the 6 April deadline remains highly unlikely due to constraints in requisite infrastructure resources like manpower, stable electricity and internet connectivity as well as the technology that registration centres need to register those without a NIN.

In fact, it is these same challenges that motivated the request of almost half a billion dollars in loans from the World Bank to facilitate the increase of registration centres necessary for NIN registrations.

And yet, the deadline imposed by the government will have us believe that it is trying to encourage citizen compliance for a process with challenges that are more related to a fundamental lack of harmonisation, scale, capacity and infrastructure than they are to citizen compliance.

Threats of SIM disconnection instead of comprehensively addressing the infrastructural gap is likely to compromise public trust in the system and could lead to general apathy when the necessary infrastructure is eventually in place.