Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Abuja has been experiencing water problems for a few weeks now. They were the last bastion of public water supply in Nigeria and now you can see signs of them coming down to the lowest common denominator of Nigeria:

The African Natural Resources and Mines Limited (ANRML) has dug solar-powered boreholes to its host communities in Gujeni, Kagarko Local Government of Kaduna State.

The projects, delivered in Gujeni and Chakwama communities, include four solar-powered boreholes designed to provide potable water to settlements where access has remained a daily struggle.

Weekend Trust had reported how the communities were neglected following vandalism of boreholes constructed by the company, with the stream they rely on contaminated.

Also, one of the communities, Marabaun Babu said the company did not extend its community project to them despite sitting in its opposite direction and feeling the negative impact of its operations.

Speaking during the commissioning, Director of the company, Professor John Ndanufa Akanya, said the intervention followed direct engagement with host communities and an assessment of urgent needs.

“We met with them to identify their priority needs,” he said. “They initially wanted a classroom, but I insisted that water must come first because survival depends on it.”

The District Head of Gujeni said the population relying on the borehole remains high, especially in Babu settlement where a large number of workers live.

“The queue is too much,” he said. “This community is very large, and many people depend on this water.”

Daily Trust

The confrontation between humans and nature in Nigeria is often very unpleasant:

One person has been confirmed dead and another declared missing following an attack by a wild elephant in Innayin Community in Oyo State.

PUNCH Online learnt that the incident occurred around 3:30 pm on Thursday when residents reported the elephant’s sudden appearance.

The state police command’s spokesperson, DSP Ayanlade Olayinka, disclosed this in a statement.

He said operatives, in collaboration with local vigilantes and hunters, responded promptly after receiving a distress call from the community.

“The Oyo State Police Command wishes to inform members of the public of an unfortunate incident that occurred on Thursday, 23rd April 2026, at about 1530HRS, involving the invasion of Innayin Community by a wild elephant.

“Upon receiving a distress call, police operatives, in collaboration with local vigilantes and hunters, swiftly mobilised to the scene. On arrival, the lifeless body of one Ibrahim Tijani ‘M’, aged 45 years, was discovered in a nearby bush with injuries consistent with an animal attack,” the statement read.

Olayinka added that the victim’s remains had been evacuated to the General Hospital, Iwere-Ile, for examination and preservation.

He said another resident, Alhaji Muhammadu Bingin, 50, was reported missing after an encounter with the animal.

“During ongoing search operations, another individual, identified as Alhaji Muhammadu Bingin ‘M’, aged 50 years, was reported missing after an encounter with the same animal. Intensive efforts are currently underway to locate him,” the statement added.

Punch

We talk a lot about the way babies are sold in Nigeria in this newsletter. Now here is an unexpected but predictable consequence: orphanages running out of children:

A quiet but disturbing shift is unfolding in Nigeria’s child welfare system – one that is leaving orphanages emptier and raising fresh concerns about an underground trade in human lives.

At first glance, the reduced number of children in some orphanages might suggest progress — fewer abandoned babies, stronger family structures, improved social responsibility. But beneath the surface lies a far more troubling reality.

According to the Chief Executive Officer of Holyland Homes, Owerrinta, Abia State, Dr Gideon Ijeoma Nwandire, the decline is not a sign of societal improvement but evidence of a dangerous trend: the commercialization of newborns.

“What we are hearing is that many young girls who get pregnant now sell their babies. It has become a business,” he said, his voice heavy with concern.

For decades, orphanages relied largely on infants abandoned due to poverty, stigma, or unwanted pregnancies. Those children, though victims of circumstance, often found refuge in care homes where they were nurtured, educated, and sometimes adopted into new families.

Today, that pathway is shrinking. Instead of abandonment, babies are increasingly being diverted into informal and often illegal networks, where they are exchanged for money — out of desperation, exploitation, or greed.

The result is a troubling paradox: orphanages are running low on children even as economic hardship deepens across communities.

“This is not because things are getting better,” Dr Nwandire stressed. “It’s because something worse is happening quietly.”

In fact more teenage girls are now into baby factory craze where they are impregnated and harboured in illegal baby homes popularly known as baby factories.

When they give birth, they sell off their babies to the operators of such illegal homes often at ridiculous amounts. The innocent babies are sold out to buyers for different purposes including rituals.

Vanguard

And elsewhere but related:

The Edo State Government said it has arrested one Grace Uwadia for operating an illegal orphanage, “Uwadia Children Home,” in Afuze, Owan East Local Government Area.

The Commissioner for Women Affairs and Social Development, Euginia Abdallah, who confirmed Uwadia’s arrest on Thursday, said it was prompted by an alleged adoption scam.

She said Uwadia had been handed over to the Edo State Police Command for further investigation and prosecution, while ministry officials had begun efforts to extend the search for similar illegal facilities in other parts of the state.

She explained that the incident was triggered by a formal complaint from a victim, identified as Monday Akpaduma, who approached the ministry after noticing irregularities in an adoption process.

A senior official of the ministry, who did not want to be mentioned because of a lack of authorisation, said Akpaduma alleged that he initially applied to adopt a child through the orphanage and paid N250,000 as a processing fee.

“After prolonged delays, he was allegedly informed that the adoption fee had been increased to N2m by the ministry, a claim that raised his suspicion and prompted him to report directly to the ministry,” the official said.

Punch

News from Mapo Customary Court:

A man identified as Tijani has taken his wife, Nafisatu, to Grade A Customary Court, Court 2, sitting at Mapo in Ibadan, Oyo State, for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

Tijani accused Nafisatu of being quarrelsome and had failed to show him love or care.

He further claimed that she betrayed his trust by engaging in extramarital affairs, which, according to him, caused a breakdown in their relationship.

He added that tensions in their marriage got to a peak when one of Nafisatu’s lovers publicly slapped him.

Tijani also stated that the same man, on another occasion, attempted to hit him with a car.

The plaintiff stated that he walked out of their marriage after concluding that the defendant and her lover wanted him dead.

Tribune

Can you just change your birth date because of a quarrel with your twin brother? It would appear so:

Hours after announcing that he would officially change his date of birth, Nigerian music star and one-half of the defunct P-Square fame, Peter Okoye, made good his promise, signaling their long dispute may have now assumed perpetuity.

Early this week, the 44-year-old singer had declared in a post on X, that he will now celebrate his birthday on November 30 — abandoning November 18, the date he has shared for decades with his twin brother

“Dear Family, Friends, and Fans, I’m making it official. November 18th is no longer my birthday celebration date. Please note that I will not be accepting any messages or gifts on that day,” he wrote.

“My birthday will now be celebrated on November 30th. This is a personal decision, and I truly appreciate your understanding. Thank you all.”

His post sparked widespread reactions, with many fans, observers online questioning his decision. He immediately fired back, insisting the outrage is misplaced.

In a post shared on Tuesday via his X handle, the former member of P-Square expressed surprise at the level of backlash trailing what he described as a personal choice.

The singer who now goes by Mr. P has been having a running battle with his twin brother, Paul Okoye, aka Rudeboy, and elder brother cum manager, Jude. In June 2025, Peter explicitly stated that he had severed ties with his family, especially his brothers.

“We are no longer family at this point! Family is blood-related, but the real family is loyalty. Like I said, ‘don’t let family be the reason you’re drowning in silence.

ThisDay

Non-Nigerian Media

Yewande Komolafe is now in a wheelchair and is rediscovering New York all over again:

In December 2023, I endured a long hospitalization marred with medical errors. I returned to my Brooklyn home in late June 2024 as a bilateral below-the-knee amputee. My only remaining digit was my left thumb. A wheelchair has been my primary means of engaging with the world since.

From the moment I left the hospital, I felt like a tourist in my body and in New York, my home of nearly two decades. Creating connections and seeking belonging feels like navigating a foreign landscape governed by new rules.

Even when I couldn’t travel because of an existing chronic illness, before my hospitalization, I found adventure in my backyard. I spent my days off practicing Arabic at Sahadi’s, a Middle Eastern grocer on Atlantic Avenue; picnicking on a blanket in Prospect Park; or riding a bike along the East River, seeking novelty and thrill in my everyday. New York had always made sense to me, having been raised in Lagos, Nigeria — another audacious, crowded, loud and overstimulating city.

Travel begins for me now by powering on my electric wheelchair with my residual thumb. My palm moves back to rest on its joystick, and the chair ever so gently propels me forward. Just as I learned to drive my first car, a 1996 white Honda Civic coupe with a manual transmission, I am learning to put faith in a new way of moving through the world.

But there is much that impedes my forward progress. Steps. Thresholds. Ledges. Closed doors. The gap between the platform and the train? An uncrossable chasm.

Whole neighborhoods I once frequented, obstructed with craggy sidewalks and never-ending construction, are impossible to steer through. When I leave the house, I run a mental list of the establishments I can access.

New York Times

Yinka Ilori has an installation at Milan Design Week:

In Milan, his installation — designed for Veuve Clicquot, the champagne house famous for its yellow branding — is bedecked with a pair of sofas beneath an enormous sphere, with upturned hands grasping orbs of light reaching towards a mirrored ceiling, all drenched in a vivid, egg-yolk yellow. “It’s a colour that says, we’re in this together,” Ilori’s recorded voice booms into space. “You might catch a glimpse of yourself in the reflection and others too. Strangers, maybe? But for the moment, you’re sharing the same light, the same space, the same energy.”

In person, Ilori recalls how he used to imagine the council estate where he lived painted hot pink, with chequered bollards and bouncy speed bumps. The theme of chasing the sun immediately sparks memories of his London youth. “I spent my summers chasing the sun with my siblings and my friends in the estate… going on our bikes to Tower Bridge to watch David Blaine in a box.” This referring to the magician who spent 44 days suspended above the Thames in 2003.

Ilori’s overflowing optimism is a product of his upbringing. Born in north London to Nigerian parents, he shared a bedroom with three siblings in a tiny flat on Essex Road, in a home where negativity was off-limits. “It was forbidden to speak ill of anyone or anything,” he says. “[My parents] really believed in energy — what you put out is what you receive. This idea of affirmation, joy and community was something I was very much encouraged to embody as a young kid.”

The Times

You may have seen on Instagram the two fellas who drove across Africa on a three-wheeler:

Sheila, the silver three-wheeler — one of the last Reliant Robins to be built — was acquired specifically for the adventure. Jenks and Scott set off in October with a can of fuel and a few essential supplies strapped to Sheila’s small roof, and a large amount of blind hope that they would somehow make it to Cape Town, South Africa, near the bottom of the world.

“No power steering, no air con, and it doesn’t do well up hills or down them. It is the most unsuitable car for probably any journey,” Jenks said in an unkind assessment of Sheila’s abilities. “We made friends with the designer of this car, and he’s scared to take it any more than 20 miles.”

Jenks and Scott ignored all the advice and took Sheila on the epic journey over four-and-a-half months that cost in the region of $40,000 to $50,000, Jenks said. They had help from sponsors and crowd funding, and documented the journey on an Instagram page that pulled in nearly 100,000 followers under the title: “14,000 miles, 3 wheels, 0 common sense.”

They arrived in Benin during an attempted coup. They skirted through northern Nigeria as the U.S. launched airstrikes on Islamic State targets. They were given a military escort for about 300 miles (480 kilometers) through a region of separatist violence in Cameroon.

“Imagine this car in a military convoy,” Jenks said.

Washington Post

Food & Wine have released their top 10 global restaurants list and the winner is none other than…

Set into the corner of a Brutalist building on the Strand, Ikoyi calls what it serves “spice-based cuisine.” The phrase doesn't adequately describe the cooking, yet it’s hard to think of an easier way to sum it up. One thing Ikoyi is not, as co-founders Iré Hassan-Odukale and Jeremy Chan have often had to explain, is a West African restaurant — at least not entirely. It’s named after the Lagos neighborhood where Hassan-Odukale grew up, and you’ll find that region’s fingerprints all over the tasting menu: sorghum, ogbono seeds, palm wine, baobab, and, of course, those spices, like uda pods and alligator pepper. But chef Chan uses these flavors as a framework for seasonal British produce and proteins — rhubarb, shell peas, Scottish scallops, Devon beef — all while throwing in more than occasional nods to East Asia. Aged turbot is paired with egusi miso; sweetbreads with heirloom grits. Suya spice, the nutty, aromatic blend that coats Nigeria’s most iconic street food, makes its way into everything from smoked squab to rich chocolate ganache. One signature course is a rendition of jollof rice done only how Ikoyi can: smoked with oak chips and draped in lush shellfish custard.

Listen to our podcast with Iré Hassan-Odukale from last year.

Food & Wine

British teenagers being blackmailed by Nigerian scammers online is back in the news. I will remind you over the coming weeks but Carlos Barragán’s upcoming Yahoo Boys is a must-read on this topic. You can preorder on Amazon:

The boy told them he only had £20, and they forced him to buy an Apple Gift Card. Easy to buy, harder to trace. They can be spent quickly on phones, accessories, games or subscriptions – or sold on.

Despite that, the threats continued. The £20 was not enough.

The criminal demanded £50, so the boy went to his mother for help. She describes him as “distraught” in that moment.

“Thankfully, the panic was stronger than the embarrassment, which meant he told me as soon as it happened,” she said. “Every child is different, my other child might not have shared this and might have internalised it. But he came to me immediately.”

His mother sprang into action, blocking the scammer and contacting Nationwide, the local police force and Apple.

She said she mainly contacted authorities because she wanted them to understand the number of teenagers who might be affected.

While she says that Apple did not respond, the police and Nationwide took it “seriously”, she says, tracing the email address to a user in Nigeria.

Recent data suggest that her son’s experience is far from unique.

Polling of more than 2,000 consumers from Nationwide suggests that secondary school and university students are targeted by scammers nearly twice a week on average.

Telegraph

Malik Afegbua is doing something after my heart:

Malik Afegbua is a Nigerian filmmaker using AI to preserve history for future generations by recording conversations with older generations.

NBC News

Inside Demas Nwoko’s self-built home in Delta state:

At 90 years old, Nigerian architect Demas Nwoko’s legacy extends beyond his art—it’s embedded in the walls of his rural sanctuary in Idumuje-Ugboko, a historic town in the north of Nigeria’s Delta State. To get there, one must drive through a landscape marked with red laterite, palm groves, and low, spreading trees that cast uneven shadows. Houses rise modestly from the earth, some coated in clay, others bare, revealing sunbaked brick and timber. Bold geometric patterns mark some walls, and carved wooden doors hint at the pride of their makers. Off of a curved path, Nwoko’s home comes into view.

Architectural Digest

News from Kentucky:

Officials in Mt. Sterling reported on Tuesday that a man was arrested for allegedly scamming a Kentucky woman for years out of more than $500,000.

The Mt. Sterling Police Department (MSPD) posted on Facebook that on April 20, a search warrant was carried out on the 200 block of Richmond Avenue in Mt. Sterling with ties to “an investigation that began in New York.”

Authorities said that “an elderly woman” had been the victim of a “romance scam.” When her son, who lived in Clayton, New York, reported it to the police, the romance scam escalated to an extortion attempt where the alleged scammer said he’d hired someone to kill her son and demanded money in exchange for his safety.

Mt. Sterling law enforcement wrote that the romance scam was reported to New York investigators, and the suspect, Ephraim Udouso, identified as a Nigerian national in an arrest citation, was arrested Monday on Richmond Avenue with the help of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Udouso, 43, was charged with extortion of more than $10,000, in addition to an unrelated warrant out of Jessamine County. He’s set to appear in Montgomery County District Court at 11 a.m. on Thursday, April 23.

FOX 56 News

Nigerian doctors in America do an annual outreach in Jackson, Mississippi:

The Association of Nigerian Physicians in America held its annual medical and social outreach event in Jackson on Saturday.

The nonprofit event offered attendees free medical care, including dental, vision, family medicine, pediatrics and mental health services. Organizers say the goal is to help those in need, especially those who may not have health insurance or who are underinsured.

“We have social workers that can guide them, housing evaluations, employment screenings — things that they need,” said Tobe Momah, a University of Mississippi Medical Center family physician and the event organizer. “We have opportunities for them to even sign up for medical insurance here today from different companies that are coming.”

The event also provided free food, clothing and shoes. Legal guidance was also available for attendees. Organizers say the annual event is designed to remove barriers to care while addressing broader community needs.

The outreach was held at Mount Galilee Missionary Baptist Church on Julienne Street. Momah said event partners included UMMC Family Medicine, the Jackson Free Clinic, the Magnolia Dental Association, and the Magnolia Bar Association. He said more than 100 people came to receive assistance.

WAPT16 ABC

You want to be left alone? It will never happen

In the nineteenth century, the notion that a state could be left to itself was a fantasy. You could shut your doors and mind your business, and still someone would turn up demanding something. Within a few years of each other, Lagos and Edo Japan received precisely such visits, delivered by the steamship - the cutting-edge technology of the age. Both societies were confronted by the same brutal fact that, as some nations had acquired engines, the old protections of distance, wind, lagoon, custom, and diplomacy were no longer enough.

The steamship was, in effect, the mobile demonstration of an industrial system. To get it to work, you needed coal supply, metallurgy, precision engineering, naval artillery, global logistics, and treaty-backed commercial expansion. More than anything else, what they did was to help countries that possessed this technology to get around the helplessness of relying on the wind for sea navigation. The natural consequence of that was the shrinking of distances that put a bigger chunk of the world in play. The US President, Millard Fillmore (who?) put this plainly in a letter to the Emperor of Japan in 1852 when he said “our steamships can go from California to Japan in eighteen days”. The line was meant to sound friendly, really, it was a warning to Japan that distance had shrunk and time had been compressed and as such, the Pacific was no longer a vast emptiness protecting Japan from strangers. That is to say, Fillmore’s was a boast backed by technology.

Lagos faced this same reckoning from the other side of the world. In Professor Hopkins’ Capitalism in the Colonies, he described the attack of 1851 as the first of three shocks through which Britain forced the issue of the slave trade, bombarded the town, and established the consular presence that would precede annexation ten years later. Lagos at the time was no backwater. It was a port city and the commercial hinge between the Atlantic and the Yoruba interior - the kind of place imperial power would not leave alone.

The principle behind steamship technology was simple. Coal heated water; water became steam; steam drove an engine; the engine turned paddle wheels or, by the 1840s, a screw propeller. But the consequences were not simple. Sailors had always been skilful, brave, and experienced, but they were still negotiating with the wind. The steamship changed that negotiation. A steam vessel could move against unfavourable winds, hold its position, tow other ships, enter awkward coastal waters, leave without waiting for a tide, and return when it chose. The enabling technology was James Watt's improved steam engine, which after 1769 made continuous mechanical power practical.

By mid-century the technology was still transitional. Many steam warships kept their masts and sails because coal was expensive, bulky, and not always to hand. One dependence had been swapped for another - the wind for coal. This is why coaling stations became a thing, and why ports turned into filling pumps for the machine. The screw propeller began to replace the paddle wheel in the 1840s, partly because paddle wheels were clumsy in heavy seas and vulnerable in battle. Royal Navy experience had shown that the wheels and their covers interfered with broadside gunnery and could be shattered by enemy fire. The steamship was not invincible but against most coastal towns, it did not need to be.

Those who experienced the technology at the time found it astonishing. Charles Dickens crossed the Atlantic in 1842 on the Cunard steam packet Britannia, a vessel of about 1,200 tons carrying Her Majesty's mails. In American Notes, he described an American steamboat as resembling a "child's Noah's ark," its machinery awkwardly visible, an "unwieldy carcase" in which "a part of the machinery is always above this deck; where the connecting-rod, in a strong and lofty frame, is seen working away like an iron top-sawyer." The tone is comic but you can detect his anxiety underneath it. Steam travel was noisy, hot, dirty, mechanical, and frankly terrifying. The countries that possessed this technology at scale were not random. They were the industrial and maritime powers: Britain first of all, but also the United States, France, Russia and the Netherlands.

Black Ships on the horizon

On 8 July 1853, residents near Uraga saw four foreign warships enter the harbour. Two were coal-burning steamships towing two sailing sloops. No sail was visible on the steamers. What announced them was black smoke. The Japanese had not been entirely ignorant of steam. Dutch contacts and Japanese castaways had brought fragments of information about the outside world. But there is a difference between hearing about a machine and watching one enter your waters under its own power. One eyewitness remembered people speculating about “burning ships on the horizon.” Later memory would call them the Black Ships - kurofune, 黒船 - “black ships of evil mien.”

The British force at Lagos two years earlier belonged to the same technological world, even if it used steam differently. Perry's ships staged a theatre of coercive diplomacy before a sovereign state. Lagos faced towing, landing, shelling, burning, and the political replacement of King Kosoko. Contemporary reports describe HMS Bloodhound towing eighteen boats belonging to five British ships across the bar. After hours of cannon fire, the town was set alight, the guns were spiked, and Kosoko was driven out. Lagosians called it Ogun Ahoyaya - the Boiling Battle - or Ogun Agidingbi, an onomatopoeic memory of cannon fire (say it slowly and stress the last three letters.) Whereas in Japan, people saw black smoke and moving ships where no sail seemed to be doing the work, in Lagos, the lesson was more immediate and destructive. Later in 1862, Oshodi Tapa - the former slave turned statesman - painted an almost cinematic picture. Looking at steamships in Lagos harbour, Oshodi understood that the town had crossed a line: “This is no longer a native town,” he observed, “it is a white man’s. We could never do this.”

