 The federal government to collect vat from market traders, others amid soaring inflation and consequent cost of living. Renewed rice smuggling threatens local production. Today we will be looking at the effect of that in our economy. We will also have off the press where we will look at major headlines from some of our natural dailies. A very good morning to you and thanks for joining us on the breakfast. My name is Nyam Ghul Agadji. We do hope that you are having a wonderful day so far. Well, today we are in the midweek and a lot of you will already remember that during the midweek after your work you go for service and you go and praise God and you do a lot of things. But you are in the middle of the week. That means that you have survived Monday and Tuesday. So why not have that positive mindset that if you could survive Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday or the rest of the week will even be better? Because that is what we like to always encourage you to do. Happiness is a choice that you make no matter how biting it might be. Like today we will be talking or dealing with the issue of the value added tax that is going to be collected from traders in a country where we are already facing hardship. So we will look at that on the program this morning but be that as it may we do hope that you are going to have a very, very wonderful day. Well, there are some topics we like to always start your day with. Before we enter the real hot topics of the day we would like to take some things that are trending on the social media. For instance, yesterday we heard the news, I don't know when it came up, but yesterday it was on the news that one person has been confirmed dead as a diphtheria breaks out in Abuja. And we hear that the diphtheria came from a neighboring Niger state into Abuja and now one person has died. Diphtheria is a respiratory illness that comes to your infection that comes and it forms a growth in your throat and it leads to a very difficult breathing time as it is. It leads to breathing being very difficult and sometimes it can lead to death. So the point here is that everybody should be careful and we are being advised that we take our personal hygiene very seriously. The outbreak of the deadly diphtheria was confirmed by the Federal Capital Territory Administration after it claimed the life of four-year-old boy out of eight reported cases in Abuja. The disease was reportedly imported from neighboring Niger state like I said and the FCT Public Health Department through its director Sadiq Abdul Rahman disclosed that the department two weeks ago was alerted of a possible outbreak of the disease in day-day. The department is collaborating right now with neighboring states to stop further spread of the disease from contagious states through border surveillance and residents are advised to take their personal hygiene really, really seriously. Okay so now what that means is that wherever you are you have to be very careful. Abuja is just a ride away from Lagos so people troop in and out of Lagos from Abuja every day so there's a possibility it could also come. What we're saying here is that do not panic but be very sure that your personal hygiene is top notch at this point and whatever can be done by the authorities to prevent these should be done. The authorities in the FCT are doing their best to prevent that by surveilling the borders and all that but there's only so much that they can do. You have to contribute your quota making sure that that disease doesn't come into Lagos. If it enters Lagos as crowded as we are if it is contagious and it's something that can be taken by contact and all that then we know that it's going to be really, really bad. It doesn't matter that it's only one person that has died that person has died and that is forever. It shouldn't be you being the next person so whether it is 100 people that died or it's one person that died it's a disease that we should not want to come to our doorstep. So whatever we need to do as individuals we should do and whatever the government needs to do as an entity they should also do and make sure that all of us are safe from Deftaria. We know that it is not Ebola which was international but you see somebody came with Ebola from somewhere else and gave us here in Nigeria and we thank God for the bravery of our health workers especially Dr. So we also know that COVID is also an international illness and a lot of countries were interested in what was happening in sub-Saharan Africa and everywhere else in the world. We may not have that kind of support that we had during the COVID but we have to take care of ourselves and make sure that this Deftaria doesn't come down to the south or doesn't even leave the FCT anymore and it should be contained wherever it is. So I think the authorities should do more enlightenment on how you can contact this how you can prevent this and how you can recognize it if someone has it so that you don't get to catch it as well if that's the word to use. Okay, so good luck to everybody. Applicants told to apply for confirmation before attempting to break records. That is according to the Guinness World Records. You know that there's been a frenzy of record breaking. Someone said he was going to sign, that is do sign language for the longest time, sanaton. Someone said he was going to stand at a roundabout for the longest of time, that is sanaton. So many people want to cook and beat the record of Hilda Basi by cooking for more than the 90-something minutes that she cooked for. One dummy wanted to cook for 150 hours. I don't know what became of that. I've not heard about that. The 150 hours should be up by now. I don't know if she started cooking again or she didn't cook but there was that rumor that she was going to do that. And then we started seeing armed policemen following her around. Whether that was a social media gimmick or not, we don't know what happened. Then a lot of people, the other person said he was going to read for the longest of time, read novels for the longest of time and so on and so forth. So the Guinness World Record Management took to its Twitter page on Tuesday to urge interested applicants to ensure their attempt to break any record is verified by them before they embark on such a task. Now let me just point out this. Breaking a record in Guinness World or setting a record for Guinness World Records is not necessarily something that has to be a very, very difficult thing. The other day I was watching America's Got Talent and someone came on the show and broke a record and guess what he was doing? He was just punching one of the judges. They were punching hands together. I don't know how they called that for the fastest time that has been done. And then he got a certificate. So you could eat more than everybody else and break a record or set a record. You can blink for the fastest in one second or in one minute. You will win a record. So it doesn't have to be a particular thing. But Nigerians have taken social media and said that that was a sub to Nigerian people because they have been saying that now that Nigerians know that a Nigerian can break a record, then in no distant time that Guinness Book of Records will be torn because there will be too many records that will be broken. Okay. In this tweet by the Guinness World Records, they also said the applicants can visit their website to see how the process works. This development is coming a few weeks after in Nigerian at Deola, at De Parousi, in Baton, a 150-hour cookathon to break Hilda Bassi's record even