General Abdourahamane Tchiani has been sworn in as Niger’s president for a five-year transitional period following his 2023 coup that ousted elected leader Mohamed Bazoum.

The ceremony, held in the capital Niamey on Wednesday, marked the formal adoption of a new charter replacing the country’s constitution. Gen Tchiani was also promoted to the highest military rank of army general and signed a decree dissolving all political parties.

“I receive this distinction with great humility… I will strive to live up to the trust placed in me,” he said during the event.

The transitional period could be adjusted based on the country’s security situation, as Niger continues to face jihadist attacks—one of the key reasons the military cited for seizing power.

The political shift has drawn international attention, with concerns over the future of democracy in the West African nation.

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A video of a lady rejecting her boyfriend’s public proposal has gone viral on social media.

The lady was first seen standing infront of her boyfriend who was on one knee proposing before she poured water from a drinking glass on him and walked away.

The young lady took her decision inspite of the many calls and pleas by spectators for her to accept the ring from her boyfriend who took a knee.

Unpleasantly, she reacted by pouring a bottle of water on the young man before walking away.

Reactions trail the video as myriad of comments condemned her harsh action towards her man, while a few supported her.

Watch the video below;

At least 10 people have been killed in an attack by suspected jihadists in western Niger, reports say.

Officials in Tillabéri province said the insurgents used motor bikes to carry out raids on two villages, Danga-Zouani and Korombara, and farmers in neighbouring fields.

Grain stores and huts were also reportedly burned down.

Tillaberi is located in the tri-border zone linking Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, a notoriously insecure area.

Hundreds have been killed and thousands displaced across the Sahel region by the continuing attacks by jihadist factions.

At least 20 children have died after their classrooms caught fire in Niger’s capital Niamey.

The cause of the fire in the school, located in the Pays Bas area of the city, has not yet been established.

The Reuters news agency reports that the fire started around the entrance of the school, which has a population of 800 students.

The blaze, which spread to 21 classrooms built with straw, trapped the children inside as the they did not have an alternative escape route.

“Without an emergency exit, many were trapped and students were forced to scale the wall to escape. Those that died were mostly children in the preschool,” Reuters quoted a teachers’ union official, Mounkaila Halidou, as saying.

Prime Minister Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou has visited the school to offer his condolences to the children’s parents, the AFP news agency reports.

An ex-Niger president Mamadou Tandja has died aged 82, the government said Tuesday.

Tandja, won election twice after the country’s return to civilian rule in 1999. He was overthrown ten years later following an alteration of the constitution to stay in power.

Tandja’s death was announced in statement read on national television, with a decree of three days of national mourning.

The current President Issoufou Mahamadou took to Twitter to express condolences to his family.

”To his grieving family, and to the Nigerien people, I extend my sincere and sincere condolences. That his soul rests in peace”, he said.

As a retired army colonel, Tandja promised to restore stability to the West African nation after he won elections in November 1999.

He was re-elected in 2004, a first in Niger and was sharply criticized by opponents a year after over his handling of a hunger crisis, caused by drought and locusts plague.

NIGERIA – A soldier has shot strapping a woman because she did dress in appropriate manner in the community of Ibadan.

According to the reports, same soldier was spotted cutting the hair of some of the passers-by after allegedly harassing and extorting them.

soldier cutting hair of a passer

The woman asked for forgiveness but the soldier continued whipping her.

Soldier beating the woman for indecent dressing

An eyewitness alleged that residents of the area now live in fear following the “extreme actions” of the “Operation Beast” soldiers in the state where there is no curfew.

Watch video below:

https://youtu.be/875POoCY3e8

I don’t know what has happened to loyalty and trust but I think the COVID-19 may have affected loyalty and trust.

Adepanews.com has come across a video that showed a beautiful Nigerian lady beating a harmless boyfriend in Italy after inviting him from Portharcourt,Nigeria.

The lady revealed she had spent a lot on the boyfriend and was very mad because she had brought a lady into the house she had rented.

The guy who looked very sad and sorry for his action pleaded but fell on deaf ears.