Both societies met an adversary who used steamship technology as leverage. One saw black smoke; the other heard loud noise. Both were presented in moral language that ran parallel with hard strategic and commercial aims - Lagos was framed through anti-slavery, Japan through friendship and the humane treatment of shipwrecked sailors. Lagos suffered regime change by proxy: Kosoko, already in a prolonged succession struggle, was physically removed and replaced by Akitoye, the British-backed claimant. Japan suffered something subtler but eventually more consequential: regime delegitimation. Perry did not remove the shogun, but he helped make the shogunate look incapable of performing its most basic duty of defending the realm. That crisis helped feed the collapse of the Tokugawa order fifteen years later, and subsequently the Meiji Restoration.

Where the story diverges, however, is when you view it as societies confronting modernisation and what to do about it. Both societies saw modernity. The difference was who had the responsibility, and the machinery, for converting that shock into institutions. That is, the difference was less the shock and more of the ‘receiver’ of that shock. Lagos was a port-city polity; Japan was a country-sized polity with a dense governing order. In mid-century Lagos, political authority, commerce, military force, and the slave trade were deeply entangled, especially around the court-commercial networks that sustained Kosoko and his allies. Later Lagos would produce a different elite - Saro merchants, professionals, clergy, journalists - but by then the institutional framework was increasingly colonial.

Japan’s political shell remained samurai but at the same time, the Tokugawa order had domain administrations, literate personnel, and a nationwide network of goods and information. That meant the Japanese response to humiliation could be led by a territorial, military-administrative class asking, “How do we preserve sovereignty?” In Lagos, the more immediate question for elites was more like, “How do we survive and bargain inside a changing Atlantic order?”

All Aboard the Perry Train

My favourite story about this confrontation with modernity, and the divergent responses to it, comes from the “gift” Commodore Perry presented to Japanese officials on his return trip in 1854. It was a fully operational miniature steam railway - a quarter-scale model built by Norris Works, with 350 feet of eighteen-gauge track, an engine, a tender, and a passenger car. It ran on a circular track a little over a hundred metres long. The passenger car was so small that Japanese officials could not sit inside. They rode on the roof. Pointedly, this was a working American locomotive, built by an American manufacturer, displayed as a symbol of mechanical civilisation. Like the steamship, this was American technological theatre designed to awe the Japanese. Another major Perry gift was the telegraph and when you take all three together, he and the Americans were essentially saying - the ocean could now be crossed without waiting for the wind, land could be crossed without relying on animal power, and information could move faster than any person or horse. The steamship and the locomotive were members of the same technological family. Both used heat, water, pressure, pistons, metal, coal, and precision engineering to turn stored energy into motion. The steamship compressed oceans; the railway compressed continents. The telegraph compressed time itself.

Strictly speaking, Perry’s was not the first railway model seen in Japan; the Russian admiral Yevfimiy Putyatin had shown one at Nagasaki in 1853. But Perry’s demonstration was the one that became theatre as staged before shogunate officials, tied to American demands, and remembered as part of the Black Ships encounter.

The Japanese received the gift with curiosity and awe. An official's diary described the train as moving "as though it were flying" - you can imagine how that felt - and called the experience "most enjoyable." Kawada Hachinosuke, a shogunate retainer, recorded and sketched the locomotive, then rode it not for amusement but out of "scientific inquiry." From the American point of view, "it was a spectacle not a little ludicrous to behold a dignified mandarin whirling around the circular road at the rate of twenty miles an hour, with his loose robes flying in the wind. As he clung with a desperate hold to the edge of the roof grinning with intense interest." Japan had no public railway at the time. The Meiji government would not open the Tokyo-Yokohama line until 1872.

An awesome wonder

Lagos got its own rude introduction to modern technology. Within a decade of the bombardment, students were being taught the principles of electricity. Public lectures by 1865 included “Electricity, as connected with the Electric Telegraph and as a source of Mechanical power.” CMS Grammar School, founded in 1859 was teaching “Natural Philosophy,” electricity included, by 1862. In 1886, HMS Raleigh arrived with electric projectors and the Lagos Observer reported a “brilliant electric display” illuminating part of the island. During Queen Victoria’s jubilee the following year, HMS Royalist was to play its electric light on the capital between 9 and 10 p.m. The point, in each case, was British technological advancement on display.

The more striking moment came in 1894, when the Lagos Weekly Record argued that electricity would not only reduce burglary but “open up a new line of industrial pursuit to our youths in the shape of electric engineering,” with apprentices trained in the principles of the science. The intent was there but whether it could be acted on, was a different matter entirely.

The telegraph arrived alongside. The West African cable was laid between June and September 1886 by the cable ship Scotia and the steamship Britannia, connecting Cape Verde, The Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Lagos, Brass and Bonny to Britain’s imperial communications network. By 1893, government offices in Lagos had telephone service, later extended to Ilorin and Jebba.

In Japan, Perry’s model railway displayed what steam could do on land. In Lagos, naval searchlights displayed what electricity could do at night. Both were demonstrations of power disguised as wonder. As with Japan’s introduction to the telegraph, Lagos saw that the distance between Marina and Whitehall had been shortened by the telegraph.

Lagosians absorbed technology in many ways. They read about it, lectured about it, bought it, protested over it, wrote newspaper editorials about it, lit churches with it, applied for home connections, rode the railway, worked in railway workshops, and used the press to debate modernity. The paper linked above even says Africans had varying levels of access to electricity from 1898, including streets, churches, homes and public spaces. But what Lagos did not possess was control over the technological learning process. You cannot properly master technology simply by admiring it. You need a system for that.

Capability and absorption

Japan imported railway technology and then moved toward domestic technical mastery. Japan’s first domestically manufactured steam locomotive was completed in 1893 at the Kobe Works of the Imperial Government Railway. Tokugawa Japan had domain schools for samurai, private academies, and terakoya schools for commoners. These schools taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and practical skills. Adult male literacy in late Tokugawa Japan is estimated at roughly 40–50%, and many terakoya became the basis for Meiji primary schools. Railways require clerks, surveyors, accountants, mechanics, draughtsmen, translators, timetablers, engineers, station managers, guards, and disciplined maintenance staff. Japan had an existing social base from which such people could be produced.

Further, Japan’s elite treated technology as a question of sovereignty. The railway was absorbed into the Meiji slogan of rich country, strong army and was driven by the strategic need to build a strong modern state capable of resisting colonisation. The aforementioned first railway between Tokyo and Yokohama opened in 1872 with foreign loans, foreign materials, and foreign engineers. British influence was especially strong in the first government railways, while other foreign engineers worked in different regions. But the important point is that Japan aimed from the beginning to take over construction and operation itself - it planned from the outset to master the technology and achieved broad operational independence in less than twenty years. Meiji Japan pursued large-scale state-led codification of technical knowledge in Japanese; 74 percent of translators of technical books between 1870 and 1885 were government employees and vernacular codification lowered technology-access costs.

It sent students abroad, hired foreign engineers, built training schools, and then replaced foreign expertise with Japanese expertise. An engineering school at Osaka Station was established in 1877 to train railway construction personnel, and its graduates helped build Japan’s first Japanese-designed and Japanese-built mountain tunnel in 1880.

Contrasted with Lagos, we can see that the same technology can produce very different outcomes depending on who controls its absorption (or lack thereof). The problem was that in Lagos the machinery of conversion was missing. In Japan, wonder could become policy; policy could become institutions; institutions could become capability. In Lagos, wonder became urban service, commercial infrastructure and colonial spectacle.

Full circle

When Perry displayed his miniature railway in 1854, the Americans meant it as a lesson in hierarchy, and that it was. The United States had engines; Japan had curiosity. The Americans had the railway; the Japanese had not yet built one. The more important fact was not Japanese ignorance but Japanese capacity. Within a generation, Japan had opened its first railway. Within two, it was manufacturing locomotives. In the twentieth century it built the Shinkansen.

Texas has a proposed high-speed rail project between Dallas and Houston, planned around Shinkansen technology from JR Central. A 2024 U.S.-Japan fact sheet welcomed Amtrak’s leadership of the project and confirmed it would use “Shinkansen technologies” from Central Japan Railway, connecting the two cities - roughly 240 miles - in about ninety minutes. Texas Central’s CEO said the train could “revolutionize rail travel in the southern U.S.” (The project remains troubled: in 2025, the U.S. Department of Transportation terminated a $63.9 million grant tied to the corridor. But that only deepens the irony.)

Kawasaki has been supplying rail cars to New York City Transit since the 1980s. In February 2025, it announced an additional order of 435 R211 subway cars from the MTA, worth about $1.3 billion. The full R211 order came to 1,610 cars, worth $4.5 billion, which Kawasaki described as its largest rail contract ever. New York approved a further $1.507 billion for 378 Kawasaki R268 cars. Governor Kathy Hochul called them “state-of-the-art.” The irony is plain enough. The country once awed by a miniature American locomotive has become one of the countries from which America now seeks railway expertise.

Edo no be Lagos

Many societies saw Western technology in the nineteenth century. Lagos saw it early, and did not simply stare. Its newspapers explained electricity. Its residents attended lectures, protested taxes, demanded lighting, imagined electric engineering apprenticeships, rode trains, worked in workshops, and debated modernity in public. The problem was not a lack of curiosity but one of control.

Japan’s advantage was not that its elites were uniquely enchanted by machines. It was that the shock fell on a society with a machinery for conversion via domain schools, terakoya, samurai administrators, translators, ministries, workshops, and eventually a central state determined to turn foreign knowledge into Japanese capability. As I have written elsewhere, the Meiji state confronted modernity by rewriting the past into the future.

Technical knowledge had to be translated, standardised, named, printed, taught, and repeated before it could become common property. A machine is not absorbed when a few elites can buy it from China or admire it. It is absorbed when a society can describe it, repair it, teach it, improve it, finance it, regulate it, and eventually stop asking foreigners for permission to use it.

That is the Nigerian lesson. Every age has its Black Ships. In the nineteenth century it was steam. Today it may be artificial intelligence, energy systems, biotechnology, semiconductors, or whatever else is coming over the horizon. The question is not whether Nigerian elites can see the future. They almost certainly can. The question is whether the country has the public infrastructure of thought to digest it: schools, books, libraries, archives, newspapers, technical colleges, translation, children’s literature, civic education, and the habits of self-education that can allow knowledge to travel beyond a tiny class. Self-strengthening1 is a whole-of-society effort.

Without that, modernity arrives as a series of enclaves. A port here. A fintech or a clever app there. A data centre. A gated estate. A government pilot scheme. A foreign scholarship. All useful and profitable, and sometimes impressive - but not transformative at national scale. Wonder without codification becomes spectacle. Imported tools without institutions become status goods. Curiosity without a learning system becomes consumption.

Perry’s little train became something else in Japan because Japan built a path from shock to mastery. Alas, the steamships at Lagos carried a different message. Power had shifted, and Lagos would now be modernised on someone else’s terms.

Edo no be Lagos. How could it be? The real work of receiving technology is done before the technology arrives through discipline and the habits of collective learning. Japan had done more of that work. Lagos had not. So when modernity arrived, Japan could begin the long business of making it its own.

The ships did not make Japan ready or Lagos unready. They only exposed the work each society had already done - and the work it had not.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

What is going on with pepper farming in Nigeria?

Farmers who produced dry-season scotch bonnet and habanero peppers, as well as dealers who purchased the peppers in the North and moved them to markets in other parts of the country, lost a lot of money this year.

Due to the decline in the prices of agricultural produce, those who farmed during the previous wet season and grain merchants in the agricultural sector are still suffering significant losses.

Alhaji Muhammed Sani Sulaiman, a farmer from Saminaka in Kaduna State, told the Weekend Trust that many farmers who produced these pepper varieties this year did not profit from their efforts.

He said producers of scotch bonnet and habanero peppers spent a lot of money on seeds, fertilisers, irrigation fuel, chicken manure and pesticides but the prices of the spicy crop dropped below their expectations.

“Like me, I invested almost N7 million in growing spicy peppers. I bought seeds, fertiliser, chicken manure and other things with this money. The market was good when we initially started planting because we could sell a bag for up to N30,000, but eventually, it dropped to N3,000. We never received N200,000 for all the harvesting done on my farm.

“In fact, farmers in the dry season have lost a lot of money this year—something they have never done before. Additionally, majority of farmers took the commodities they grew during the wet season, sold them at a low price and invested in growing these peppers. It turned out that there were two failures: the first occurred during the wet season and the second occurred during the dry season,” he said.

Another farmer, Haruna Idris, said the cost of a hot pepper bag began at N30,000 but the price later collapsed to N4,000.

He said it became evident that farmers’ earnings from the production of spicy peppers would be extremely low despite spending lots of money on production.

“Pepper farmers are currently in a terrible predicament. I know people sold their lands and others sold their houses. I also know someone who sold his car to invest in pepper cultivation, but all of them are counting heavy losses.

Daily Trust

I try not to cover stories like this in BTH (there are so many of them every week) but I will make an exception for this one buried at the end of a longer story about all sorts of criminals arrested:

He also confirmed the arrest of one Hamza Woru in Kaiama for unlawful possession of a human skull. Investigations revealed that the suspect allegedly exhumed the remains of a deceased relative for ritual purposes.

Describing the incident, the commissioner said, “The suspect attempted to sell the human skull before he was apprehended, while his accomplice is still at large.”

He added that the case has already been charged in court under the Kwara State law prohibiting dealings in human parts.

Punch

It is perhaps an easy mistake to make to confuse Mali with Malaysia:

Three Nigerian young girls trafficked under the guise of overseas employment have exposed a cross-border human trafficking syndicate that lured them with promises of jobs in Malaysia but ended up forcing them into prostitution in Mali.

The victims, Bella Boluwatife, Linda Zainab and Amoke Joy, who spoke to Vanguard reporter, said they were deceived, transported across multiple borders and held in debt bondage before their eventual rescue through coordinated intervention by authorities and anti-trafficking groups.

According to one of the victims, Bella: “Our journey began on February 17, 2026, when an agent identified as Peter Osas arranged what appeared to be legitimate travel plans to Malaysia with our parents. He assured us of employment in a bar or as a housekeeper to their parents. The process initially appeared credible, with a video call arranged with our supposed sponsor, identified as ‘Angel,’ during which they were coached to respond positively to all questions.”

“From Ogun State, we were taken to the Seme border and moved into Cotonou in Benin Republic. Our clothes were changed, new identities were issued, and passports were processed in less than an hour. We were told to lie about where we were from if questioned,” she said.

The journey, however, took a different turn as they were transported by road for six days through several checkpoints en route to Mali.

“At that point, we realised we were not travellers but cargo. There were armed officers at checkpoints, and money was exchanged to secure our passage,” Bella added.

“There were no houses, only makeshift shelters in a bush. We saw condoms everywhere and young girls, some as young as 13. That was when it hit us, this was not Malaysia. It was a brothel,” she said.

The victims said they were immediately forced into sex work and informed that each of them owed 1.5 million CFA francs, a debt they had to repay to regain freedom.

Vanguard

When the Lipman brothers invented the handheld PoS machine in 1995, I don’t think they ever envisaged this use case. But the nature of inventions is that they very often go on journeys that surprise the inventor:

The Delta State Police Command has commenced disciplinary proceedings against two officers captured in a viral video allegedly collecting money from a motorist through a Point of Sale (PoS) machine within the premises of the ‘C’ Division Police Station in Asaba.

The command’s spokesperson, Mr Bright Edafe, disclosed this in a statement, describing the incident as embarrassing, unprofessional, and conduct unbecoming of police officers.

He said the incident occurred on January 13, 2026, and drew public outrage after the footage surfaced online.

Edafe said the Commissioner of Police in Delta State, Mr Yemi Oyeniyi, aligned with the directive of the Inspector-General of Police, Mr Kayode Egbetokun, prohibiting extortion and the use of PoS machines or any electronic payment platforms within police formations.

Guardian

Is poverty enough grounds for divorce? We go to Ilorin to find out:

An Area Court at Centre-Igboro, Ilorin, Kwara State, has dissolved the Islamic marriage between a couple, Toyin Ajibola and Bashirat Mohammed on grounds of lack of money.

The presiding judge, Hammad Ajumonbi, while delivering ruling said that even though Toyin did not want to divorce his wife, she still had the needed to move on not be left stranded.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), he, therefore, dissolved their marriage and granted custody of the three children from their union to the wife.

The court also ordered the woman to observe the three months iddah (waiting) period before remarrying.

Ajumonbi ordered Toyin to be responsible for the feeding of their children.

“The defendant should have unrestricted access to their children, while the plaintiff should always make their children available any time the defendant requested to see them,” the judge said.

Earlier, Bashirat had applied for divorce saying that she was tired of her marriage to her husband due to paucity of fund and her husband’s irresponsibility.

“I want the court to grant me divorce so that I can have rest of mind,” she said.

The husband, however, told the court that he was still interested in his wife even though he was financially handicapped.

“I have been trying hard to get money to feed my family, but couldn’t.

“It is so painful that I can’t get money to visit her and the children when they left home,” he said.

Tribune

Ok, that’s enough internet for today. We end the Nigerian section with this story as there is nothing more to add after a story like this:

A mortician named Amaobi, in charge of a mortuary in Agwabi, Buruku local government area of Benue State has been arrested by operatives of the Benue State Police Command.

DAILY POST learnt that the mortuary attendant was arrested after he was caught on Friday morning using the leg of a dead person in the morgue as a walking stick.

It was gathered that Amaobi took the dead person’s leg he was using as a walking stick to a retailer’s shop to buy some items when he was caught.

This unusual act, according to reports, drew the attention of the community, and it eventually led to his arrest by the youths.

Upon the arrival of police officers, Amaobi, in his confession, claimed that his action was a demonstration meant to draw people’s attention.

According to him, he was trying to get support so he could appeal to the government for help, especially to evacuate over 18 criminal dead bodies reportedly killed last year by security operatives and deposited in his mortuary.

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

A husband and wife joint venture has ended in prison for both:

A husband and wife who stole the personal data of more than a hundred TfL workers and claimed false tax rebates worth £650k have been jailed. Luciana and Femi Akanbi's fraud was described by a judge as the 'worst ever' data breach in Transport for London's history.

A court heard Luciana Akanbi, 38, worked in HR for the capital's transport company and accessed her colleagues' private, personal information. Prosecutors said she and her husband, 51-year-old Femi Akanbi, used the passport number, national insurance numbers and bank details of 40 TfL employees to submit 139 false tax rebate claims to HMRC.

Woolwich Crown Court heard the fraud, carried out between September 2021 and January 2022, led to a loss of £433,000 from the public purse. The pair, who live in Dartford, have now been jailed for three years and nine months each for their part in the sophisticated fraud.

Kent Live

Meanwhile over in Atlanta but on a much bigger scale:

Indictments were unsealed today in the Northern District of Georgia and the Western District of Texas charging a Georgia man and a resident of the United Kingdom and Nigeria with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, money laundering, aggravated identity theft and other crimes arising out of a scheme to defraud the IRS using stolen identities.

According to the indictment, Akinade Adedeji Raheem, 43, of Atlanta, Georgia, and Abayomi Quadri Eletu, 42, of the United Kingdom and Nigeria, conspired together and with others to claim fraudulent tax refunds using the stolen identities of accountants and taxpayers. Over the course of their scheme, the co-conspirators allegedly filed more than 300 false tax returns claiming over $100 million in refunds from the IRS.

Between 2018 and 2023, Eletu, Raheem and others allegedly obtained identifying information for tax professionals and taxpayers, including their names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, by creating online accounts with the IRS and requesting private taxpayer information. As part of the scheme, they changed the addresses of taxpayers to an address controlled by the co-conspirators, so the IRS would correspond with the co-conspirators instead of the taxpayers. They also submitted “change of address” requests to the U.S. Postal Service to cause the mail of some taxpayers to be forwarded to a co-conspirator’s address. Using the personal identifying information of others, Eletu, Raheem and their co-conspirators electronically filed tax returns claiming fraudulent refunds, then allegedly directed the IRS to split the refunds among several prepaid debit cards. Before issuing some of these tax refunds, the IRS sent verification letters to the addresses controlled by the co-conspirators, who, pretending to be the taxpayers, fraudulently verified the taxpayers’ identities and instructed the IRS to release the refunds.

Department of Justice

Diezani Alison-Madueke says she’s a scapegoat:

The only woman to head the Opec oil group has told her corruption trial she “stepped on the toes” of powerful men and was warned she would be made a political “scapegoat”.

Diezani Alison-Madueke denies living a “life of luxury” in the UK including having the use of seven homes, spending £2 million at Harrods and taking private jet trips funded by bribes from the oil industry.

The former executive for the Shell oil company was appointed Nigeria’s minister for petroleum resources between 2010 and 2015 under the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan. She was president of Opec, the world’s largest grouping of oil producers, between 2014 and 2015.

“For the first time in history, a woman had been put in charge of the nation’s most powerful sector,” Alison-Madueke told Southwark crown court. “This was not something that went down very well.” She added: “Obviously I had stepped on the toes of all the people and the groups in the petroleum sector.”