before she was officially certified as a new Guinness World Record holder for the longest cookathon by an individual. It was after cooking for 150 hours that she disclosed that she didn't officially apply to break any world record. Now, she ended the task after collapsing while, okay, another Nigerian, Joyce Geoma, who is a masseuse, also attempted to break the record for the longest massage that they call massagerton by an individual. She ended the task after collapsing while massaging a female. It was, however, not stated if her attempt at breaking the record was confirmed by Guinness World Record. Okay. So if you are a farmer and you make mounds, maybe you should apply to Guinness World Records and you make the most mounds in one day or in one hour. Well, some of you may not understand what mound making is when it comes to farming. But some people who are in the agrarian area will know that when you're planting yam or cassava in so many societies, you make little mounds and then you plant them. And they do better than just planting them on the ground like that. So maybe you try that as well. Whatever you do and you think you can excel, nobody else does it better than you. You can apply to Guinness World Record, but don't make the mistake that Dami, Chef Dami, as she is popularly called, made. She cooked for 150 hours, allegedly cooked for 150 hours only to find out that she didn't pass through the right channels. She could have broken that record by now, but you know, that was an effort in futility because it didn't get her anywhere. And by the way, Guinness World Records does not pay for what you do. It's more like singing in the Super Bowl halftime. They don't pay you for that, but it exposes you to a lot of things. So a lot of people do that so that they get fame, they get followers on social media and start to do other things to make money off of it and so on and so forth. So if you're going into it thinking that directly, the Guinness World Records management is going to pay you, I doubt if that is how it works so far that I know they don't pay. If they have started paying, it's when I didn't get that information, I didn't get that memo. But if you're going into it, just go into it because you know you can do something. For instance, one of the players in Falcons of Nigeria may be getting a Guinness World Record as the person who has participated the most in female World Cups. She's going to be at the World Cup for the sixth time and probably will be like one of the oldest people that will be playing the World Cup at 40. So she just might get the Guinness World Record without having to apply for it and all that. So if you're just good at what you do, people are watching and if you do better than everybody else, the Guinness World Records may just be at your doorstep. For instance, we've also had someone, I think from the East, the Asian countries, I can't remember the country right now, but he played professional football till like 56 years or so. So if you check, you will find out the oldest professional footballer, you will see where he is. So the frenzy for breaking records is a good thing, competition is good, but your competitive spirit also should be just for the sake of the ability to do it. Not just to show that somebody else, to make it look like you're jealous or to make it look like somebody else does not deserve what they have and all that. Do it because you can do it and do it because you just want to show that your people are good enough to do these things. Not competitiveness should not go beyond just the word competitiveness to rivalry to bad ballet as we usually say in Nigeria. But that is how it is, whatever you can do, go ahead and do it. Well like I said, the traffic is quite good this morning. I hope it is continuing to this moment because at the time that I got the report from LASMA officials, it was really, really good. So wherever you are, you shouldn't have the excuse. But we still use this time to tell employers of labor, whatever you can do to make sure that your people have some kind of padding as it is so that they don't fall so badly. You should do, provide accommodation for them for instance, for those of them that come from a very far place. So that if they can stay back after work every day until we can before they go home, let it be their option. Let it not be that they don't have any option. So provide accommodation, provide mattresses and all that, maybe just dedicate one room to the men and another one to the women. And some people will take that option because it is not enough to just say come to work for three days. There are some jobs that should never be compromised. For instance, you go to a do-state. A do-state said workers should come to work or should go to work three days in a week. And that also affected the schools. So children will now go to school three days in a week. Do we even have enough time in the five days that we have in a week? Every school or almost every school, I don't know about some others, but almost every school at least here in Lagos has what they call lesson. So after school they will still stay for lesson. That tells you that the school hours are not enough to cover what they should cover. Or maybe like some people will argue is just another way of making money. But even then they teach regular classes, they teach during the lesson period and still they don't even cover the syllabus. So you can just say teacher stay home and come to work three days. The students will be missing two days out of a week that they should study. And you know, I don't think that is a very good thing for us. So solutions rather than just staying home should be sought. And if the students have to stay home, maybe the government should also look at ways where they can be doing online teaching. And online teaching will be a difficulty now, especially that data is like, you know, the service providers use funnel. They put funnel to your data and just drink it because you don't even know how it goes. You subscribe for like 27 gig and in two days it's gone. You're not even downloading videos or movies or something. It's just gone. And you're not using 5G. It's just gone. And you'll be asking yourself, what really am I doing with this data? So if the online study is an option, the government should look for ways to maybe give free Wi-Fi to various locations around the cities. So the students who are close to wherever they are supposed to be studying from, from home, they can have access to Wi-Fi and log on to the Wi-Fi and then do their studies. Because if you say home study or remote study and then you're saying get a phone, well, maybe some families cannot even afford that phone. But if they cannot afford the phone, getting the data will be a difficulty. So there should be areas where there will be free Wi-Fi, maybe parks, maybe some other places that children can go or students can go to and freely sit there, do their homework, learn remotely and whatever they need to do. So these are all options. Like we were saying yesterday, Tech Tuesday, we said technology can solve all our problems in Nigeria. So technology can also solve the problem of education if we have to study remotely. And that's what I'm just saying this morning. But it's a wonderful Wednesday morning and we're hoping that it's not raining where you are because the rain has been disrupting a lot of things lately. But let's go to the weather right now to see what the weather says so that you can plan your day well. We'll take this short break for the back in a moment. Stay with us.