The lady went ahead to remove the jeans trouser of the boyfriend and pushed him outside.

Have a look at the video below

Click

General Salou Djibo, former head of Niger’s military junta, will contest the 2020 presidential election after being adopted on Sunday as the candidate for the Peace-Justice-Progress (PJP) party.

He accepted the candidacy at a ceremony before some 5,000 people at the Niamey Sports Palace. Djibo, 55, led the military junta that ousted President Mahamadou Tandja in February 2010, after he tried to stay on in power beyond his two-term limit.

Djibo stayed in power until April 2011 before handing back power to civilian rule, in the form of the current president Mahamadou Issoufou. The ruling part has picked Mohamed Bazoum, the Minister of Interior, as its candidate.

Unidentified gunmen have abducted 10 humanitarian aid workers as they were distributing food in a village in southwestern Niger, their NGO said in a statement.

Kadidiatou Harouna, of the Action and Impact Progress (APIS), said on Thursday the assailants drove into the village in the Tillaberi region on Wednesday afternoon on a motorbike and told the victims to follow them.

She told the AFP news agency APIS, a partner of the UN World Food Programme, had worked in the volatile region near the borders with Burkina Faso and Mali “without problems” in the past year.

Gunmen in the area have previously stolen several vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) in the region.

One of the MSF vehicles was used in May 2019 in a failed attack on a high-security prison near the Niger capital, Niamey, where fighters were being held, according to the authorities.

Fighters with links to al-Qaeda and the ISIL (ISIS) group have increasingly mounted attacks across the Sahel in recent years despite the presence of thousands of regional and foreign troops in the region.

The violence has hit Mali and Burkina Faso the hardest, rendering large swaths of those countries ungovernable, but it has also spilled into Niger, which shares long and porous borders with its two neighbours.

-Africanews-

Ten people were jailed after taking part in violent protests in the Niger capital Niamey against measures aimed at containing the coronavirus pandemic, police said on Tuesday.

The measures include a nighttime curfew and a ban on collective prayers, with the holy Muslim month of Ramadan approaching at the weekend.

Those jailed were among 108 protesters who were arrested between Friday and Sunday, a police statement said.

They are being held in the high-security Koutoukale prison some 60km outside Niamey, the statement said.

Residents of several districts of the capital clashed on Sunday with security forces against the confinement measures.

“Organised individuals set about burning tyres and attacking private property,” the Niamey regional governor, Issaka Assane Karanta, said on state television Tuesday. “Many neighbourhoods were torched.”

He said assailants on motorcycles were seen placing tyres and petrol-filled jerrycans around the city, adding: “Everything was well planned, well organised.”

Residents in the working-class district of Lazaret said security forces fired tear gas to disperse worshippers who were gathering to pray at a mosque.

A riot quickly ensued, with mainly youthful protesters burning tyres and setting roadblocks, the residents said, quoting them as shouting slogans such as “the struggle continues” and “don’t back down”.

A security source told AFP that similar protests had taken place earlier on the outskirts of Niamey.

On April 12 the government extended Niamey’s isolation from the rest of the semi-desert country as well as a state of emergency and the curfew. Places of worship and schools are shut.

The former French colony is also battling frequent attacks by jihadist groups in the west along its borders with Mali and Burkina Faso, and in the southeast on its border with Nigeria.

In Niger, fifteen women and five children have died after being trapped in a stampede while trying to receive food and money for refugees.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Diffa, southeastern Niger, depend on food handouts to survive

The accident occurred at a youth and culture centre in Diffa, the main town of a region of the same name that hosts more than a quarter of a million refugees and internally displaced people.

“Unfortunately, fifteen women and five children died… in this regrettable drama,” Issa Lemine, the regional governor of Diffa, said on television after visiting the injured in hospital.

Aid workers confirmed the death toll and said about 10 people had been injured.

The region which abuts Nigeria and Chad has been repeatedly hit by attacks by Nigeria’s Boko Haram jihadist group since 2015.