Alison-Madueke, the daughter of the late King Ogbotom Edede of the Atissa clan, described Nigeria as a “very parochial society” and that a “woman sitting at the helm was a major no-no.”

The Times

Mama Brazil is a Nigerian in Johannesburg proselytising Nigerian food:

Some people are born into their passions, while others discover them over time. For Loretha, the love of cooking was inherited. Known to many Joburgers as Mama Brazil, she traces her culinary journey back to the 1980s, growing up in a bustling household where her mother worked tirelessly to feed and support their family.

From a young age, Loretha was drawn to the kitchen. Before heading to school, she would help her mother prepare meals, unknowingly laying the foundation for what would become her life’s calling. Out of eight siblings, she is the one who followed her mother’s footsteps most closely, continuing the family’s food business legacy alongside her brother, who now runs a restaurant in Brazil.

Loretha arrived in South Africa in 2005 with a completely different plan. Initially, she intended to start a shoe business, importing footwear from Brazil. But life had other plans. Her passion for cooking proved stronger, gradually pulling her back into the world she knew best. She opened the first female-owned Nigerian restaurant in one of South Africa’s busiest neighbourhoods, Kempton Park, just 10 minutes away from O.R Tambo International Airport.

[…]

Life wasn’t always easy. After helping her mother’s business, Loretha worked as a domestic worker, hoping it would lead to educational opportunities. When that promise didn’t materialise, she carved her own path, working across the globe in countries such as Iran, Dubai, and Brazil.

It was later when she left Brazil and came to Johannesburg that she was recognised by someone who had met up with her in Brazil and referred to her as ‘Mama Brazil’. That is where the name of her restaurant comes from.

Despite her international experiences, South Africa holds a special place in her heart.

“This country is blessed,” she says. “There is peace here, and there are opportunities. You don’t have to wait for someone to give you a job, you can create something for yourself.”

TimeOut

A feature on the Kano Durbar with some great photos too:

It was around 500 years ago that the Emirate of Kano’s reign was challenged by a neighbouring kingdom in northern Nigeria. At the time, explains Nasiru Wada Khalil, a Kano-based researcher on Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritages of Kano Palace, the Emir of Kano was king of one of the most important trading cities and kingdoms in Sub-Saharan Africa. And the neighbouring Emir of Katsina had decided to wage war at Eid al-Fitr, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.

In an exuberant show of support in Kano, thousands of local leaders dressed in their turbans and rode out on their gilded horses – decked in leather saddles made from the region’s skilled craftsmen and silver stirrups from local metalworkers – next to their emir. The display of strength and solidarity worked, and the Emir of Katsina backed down, says Khalil. From that time forward, each and every Sallah (Eid) day, the Durbar is staged. ‘The Durbar in Kano has been in existence for 500 years plus,’ Khalil continues, ‘and our local leaders pledge their allegiance to the emir by taking an oath that they are not going to retreat in case of warfare.’

The World of Interiors

Quite rare to see an extradition from Nigeria to the UK. Typically it’s America that demands it:

A man has been extradited from Nigeria and charged with the 2018 murder of a 23-year-old in London.

Matthew Adebiyi, 25, arrived in London on Wednesday and was charged with the murder of Joshua Boadu.

Boadu, known as SJ, was attacked in broad daylight on Linsey Street in Bermondsey, south London on June 11 2018.

He was taken to hospital in a critical condition with injuries to his chest, neck and arm, but suffered a heart attack on the way to hospital and his life support was turned off ten days later.

Adebiyi has been remanded in custody and will appear at Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court later on Wednesday.

Two others have previously been convicted of SJ’s murder, with Denilson Davis, 27, and a 16-year-old boy from the Southwark area sentenced at the Old Bailey in September 2019.

The Standard

News from Oakland, California:

What began as a City Council hearing on a nearly $1 million fine for a man who city arborists said cut down protected trees on his Claremont Avenue property escalated into a heated debate about whether Oakland’s leaders would enforce their own laws.

It ended without a decision — and the council will take it up again next month.

The Tuesday hearing centered around Matthew Bernard and Lynn Warner, who city arborists say chopped down 38 mature trees without permits in 2021 and 2022 across their land, an adjacent city property and on neighbors’ lots. One arborist called it “the most egregious illegal tree removal case” in decades.

Bernard, who was born in Nigeria and immigrated to the United States in 2001, said he and Warner wanted to build a future home for their family on the Oakland hills lot, and did “everything in their willpower” to respect the city’s laws. He said that he had acted on advice of an arborist to remove trees at risk of falling, or igniting during a wildfire. Bernard’s neighbors have also sued him over the trees that he cut on their property.

The Oakland City Council was split — with some aligning with environmental advocates who felt the city needed to show it would not allow trees to be removed without consequences, and other council members expressing sympathy for a couple trying to navigate city permitting.

[…]

“I have to express my confusion about how a Black man should be the first to receive consequences for things that white people have been doing for centuries,” Fife said. “The hills were built up for white Oaklanders, that nobody else had access to — not Asians, not Mexicans, not Black people.”

The council weighed whether to impose a smaller fine of $411,000. The vote came down along the same lines — with those who had voted for the full fine refusing to approve the smaller amount.

With no consensus, the council agreed to continue the matter at its May 5 meeting, marking the second time the council has deferred the decision since the matter was first brought before it in December.

SFChronicle

Long feature on ‘Pastor’ Tobi:

Stepping out of a black Lamborghini, dressed in a two-piece Under Armour tracksuit with dark sunglasses and a cap pulled down tightly over his face, Tobi Adegboyega looks more like a movie star than a church pastor.

In a video he shared on Instagram on March 25 this year, the Nigerian founder of the Peckham-based Salvation Proclaimers Anointed Church (SPAC Nation) is being mobbed by adoring young fans as he attends a charity running event in central London organised by his church.

However, despite the incongruity of a clergyman having this Hollywood appearance and celebrity status, what’s most surprising is that he is in this country at all.

For in December 2024, Adegboyega lost an appeal against deportation after it emerged he’d been living in Britain illegally for more than 20 years, having first arrived from Lagos in 2005 on a six-month tourist visa.

When questioned about this in an interview with the BBC, the pastor claimed he had simply ‘lost track of time’. Regardless, it appears that 16 months after the immigration tribunal, the 45-year-old continues to live in the UK.

[…]

One 18-year-old whistleblower known as Lovis had a £5,000 loan taken out in her name by a company associated with the church, without her permission, after she had shared her bank details with a minister while suffering from kidney cancer.

A second, Gracy, joined the church in 2017 aged 21. A minister soon offered to apply for Universal Credit on her behalf. Weeks later she received a benefits payment for £1,200, significantly more than she was entitled to. It emerged that her application had falsely disclosed she had two children, increasing her entitlement. The church told her to deposit £900 across two church accounts, allowing her to keep the remainder.

‘I am convinced that SPAC Nation is a cult,’ declared Labour MP Steve Reed in Parliament in January 2020 before criticising the leadership’s outrageous displays of wealth. The Streatham and Croydon North MP then alleged – using parliamentary privilege – that some male SPAC Nation pastors were engaging in sexual relations with young female followers.

Daily Mail

Who is The General?

A notorious London gangster dubbed ‘The General’ has been jailed again - after repeated Home Office attempts to deport him failed.

Serial offender Joland Giwa, 36, was caught with around £17,000 worth of drugs when police raided his home in Risca, South Wales.

Giwa grew up terrorising the streets of Croydon as part of the ‘Don’t Say Nothing’ gang, or ‘DSN’ for short, after arriving in the UK aged ten.

He boasted on YouTube about his life of crime including ‘shanking’ his rivals - slang for stabbing.

Giwa was first jailed in 2009 for a string of offenses, and later moved to Newport in the hope it would sever his crime links with the capital - but failed to stay on the right side of the law.

The UK government has repeatedly tried to deport the criminal, believed to be from either Nigeria or Sierra Leone, but has been blocked for 17 years because neither country would take him.

Giwa and his twin brother landed at Heathrow in 1999, aged ten, without any parent, guardian or documentation.

He was granted indefinite leave to remain in 2005 - but that was withdrawn after his first conviction, and the deportation process began in 2009.

Daily Mail

Somehow Nigerians have been entering Britain on visas created for Ukrainians:

Thousands of Asian, African and Middle Eastern migrants have come to Britain under the Government’s Ukrainian free visa scheme, The Telegraph can reveal.

Nearly 3,500 visas have been granted to migrants from 112 countries – including Afghanistan, Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, India and the Palestinian territories – under the two schemes offering sanctuary to Ukrainians fleeing Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

They were eligible as family members of Ukrainians in the schemes, which allowed applicants to come to the UK either because they had family in Britain or had been offered accommodation by Britons under the Homes for Ukraine sponsorship programme.

The schemes were set up by the previous government, but have continued under Labour as the war between Russia and Ukraine drags into its fifth year.

The 3,464 visas for non-Ukrainians represent one in every 80 of the 279,223 granted under the schemes, according to Home Office data analysed by The Telegraph.

Russians account for the biggest number of non-Ukrainian nationals to have come to the UK under the visa scheme, at 588. They are followed by Nigerians (408), Afghans (294), Iraqis (161), Moldovans (152), Turks (149), Indians (124), Belarusians (107), Iranians (107) and Egyptians (106).

Telegraph

Who the hell is that kid?

And the final stop of Max Iheanachor’s whirlwind pre-draft tour? San Francisco.

Since April 1, the former Arizona State tackle has crisscrossed the NFL universe in meeting with 12 teams for “Top 30” visits, which is some kind of clue underscoring his rising stock as the NFL draft looms.

“It’s a business, with teams bringing in all the guys they like or are interested in,” Iheanachor, 22, told USA TODAY Sports this week, on the eve of a visit with the 49ers that came on the final day when teams could conduct such sessions.

“You just kind of talk to them eye-to-eye. The O-line coach, teaching you in a room, seeing how you retain information. They want to learn about your character as a player. It’s definitely been an awesome experience.”

Maybe this winding journey leads to Iheanachor, ranked 27th on the big board for USA TODAY Sports, getting picked in the first round on Thursday. Regardless, that so many teams during the draft process have wanted a closer look at a prospect who has played football for all of four years – Iheanachor moved to the U.S. from Nigeria when he was 13 – seems to add value.

[…]

Listen to Saga Tuitele, Arizona State’s edgy offensive line coach, provide a snapshot. Tuitele, who was then at Fresno State, discovered Iheanachor when he went to check out another junior college player at East Los Angeles College (ELAC).

“Then, all of a sudden, I was like, ‘Who in the hell is that kid?’ Tuitele tells USA TODAY Sports.

USA Today

David Ojabo has been mentioned here before (BTH - 45) but this is a fuller story of his journey. There is an Ojabo ko fo joke playing in my head. I’m very sorry:

David Ojabo likely has one of the most unique journeys in the entire NFL. He was born in Nigeria but primarily grew up in Scotland. He hooped for on the U-14 Scottish National team. And he didn’t touch a football until his late teens after moving to New Jersey. That, however, didn’t stop Ojabo from being selected in the second round of the 2022 NFL Draft.

Now, the Miami Dolphins edge rusher has a chance to prove that his choice of football wasn’t in vain after an injury-riddled start to his career. “You can’t even script this up, all those stops, man,” Ojabo said. “It’s been a wild journey, the ups and the downs, but it just made me into the man I am. I’ve met a lot of cultures, a whole lot of people, and I just feel almost like ready to take anything on, because I feel like there’s nothing I really haven’t seen with the international background and coming to America and being kind of all over the place leading up to now.”

Football, it would seem, found the 25-year-old by mistake. Ojabo moved to America at 17 where he began to flourish as a soccer and track star, even running a 10.8 second 100-meter dash. He set a Blair Academy school record, something that first put him on the map.

Miami Herald

Obe ata is a foundational sauce. You heard it here first:

Obe ata is a foundational sauce in Nigerian cooking, made from tomatoes, peppers, onions, and chiles simmered until richly flavorful. The sauce forms the base of many dishes, from rice preparations like jollof to stews served with meat, fish, or vegetables. In this skillet dish, it becomes the base for gently poached eggs, creating a vibrant meal that works equally well for breakfast, brunch, lunch, or dinner.

Eggs are cracked into small wells in the sauce and covered so they can poach gently in the steam. This method allows the whites to set while the yolks remain soft and creamy, creating a rich element that blends into the sauce when broken. The technique is similar to dishes like shakshuka, but the flavor profile here is distinctly West African thanks to the bold, peppery depth of obe ata.

Fresh parsley and basil are scattered over the skillet just before serving to deliver brightness and aroma. A sprinkle of crumbled feta adds a salty contrast that complements the savory sauce and eggs.

FOOD & Wine

Professor Ahmed Ahijo’s very simple solution to extreme heat in Nigeria’s north:

At less than a year old, the papayas are already fruiting outside the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH) in the capital of Borno State, northeast Nigeria.

The fruit is joined by other crops – bananas and plantain – though they were still small and not yet ready to be eaten when The New Humanitarian visited in December 2025. Dotted among less edible plants like young baobab trees, the fruits fill up 26 plots, each 25 metres in length. Together, they form a 1.75 hectare orchard of roughly 826 trees – all selected for their ability to withstand extreme heat and arid conditions.

Inaugurated at the beginning of 2025, the hospital’s orchard was a direct response to one of the most pressing challenges doctors and staff are facing: rising temperatures caused by climate change.

Extreme heat is a global challenge with major implications for humanitarians. As the climate crisis intensifies, it won’t be uncommon to see emergency responders like doctors and nurses forced to take up adaptation measures like the orchard at UMTH.

Such projects can come with co-benefits, according to Ahmed Ahijo, chief medical director of UMTH. The hospital is a major healthcare institution, which caters to patients from across Borno, a region which has long grappled with a deeply entrenched conflict. A bombing in Maiduguri on 16 March killed 23 people and injured more than 100 others, a violent incident said to be indicative of a resurgent Boko Haram.

“Apart from helping to reduce and abate the temperature and mitigate climate change, we can also provide fruits for our patients and our staff at subsidised rates,” he told The New Humanitarian on a tour of the gardens.

The orchard is not yet complete, with many areas still empty, but fountains and benches have already been installed. The fountain water is intended not only for irrigation and for patients to enjoy, but also for animals like birds and bats. Some of the plots are named after real people, including Ahidjo, who has one dedicated to him.

The New Humanitarian

A NYT feature on Kannywood, thriving in the face of censorship:

Hollywood and Bollywood may be the two biggest “-woods,” but in Northern Nigeria there is a scrappy, thriving filmmaking industry, nicknamed Kannywood. The name comes from Kano, both a city and a state, where moviemakers with modest means churn out an amazing number of productions, all while dealing with strict censors.

Nigeria’s film industry is perhaps better known globally for its bustling Nollywood industry, based in the economic capital of Lagos. But Kannywood, to the north, is a genre that focuses on different cultural aspects.

Mansura Isah, an actress, filmmaker and producer in Kano, is a leading figure who has worked in the business since 2001. Today, at 40 years old, she is particularly proud of “Jodha,” a film she finished making late last year. The film touches in part on social issues including H.I.V. awareness and early marriage.

But when Isah took the final cut to the Kano Censorship Board in January, a process every Kannywood filmmaker must go through before a movie can be released, she broke down in tears over the ruling. The officials ordered her to cut out most of a birthing scene.

“They just told me that the way I lifted my legs was not OK, that men can have a fantasy,” she said. She had spent a lot on the movie and especially on that scene, she said, because it’s “the core story.”

“Without that scene,” she added, “that movie can never be the movie that I want people to see.”

[…]

According to Adamu, Kannywood productions started addressing social issues when AREWA 24, a U.S.-funded, Hausa-language TV station, was created in Kano more than a decade ago.

He said creation of the station was one of two defining moments of modern Kannywood history.

“The first one was the introduction of censorship, which has altered the story lines and everything. And then the second one was American funding to initiate” AREWA 24, he said.

AREWA 24 was created in 2014 at a cost of about $6 million and initially financed by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism. At the time, American officials said the channel was crucial to countering the extremism of violent militant groups such as Boko Haram.

It took about four or five years for Kano filmmakers to incorporate social issues into their productions, Adamu said. What helped, he said, was seeing “the success of the TV shows that were inspired by American funding but not American story lines.”

The station was founded, he added, immediately after what he referred to as “the dark period” of censorship.

New York Times

All reforms are painful and inconvenient but macroeconomic reforms can be particularly devastating. Since the inauguration of President Bola Tinubu in May 2023, Nigeria has moved from reluctance to urgency in macroeconomic reforms.

These reforms, implemented through the removal of fuel subsidies and the devaluation of the Naira, have helped to ease fiscal and external stress which accumulated following the COVID-19 crisis.

For many years, the Federal Government (FG) spent money it did not earn, supported by excess borrowing of over N23 trillion from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). The FG’s fiscal deficit averaged 3.9% of GDP between 2020 and 2023, beyond the 3% limit set by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2007. Like the FG, the entire country spent money it did not earn as the CBN financed imports by borrowing in dollars from private investors.

With the country having nothing to show for this spending, as it did not boost growth or exports, it was clear that this behaviour was unsustainable by 2021. The FG used all its revenues to service existing debt in 2021 and the CBN soon defaulted on its obligations to commercial banks, corporates and some international airlines, such as Emirates.

When governments want to resolve a fiscal and external crisis, they crush households and businesses to make it happen. The government increases its revenue by raising taxes, or in the Nigerian case, removing subsidies and devaluing the currency.

This destroys the purchasing power of anyone who earns, invests and owns assets in the local currency. Rather than creating wealth, the adjustment process destroys wealth. The government benefits the most given that most of its debt is in Naira and it earns part of its revenue in dollars.

Today, these reforms have partly eased the fiscal and external burden of the public sector. The consolidated fiscal deficit of the FG, states and Local Government Areas (LGAs) narrowed to 3% in 2024, the lowest in five years. However, the FG continues to struggle with high fiscal deficits prior to GDP rebasing mostly due to refunds to states.

Nigeria's economic reforms since 2023 have attracted domestic criticism, mainly because of the cost-of-living crisis it spawned. Despite the merited criticism of how the government implemented some of these reform policies, it should also be uncontroversial to say that these reforms were necessary and overdue. Developing countries are regularly plagued by four maladies: inflation, excessive public debt, mismanaged exchange rates, and persistent unemployment. Each has clear origins, and each works through a chain of effects that damages real economic activity. For eight years leading up to 2023, the Nigerian government pretended this was not the reality and kept kicking the can down the road. With the resumption of a new government in May 2023, the complete collapse of foreign investment in the country, the illiquid state of the foreign exchange market, and the state of public finances effectively left the new government without a choice but to confront these problems - hence the now infamous line in the lore of inauguration speeches, "subsidy is gone".

While the reforms have bought the government some time and breathing room, to paraphrase another infamous quote from the president, the poor have barely been able to breathe. Adedayo succinctly framed it:

The life of the ordinary Nigerian is not better because the FG and CBN have eased their debt burden. Only the availability of high-quality jobs and a significant income growth will help households to fully recover.

The macroeconomic reforms have partly corrected years of financial recklessness and sanitised public finances, but this should not be the end goal. The reform process must endeavour to return the average Nigerian back to the peak per capita income level of $3,265 [currently at $1,295] in 2014.

This is one of my frustrations with the policymaking process and its communication. Nigeria was definitely in a bad state in 2023, and yes, this government has made some right moves to undo years of terrible policies. Still, policymakers, government spokespeople, and their apologists have an annoying habit of speaking as if these reforms by themselves are the goal. I do not think this attitude is an accident; I think it reveals two problems with policymaking with far-reaching implications.

The first one is a general ignorance about what economic development is, which leads to incompetence deciphering what policies are a good fit. Macroeconomic reforms are stabilisation policies. They are the equivalent of doctors trying to stop the bleeding after a patient has been fatally shot. After the bleeding has been stopped, critical organ damage will still need to be assessed and treated before the patient can be said to be in recovery. To extend the metaphor further, development policy is not even nursing the patient back to survival without critical organ damage. It is more like performing a reconstructive surgery after recovery, so the patient can start living a whole new life. Necessary stabilisation is not the same thing as successful development. So it is to my constant annoyance that getting back to GDP growth is treated as the destination. Not even getting back to the 2014 level of growth and average income levels will suffice. Development is not just about growth, but also about the structure of growth. As Robert Kappel wrote in a recent paper:

….economic growth does not necessarily lead to structural transformation—understood here as sustained industrialization, the expansion of tradable services (“industries without smokestacks”), technological upgrading, and broad-based employment creation.

Nigeria and South Africa illustrate the tension between economic scale and limited transformation. Nigeria represents a classic rentseeking regime, characterized by oil-based revenues, rent allocation networks, and limited diversification. Growth episodes have been volatile and weakly employment intensive.

