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Jumu’ah Chides Gov Yahaya Bello, Kogi Assembly Over COVID-19 Vaccine Statement

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A Dedicated fighter for Government Accountability & Justice and Human Rights Journalist, Jumu’ah Abiodun, on Friday chided Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, over his comment on COVID-19 vaccine.

…Says you know nothing about science

A Dedicated fighter for Government Accountability & Justice and Human Rights Journalist, Jumu’ah Abiodun, on Friday chided Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, over his comment on COVID-19 vaccine.

Earlier, Governor Yahaya Bello while addressing a crowd was quoted discouraging the use of COVID-19 vaccine.

Yahaya Bello said: “Vaccines are being produced in less than one year of COVID-19. There is no vaccine yet for HIV, malaria, cancer, headache and for several other diseases that are killing us. They want to use the (COVID-19) vaccines to introduce the disease that will kill you and us. God forbid.

He concluded: “If they say they are taking the vaccines in the public, allow them take their vaccines. Don’t say I said you should not take it but if you want to take it open your eyes before you take the vaccines.”

The activist who faulted Bello’s comment on the pandemic via his Twitter handle said the Governor knew nothing about ‘science’.

“To be sincere, I still don’t understand why a leader, a governor for that matter would hold a microphone at a public function and say such erroneous, unguided statement on the pandemic that has killed more than 1,400 people in Nigeria and over 2 million globally in less than eleven months.”

“With due respect, Governor Yahaya Bello needs to be educated on the pandemic that’s ravaging the world, most especially from some of us that survived the novel virus. I’m ready to offer my service for him and his cabinet, to give them a tutorial on the pandemic.”

The public affairs analyst also took a swipe at the members of Kogi State House of Assembly for endorsing Yahyah Bello for 2023 presidency. “This shows the height of irresponsible on the part of the Assembly for endorsing a Governor who knows nothing about science for the 2023 presidency,” he tweeted.

“It took Mallam Bello, his cabinet and his rubber stamp Assembly months to admit a single case of COVID-19 in their state last year, despite NCDC confirmed numerous cases earlier in The Confluence State.”

He concluded: “Thank God, he’s saying this now, we now know where we are going, in fact, Yahaya Bello as President will be a disaster for this country than Donald Trump was for the United States, they both ignored the science and experts on COVID-19.”

Meanwhile, Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) on Thursday also dissociated itself from the unguided statement by Yahaya Bello about coronavirus conspiracy theories. “On the ill-fated pronouncement made by a member of the Forum regarding the COVID-19 vaccine in a national daily, the Forum totally and categorically dissociated itself from the statement, emphasising that the Forum will continue to be informed and guided by science and will ensure that every decision it takes retains public and professional trust and is not compromised by conflicts of interest.”

   

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Time Nigeria is a modern and general interest Magazine with its Headquarters in Abuja. The Magazine has a remarkable difference in editorial philosophy and goals, it adheres strictly to the ethics of Journalism by using the finest ethos of the profession to promote peace among citizens; identifying and harnessing the nation’s vast resources; celebrating achievements of government agencies, individuals, groups and corporate organizations and above all, repositioning Nigeria for the needed growth and development. Time Nigeria gives emphasis to places and issues that have not been given adequate attention by others. The Magazine is national in outlook and is currently being read and patronized both in print and on our vibrant and active online platform (www.timenigeria.com).
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This is not a story about a reluctant investor. It is a story about capital that wants to move, cannot find enough places willing and able to receive it in a form it can underwrite, and quietly waits instead. Multiply that fund by the hundreds of pension schemes, sovereign wealth vehicles, commercial banks and infrastructure funds now carrying dedicated allocations for emerging-market infrastructure, and a pattern emerges that rarely makes it into a headline: the world is not short of capital for infrastructure. It has capital in historic abundance, sitting adjacent to a historic infrastructure gap, unable to cross the distance between the two. 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Availability Is Not Deployability  Capital availability and capital deployability are not the same condition, and the conflation of the two is doing real damage to how the world thinks about the infrastructure gap. Availability asks whether money exists somewhere with a mandate that could, in principle, be pointed at infrastructure. Deployability asks something much narrower and much harder: whether a specific project, at a specific moment, has been engineered, structured, documented and de-risked to the point where an investment committee can approve it without exception. 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Where the Conversion Breaks  The break does not happen at the ends of the process. It happens in the middle, in the unglamorous sequence of work that turns a plausible concept into an instrument a fiduciary can sign. A promising transmission project needs a feasibility study rigorous enough to survive institutional scrutiny rather than optimistic enough to attract early interest. It needs offtake arrangements that hold up under real counterparty and currency risk, not the counterparty risk assumed in a base case. It needs environmental and social documentation calibrated to the standards of the institutions being asked to fund it, not the standards of the jurisdiction hosting it. It needs a legal and commercial structure that allocates risk in ways a commercial lender, not only a development financier, will accept. It needs a sponsor capable of executing what has been proposed, not merely capable of proposing it. Each of these is ordinary project finance discipline. None of it is exotic, and in mature infrastructure markets it happens as a matter of course, absorbed into systems built over decades: specialist advisers, standard-form contracts, established procurement norms, deep pools of transaction expertise. What is missing in the markets where the infrastructure gap is largest is not the standard itself but the machinery that meets it. Projects arrive at investment committees with ambition intact and preparation incomplete, and that gap is treated, again and again, as an individual project’s failure rather than what it actually is: a structural absence in the systems responsible for producing investable transactions at scale. 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