It hosts 119,000 Nigerian refugees, 109,000 internally-displaced people and 30,000 Nigeriens who have come home from Nigeria because of the instability in its northeast, according to UN figures released in October.

In Nigeria – A final year student of University of Port Harcourt (UNIPORT) identified as Prince Digbani reportedly committed suicide at his off-campus apartment in Aluu on Monday November 25.

The department of electrical engineering student was reportedly advised against committing suicide after hinting about it while telling his friends that “he doesn’t feel fulfilled”.

Friends of the native of Bille in Degema Local Government Area of Rivers State rushed down to his apartment after he failed to pick his calls after sharing suicidal posts on his Whatsapp status.

The deceased who was given red oil to drink by his co-tenants who found him convulsing upon breaking down his door after hearing a loud noise, was pronounced dead at Lulu-Briggs medical centre where he was subsequently rushed to. It was gathered that he took a poisonous substance.

Digbani’s corpse was deposited at the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital Mortuary after his relatives were contacted.

African leaders on Sunday officially launched the operational phase of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement in Niamey, capital of Niger.

The launch occurred at the 12th Extraordinary Summit of the African Union (AU) Heads of State and Government.

“The free trade area plays a big role in walking out of the 84,000-km boundaries that we inherited from our colonial past, which means it ensures the full African integration instead of eliminating the boundaries,” noted Nigerien President Mahamadou Issoufou.

On Sunday, Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria and Benin joined the list of signatories of the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement signed on March 21 last year in Kigali, Rwanda.

Eritrea is the only member of the African Union that has not signed the historic accord.

It came into force on May 30, after the deposit of the required minimum 22 instruments of ratification by AU member states to the AU Commission.

The pact calls for a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of business persons and investment, paving the way for faster establishment of a customs union.

Once fully operational, the free trade accord is projected to boost the level of intra-Africa trade by more than 52 percent by the year 2022, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

The bodies of 11 missing Niger soldiers have been discovered after an ambush by armed men killed 17 of their colleagues on patrol near the Mali border, security sources said.

The military patrol was ambushed on Tuesday near the village of Tongo Tongo in the western Tillaberi region, sources said.

One of the military vehicles had set off an explosive device.

Several troops were also injured and evacuated to the capital Niamey, a different source told AFP.

According to sources a patrol of 52 Niger soldiers happened upon a group of heavily armed men at Baley Beri, near Tongo Tongo. Heavy fighting ensued, lasting more than two hours.

Twenty-two soldiers made it back to their base at Ouallam in three vehicles, while the rest were unaccounted.

This is the same region where four American and five Niger soldiers were killed in a jihadist attack in October 2017.

Niger is one of a number of poor, fragile countries in the Sahel region that have been hit by a jihadist revolt.

Fifty-five people were killed in the late hours of Sunday night following by the explosion of a tanker truck carrying gasoline, a few hundred meters from the Niamey International Airport, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior told AFP.

“The toll of the explosion was 55 dead and 36 wounded. The victims were burned,” the spokesman added. According to witnesses interviewed by an AFP journalist, the truck ran over on the railway tracks as it left town. Onlookers were trying to recover the gasoline that was leaking when the explosion occurred.

“It was a little less than midnight when I got out and saw the truck lying down. People came from all over to get the gas. Then I saw a fire on the side and everything went up in flames,” said a schoolgirl on site Monday morning at AFP.

It was a little less than midnight when I got out and saw the truck lying down. People came from all over to get the gas. Then I saw a fire on the side and everything went up in flames.

“There were motorcyclists and people around the truck when the fire started out of nowhere and it went bam. I saw at least 40 deaths,” said a shopkeeper, another witness to the scene.

On Monday morning, the burnt-out truck lying on its side was still visible as police picked up debris and burnt motorcycles on the road. Surrounding houses were affected by the flames.

The explosion occurred on the RN1 road leaving Niamey in a southeasterly direction. A fuel depot, where the truck probably came from, is a few hundred metres away.

Airport operations were not disrupted by the accident.

Source : Africanews & AFP