This much was also recognised by Adedayo, and he was pretty clear that Nigeria needs structural transformation of the economy. Drawing on the example of Vietnam, he argued for more Foreign Direct Investment in Industry, making the tradable sector investible, and boosting export competitiveness through domestic value chains. These are all sensible policies, and I fully endorse them. The question then remains why the government has so far not demonstrated any cognisance of this challenge? Other than ignorance about how development works, the other reason is that Nigeria's current elite structure and political leadership cannot imagine an equilibrium that is different from the status quo. They cannot imagine a possible future for the country that is any different from what it is currently. This is why we keep reforming but never truly transform. This is why subsidy removal is not about repairing public finances to enable strategic sectoral investments, but about more fiscal transfers to the governors. This is why tax reform is about raising government revenue, and other complementary reforms to ease business and commerce are never urgent. The reason Nigeria does reforms is always to prevent a collapse of the sources of rent to the various patronage networks, and for political leaders and government functionaries to keep funding their lifestyles. This is why I have soured a bit on all talks of reforms. Economic reforms are always a political project. Taking reforms beyond short-term stabilisation towards structural transformation requires a new kind of political leadership and elite bargain than we currently have. For Nigeria to move from an economy of recurring crises to a solid path to development, nothing short of political and social transformation will suffice.

We question the established narratives, examining whether the crisis is the inevitable result of historical external punishments - like the French indemnity - or a prolonged failure of domestic institutions. We also look skeptically at the “copy-and-paste” development strategies pushed by international donors that consistently break down in the real world.

Please forgive any cuts or glitches in video. This was recorded across 3 different countries with varying levels of internet stability between them.

It follows, then, that rolling back tariff protection - and replacing it with a different kind of government support, one that enables rather than insulates - has to be the starting point for removing this handbrake on Nigeria's economic development. (Note: development, not growth. The two are not the same thing.)

Which way, Tariff Man?

Nigeria's Finance Ministry recently released a new list of Fiscal Policy Measures and Tariff Amendments for 2026, as approved by the President. The best way to describe the changes is as a selective retreat from the most damaging parts of Nigeria's protectionism. In that sense, the biggest line in the gazette is not any specific tariff cut but the commitment to reduce the Import Adjustment Tariff (IAT) every year starting in 2027, until it is fully eliminated by 2036. The IAT is the most punitive and arbitrary component of the tariff regime, so signalling its eventual removal is directionally good. Of course, 2036 is a long way off - enough time for Nigeria to elect another leader who believes tariff walls are the road to economic development (the supply of such politicians in Nigeria is unlimited) - so it would have been better to move faster. But you take what you can.

2026 Fiscal Policy Measures And Tariff Amendments

16MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Another small positive is that when you compare this 2026 FPM with the one from 2023 [PDF], you see a reduction in the number of items on the import prohibition list. In 2023 there were 26 such items. In 2026 the number down to 17. The clearest removals are the old bans on spaghetti and noodles, fruit juice in retail packs, tomato ketchup and sauces, retreaded and used tyres, carpets and rugs, all types of footwear, bags and suitcases, used compressors and air-conditioning units, and used motor vehicles above twelve years old. All of these appear in the 2023 prohibition schedule and are absent from the 2026 one. Dropping off the prohibition list does not mean zero duty - it simply means these goods move back into the tariff regime instead of facing an outright non-ECOWAS ban.

On food and drink, the interesting removals are noodles, fruit juice, tomato sauces, and beer and stout. In 2023, beer and stout were bundled into the broader beverages ban; in 2026, the prohibition remains for non-alcoholic beverages, but beer and stout have disappeared from the schedule entirely. I suppose this is good news for the Philistines who drink this stuff. Personally I’d rather drink dishwater than stout but to each their own.

The one notable new prohibition is corrugated flat-rolled steel sheets (nothing is ever random with these things so you can guess that someone lobbied to put it in there). That item is in the 2026 prohibition list and not in the 2023 one.

Back in 2023 there were 102 items on the national list of reduced-duty items. In 2026 that number has grown to 127. In 2023 there was a broad catch-all concession for “chemical inputs for the production of agro-chemicals.” In 2026 that umbrella line disappears, and instead you get a longer list of named compounds and intermediates. So the policy is moving from broad concessions to targeted, line-by-line relief. That is more technocratic, but it also gives government more discretion over who benefits.

There is a new food/feed block for prepared or preserved poultry meat/offal, drink-industry flavouring/extract inputs (2106.90.92.00), and animal-feed preparations, including vitamin premixes and other feed preparations (2309.90.10.00 and 2309.90.90.00). That is a fairly clear poultry/livestock and food-processing lobbying (they have been complaining very loudly, with some justification, it must be said). A lot of these come in at 0% or 5%.

There also seems to be a move away from tariffs on raw materials more broadly. This shows up across the board: crude palm oil versus refined vegetable oil, raw sugar versus retail sugar packs, bulk clinker versus bagged cement, urea versus NPK blends. The logic is straightforward that if you bring in the raw materials or intermediate goods for production in Nigeria, we will not hassle you. It all sounds sensible, and it is hardly a new idea, but the devil will always be in the implementation.

That’s the general view and direction. Let us walk through some of the specific items we covered in the F.O.O.D series.

Sugar

This is one of the more meaningful changes on paper. Most of the affected sugar lines move from 70% in 2023 to 55–57.5% in 2026. But the non-ECOWAS prohibition on retail refined sugar packs remains; the USDA estimates that domestic production still accounts for less than 5% of consumption; raw sugar imports are still effectively tied to backward-integration participants; and household use is less than 20% of total sugar demand, with industry taking the rest. So this is not really a change directed at lowering prices for consumers. It is best interpreted as a modest easing for refiners and industrial users.

That is pretty much an admission that the National Sugar Master Plan (NSMP) has not worked. The NSMP has missed its goals after fifteen years, with imports still covering roughly 95% of supply and raw sugar imports forecast at 2.0 million metric tonnes in MY2026/27, according to the USDA. The tariff trim is sensible, I suppose, but it should be taken as evidence that backward integration has not worked. Its been almost two decades now and the clock really should start counting down on this policy if it is unable to deliver over the next few years.

Wheat

This is the biggest area where any "reform" narrative falls apart. In the gazette, the relevant line is wheat or meslin flour, and it stays at 70%, exactly where it was in 2023. On flour, there is basically no change to speak of. Meanwhile, USDA expects Nigeria to import 7.2 million metric tonnes of wheat in MY2026/27, and notes that flour milled from local wheat is generally not suitable for bread, pasta, or noodles because of low protein content. The binding constraint is still agronomy and quality.

For the sake of full accuracy, some wheat easing happened in 2024 when the 2024 zero-duty wheat import waiver lowered costs well into 2025, and some mills operating in free trade zones also benefited from lower landed costs. But the 2026 FPM remains a maintenance of the status quo and nothing else.

Addendum: I’m told that ‘Durum Wheat Seed (for sowing)’ has had its IAT completely removed (from 15% to zero) hence it no longer appears on the list which only includes items with IAT applicable.

Palm Oil

This cut is directionally sound and, unlike wheat, actually says something. Crude palm oil moves from 35% in 2023 to 28.75% in 2026, while refined vegetable oil stays on the non-ECOWAS prohibition list. Once again, the idea seems to be allowing feedstock in while reserving refining for local players. The external context is that the CBN had already lifted foreign-exchange restrictions on 43 commodities in October 2023, including palm oil products, and the USDA noted back in 2024 that significant black-market inflows were already coming through neighbouring countries to evade duties above 35%.

Maybe the reason the palm oil cut is modest is that the palm oil guys clearly knew what was coming and took to the newspapers to disturb the peace with warnings of impending “doom” if imports were allowed to come in “unchecked”. In general this is something to be mindful of when you see stories in the newspapers - apply the necessary amount of skepticism and remember how long a lot of these sectors have been supported with not much to show for it other than profits to shareholders.

Cement

Elections are coming. The big daddies were left alone. Are these two things related? I don’t know, you tell me. The bulk and clinker lines remain at 50%, just as in 2023, and bagged cement stays on the import prohibition list where it has been for two decades or so. That is of course very hard to defend as infant-industry logic at this point. By the companies' own stated figures, Dangote has 35.25 million tonnes per annum of capacity in Nigeria, BUA has 17 million, and Lafarge has 10.5 million. Taken together, that is roughly 63 million tonnes of installed capacity, while Dangote says Nigeria consumed a little over 28 million tonnes in 2025. As I documented in Defensive Capacity, we know why they keep adding capacity they seemingly have no intention of using.

Urea

Urea does not appear as a headline protected line, while NPK fertiliser remains on the prohibition list. NEPC says urea brought in $1.29 billion in non-oil exports in 2025, second only to cocoa. So fertiliser policy now looks more like: export the upstream nutrient where Nigeria is competitive, but protect the downstream blending and finishing stage at home. But as we know, Nigerian farmers are paying the price for this with terribly low usage rates of fertiliser that is more valuable to be exported (especially with government gas subsidies) than sold to them.

Conclusion

As I said at the start, the best signal to read from this document is a change in logic and not really a change in rates. The country remains very protectionist but the protection is being applied a bit more selectively. And in areas like sugar and palm oil, the tariff cuts are really acknowledgements of domestic shortfall and policy failure. One can only hope that this is a sign of better changes to come.

Finally, for the love of God, the Finance Ministry should put more time into reading through its documents before publishing them. Given what is at stake, the circular itself is really quite sloppy. As one example, the descriptions given on page 3 to Annex II and Annex III do not match the actual annex titles later in the document.

Anyway, one small step for man.

Our guest will be Funsho Doherty, who has just declared his intention to run for Lagos governor in 2027. The recording will be released afterwards on YouTube and Spotify as a full Frontier Matters episode.

Only 20 tickets are available (due to space constraints). Each ticket costs N50,000, which includes a N25,000 food voucher from the venue.

Tickets are available HERE.

We look forward to seeing you!

Frontier Matters podcast should be back next week.

Enjoy the usual selection below

Nigerian Media

Very good article on wildcat gold mining in Niger state and the damage it is doing to communities and the environment. With lots of excellent photos too:

For about five years now, the silence of his neighbourhood has been broken not by the laughter of children or the bustle of new shops, but by the metallic clang of shovels and the chaos of hundreds of illegal miners, mostly youths.

Illegal miners had occupied lands within the community. Armed with weapons, cutlasses, and knives, and emboldened by impunity, they dig through residential lands in search of gold, carving scars into the earth and into the lives of those who lived there.

At first, Ike thought it was a case of young people constituting a nuisance, but when he confronted the miners who closed onto his property, his worst fears materialised. The same day he confronted them in late 2024, his home was attacked. During the attack, miners rained insults, calling him an enemy of progress and telling him to mind his own business while they focused on theirs.

[…]

An illegal miner who simply identifies as Rugged explained that the practice began as a response to constant power struggles among young people in the state capital.

“Miners who are stronger or have the numbers tend to attack the weak ones to collect their gold or money. So, we decided to also come with our weapons in order to protect ourselves and avoid intimidation,” the illicit miner told HumAngle.

Over time, the weapons were not only used against rival miners but also against residents and security personnel. Confirming what residents told HumAngle, Rugged admitted that when community members tried to stop them, they were chased away with threats.

HumAngle

If you don’t want us anymore, we don’t want you too either:

The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, has directed the Nigeria Immigration Service to immediately withdraw and deactivate passports held by persons who have formally renounced their Nigerian citizenship.

The directive, contained in a statement issued on Saturday by his Special Adviser on Media, Alao Babatunde, covers Nigerians whose renunciation requests have been formally approved by the President.

Tunji-Ojo said the ministry, saddled with the responsibility of citizenship integrity, derives its authority for the directive from Section 29(1) and (2) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended.

The statement quoted the constitutional provision as stating: “(1)Any citizen of Nigeria of full age who wishes to renounce his Nigerian citizenship shall make a declaration in the prescribed manner for the renunciation.

“(2)The President shall cause the declaration made under subsection (1) of this section to be registered and upon such registration, the person who made the declaration shall cease to be a citizen of Nigeria.”

According to the statement, the minister said once a person ceases to be a citizen, they can no longer hold any sovereign document of Nigeria, including a passport.

Punch

Abuja’s trees are disappearing. The inability to build around nature remains one of the saddest things about Nigerian construction:

Across the Federal Capital Territory, chainsaws hum where trees once stood, and bulldozers carve through forests that once cooled the city and absorbed its floods.

But beyond the rising skylines and luxury estates lies a more troubling reality: as green cover disappears, temperatures climb, floodwaters surge faster, and climate risks intensify. What was once a gift from nature, has not been sapped by man in his quest to build more structures for pecuniary gains. Thus, with more houses springing up here and there, fetching millions for their owners, Abuja is gradually being turned into a scorched earth and rendered bare by builders. The effect comes back to hurt every city dweller.

When Abuja was chosen as Nigeria’s capital in 1976, it wasn’t just a political decision — it was a bold vision. Planners imagined a city that would rise in harmony with nature: rolling hills, lush forests, and wide green belts that would shield residents from the harsh African sun and unpredictable rains. Every street, park, and estate was mapped with an eye toward balance — a capital that would breathe, not just function.

Architects and urban planners dubbed it a “green city,” a symbol of modernity intertwined with ecology. Protected forests and buffer zones were deliberately integrated into the master plan, meant to absorb floodwaters, moderate temperature, and sustain biodiversity. Abuja was meant to be more than concrete and steel; it was meant to be a living city, where nature and development coexisted.

Today, that vision is under siege as rapid population growth, sprawling estates, and unrelenting construction are erasing the very green spaces that were meant to define the capital. The dream of a climate-resilient Abuja is fading, replaced by heat, dust, and the creeping threat of floods — a stark warning that Africa’s showpiece city may be paying the price for unchecked urban ambition.

From the air, the changes are undeniable. Satellite images show forested hills around Gwarimpa, Kubwa, and Jabi shrinking year by year, replaced by sprawling housing estates, highways, and commercial complexes. Where once thick greenery cushioned the city against heat and floods, now bare patches of land and dusty roads dominate the landscape.

Vanguard

That thing Fela sang about….

Three people were killed when an ambulance conveying the corpse of an old woman home for burial ran into a tricycle.

The accident which happened in the Big Gutter area of Aba road in Umuahia on Thursday, claimed the lives of two Keke passengers on the spot while the third victim died in the hospital.

The ambulance which was driven by a woman, was alleged to be speeding when it hit the tricycle that was coming from the Ubakala-Old Umuahia axis.

A crowd of sympathisers who gathered at the scene after the incident, alerted some police officers who arrived the scene and helped in evacuating the injured victims to the Federal Medical Centre Umuahia for immediate attention.

No official statement has been issued by relevant agencies in the state about the accident but some residents who witnessed the incident claimed that it could have been caused by over speeding on the part of the ambulance driver.

An eyewitness who pleaded anonymity, said that the ambulance was conveying the corpse of a 77-old-woman to the Isi Court area of Umuahia for burial when the accident occurred.

Daily Post

Daniel Bwala wants you to know what happened to him after his car crash of an interview with Mehdi Hasan:

The Special Adviser to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Policy Communication, Daniel Bwala, has said he underwent throat surgery days after his widely debated interview with Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan.

Bwala disclosed this on Friday during an appearance on News Central’s programme, 60 Minutes with Mr Kay, while reacting to the interview and the backlash that followed online.

“Eight days after the interview with Mehdi Hasan, I underwent surgery on my throat. I don’t know whether it is the ‘Obidient’ people that threw that African thing, but in any case, I’m back and strong,” he said.

He criticised a group of social media users he identified as “Obidients,” accusing them of placing political loyalty above national interest.

“I know the environment I come from; it’s an environment where there exists a species of ‘Trojans’ of social media called the ‘Obidient,’ who do not care about the national interest or the security of Nigeria and will do everything possible to achieve the aim of their hero, no matter the cost,” Bwala stated.

Tribune

Nigeria’s disorder and coordination problems in miniature:

Zuba, a major commercial hub in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), is grappling with the absence of a functional central motor park despite hosting about six strategic markets.

Located along key highways linking northwestern states and the southern part of the country, the town falls under Gwagwalada Area Council. Its strategic position earned it a pioneer motor park, reportedly built in 1986 by then FCT Minister, Hamza Abdullahi.

Findings by Abuja Metro show that the once-bustling motor park, constructed alongside shops that added commercial vibrancy to the facility, has gradually lost its relevance due to the emergence of parallel roadside terminals within the community.

As a result, most drivers have abandoned the park, leaving it largely occupied by mechanic workshops, makeshift stalls and a few struggling businesses.

Stakeholders who spoke to Abuja Metro attributed the decline to the park’s location, which they said is far from major roads where passengers typically alight.

An official of the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW), Abubakar Bello, explained that passengers arriving in Zuba often prefer boarding onward vehicles directly from the roadside rather than hiring motorcycles to access the motor park.

“Passengers come into Zuba from different parts of Abuja, but once they drop, they are reluctant to take motorcycles to the motor park. Instead, they join vehicles heading to places like Kaduna or Lokoja along the roadside, often at cheaper rates,” he said.

According to him, this trend has forced many drivers to relocate their operations to the roadside in search of passengers.

Daily Trust

Revenge theft is officially added to the lexicon:

The Airport Police Command has arrested a 28-year-old man, George Ikpe, over the alleged theft of equipment valued at about N15 million from his former workplace, Vovida Communications Limited, an IT solutions company.

According to the statement issued by the Command, the suspect was apprehended on April 3, 2026, by operatives of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport Police Division after what authorities described as careful intelligence gathering and investigation.

Police said preliminary findings showed that Ikpe allegedly gained unauthorised access to the company’s premises located along the Murtala Muhammed International Airport axis and carted away key equipment.

A review of the company’s CCTV footage was said to have captured the suspect’s movements, helping investigators confirm his identity.

Items reportedly stolen include two custom-made Vovida Central Processing Units (CPUs) valued at ₦10,357,000 and a high-end printer valued at ₦4,715,000, bringing the total value to approximately ₦15,072,000.

Further investigation led to the recovery of the stolen CPUs after the suspect provided useful information. However, the high-end printer had already been sold before his arrest.

The suspect reportedly told investigators that he carried out the act as revenge after his employment with the company was terminated.

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

The intrepid Ruth McClean goes undercover in a erotica WhatsApp group. Journalism ensues:

On a recent morning in northern Nigeria, some thousand women’s phones pinged. The latest chapter from “Nymphomaniac King” had just dropped on a women-only WhatsApp group.

I had been silently observing in the group, Oum Hairan World, for months, after the author let me in. The prose was explicit, using Hausa words for body parts that would never survive the region’s Islamic censors. The group of Muslim women responded in kind, in a hilarious, emoji-laden discussion of who could handle the king’s appetites.

“His Majesty’s great staff is what impresses you all,” posted Oum Hairan, the author, teasing her raucous readers.

Then, just as “Nymphomaniac King” reached a tantalizing climax, she slammed the paywall down.

“You will pay 300 naira (about 20 cents) for the regular group,” she wrote to the women begging for more pages. She added that “V-VIP” access cost 1,500 naira, dropped her account number and waited for the payments to roll in.

[…]

But then, in 2021, the Hisbah called her into their office in Kano, Nigeria’s second-largest city. When she presented herself before three women from the Hisbah, she said they told her to make her writing less erotic.

“They told me I was committing a very big sin,” she said, laughing. She said she shot back, how could they know that — unless they were reading her books?

When they admitted that they had read a few, she explained her philosophy. Her books were targeted at married women, she said, and the point was to convey messages about society. She was a mother, trying to raise upright children, she added, so she wouldn’t do anything to corrupt young people. Indeed, in a kind of foreword to each book, Mrs. Umar forbids young, unmarried women from reading them.

The Hisbah seemed to accept her explanation.

“I told them I couldn’t promise to stop, and they let me go,” Mrs. Umar said.

New York Times

I hope Moby does not plan to visit Nigeria anytime soon. Lest he becomes the thing he sniffed out:

A Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) detector dog sniffed out 40 kilograms of undeclared beef and chicken that was stashed in a travellers’s luggage at Toronto Pearson Airport late last month.

CBSA tells CityNews their dog, Moby, caught scent of the meat in a traveller’s luggage arriving from Nigeria on March 27.

“The food products were seized and the traveller was fined,” CBSA said while reminding travellers that they are required by law to declare all food, plant and animal products coming into Canada.

Toronto City News

If you are on a provisional licence in the UK, you need to take extra care:

A coroner has called for the government to look into a loophole in UK driving laws after a Nigerian man who had twice failed his test caused the death of a pensioner.

Timothy Kusemi, 41, killed Susan Whittles, 70, in a collision in the East Riding of Yorkshire while driving unsupervised on an provisional licence.

Kusemi failed to give way at a crossroads and hit the side of Whittles’ vehicle, which had right of way in Bridlington, on November 24, 2023. Whittles died at the scene and her husband, a front seat passenger, was seriously injured.

A coroner has now called for the government to close a loophole that allows foreign motorists to drive unsupervised for a year without L-plates. This rule does not apply to British learner drivers.

Kusemi held a Nigerian driving licence which was valid in Great Britain for 12 months from the date he became resident. He was issued with a provisional British licence and was required to pass a driving test before September 14, 2023.

Kusemi, who had moved to the UK 14 months before the crash, had passed his theory test but failed his practical driving test twice before the collision. He failed his practical test four further times before passing on March 21 last year. The coroner noted that Kusemi continued to drive beyond the 12-month limit despite failing his test.

After pleading guilty on June 10 last year to causing death while unlicensed and uninsured, Kusemi was given an interim disqualification. He went on to plead guilty on February 23 to causing death by dangerous driving and while unlicensed, and causing serious injury by dangerous driving. He was jailed for six years and banned from driving for 11 years, after which an extended retest will be required.

The Times

New documentary about Nigeria’s female film directors out in the UK today:

7.30pm, Channel 4
There’s a reason why this Friday evening buzzkill of a documentary strand is approaching its 50th season: it does a brilliant job of finding essential, often bleak stories from around the world and offering a potted guide. This new run begins in Nigeria and the conservative city of Kano, which is home to a prolific film industry. Anja Popp meets Mansurah Isah, one of its few female directors, and explores her battle to elevate women’s perspectives.

Guardian

Helen Ogbu is running for office in Ireland:

At the top of the staircase in Helen Ogbu’s home in Galway is a large picture of her late husband Sunny Ogbu, a man who she always described as the “light of my life”.

In 2010, Sunny Ogbu was poised to make a big announcement about plans to run for the People’s Democratic Party in Nigeria in the country’s national assembly. The day before his announcement, he spotted what he thought were stranded locals on the roadside. They were waving for help, and despite his driver’s reservations, they pulled over. In fact, it was a team of suspected hired assassins.

“His driver slowed down and the next thing, they put the gun to his head and shot him,” Ogbu, 53, said this week, speaking from her home in Galway. Ogbu, who was the first person of colour to be elected to Galway city council in 2024, has now been selected to run for Labour in the Galway West by-election, following Catherine Connolly’s election as the president of Ireland.

For the first time, she is telling the full story of how she came to Ireland from Nigeria, where she was born and grew up as part of a family of nine children; how she lost her husband in a killing that she had feared would happen for years; and how she is facing down racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in a bid to win a seat in the Dail in this May’s election.

The Times

Incredible things are happening in Ireland:

A Nigerian national who insists gardaí mixed him up with one of his nine identical brothers is the first person in the State to be prosecuted for obstructing deportation.

Alleged “decuplet” Sam Okwuoha (28) was originally brought before Dublin District Court on Tuesday, following a Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) investigation.

He claims a case of mistaken identity has led to him being charged with a single offence contrary to the Immigration Act 1999.

According to court documents, he is accused of obstructing Det Gda Graham Dillon at Dublin Airport on March 6th during an effort to deport him from the State.

The accused, who had previously lived in Dublin, replied, “I am not the person” when the charge was put to him.

Bail was denied on Tuesday, and his case continued before Judge Alan Mitchell at Cloverhill District Court on Friday.

The accused, who appeared via video-link, spoke several times during the procedural hearing, at first repeating his contention that “I am not the person named on the charge”.

The judge noted the allegation was a “summary only” offence, dealt with at the District Court level, and punishable by a maximum 12-month sentence and a fine of up to €2,500.

“It is the first time we have ever used it,” Dillon told the court.

Irish Times

Your flight from Lagos to Barbados that you have been waiting for will depart next month:

Nigeria’s Air Peace will restart once-monthly flights from Lagos, Nigeria to Antigua and Barbados starting May 24 using a Boeing 777.

Sean Mendis says Air Peace has threatened to sue him for questioning the wisdom of this service. I’ve known Sean for more than 20 years, when we co-moderated the Delta Air Lines forum together on FlyerTalk. He’s former COO of Ghana’s Africa World Airlines and he wrote on LinkedIn,

The airline argues this service makes sense based on “previous ad-hoc charter flights to Antigua and Barbuda in 2023 and a landmark Lagos-Montego Bay charter flight to Jamaica operated in 2020.” A single ‘landmark’ charter flight six years ago. There were some services beyond this. And it’s just… weird.

There’s not a lot of traffic West Africa and the Caribbean. So daily or even Saturday-only service would bleed horribly. So the one thing that monthly service has going for it is fewer flights means losing less money.

Boarding Area

My Father’s Shadow still getting love and if you’re in Houston you can still see it:

The Nigerian/British co-production “My Father’s Shadow” arrives in Houston on a wave of acclaim that has made it one of the most celebrated movies from the African continent over the last year. It won outstanding debut honors at this year’s BAFTA Awards for filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr., nabbed the British Independent Film Awards’ best director nod, was given the Golden Camera Special Mention title at Cannes and was the UK’s official entry in the international category for this year’s Oscars, though it didn’t make it to the final five. Throw in a multitude of nominations and wins at various global film festivals and “My Father’s Shadow” is a low-key, indie juggernaut.

Not bad for a movie made for around $3 million by a guy directing his first narrative feature with a 16mm camera and a hope and a prayer. Co-written by Davies with his brother, Wale, “My Father’s Shadow” is a moving, semi-autobiographical remembrance of family and fatherhood, set against the chaotic backdrop of Nigeria’s disputed 1993 election in which the ruling military junta annulled the results, sparking violence and protests.

Yet the film, playing twice on Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and streaming on mubi.com beginning Friday, opens quietly, with 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and his eight-year-old brother Akin (Chibuike's real-life brother, Godwin Egbo), playing in their village, waiting for their mother to come home from work. Their father, Folarin (Sope Dirisu, "Gangs of London"), is working far away, and they don't know when they might see him again.

Houston Chronicles

Aso-oke is God-ordained and there is nothing anybody can do about it:

Artisans work for hours setting threads on looms to create narrow, tightly patterned strips, which are later sewn together into wider cloths for garments and accessories.

“This is what Iseyin is known for,” Kareem Adeola, 35, said from behind his loom. “We inherited it from our forefathers.”

While many weavers in Iseyin are middle-aged men, younger people like Waliu are entering the trade, bringing new ideas and skills.

Some engage graphic artists to develop new designs.

- ‘Meant to be handwoven’ -

Despite rising demand, the craft has largely stuck to its rudimentary roots.

Attempts to mechanise production have been limited or largely failed.

“If you use a machine to weave aso-oke, it won’t come out as nice as if it was handwoven,” said Adeola, weaving a yellow-and-olive piece.

“People have tried it before and it did not work. It is meant by God to be handwoven.”

Daily Mail

Which one of you brought bushmeat into Peckham?

A Russian crypto firm has opened an office in Lagos:

A recent vacancy posted on a Russian recruitment site sought a project manager to build a business “from scratch” in Togo, west Africa. The employer would be A7, a Russian cryptocurrency network under western sanctions, run by a fugitive oligarch and a state defence sector bank.

The advert is the latest sign that Moscow is seeking to build an alternative payments system after its banks were cut off by the west in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The company’s eye on Africa tracks with Moscow’s expanding influence across the continent. Russia has strengthened its presence in several African countries in recent years, making new political inroads following a string of coups in the Sahel region and in Madagascar, and signing a series of trade and military deals.

A7 and its backers may be seeking to “integrate their operation into the Kremlin’s larger strategic machine in Africa,” according to Elise Thomas, senior investigator at the Centre for Information Resilience, a London-based non-profit research group. The payments network opened an office in Nigeria last autumn, videos showed, and also announced a new branch in Zimbabwe.

[…]

“The project is being implemented with the comprehensive support of government financial agencies of all parties,” Mikhail Dorofeev, deputy chair of PSB, said about the Nigeria and Zimbabwe openings, according to state news agency Interfax. He spoke of “a shared interest in . . . scaling a stable and sanctions-resilient cross-border settlements system”.

Financial Times

Update on the Australian lithium play in Nigeria. Note that the company is putting a lot of sponsored reports (including this one) into Australian media:

Chariot Resources has confirmed the presence of valuable spodumene in all six of its previously announced high-grade lithium samples taken from its green Fonlo and Iganna projects in Nigeria.

Independent quantitative mineralogical analysis, completed by the University of British Columbia, identified easily processable spodumene, accounting for between 28.4 per cent and a whopping 75.3 per cent of the overall weight in crystalline phases.

The confirmation is a serious boost for the company’s Nigerian ambitions, with the presence of the simple, recoverable spodumene being a major contributing factor for any hard-rock lithium hopeful.

Spodumene is far more amenable to conventional processing methods than other lithium-bearing minerals, such as the common lepidolite, which is complex and full of impurities. Notably, lepidolite was not identified in any of Chariot’s test results.

The six samples also returned impressive lithium oxide grades between 2.66 per cent and 5.96 per cent, with management insisting that the new mineralogical data now provide the necessary technical input for its development plans to eventually produce a direct-shipping lithium ore.

Test work also identified the caesium-rich mineral pollucite, with one sample from Iganna notching up 9.5 per cent of the mineral. The company says this explains the elevated caesium values previously reported and strengthens its interpretation that Fonlo and Iganna are the most favourable lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatite systems.

Notably, the confirmation of mineralogy has substantially cleared the metallurgical pathway for Chariot’s Nigerian assets, allowing high-confidence planning to accelerate technical studies and field programs.

The Fonlo and Iganna projects form part of a four-project portfolio in southwest Nigeria in which Chariot is currently acquiring a 66.67 per cent interest. The portfolio covers 254 square kilometres and has a documented history of artisanal lithium mining.

The West Australian

Getting hot in here:

Azeez Akanni hopped on a yellow bus heading for the central business district on Lagos Island, beads of sweat rolling down his neck and arms.

The 32-year-old clothier regularly navigates chaotic traffic to deliver luxury clothes and footwear to customers across the megacity of Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital.

But his and millions of others’ commutes have been snarled by brutal temperatures as Africa’s most populous country fights a heatwave.

Adding to the pain, a spike in fuel prices from the Iran war has sent costs for air conditioning and back-up generators shooting up alongside the mercury.

“The sun is too hot,” Akanni told AFP, wedged between two equally sweaty passengers.

High temperatures are nothing new in the west African nation, perched just above the equator

But according to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet), things are getting worse: it warned in a 2025 report that in the decade from 2016-2025, nine out of the 10 years were “among the 12 warmest on record”.

Last week, UK-based Korean DJ JinseoulMusic, who is currently touring Nigeria, shared her struggles in a post on Instagram to her more than 430,000 followers.

“Surviving Nigerian heat with no light,” she wrote, using the colloquial term for electricity. “Heat woke me up in the middle of the night.”

AFP

What caught my eye was "Power Supply." Before the First World War, the company was helping to power trams, underground railways and entire towns. I live something like twelve miles from this sign, but when I looked up the Wikipedia page I was surprised to find that the power station once supplied the town where I live. The phrase struck me because the plant was clearly not imagined as a public utility summoned to overcome darkness with illumination - it was a force that moved, pumped and powered things, and earned a healthy living while doing so.

The history of regional electricity in Britain broadly shows that companies quickly ran into a commercial problem because lighting alone created an awkward evening peak, and real viability came only when they found daytime loads - tramways, electric motors. A brief history of power generation published by Enfield Council emphasises the point: companies that needed power to function congregated around the plant, and their demand is what made it viable. Street lighting came after, in 1913.

I thought about Nigeria when reading that old inscription in the photo above that preserves a meaning of electricity that the country never inherited: not the banishing of darkness, but energy harnessed to make things move, pump and produce.

Defensive vs Productive

When you survey the history of energy generation in today’s advanced nations, the story runs something like: resource, task, paying user. At the Dutch windmills of Kinderdijk, wind was used to pump water and keep low-lying land dry. Later, steam and then electricity scaled the same job. In Britain, the first practical steam engines were built to pump water out of mines - steam did not begin as abstract “progress” but as a solution to a bottleneck. Norway turned falling water into cheap electricity for industrial production; Norsk Hydro used that power to begin manufacturing nitrogen fertiliser in 1907. First-principles energy policy: match the resource to a paying industry. In all of these examples, illumination hardly ever featured as a primary driver.

One way to think about all this in relation to Nigeria is in terms of defensive and productive electricity. Defensive electricity is what people buy to survive dysfunction: light, fans, phone charging, refrigeration, generator fuel, and various other coping mechanisms. Productive electricity is what multiplies output: pumping, milling, welding, cold chains, rail, machine tools, fertiliser, industrial processing, water treatment.

A power sector dominated by defensive demand will always have brutal tariff politics, because households and tiny businesses are being asked to bear costs the wider economy is not productive enough to support. A power sector anchored by productive demand has a much better chance of paying for itself. This does not mean households do not deserve affordable electricity - of course they do. But it means household affordability should be treated as a kind of explicit social policy, not hidden inside general market debt that later shows up as a bailout.

Ratchet Effect

Yesterday the Nigerian government announced a further bailout - N3.3 trillion (roughly $2 billion) - for the settlement of legacy debts accumulated in the power sector over the past decade:

“Following verification, ₦3.3 trillion has been agreed as a full and final settlement, ensuring a fair and transparent resolution,” the statement partly read.

The government noted that implementation of the repayment plan has already commenced, with 15 power generation companies signing settlement agreements valued at ₦2.3 trillion.

It added that the Federal Government had so far raised ₦501 billion to fund the initiative, out of which ₦223 billion had already been disbursed, while further payments are ongoing.

"Full and final settlement" is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that statement. As anyone familiar with the Nigerian power sector knows, the problems are deeply structural, so the moment one debt is cleared, another begins to accumulate. Without getting too far into the weeds, in Q1 2025 the federal government absorbed about 59% of total generation costs because end-user tariffs were frozen at July 2024 rates. By Q3, tariffs for July, August and September 2025 were still frozen at those levels. DisCos could show a 95.21% remittance rate on their adjusted invoices in Q3 - but those invoices had already been shrunk by subsidy. The cost of generating power is far higher than what consumers can reasonably be asked to pay.

Original Sin

There are several original sins one can point to as the culprit for this. One I like to talk about is that the auction of telecoms licences at the turn of the millennium - and the privatisation of the entire sector - was too successful, and created problems no one has properly acknowledged since. Nobody imagined that the licence round would turn MTN Nigeria into one of the largest and most profitable companies in Nigerian history, with a whole economy of suppliers built around it. Those who missed out on that round of wealth creation - the politically connected class - determined never to make the same mistake again. Every privatisation or licensing round since has been plagued by underqualified people with not much capital to invest, using every connection they have to descend on the process and make sure “they leave with something.”

The power sector privatisation has been the biggest victim of this. Assets that needed patient capital were handed to buyers armed mostly with political access and expensive foreign-currency debt, virtually guaranteeing either unaffordable tariffs or recurring public bailouts. Transcorp’s purchase of Ughelli Power illustrates the problem. This was a 594 MW plant built in 1964, coming to the end of its useful life. Anyone who bought it would need to invest serious money to repair and upgrade it.

But here was how Transcorp funded the purchase [2023 annual report, PDF page 96]:

Around 2013, LIBOR was something like 0.51% per annum. The addition of an eye-watering 8.5% margin suggests the lender treated the loan as a speculative, high-risk venture. The fact that Transcorp ultimately had to restructure the tenor and then defaulted on a relatively paltry $1.6 million final instalment a decade later proves that any initial scepticism was entirely warranted. That the government pocketed the $300 million sale proceeds merely added insult to injury - this was capital no longer available to invest in upgrading a plant the same government had neglected for decades (within six weeks of taking over, Transcorp “ramped up” available capacity from 160 MW to 324 MW - that is, they simply got staff to turn up to work).

Generation is not the only problem of course. There are real losses, problems with collections and metering, gas constraints, transmission bottlenecks, FX exposure, and governance failures. NERC, the electricity regulator, reported that in Q1 2025 DisCos collected ₦553.63 billion out of ₦744.27 billion billed to customers, so there are leaks all along the chain.

Countries build the power systems they can imagine, and Nigeria has long imagined electricity as household relief than as an engine of production.

A journey into history

I can never resist wandering into history, and two questions have nagged at me for a while. Why do Nigerians use “light” as shorthand for electricity? All my life this has been the case - power generation’s most visible impact, in life and in vocabulary, has been illumination. And what, historically, was the way the people who occupied the area we now call Nigeria harnessed and deployed energy?

The social imagination of electricity in Nigeria was formed far more by illumination, prestige and urban modernity than by productive power. Electricity arrived as a symbol of urban modernity and illumination, not as the backbone of any kind of productive revolution. A 2024 paper by Adewumi Damilola Adebayo explored the history of electricity in Lagos from 1860 to 1914:

I argue that the political and economic circumstances, especially the politics of financing electricity, that led to the installation of the first power plant in 1898 were influenced by African agency. Agency, in this context, is the knowledge that came from learning about and experiencing electricity, coupled with an unusual socio-political influence that enabled Africans to sway the policies of the colonial government.⁴ The African residents desired electricity. However, they expected and insisted that the colonial government should finance electrification from its surplus revenues. The construction of the first plant became the subject of a political process spanning three years from 1893 to 1895. This process revealed the motivations for the introduction of electricity, the parties involved, its original purpose (for lighting streets, public buildings and private residences) and the government’s preference to fund it through a house tax.

The financing debates around the Electric Lighting Ordinance were framed entirely around street lighting and house lighting. From the 1860s to the 1890s, Lagos residents had encountered electricity as light and spectacle. Public lectures at the Literary Society demonstrated electrical experiments. The Lagos Observer and the Anglo-African reprinted foreign articles on the wonders of the new technology. And warships in the harbour - HMS Raleigh in 1886, HMS Royalist the following year - literally played electric light across the town as demonstrations of imperial technological prowess. For the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession, the colonial secretary proclaimed a public holiday and had the Royalist‘s searchlight sweep the capital between nine and ten in the evening. Electricity entered the Lagosian imagination as illumination, and it never left.

When the colonial government and the Lagos Chamber of Commerce began serious discussions about electrification in the early 1890s, every argument ran along the same track. The Chamber wanted better-lit back streets to protect its “many small stores and branch factories” from burglars. The press argued that electric light would render “burglary impossible except at an enormous risk.” Churches competed to install electric lights as a mark of distinction - at least four had done so by 1910, and one congregation accused the Public Works Department of sabotage when a power cut interrupted an organ dedication. Domestic consumers applied in such numbers that the PWD had to shelve requests for months. Electric light was a status good, a marker of conspicuous consumption and urban modernity - never a tool of production.

Energy from First Principles

Rhetoric is a grossly underused tool in Nigerian politics, and this is yet another case that cries out for it. The country's elite and leadership have a responsibility to reframe electricity - away from illumination, towards energy as a force multiplier for productivity. (They would do this, but they are too busy installing their solar panels at the correct angle and loading up on inverters and batteries, making sure they have "light" round the clock.)

Thinking about electricity from first principles means asking a set of rude questions Nigerian policy has spent decades evading. Power for what? Generated from which local resource? Sold first to which users whose output rises enough to pay for it? Subsidised for whom, and how transparently?

A serious strategy would begin with productive load: water systems, irrigation, cold chains, rail, industrial estates, machine shops, fertiliser, processing because a system that cannot earn revenue from work will never sustainably finance comfort.

The old sign in North London says “Power Supply” because that is what electricity was understood to be: motion, traction, industry. In Nigeria it is still mostly called “light.” That is more than a linguistic quirk. It is a clue to how thinly the thing itself has been imagined. A country that thinks of electricity mainly as relief from darkness will keep piling subsidies onto losses and calling the result reform. A country that thinks of electricity as energy can begin with a harder, better question: what work should this energy do? Until Nigeria answers that honestly, ₦3.3 trillion will not be a full and final settlement.

Words matter and so does - as a first step - naming things correctly.

Hope you’re enjoying the Easter break and this week’s selection does not spoil it for you.

Nigerian Media

Competition for DHL and the likes is coming from motor parks:

Nigerians are increasingly turning to motor parks as a cheaper and more accessible alternative for sending packages across the country. The shift, which has become more pronounced in recent months, is reshaping the way goods are moved between cities, with transport parks now handling more deliveries than passengers.

Unlike the conventional logistics firms, such as DHL, FedEx and GIG, motor parks offer a more flexible and affordable system that connects senders, drivers, storage handlers and motorcycle dispatch riders in a chain that ensures packages reach their destinations.

With fuel price high and conventional logistics firms charging more, the informal network of drivers, storage handlers and motorcycle dispatch riders has become the backbone of intercity logistics.

At Jabi Motor Park in Abuja, a fully loaded vehicle is no longer a sign that passengers are ready to go; it often means that it is packed with parcels.

From bags of cloths to live animals, drivers now move more goods than people as Nigerians increasingly turn to motor parks for faster and cheaper delivery.

Parcels wrapped in nylon or sacks sealed with tape and marked with phone numbers now compete for space with passengers. In some cases, they take over entire vehicles.

Weekend Trust findings show that many Nigerians are turning to commercial vehicle drivers at motor parks to send goods, citing lower cost and faster delivery despite the absence of formal tracking systems.

At Jabi Motor Park, a booking agent, Musa Ali, said the volume of parcels, locally referred to as waybills, has grown so much that they sometimes outweigh passenger traffic.

Daily Trust

A strange and terrible story:

A 15-year-old boy, identified simply as Gift, has died from suspected complications arising from a drug overdose reportedly taken in an attempt to gain weight.

The Delta State Police Command Public Relations Officer, Bright Edafe, disclosed details of the incident in an interrogation video shared on X on Thursday.

According to him, the boy ingested multiple tablets of a drug identified as dexamethasone, which was allegedly given to him by his friend, Destiny Akpofure, who claimed it could make him gain weight.

He noted that Gift fell ill days after taking the medication and later died from the resulting complications.

Edafe wrote, “A very sad case of a 15-year-old who took sachets of dexamethasone tablets and swallowed several tablets at once.

“Asked why they were taking the drug, his friend, from whom he got it, said they were taking the drug to make them gain weight and eat more.

“The boy fell sick days later and was told by the suspect not to disclose that he had taken an overdose. He died four days later.”

Recounting events leading to the incident, Akpofure said he had obtained the drug from another friend at a party.

Speaking in Pidgin English, he explained that Gift had asked about the purpose of the drug, and he told him it could make a person sleep, eat more, and gain weight.

He added that the deceased requested to see the drug.

Akpofure said he had earlier taken some of the tablets himself before handing them over.

He said, “I collected the drug from a friend at a party. I asked him to introduce me to a medicine that would make me gain weight, and he gave me the drug, saying it would make me eat, sleep, and get fat. I took four tablets.

Punch

Baby price watch:

The National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons has secured the conviction of a couple for baby trafficking in Cross River State.

The convicts, Esther Ini Udo, 32, and Eyo Stephen Udo, 34, were sentenced by the Federal High Court sitting in Calabar to a total of 30 years’ imprisonment.

PUNCH Metro reports that each of the convicts is to serve 15 years in prison.

According to a statement issued by NAPTIP on Thursday, the couple was arraigned on a four-count charge bordering on the buying and selling of babies for exploitation, contrary to the provisions of the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act, 2015.

The statement read, “Today, April 1, 2026, the Cross River State Command secured two convictions in FRN v. Esther Ini Udo & Eyo Stephen Udo, Charge No. FHC/CA/19C/2025.

“The convicts were charged with four counts bordering on the buying and selling of babies for exploitation, contrary to Sections 13(4)(a), (c) and (e), 21, and 27 of the TIPPEA Act, 2015.

“The first convict sold her newborn baby to one Oluchi Judith, who is at large, for the sum of N300,000 (Three Hundred Thousand Naira).

“Also, the two convicts bought a one-year-old baby boy for the sum of N150,000 (One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Naira) from Blessing and Uduak (both convicts) and resold the baby to the same Oluchi Judith for the sum of N400,000 (Four Hundred Thousand Naira).”

Punch

What does one even say to this?

In apparent effort to cushion the effects of high cost of tomatoes, the average Nigerian family has returned to the long abandoned habit of buying boiled tomato mix.

Economy&Lifestyle findings revealed that the tomato mix is a combination of tomatoes, habanero pepper and onion blended to paste and boiled.

The paste is allowed to cool before being portioned in cellophanes sachets and sold within the ranges of N200 to N500.

Mrs. Ramota Abdul, a vegetable seller, said she had to include it to her business, as there is hardly electricity in their area for residents to use their electric blenders.

“For months now we had no light.

“The increase in the price of fuel has created a rise in the cost of blending things in the market.

“My vegetable business is crawling with bills piling up. So I saw the opportunity to introduce blended tomato mix paste for sale to make profit to foot my bills.

“At first I thought people wouldn’t patronize me but they did.

“At times I sell up to a basket of tomato paste mix in a day.

Vanguard

The violence is real but the security is fake:

The Nigerian military has disclosed that its troops arrested two people posing as security operatives and prevented fresh attacks in parts of Plateau State.

A statement signed by Captain Chinonso Polycarp Oteh, media information officer of the Joint Task Force Operation Enduring Peace, described the development as a major step toward restoring peace in the state.

“In a significant breakthrough aimed at restoring the desired peace in Plateau State, troops of Joint Task Force, Operation Enduring Peace, achieved remarkable success in the late hours of Thursday during a targeted operation at Dutse Uku in Jos North Local Government Area,” the statement said.

“At approximately 11:45 pm, vigilant troops responding to a distress call on sporadic shooting at Dutse Uku general area intercepted and apprehended two individuals masquerading as security operatives. These impostors, dressed in tactical black uniforms, were caught actively participating in the arson of residential properties and the orchestration of violence within the community,” the statement added.

It said further, “Those arrested are currently in custody, while two persons who sustained gunshot wounds were moved by troops to a medical facility for attention, and they are in a stable condition. This pivotal arrest serves as a direct rebuttal to recent allegations suggesting military complicity in the Jos North unrest, effectively proving that the atrocities previously attributed to official personnel are being committed by criminal elements using deceptive attire to sow discord and defame the Armed Forces.”

Daily Post

This is the first case of Indomie fraud we have covered here at BTH:

In another development, the EFCC on the same day arraigned one Ibrahim Mohammed Tungushe before Justice Kumaliya on charges related to alleged fraud involving N1.25 million.

One of the counts read: “That you, Ibrahim Mohammed Tungushe on or about November, 2025 in Maiduguri, Borno State within the jurisdiction of this Honourable Court dishonestly misappropriated and converted to your own use the aggregate sum of N 1,250,000.00 ( One Million Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand Naira) only, being proceeds from the sale of 100 cartons of indomie instant noodles, belonging to one Bukar Babakura which you received under the guise that you will supply same to your customers and make payments for it within 24 (twenty four) hours and thereby committed an offence contrary section 296 and punishable under section 297 of the Borno state penal code Law and other matter connected therewith (No. 3 Vol. 48 Law 2923) respectively.”

Daily Post

A strange story of a couple going through a divorce who are fighting over one of their 3 children:

The Family Court sitting in Calabar, Cross River State, yesterday, extended the interim custody of an eight-year-old boy to the state’s Ministry of Social Welfare, pending the determination of a dispute between his parents.

Justice Blessing Egwu gave the order during proceedings in a suit marked HC/FC/13/2026 involving a Deputy Registrar in the state’s judiciary, Edmund Ujong (applicant), and Ms Wofai Bassey Etim (respondent).

The dispute centres on the custody of the child, with both parents who have two other children together accusing each other of abducting the boy.

At the resumed hearing, each of the parties urged the court to grant them custody of the child.

However, the judge expressed displeasure with counsel to both parties for filing fresh motions on the eve of the hearing, a development the court said delayed proceedings and stalled progress towards a resolution.

[…]

The court further ordered that both parents be granted access to the child at least twice weekly, subject to conditions set by the Welfare Department, and adjourned till April 28, 2026, for continuation of trial.

Guardian

Human beings are complicated beings with needs that can never be fully met:

“My husband used to cheat when we first started dating. I would suspect him and he would usually beg and beg and beg till I forgive him. Then we got married. My husband was cheating all through the first year, second year.

“In fact, every day we were fighting. Every day we were having an argument, from one argument to another. After we finished fighting, we would make up and everything would go smoothly.”

She admitted confronting other women involved, sometimes issuing threats.

“I remember calling the friend ladies, threatening them to leave my husband. I remember telling them to leave him or else I would post their pictures online. And they would insult me and I would insult them back.”

“All those things was what made our marriage sweet. It used to make me very, very happy. Our marriage was very, very interesting.”

The woman said her husband’s life changed after a spiritual encounter.

“But look, I don’t know what happened and how God encountered my husband or my husband encountered God. Now, my husband is a saint. To even cheat on me is a problem. Work will close, my husband will come back immediately.”

“I’ve asked him so many times if he’s going through midlife crisis. He will keep telling me that no, that he has found the purpose and he has known that there’s nothing out there again. And it is left for him to be faithful to his wife.”

She said the absence of conflict has made her marriage dull.

“I don’t know how to tell him to go back to the streets. I don’t know how to tell him to bring up all those things that used to make our marriage interesting. Now our marriage is just a one-way street. Very boring. Cook, sleep. Even to argue with me is a problem.”

“To me, I feel like every marriage needs a spark. Spark can be a cheating partner or an abusive partner or a violent husband. Something that just keeps the marriage going. Something that just makes it interesting. But my husband is boring.”

She also said she is unsure whether she should take drastic steps herself.

“Me now, I don’t know if I should start cheating on my husband to bring back the spark. But I know that many men don’t forgive cheating. And I don’t want to be caught cheating on him. Because I don’t want to go back to my parents’ house.”

Tribune

Non-Nigerian Media

Who is Uar Bernard?

Uar Bernard (pronounced “ooh-are”) measured in earlier this week at the NFL’s HBCU showcase at 6-4 1/2, 306 pounds with 11-inch hands and almost 36-inch arms. Other people who have spent their lifetimes in football say Bernard looks like a Marvel creation. Bernard’s body fat: 6 percent. He vertical-jumped 39 inches and broad-jumped 10-10, which was 14 inches more than any other defensive tackle did at this year’s combine. His 40-yard dash: 4.63.

“Hands down, he is the most explosive athlete I’ve ever seen in my life,” Luallen told The Athletic. “He broad jumped 10-10, and it was effortless. At 306 pounds. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Longtime quarterback coach George Whitfield was helping lead the offensive positional drills at the HBCU showcase at the Washington Commanders facility. After his work was done, the defensive players took the field. Whitfield couldn’t take his eyes off Bernard. He’d never seen anyone like that, either.

“It’s like watching (Victor Wembanyama),” Whitfield said. “The numbers don’t even do him justice. He’s 6-5, 310, and he’s got 6 percent body fat on him. NBA players don’t have 6 percent body fat on them.”

[…]

Bernard has come a long way in three years. He grew up in a small village in Nigeria, where most people are farmers, he said. His father was a policeman but passed away when Bernard was 16.

He wanted to do something different from most people in his area. “I wanted to go into real estate,” he said. But after getting noticed while playing basketball and told by a coach he should try American football, Bernard attended several camps in Africa before getting selected for the NFL’s IPP program. In the past decade, the program has put numerous players on NFL rosters. Eagles offensive tackle Jordan Mailata is the most notable IPP alum.

The Athletic

Not been a good couple of weeks for NIgerian dieticians:

A dietician has been struck off the UK register after using ChatGPT to give ‘textbook’ answers during a remote NHS job interview while she was in Nigeria.

Aiwanehi Aigbokhaevbo was caught using AI to provide real-time answers to impress interviewers during a video call for a job at an NHS hospital.

The registered dietician kept asking the interview panel to repeat the question, before ‘slowly and deliberately’ repeating the question back herself, in an effort to buy time until she had ‘model’ answers, a tribunal heard.

Nigeria-based Miss Aigbokhaevbo raised suspicions when she was spotted reading off a screen and managing to speak ‘very eloquently’ despite her considerable hesitation before answering.

One of the panel members subsequently put the interview questions into ChatGPT and noted significant similarities to the answers she had provided.

It was heard that the use of AI had been a particular problem with candidates from Nigeria applying for jobs.

Three different members of the panel suggested she was cheating both while answering questions in the interview and while completing a subsequent case study question.

Miss Aigbokhaevbo has now been struck off following a hearing at the Heath and Care Professions Tribunal Service (HCPTS).

The tribunal heard that she undertook the job interview for an oncology dietician role at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in March 2024.

Daily Mail

The work of Tolù Adẹ̀kọ́:

In a world filled with cookie-cutter interiors, there is an element of comfort and joy in embracing spaces that skew from the norm, or so thinks Nigerian-born, London-based British interior designer Tolù Adẹ̀kọ́.

As the founding designer of multidisciplinary practice Adẹ̀kọ́ & Co., he is equally acquainted with imagining exclusive hospitality and gastronomy destinations that stand out for their moody atmosphere and artisanal flair, as he is used to dreaming up homes that reflect the breadth of experiences, passions, and stories that make up his clients’ universe.

I sat down with Tolù to understand why, in his own words, personality, not trends, is the hottest new thing in decor, and why today, the best designs — the ones that stick with us, standing the test of time — are those that not only look beautiful but capture the nature of those who inhabit them.

Livingetc

Electric vehicle assembly from kit in Lagos:

A growing number of Nigerian companies are turning to kit-based assembly to bring electric vehicles to market in Africa. Lagos-based Saglev Micromobility Nigeria recently partnered with Dongfeng Motor Corp., in Wuhan, China, to assemble 18-seat electric passenger vans from imported kits.

Kit-based assembly allows Nigerian firms to reduce costs, create jobs, and develop local technical expertise—key steps toward expanding EV access. Fully assembled and imported EVs face high tariffs that put them out of reach for many African consumers, whereas kit-based approaches make electric mobility more affordable today. Saglev’s initiative reflects a broader trend: CIG Motors, NEV Electric, and regional players in Côte D’Ivoire, Ghana, and Kenya are also leveraging imported kits to build local EV ecosystems, signaling that parts of West Africa are intent on catching up with global electrification efforts.

CIG Motors operates a kit-assembly plant in Lagos producing vehicles from Chinese automakers GAC Motor and Wuling Motors. These vehicles include the Wuling Bingo, a compact five-door electric hatchback, and the Hongguang Mini EV Macaron, a microcar with roughly 200 kilometers of range aimed at ride-share operators looking for ultralow-cost urban transport. NEV Electric focuses on electric buses and three-wheelers for urban transit and last-mile delivery.

Saglev’s CEO, Olu Faleye, emphasizes that Nigeria’s EV transition addresses both practical economic needs in addition to environmental goals. Beyond passenger transport, electric vehicles could help reduce one of Nigeria’s persistent agricultural challenges: postharvest spoilage. Nigeria loses an estimated 30 million to 40 million tonnes of food annually because of weak logistics and limited refrigeration infrastructure, according to the Organization for Technology Advancement of Cold Chain in West Africa.

IEEE Spectrum

Elizabeth Adeagbo has been found guilty of assault:

A toddler was grabbed like a ‘bag of rubbish’ by an ‘experienced’ nursery worker after the ‘happy-go-lucky’ child grabbed her trouser leg wanting her attention, a court heard.

Nursery worker Elizabeth Adeagbo, 29, was found guilty of assault by beating after a trial before magistrates.

The mother of the boy, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said the incident meant she had ‘lost trust’ in leaving her child with others.

She said: ‘Leaving your children at nursery for the first time is a significant and emotional step. No family should have to fear that their child will come to harm. It’s shaken our confidence.

‘They’re looking after the youngest, most vulnerable children, what happened has made me so wary.

‘It’s vital that standards of care for children are upheld so that those entrusted with their care cannot be given free rein do what they see fit with our children.’

Sefton Magistrates’ Court heard the incident happened at a nursery on the Wirral, which also cannot be named.

The incident happened at around 9.30am on April 16, last year, when the ‘happy-go-lucky’ child grabbed her trouser leg, wanting her attention.

[…]

The teaching assistant, who moved to the UK from Nigeria, where she was a teacher, in 2023, then lifts the child by his left upper arm and carries him across the room. At the end of the CCTV clip she grabs him by both arms and lifts him up.

Adeagbo, who had a 17-month-old son at the time of the incident, said her intentions were to remove the ‘wet apron’ with her other arm, while carrying him.

Daily Mail

Nigerian gig workers training robots in Nigeria:

When Zeus, a medical student living in a hilltop city in central Nigeria, returns to his studio apartment from a long day at the hospital, he turns on his ring light, straps his iPhone to his forehead, and starts recording himself. He raises his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker and puts a sheet on his bed. He moves slowly and carefully to make sure his hands stay within the camera frame.

Zeus is a data recorder for Micro1, a US company based in Palo Alto, California that collects real-world data to sell to robotics companies. As companies like Tesla, Figure AI, and Agility Robotics race to build humanoids—robots designed to resemble and move like humans in factories and homes—videos recorded by gig workers like Zeus are becoming the hottest new way to train them.

Micro1 has hired thousands of contract workers in more than 50 countries, including India, Nigeria, and Argentina, where swathes of tech-savvy young people are looking for jobs. They’re mounting iPhones on their heads and recording themselves folding laundry, washing dishes, and cooking. The job pays well by local standards and is boosting local economies, but it raises thorny questions around privacy and informed consent. And the work can be challenging at times—and weird.

Zeus found the job in November, when people started talking about it everywhere on LinkedIn and YouTube. “This would be a real nice opportunity to set a mark and give data that will be used to train robots in the future,” he thought.

Zeus is paid $15 an hour, which is good income in Nigeria’s strained economy with high unemployment rates. But as a bright-eyed student dreaming of becoming a doctor, he finds ironing his clothes for hours every day boring.

“I really [do] not like it so much,” he says. “I’m the kind of person that requires … a technical job that requires me to think.”

Zeus, and all the workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review, asked to be referred to only by pseudonyms because they were not authorized to talk about their work.

MIT Technology Review

A tragedy in London:

A 14-year-old boy shot dead in south-east London has been named as Eghosa Ogbebor.

Officers received reports of a shooting on Lord Warwick Street, Woolwich, at about 15:40 BST on Thursday. The boy was treated by paramedics but died at the scene. His family has been informed, the Met said.

Two boys, aged 14 and 16, and an 18-year-old man have been arrested on suspicion of murder.

Detectives leading the inquiry have urged anyone with information about the incident to come forward as well as appealing for anyone who may have relevant CCTV or dashcam footage.

Customers sitting outside a nearby pub, The Greyhound, are said to have run inside in panic as they heard gunshots.

Pub worker Sofia Pereira said she heard someone fall on one of the bins on the pub’s patio at the time of the shooting.

Pereira said she then saw a teenager run through the patio towards Woolwich Church Street.

She said: “I just heard like a big ‘bang’, like a big, strong ‘boom’, which was obviously one of the kids, I think, jumping on the wall, through the bin, and then obviously the bin fell and broke, then he just ran off.”

She said about 10 customers who were on the patio ran inside “panicking”, adding the atmosphere in the pub was “very overwhelming”.

“Everyone got scared because they heard shooting and they could see one of the guys had a machete, or something like that.

“So everyone just ran inside, said ‘lock, lock all the doors and everything’, because obviously we didn’t know what was going on.”

BBC

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

These days, Keffi can feel like a town you arrive in by accident. It sits in the long shadow of Nigeria’s federal capital, close enough to Abuja to be pulled into its daily rhythm, a modest market town on the edge of someone else’s importance. It is easy to read it as a minor settlement along the corridor of movement and commerce, known more for the practical business of ordinary life than for the business of history.

But it was not always like that. Long before Abuja redrew Nigeria’s mental map, Keffi’s location made it the sort of place that could not be unimportant. Perched on the rolling grasslands south of the great Hausa heartlands, Keffi sat at a threshold that made it simultaneously indispensable and imperilled. It was close enough to the emirate of Zaria to be pulled into its political orbit, far enough south to survey a patchwork of smaller communities, hill settlements, forest-edge villages, and the long-distance trade routes that connected them all. It was a geography that made it useful and also dangerous. Border towns accumulate power by mediating between stronger states and weaker neighbours; they also accumulate enemies by doing the same work too successfully.

The nineteenth century was the era in which raiding and forced movement became the dominant political technology across the country south of the Hausa heartlands. By the century’s end the province had been “ruined” and depopulated. Fortified strongholds had radiated violence into the surrounding countryside, and caravans of captives had been pushed northwards year after year. This was the landscape Keffi inhabited as a borderland between different ways of producing wealth and authority.

To understand how and why Keffi’s relationship with Zaria became so fraught, and remained so for a century, it helps to see Zaria as something more than a city-state. The old kingdom of Zazzau was the southernmost of the “seven Hausa States” and it was the one whose role was to provide slaves for the others. Zaria’s power in the south was economic, and it was built on human capture.

Keffi, positioned near the southern reach of that influence, became entangled in that system early. Its rulers would repeatedly discover that they could not be fully independent without provoking the north, and could not be fully obedient without losing autonomy and legitimacy at home. That awkwardness - between being a client and trying to be a player - is the tension you can feel running through every recorded encounter in the town’s history. It is also, as we shall see, the tension that would eventually produce a dead British Resident, a fugitive Magaji, and a very fat interpreter whose loose tongue provided the excuse for the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate.

Keffi’s founding is anchored around the turn of the nineteenth century. A leader named Abdullahi, better known as Abdu Zanga - a Katsina Fulani - gathered a band of cattle-owning Fulani around him at a time when Fulani rule was “rapidly spreading southwards.” He chose a site sheltered by thick bush and defended it with a heavy stockade, a kaffi in Hausa, from which the settlement took its name. Thus Keffi began as a defensible enclosure: a place meant to withstand attack and to project force outward.

Very early, Keffi discovered that it could not choose its own political parent. Abdu Zanga attempted to obtain his title - and, crucially, a flag - directly from Othman Dan Fodio, the Emir of Sokoto. Flags in this context were licences of authority, publicly signalling recognition and allegiance. It was a bold gambit and an attempt to bypass Zaria entirely and claim direct legitimacy from the supreme authority of the Caliphate. It was punished swiftly. Around 1810, Zaria horsemen rode down and destroyed Keffi with fire in “a slave-collecting Razzia.” The lesson was clear that in this region, claims to sovereignty were not policed by mere diplomacy.

The punishment, however, did not settle the matter. When Keffi was rebuilt, it was fortified far beyond a simple stockade. The town was enclosed with a triple wall and a moat - defences significant enough that they were still visible when the British arrived decades later. The architecture made clear that this was a place expecting violence, planning for siege, and ready to hold out against cavalry. If Zaria intended the raid to establish the final verdict on Keffi’s subordination, Keffi’s rulers treated it as the opening salvo of a long contest over autonomy. Abdu Zanga was compelled to hold his title directly from Zaria and to pay annual tribute in slaves, even if the triple walls suggested a town that had learned to submit with one hand while preparing to resist with the other.

From around 1820 onwards, Zaria appointed a kofa - an officer whose role was to inspect and communicate with local authorities in Keffi. The kofa travelled with jekadu - tax collectors - whose periodic tours made the relationship between the two polities material and extractive. The currency of that collection was overwhelmingly human and it transformed Keffi into an “advanced base” for slave raiding into the south. This matters for understanding everything that follows. Keffi became a frontier node and pipeline in a system that converted violence into wealth, and wealth into legitimacy. And pipelines, as a general rule, produce conflicts whenever they are threatened or rerouted.

Chiefs and headmen paid tribute in money and slaves, with specific figures: a slave or more, plus one hundred thousand cowries, sent once a year or sometimes more often. Traders entering the town brought a share of their goods to the Emir. Installation into office required enormous payments - from the Madawaki and Galadima, one million cowries each; from the Wambai and Dallatu, five hundred thousand; and from lesser title-holders, amounts scaled to their position and means. The spoils of any raid were formally divided, with shares due to the emir and senior officials. This was a system of professional incentives in which officials who lived off shares of tribute and shares of raids would naturally resist any political change that threatened those streams.

After a particularly savage battle between Abuja and Zaria, in which three hundred prisoners were killed at the Gate of White Water and their heads mounted on poles along the town wall, the Emir of Abuja spared one captive - the son of the Makama of Zaria. He was given garments and money for his journey and then “handed on to the Sarkin Keffi to be sent back to Zaria, for at that time Keffi was on terms of friendship with both Zaria and Abuja.” Here, Keffi appears as intermediary, courier, and neutral-ish corridor between two enemies, the kind of role that makes a border polity useful and vulnerable to pressure from both directions.

Keffi’s Zaria problem, then, had two faces at once. In one direction, the town was compelled to acknowledge Zaria’s suzerainty through tribute and oversight. In another direction, it could leverage its position as a hinge between Zaria, Abuja, and other southern polities - sometimes as a friend, sometimes as a rival, sometimes as a necessary conduit. That is a recipe for what might be called awkward sovereignty: a condition where a town’s survival depends on constantly renegotiating its degree of dependence, and where the man who controls the terms of that negotiation becomes very powerful.

The most revealing window into Keffi’s internal stress lines comes from its successions. After the third emir, Jibirilu, died in 1859, he was succeeded by his brothers in order of seniority - Mohamadu, then Ahmadu, then Mallam Sidi (also known as Sidi Umoru), who died in 1894. Up to this point, succession appeared orderly, following the recognisable principle of seniority among brothers. Then the rule broke. Sidi Umoru was succeeded by Ibrahima, the ninth son of Abdu Zanga, and the succession thus skipped three brothers - Yamusa, Sulimanu, and Isiaku - all of them older than Ibrahima.

The records do not explicitly say why those older brothers were bypassed but the bare fact of the skip tells several important things at once. First, that Keffi’s political life was not governed by a single, stable succession principle - seniority could matter, until it didn’t. Second, that actors with influence - kingmakers, councillors, or outside patrons - could intervene to reshape the line of succession. And third, when legitimacy is contested or improvised, offices outside the throne can grow disproportionately powerful.

By the time Ibrahima ruled, Keffi had developed what can only be called a dual-power arrangement. The emir sat on his throne, but real authority in the town resided elsewhere - in the hands of a man named Dan Ya Musa, who held the title of Magaji. Ibrahima was a figurehead. Dan Ya Musa was the one who mattered.

The Magaji’s office was, in constitutional terms, that of the accredited agent of the Emir of Zaria, the suzerain to whom Keffi owed its allegiance and its tribute. Read one way, this made Dan Ya Musa a functionary: Zaria’s man in Keffi, a conduit for instructions and a collector of dues. Read another way - the way that actually corresponded to reality - it made him the most powerful person in a town whose emir could not match him in will, in resources, or in the capacity for violence. Keffi’s Zaria problem had become internalised. Zaria was inside Keffi’s power structure, operating through an office that had accrued more real authority than the throne itself. The title of Magaji would later be rendered obsolete under colonial reorganisation, one of many local offices swept away in the imperial tidying-up. But in 1902, it was the office that ran Keffi.

Dan Ya Musa was, by all accounts, a man whose character matched his position. A member of the Keffi royal house by birth, he was still young when the British arrived - under thirty-five - and in the full vigour of his powers. He was not a large man. An eyewitness who knew him well recalled that he stood “not more than five feet two inches at the most,” was dark-skinned, well-proportioned, and “always wore a black beard, but no side-whiskers.” His teeth, the same observer noted with curious precision, “were small and well-formed and he had not lost any.” For a Fulani, he was a fine horseman, a hunter, and a warrior. When crossed, he was possessed of “an extremely fiery temper” and could then be severe. Radiating energy and appetite, he had four wives and many concubines. His hobby, this witness noted with an air of understatement, was war. Each dry season he rode out from his headquarters at Kokona against the surrounding communities, and the horses used to mount his men were paid for in slaves.

He had also set himself against the establishment of British rule - though his resistance up to 1902 had been of the passive rather than the active variety. One colonial historian described him as a “robber chief and slave-raider” who had obtained “complete control” over the weak old king. That phrasing captures something real about how colonial officials perceived the situation. They saw the Magaji as a powerbroker whose authority was rooted in coercion and the slave economy, and whose capacity for independent action unsettled everyone in the vicinity, British and African alike. Before any British officer arrived to issue demands, Keffi was already a place where sovereignty was divided, contested, and brokered. And in a polity where the state already spoke with two tongues, the role of the man who translated between all of them - the interpreter - would prove more consequential than anyone imagined.

If the Magaji’s office connected him to Zaria, it also gave him a platform to act beyond Keffi, sometimes aggressively. Around 1893, a boundary dispute arose between the emirate of Jemaa and the Magaji of Keffi, who claimed the Numana and Ninzam districts as his own. The Magaji did not petition or negotiate. He advanced against Jemaa. He was driven away, but advancing against a neighbouring emirate in a boundary dispute was not the action of a passive local official but of a man who believed he could assert claims through force, or at least through the credible threat of it.

Just as important was how the dispute was settled. It ended only when the Emir Yero of Zaria gave a decision, after both parties appealed to him. Zaria appeared as a court of appeal with the authority to redraw claims between its own subordinates. And yet the episode also revealed the limits of Zaria’s ability to control its own frontier agents: Keffi’s Magaji could push outward until someone pushed back hard enough to make arbitration necessary.

Even at its most routinised, slave-raiding on this frontier was rarely presented as raiding at all. The sub-emirates that held their titles from Zaria - Keffi among them - had begun as extraction outposts and then, belatedly, tried to look like administrations. Each emirate was parcelled out in lots among office-holders, who in turn divided villages among retainers serving as jekadu. All of them lived at the respective capitals, drawing sustenance from a system of levies elastic enough to include not only a share of crops and livestock but “even of children of the pagans.” Where communities proved less tractable, officials manufactured justifications to attack, to carry off the young and the able-bodied, and to dispatch them northwards in time for the annual tribute. In other words, slaving could be made to wear the costume of taxation, and violence could be made to wear the costume of law. By the end of the nineteenth century, this machinery had consumed itself: depopulation was so complete that the Fulani retainers had been forced to turn their own hands to farming the emptied lands around their towns.

This matters for what abolition was up against in 1902. The British did not arrive to a clean distinction between war and taxation, or between tribute and kidnapping. Raiding was still going on up to 1902. It only began to buckle when frontier rulers made formal submission to the new government, a process that cut across the old Zaria-centred hierarchy and interrupted the raiding careers that were remaking the map by force. In the same breath, the colonial administration was tightening its frame around Keffi: early Residents commenced exploration and by July 1902 the provincial headquarters was transferred to Keffi itself - an administrative relocation that was also a declaration that this borderland would now be watched and disciplined from the inside.

The British clampdown felt, to many office-holders, less like moral reform than like an attack on the very possibility of wealth that depended upon the slave trade. Chiefs went raiding the surrounding communities, captured people, and brought them back to sell to wealthy merchants and traders, receiving in exchange money and fine robes. Those merchants then took their human cargo further afield - into Nupe and Ilorin country - and sold them there, returning with all manner of goods: horse harnesses, muskets, and gunpowder, which could be sold again at further profit. The price of a strong young captive could reach two hundred thousand cowries. And therefore, when the British came, “those men who had been earning a rich living by this trade saw their prosperity vanish, and they became poor men.”

Abolition was also experienced from the other end as a restoration. The British arrival was framed as an act of divine mercy because it “put an end to all raids.” The communities that had fled to forests and hilltops during a century in which flight had been their primary survival strategy began to come down. Those who had been carried off as slaves were, in some cases, restored to their homes. Thus the end of raiding was not an abstract reform but a physical reshuffling of bodies back into places, a reversal of the demographic engineering that the slaving frontier had been perfecting for generations.

The colonial administrative records offer a parallel, if considerably more self-congratulatory, version of the same transition. The province at the century’s end is depicted as a landscape of ruin and depopulation; then comes Sir Frederick Lugard, and - in the telling of his own administrators - people scatter back to their lands and farms, and even slaves filter home from as far away as Sokoto and Kano. Lugard was, at this point, barely two years into his tenure as High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Installed on New Year’s Day 1900 at Lokoja, a river-town at the confluence of the Niger and Benue, he governed a vast territory of some twenty-four million souls with a total of nine political officers, a shoestring budget underwritten mostly by customs revenue from the south, and the small but determined West African Frontier Force (WAFF) he had himself helped to create. His Protectorate was, in truth, a paper claim - a set of theoretical boundaries drawn from international treaties of very little significance to the actual rulers and people on the ground.

One of his very first acts had been a legal proclamation abolishing slavery - an important political statement but, as of that date, a largely meaningless edict, since he had no power to enforce it beyond the immediate reach of his garrisons. Still, the proclamation served its purpose: it publicly identified the new power in the country as the ally of the oppressed, and it placed every slaving emir on notice that their revenue model now had an expiry date, even if nobody yet knew when it would arrive.

But clampdowns create adaptations, and this frontier had always been fluent in adaptation. You cannot raid as openly once the Resident is in town and the headquarters has moved closer - but you can bargain, delay, redefine, outsource, and above all insist on your own interpretation of what the new rules mean in practice.

That was the combustible backdrop to the slavery conversation in Keffi in 1902. Abolition, as the British presented it, was a direct intervention into the frontier’s revenue model and coercive toolkit, and therefore into the Magaji’s power. A man whose authority rested on controlling movement - of tribute, of captives, of horses bought with human beings - would have heard anti-slaving demands as an existential threat. Into this arrangement walked three men whose collision with Dan Ya Musa would change the course of Nigerian history.

The first was Captain George William Moloney, the British Resident for Nassarawa Province - a man described by his own contemporaries as possessing strong character and a determination to act. Moloney was a military officer before he was an administrator, and he carried on his body the proof of it: a gunshot wound to the thigh sustained during the Akassa raid of 1895, when the Brassmen of Nembe stormed the Royal Niger Company’s headquarters on the Niger Delta coast. The wound had left him permanently crippled, and by the time he reached Keffi he was carried about in a hammock - a detail that would matter enormously on the day he needed to summon troops in a hurry. Yet a lame leg had not dulled his appetite for action. Just weeks before the events that would end his life, Moloney had led the expedition that subdued Abuja in August 1902, arresting the Madawaki and breaking the brigandage that had made the trade routes south of Keffi impassable. To the locals he was known as “Mai Launi” - the Coloured One - a pun on his name and a nod to the strangeness of the white man in their midst. Moloney was under immense pressure from Lugard to bring Keffi to heel and end the slave raiding. But unlike the fire-and-sword approach favoured by some of his fellow Residents, he initially believed in a diplomatic solution - that the Magaji could be brought into the fold through persuasion rather than force.

Accompanying him was his Assistant Resident, a man named Gustavus William Webster, whom the locals in Keffi came to call “Mallam Bature” - the learned European. Webster, during Moloney’s absences on campaign, had managed to cultivate a genuine friendship with Dan Ya Musa, visiting him regularly at his headquarters in Kokona and earning a reputation among the townspeople as a protector. The people of Keffi, one eyewitness recalled, knew him well, liked him, and regarded him as their guardian. But between these two British officers and the Magaji stood a third figure - the indispensable and treacherous intermediary through whom all communication had to pass.

This was Audu TimTim, Moloney’s chief Government Agent and interpreter. His nickname, TimTim, meant a leather pouffe - because he was, as one contemporary put it, “a very fat man with no neck” who looked exactly like one. The physical description is memorable, but it was the least important thing about Audu. He was, by the most charitable account available, “a liar and a rogue and utterly without scruples.” He set himself the task of playing Moloney off against the Magaji and vice versa - telling each party things designed to inflame suspicion of the other, manufacturing grievances where none existed, and exploiting the linguistic gulf between the British officers and the Fulani court for his own enrichment and influence. In a town where sovereignty was already fractured and communication between rulers already treacherous, the man who controlled the words between all parties would hold a terrible, decisive power.

By half past ten on the Friday 3 October morning, Keffi was already doing what Keffi always did on a Friday: turning politics into public theatre. This was the town’s weekly gathering-point, the day when the Magaji - who normally kept his household eight miles away at Kokona - would ride in to salute, attend the central mosque, and remind everyone which authority truly carried weight in this town. It was also the day the Emir and the leading men sat most visibly inside the architecture of rule: palace, square, mosque, and crowd arranged in their familiar pattern like a diagram of power.

Captain Moloney chose that day deliberately. He had already sent word to the Emir of Keffi, the aged Ibrahima, with a plan: on Friday, “if God wills,” the Emir was to meet the Magaji at the Jama’ar Gayyam gate because there was work to be done. The message read as both invitation and warning. The barracks sat outside the gate, some distance from the palace precinct. Moloney wanted a conversation about power and policy, but the staging of it mattered. This was the British Resident trying to pull the most dangerous local actor in Nassarawa Province into a controlled, visible setting.

Moloney was carried in his hammock down to the Emir’s palace, with Audu TimTim and a second messenger named Musa Gana walking alongside. Soldiers accompanied them as escorts, with some left behind on guard at the Resident’s quarters. When the party arrived at the palace entrance - the Council Chamber, the formal hall that served as the threshold of the Emir’s private compound - they found the place already crowded with men. The Emir dismounted from his horse, passed through the Chamber, and went into his private quarters. Then he came back out and they all moved to the open square in front of the palace. On one side stood the Emir’s residence. On the other, barely a hundred and fifty yards away, stood the Magaji’s. A chair was placed for Moloney. The Emir sat on a mat. Soldiers took up a position near the gateway. Webster was there too. A crowd began to gather. The geometry of the morning was set: all the principals of Keffi’s fractured sovereignty arranged within conversational distance of one another.

Moloney immediately asked - through TimTim - where the Magaji was. The Emir’s reply was that this was his town, not the Magaji’s, and whatever the white man wanted he should say it to the Emir and it would be done. Moloney did not take the opening. Instead, he turned to his interpreter and asked whether the Emir was speaking the truth. TimTim’s answer exposed the dual-power reality of Keffi in a single sentence: in this town, he said, people feared the Magaji more than the Emir. Moloney pressed on. He told the Emir, in effect, that he wanted the Magaji because the Emir was old and the job required a younger supervisor, a sentence that would have landed badly in any court, but especially in one where dignity was a political resource and an insult to the king’s capacity was an insult to the king.

From the gate they moved into the square. The messengers were dispatched to summon Dan Ya Musa. He refused to come.

In the account dictated by Sergeant Major Usman Umaisha - Webster’s groom, who was present throughout and gave his testimony in 1937 with a memory that later investigators found remarkably consistent with local oral tradition - TimTim’s duplicity had begun long before the fatal Friday. It was already in motion when Moloney first arrived in Keffi. At the start, Umaisha recalled, the Magaji had treated Moloney with great courtesy, even moving his household out of Keffi town to Kokona and returning only on Fridays. Then, one day, Dan Ya Musa asked TimTim a simple, practical question: what does your white man like and dislike? TimTim’s reply was to sow a seed of panic. He told the Magaji that the real reason Moloney had come was to capture him. Then he went to Moloney and told him the Magaji would murder him one day.

Read slowly, that is not a mistranslation. That is the deliberate planting of two incompatible stories about the same relationship, designed to make each side see the other as a mortal threat.

By Friday morning, that earlier poisoning of the well became operational sabotage. Once the Emir had gone through the Council Chamber into his private quarters, Moloney told TimTim to go to the Magaji’s house and summon him. TimTim went off and came back: the Magaji refused. Moloney sent him again with the same message - he was here to discuss work, nothing more. TimTim went off and came back again: still a refusal. But here Umaisha inserts the accusation that transforms the entire episode. In fact, he said, TimTim had never gone into the Magaji’s presence at all. The messages that Moloney believed were being delivered and rejected were being invented by the interpreter in the space between two compounds, a hundred and fifty yards of open ground that had become an abyss of manufactured meaning.

Then TimTim gave Moloney the line that mattered most. The whole town had assembled, he said, and the people believed Moloney had come to arrest the Magaji because he had soldiers with him. Moloney - trying to avoid a confrontation and to let the Magaji come without losing face - did the thing that made the rest of the day possible. He dismissed the soldiers. They marched away to barracks. The armed protection that might have prevented what followed was sent back on the strength of a single sentence spoken by a man who had been lying all morning.

This was the structural cruelty of the interpreter’s position in Keffi. TimTim only had to manipulate protocol and perception: they think you came to arrest him; let your soldiers go so he will come. It sounded like de-escalation but in reality it was disarmament. After the soldiers left, those who remained in the square could be counted on two hands: Moloney and Webster; TimTim; Musa Gana; two messengers named Tabba, and Abdu Kiri; a man called Jika Akur; the two grooms - Umaisha himself and Moloney’s own - and a boy. The Resident, his assistant, and a handful of unarmed staff, sitting in an open square in a town whose most powerful man had just been told, by the man he trusted least, that the white man had come to destroy him.

And then the Magaji’s own intelligence network lit up. Dan Ya Musa, it turned out, was not entirely blind to what was being said in the square. He had a boy named Auta Maidungu - someone he trusted for a particular reason: the boy understood English. The Magaji had posted Auta in the doorway of the Council Chamber to listen and report what passed between the white men. It was a small precaution with enormous implications. It meant that a parallel translation channel existed.

Now Auta went to his master and asked a devastating question: did you see TimTim? Did he come and deliver any message? The Magaji said he had not. Auta told him that Moloney had sent messages three times, and each time TimTim had returned to the white man claiming the Magaji refused. Worse: TimTim had been putting specific, provocative words into the Magaji’s mouth - something to the effect that Moloney had brought soldiers to arrest him, so why should he leave his house? And then the final piece: because of this, Moloney had dismissed his soldiers back to barracks. The Magaji’s reply, in Umaisha’s narrative, is the sound of a man realising he has been played in public. “So this is what Audu Timtim has said.” Then he gave the vow that turns the story from misunderstanding to intention: TimTim had lied in this fashion to him before, he said. Today, by God’s grace, his lies would end - TimTim “and his White Man.” The line was both personal and political. TimTim’s lies were not merely insults but actions with consequences: they had manipulated the Magaji’s honour, placed him in open conflict with the Resident, and - perhaps most unforgivable in a court society built on reputation - made him look as though he was refusing a summons out of fear.

At roughly the same time, Webster tried to intervene. He was the one person with a genuine chance of calming the Magaji. One eyewitness who knew both men insisted that the official stories which painted Webster as blundering into private quarters or being manhandled by the Magaji’s guards were wrong, because Webster knew the Magaji’s house intimately and was always welcome there. But when Webster went to the Magaji’s compound to reconcile the parties, he found the entrance hall packed with young men armed with flintlocks. That was the moment Webster understood what was coming. He ran back, mounted his horse, and rode hard for the barracks, about three miles away. The distance was decisive. Three miles, with horses and confusion and orders needing to be given before armed men could march back to the palace square, was a very long way when the clock had already started.

Meanwhile, the meeting in the square had turned into a public standoff. Another eyewitness recalled the scene as an exercise in accumulating heat. Moloney had been carried down in his hammock and helped out, limping. Eleven o’clock passed. The Emir sent word that those gathered were tiring of the game of waiting. Still no Magaji. At one point Moloney himself wanted to go and fetch Dan Ya Musa in person, but the Emir prevented him - perhaps recognising that if the Resident entered the Magaji’s compound, the meeting would cease to be a negotiation and become a confrontation. Every minute added heat. Every delayed reply, every rumour circulating through the crowd, was another opportunity for TimTim’s earlier framing - he fears arrest; the Resident is about to seize him; the soldiers are proof - to harden into established fact inside people’s minds.

In Umaisha’s account, after Webster rode for help, Moloney decided to return to his quarters. His carriers lifted him into the hammock and began to move. They got as far as the Friday Mosque - less than a hundred yards from the Council Chamber - when the Magaji appeared on horseback. That image is almost unbearably consequential. The Resident, unable to walk quickly, carried on a cloth bed. His escort already dismissed. His assistant galloping for help three miles away. The crowd within shouting distance. And the Magaji arriving mounted - on his war-horse, a stallion called Dan Ashalu - accompanied by armed riders and footmen, in a space already poisoned by language.

The carriers panicked. They dropped the hammock and fled into the mosque. Umaisha and the others ran into the mosque too and peered out from the sanctuary. What they saw next they could not fully interpret, because the one man whose job was to interpret had already begun to run.

Umaisha says the Magaji came close to Moloney and spoke with him, though the men in the mosque could not hear what passed between them. This suggests a final chance, a short exchange in which violence might still have been avoided. But the exchange, if it happened, was fatally compromised by the same absence that had brought them here. Moloney needed language. He needed a trusted bridge between English and Hausa - and the bridge was either absent, corrupt, or both. Then the Magaji withdrew briefly towards the Tudun Kofa - the broad open space where riders showed their horses’ paces on ceremonial occasions - and the people watching believed he had gone away. Then he reappeared at full gallop.

Another eyewitness remembered the sequence differently: the Magaji rode out through the archway of his house on Dan Ashalu, approached the Emir to give the traditional salute with his spears, and then a shot rang out. He recalled later that the Magaji always carried two pistols and never parted from them - one hidden under his left armpit beneath his gown, the other kept in a pouch on his right hip, concealed by the folds of his clothing. The shot that brought Moloney down, this witness believed, came from the revolver on the right hip.

The two accounts can be read together without forcing them. The sequence may have been: approach, brief exchange of words, withdrawal, return at speed, shot. Or: approach, salute, withdrawal to gather himself and set his men, return at full gallop, pistol and impact. Either way, what both men agreed on was the result. Moloney was killed in the open, in front of witnesses, in the midst of Friday’s gathered crowd. Umaisha’s phrase is stark: the Magaji rode him down. When the dust settled enough for the men in the mosque to see, they saw Moloney’s head on the ground. Soldiers began firing. Bullets fell into the crowd. People were killed and wounded. Someone in the Magaji’s retinue fired an arrow that struck the Emir in the foot, adding injury and humiliation to the panic. Webster took refuge in the mosque. And in the middle of it all, Audu TimTim ran.

Here the sources converge on the story’s bitter irony: the man who had manufactured the crisis did not survive it.

As soon as Moloney fell, TimTim bolted from the square in the direction of the barracks and Moloney’s house. The Magaji shouted an order that is revealing in its selectiveness: “Do not touch Mallam Bature.” It was a command that protected Webster - the man with whom he had real personal relations - even as he killed the Resident and turned to pursue the interpreter. Dan Ya Musa was not simply losing control in blind fury. He was choosing targets.

Umaisha’s narrative gives us the same instinct in another form. After Moloney was killed, the Magaji cried out: “Where is Audu Timtim?” He was told TimTim was on the road to the barracks. The Magaji went after him. The chase ended in Ungwar Alkali, near the house of Asamudu, the Alkali - chief judge - of Keffi. Both testimonies fix the kill-site around the same landmark: a baobab tree that was still standing when Umaisha dictated his account thirty-five years later. The Magaji caught TimTim as he was trying to scramble up the rise by the baobab. One account recalls that Dan Ya Musa, wheeling his horse, slashed TimTim across the belly with the knife-edge of his fighting stirrups and ripped open his bowels. A man named Barga - a slave of one Adamu Mai-Doka - then cut off TimTim’s head. Umaisha does not linger on the detail. He simply says the Magaji killed TimTim on the spot. But he adds a decisive tactical note: at the very moment the Magaji overtook his quarry, the soldiers Webster had gone to summon were coming up the road and began firing their rifles. The Magaji escaped anyway.

The geography of Keffi had done its work one final time. The troops were too far away to arrive in time to prevent either killing, but close enough to witness the second - close enough to fire at a fleeing Magaji, yet not close enough to hit him. In the chaos that followed, another man threw Moloney’s head down a well outside the gate of the mosque. It was a final act of desecration that the British would neither forget nor forgive. In the days after, they tried to pin the violence to fixed points in the landscape. A tall white wooden cross was planted in the public square outside the mosque to mark the spot where Moloney fell. And above the town, on the summit of a high hill overlooking the older settlement on the plain below, a solitary grave was dug and enclosed by a circular wall - Moloney’s resting-place, set apart on the skyline like both a warning and a claim of ownership over the country that had swallowed him.

That hill can still be seen today. The locals know it as Pyanku Hill, but it is more widely called Moloney Hill - or, in the way that Nigerian English softens and domesticates colonial relics, “Maloney Hill” - and it rises at the edge of Keffi behind the Emir’s palace, looming over the town with the quiet insistence of unfinished business. The grave at the top is a physical place you can still climb up to, and it remains part of Keffi’s public memory in a remarkably literal way. As recently as 2020, Nasarawa State’s commissioner for information, culture, and tourism visited the site with ministry officials, and the Emir of Keffi spoke openly about having renovated the tomb and wanting a museum built to preserve the town’s historical artefacts. A hundred and eighteen years after a crippled British Resident was carried in a hammock to a meeting that killed him, the hill where he was buried is still being tended - a reminder that in Keffi, the past is not something that happened long ago.

Once TimTim was dead, Dan Ya Musa swung his horse round and rode back through and around the town, then out towards Kokona. He gathered his women, about forty of them, his horses - some seventy in number - and six herds of cattle, and set off north. At Keffin Shanu, he stopped long enough to cut the telegraph wire with his sword, severing the British system’s nerve in a single stroke.

In Keffi itself, the Friday rhythm had been shattered beyond repair. The Resident was dead. The interpreter was dead. The Emir was wounded. The crowd had been fired into. The Assistant Resident was still somewhere on the road between palace and barracks, a few miles of distance that had suddenly become the difference between life and death.

TimTim’s choices - whether you frame them as corruption, self-dealing, personal grievance, or a half-baked political scheme - shaped the conditions in which violence became the rational outcome for a man like Dan Ya Musa: public humiliation, fear of arrest, the loss of face, and the sudden discovery that the Resident had dismissed his soldiers. When the Magaji rode into that square, he was acting inside a story TimTim had already written for both sides - one in which the only safe move left was to strike first.

By evening, the Magaji was on the run.

The phrase “butterfly effect” belongs to a much later century. It entered popular science through the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, whose work in the early 1960s on weather systems showed how tiny differences in starting conditions could produce wildly different outcomes; by 1972 he had given the idea its enduring image when he asked whether the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might set off a tornado in Texas. In its simplest form, the theory means that in a complex system, a seemingly trivial disturbance at the beginning can alter everything that comes after.

None of the people in Keffi that Friday could have imagined that an episode which began in mistrust, and manipulated speech would open a road to the destruction of one of the great Islamic states of nineteenth-century Africa. Yet that is what happened. The killings at Keffi were local and intensely personal but their consequences were imperial. A chain of self-interested manipulations performed by one fat man in a dusty square, became one of those small initial disturbances whose effects widened far beyond the men who first felt them.

To Lugard, sitting in Lokoja, Keffi did not look like an isolated outrage. The southern approach to Zaria had delivered an earlier lesson in blood. Before Moloney, there had been David Carnegie - the younger son of the Earl of Northesk, an adventurer who had previously crossed the deserts of Western Australia and written a book about it, and who had come to Nigeria as an Assistant Resident with plenty of enthusiasm. He was killed by a poisoned arrow in a skirmish with the local Tawaris in November 1900 near Uma’isha, in the same belt of highway robbery and armed disorder that later produced the killing of the missionary Bako and the British messenger whose deaths had brought Moloney against Abuja in August 1902, in a direct response to the atmosphere of lawlessness. Carnegie’s death thus gave Keffi a history before Keffi. By the time Moloney was murdered, British authority in this region was losing ground to the frontier of raiding, brigandage, and contested sovereignty. In other words, when Keffi erupted, Lugard did not see a freak incident but further proof that hesitation on the southern marches invited defiance.

His official language after the event is revealing. In the report he wrote to the Colonial Secretary the following year, Lugard recounted how Moloney had attempted to bring the Magaji to “an amicable understanding,” only to fall victim “through the treachery of his interpreter.” The crime, Lugard wrote, “called aloud for punishment” - not least because Moloney had been “unarmed and dependent on crutches” when he was butchered. But the next sentence is the hinge on which the wider story swings. Lugard added that the Magaji had fled to Kano, where his “cordial reception” by the Emir “was one of the immediate causes of the advance on that town by the British troops.” In other words, Keffi did not merely horrify Lugard. It furnished him with the language of necessity.

That does not mean he had suddenly discovered an ambition he had never previously entertained. The British high command in Northern Nigeria had been circling the Kano–Sokoto problem for years, while London hesitated over the cost and risk of a major campaign so soon after the exhausting Boer War. One careful study of Lugard’s career shows how, after Moloney’s death, he hardened sharply against conciliation, warning that those who still urged diplomacy risked “the murder of all the British in Northern Nigeria.” The same study demonstrated that London only reluctantly accepted action against Kano as “inevitable.” Keffi, then, was not the birth of Lugard’s larger design. It was the opening he needed to present that design as unavoidable - to transform what had been an ambition into what looked like a duty.

The Magaji’s own movements helped make Lugard’s case for him. After escaping Keffi he fled northward and was sheltered by the Emir of Zaria, though he lost much of his property in the flight. Later he went on to Kano, where the Emir Aliyu Babba - nicknamed Mai Sango after the devastating explosive weapon he had deployed to lethal effect during the Kano civil war - gave the fugitive Magaji a state welcome and rode through the city with him on a horse. This was the same Aliyu Babba whom Lugard's hawkish Resident in Zaria, Captain Abadie, had already been accusing of assembling an army to attack the British garrison - a claim that was largely invented, but which the Magaji's triumphal reception now made considerably easier to sell. That reception converted a murder into a diplomatic fact. Once Kano chose to publicly honour the man who had killed a British Resident, Lugard could argue that the issue was no longer Keffi alone. It had become a test of whether British authority in Northern Nigeria meant anything at all. Within days of Moloney’s death, the old Sultan of Sokoto, Abdurahman, also died, an event that might reasonably have prompted Lugard to pause, to open discussions with the new Sultan on a clean slate. But Lugard carried on as if nothing had changed, and did not even reach out to the successor, Muhammad Attahiru I.

By January 1903, Lugard was ready to mount expeditions against Kano and Sokoto without informing the Colonial Office. He planned to commence the expedition and present its success as a fait accompli - forcing the government to support him if things went wrong, to save British prestige. When the plans were somehow leaked to the Reuters wire service and appeared in British newspapers, the blindsided Colonial Office was furious. Sir Charles Dilke raised the issue in Parliament, demanding assurances that Kano would not be attacked. Telegrams flew back and forth between Nigeria and London in which Lugard hinted at his plans without fully revealing them, preserving plausible deniability for himself. In the end, the determined High Commissioner ordered Colonel Thomas Morland to take over seven hundred infantry soldiers, twenty-four British officers, four Maxim guns, and four 75-millimetre artillery pieces, and march from Zaria to Kano. Before embarking on the journey to join Morland, Lugard took some time to write his will.

The campaign moved with startling speed after that. The troops marched on the 29th of January 1903. Kano - the great walled city that visitors had called the Manchester of Tropical Africa for its manufacturing and thriving commerce - fell in February. Sokoto fell in March. If you race through the chronology, the velocity is almost bewildering. Five months from a murdered Resident to the conquest of an empire.

Then came the reckoning. Sultan Attahiru I began his eastward withdrawal, joined by the irreconcilable chiefs who would not accept the new order. Among them was Dan Ya Musa. The Magaji of Keffi had found his way to Burmi, where the last stand of the old Caliphate would be made. The final engagement came on the 27th of July 1903 - the bloodiest battle the British had so far faced in Northern Nigeria, raging from eleven in the morning until six in the evening, with Attahiru himself leading the resistance of ten thousand men. When the dust settled, the ex-Sultan was dead. And among the fallen, the records note with the economy of a closing file, was “the Magaji of Keffi, who had killed Captain Moloney.”

A meeting that should have ended in a public scolding or at worst a controlled arrest instead widened into a chain of events that ended, within ten months, at Burmi with the destruction of the last armed resistance of the independent Caliphate. The Sokoto Caliphate did not fall because one interpreter lied. It fell because a lie at the right point in a tense and overextended political system helped trigger the sequence that turned British desire into British action. Keffi was the hinge on which that sequence swung.

Lugard himself drew the institutional lesson in language more explicit than any historian later needed to supply. Writing about the malpractices of native agents and the “guilt of the agent Awudu,” he concluded that “the absence of honest native interpreters and agents is the curse of the country,” that “the only remedy is for Residents to learn Hausa,” and that he intended to make not only promotion but even “the retention of seniors” dependent on passing the language examination. The policy that followed was administrative prophylaxis: if the empire was going to survive on the frontier, it had to hear for itself. It was, in its own grim way, the most consequential memorial that Audu TimTim would ever receive - not a grave, not a marker, but a language examination, mandated by the High Commissioner of Northern Nigeria.

And yet TimTim himself remains a strangely fugitive figure. We can recover his nickname, his girth, his job, his death, the fear and disgust he inspired in those who remembered him. We can place him in the square, in the Council Chamber, on the road to the barracks, under the baobab tree where the Magaji finally caught him. But beyond that he slips away. The archive that records the collapse of an empire leaves only scraps for the interpreter who helped precipitate it. A later British district officer who spent years at Keffi collecting oral testimony about the murder found that “the person invariably blamed for the affair was Abdu Tintin [sic], Moloney’s head messenger who was also his interpreter.” That was the verdict of the town itself - not the official British narrative of a stubborn Magaji resisting civilisation, but the local memory of a man who had lied to both sides, manufactured a crisis for his own purposes, and been cut down for it under a tree that was still standing thirty-five years later.

TimTim altered the course of Nigerian history and then vanished into it, preserved less as a person than as a warning: that on a frontier ruled by layered sovereignties and mutual suspicion, the man who controls the meaning of words may briefly hold more power than the men who carry the guns - and that the tongue, as the Hausa proverb has it, has no bones, but it is strong enough to break a man.

Enjoy the usual selection below

Nigerian Media

A story about unoccupied government houses in Bauchi:

Findings by Weekend Trust revealed that at least four sets of about 6,000 housing units in Bauchi State are either completed but unoccupied or abandoned halfway through construction. Several of them have now been overgrown with weeds and taken over by reptiles.

The housing schemes include the 1,000 Unity Estate located along Jos Road, the 1,000 Isa Yuguda housing units at Hakan-Yafi village, the Federal Government 1,000 housing units along Ningi-Kano Road and the 2,500 Governor Bala Mohammed housing units across the six Bauchi emirates: Katagum, Jama’are, Dass, Bauchi, Misau and Ningi.

Weekend Trust gathered that the construction work for the Unity Estate started sometime in 2007, but the project was abandoned halfway. While a significant portion of the first phase was 100 percent completed over 15 years ago, other units were abandoned at various levels of completion.

Further investigation also indicated that some residents of Bauchi, suspected to have applied for the houses but got tired of waiting for formal allocation, sometimes in 2014, moved into some completed portions of the houses. The uncompleted structures in the estate have been left at the mercy of vandals, reptiles and criminals using them as hideouts.

It was also observed that while several walls of the abandoned structures have collapsed, others are replete with cracks.

The second 1,000 housing units project, located about 3 kilometers away from the Unity Estate, was initiated and completed by the former Governor Isa Yuguda-led administration. Although it was fully completed, not a single house has been officially allocated, years after completion. The structures have been taken over by hoodlums who converted them to criminal sanctuaries.

Multiple sources at the Bauchi State Ministry of Housing, who craved anonymity, confided in this paper that the houses have not been allocated to occupants due to the change of governments.

One of the sources said former Governor Yuguda completed the estate towards the end of his second tenure in May 2015, but had left the office by the time they were ready for allocation.

“His successor, the present administration, hasn’t paid much attention to the project. I later learnt that the terms for occupying the houses were also reviewed and the applicants found it difficult to own them. I don’t know if the present administration will review the terms again to simplify the processes to enable the applicants to own the houses,” the source said.

Daily Trust

The most annoying thing about mining stories in Nigerian media is they never tell you what they were mining. That is the most important part of the story!

Troops of 176 Guards Battalion under Operation MESA have arrested 98 suspected illegal miners during a raid on an illegal mining site in Gwagwalada Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory, FCT.

This was made known in a post on X by Zagazola Makama, a counter-insurgency and security expert in the Lake Chad region.

Makama stated that the operation was conducted at about 5:55 p.m. on March 23, following intelligence on illegal mining activities in the area, noting the troops stormed the site and apprehended the suspects without resistance.

The source further revealed that items recovered during the operation include one vehicle, eight motorcycles, five pumping machines, 27 shovels, seven sledgehammers, 22 diggers, three head pans, five mining mats, and a sack of charcoal.

“The arrested suspects have been handed over to the Guards Brigade Provost Group for further investigation and necessary action,” he said.

Daily Post

Even by Nigerian standards this whole attempt at rehabilitating a convicted paedo has been shocking:

Controversial Nollywood actor Yomi Fabiyi has once again ignited public outcry after doubling down on his defence of convicted actor Olanrewaju Omiyinka, popularly known as Baba Ijesha, claiming the 2021 incident was a matter of “play” rather than a criminal attempt at sexual violence.

During a recent live session that has since gone viral, Fabiyi sought to downplay the gravity of the assault that led to Baba Ijesha’s imprisonment. Fabiyi claimed in the Yoruba language that “there was no intention to rape. Baba Ijesha just wanted to play with the girl and kiss her quickly because he knew the homeowner would be back soon.” He further added, “He just wanted to kiss the girl and play with her breasts.”

The case, which first shook the Nigerian entertainment industry in 2021, involved the sexual assault of the 14-year-old foster daughter of comedienne Damilola Adekoya, professionally known as Princess. The incident was captured on CCTV, providing key evidence that led to a high-profile trial.

In July 2022, a Lagos State High Court sitting in Ikeja convicted Baba Ijesha of sexual assault and indecent treatment of a child. He was sentenced to five years and three years’ imprisonment, respectively, to run concurrently.

Tribune

And another story that just leaves you speechless:

Chaos erupted in Southern Ijaw on Wednesday after a 47-year-old man, identified simply as Emi, collapsed and died while undergoing a traditional punishment for the alleged rape of a 10-year-old girl in Ekeowe.

According to community sources, the victim was returning from a farm with her aunt when Emi allegedly ambushed and assaulted her in a nearby bush. Under a longstanding local custom, the punishment for such an act involves receiving 10 strokes of the cane from each of the community’s 12 families, totaling 120 lashes.

Tensions mounted as some residents offered alternatives to the brutal flogging, with one proposing N50, 000 and another N15, 000 to spare the suspect. However, the wider community rejected the offers, insisting that the full traditional penalty be enforced as a deterrent.

During the marathon flogging session, Emi collapsed and lost consciousness after receiving just 40 strokes—a third of the prescribed punishment. He was later confirmed dead upon arrival at the community hospital.

The death sparked immediate pandemonium, with angry youths flooding the streets.

Armed soldiers from the Ogboinbiri base were deployed to restore order, following fears that the situation could escalate further.

Vanguard

This shouldn’t be funny but I couldn’t help myself especially at the highlighted section:

Panic gripped residents on Tuesday after a truck loaded with sand rammed into the main gate of the Gombe State Government House, damaging the structure.

The incident, which occurred around 12:55 p.m., involved a gate reportedly constructed as part of ongoing renovation projects at the Government House under Governor Muhammadu Yahaya. The gate has yet to be officially inaugurated.

Eyewitnesses said the truck lost control before crashing into the multi-million-naira facility.

“I was standing across the road when I saw the truck approaching at speed. Suddenly, the driver seemed to lose control, and the vehicle veered off and hit the gate,” said a trader, Musa Abdullahi.

Another witness, a commercial motorcyclist, Ibrahim Sadiq, said the incident could have been more tragic if pedestrians had been nearby. “It happened very fast. People started running when they saw the truck coming. Thankfully, no one was injured,” he said.

A security aide in the area, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the impact caused significant damage to the newly installed gate. “The gate is part of the ongoing renovation. The force of the crash bent parts of the structure,” he added.

Punch

Non-Nigerian Media

Interesting or weird story:

A serial criminal jailed for drug dealing has won a reprieve against deportation because immigration courts cannot decide whether he is a British citizen.

Isaac Bramwell was set for deportation to Nigeria after being sentenced for possessing class A drugs, an asylum hearing was told.

The 28-year-old had previously lodged an appeal but committed another offence while waiting for the decision and was jailed for more than five years – a sentence he is currently serving.

However, his deportation case will now be reconsidered because it is unclear whether he is a British citizen.

Although Bramwell was born in Britain, his mother is Nigerian and was adopted by parents in Nigeria who had UK settled status.

The dispute over Bramwell’s citizenship centres on whether his mother acquired UK settled status when she was adopted.

Bramwell was born in south London in 1997 and has never left the UK, but he qualifies as a foreign criminal and was thought to be eligible for deportation because of his mother’s Nigerian heritage.

The Home Office has insisted that, despite living here from birth, Bramwell is not a British citizen because his Nigerian mother did not have settled status in the UK when he was born.

His mother was adopted in Nigeria in 1987 by parents who did have UK settled status, but the Home Office contends that this did not mean she had settled status when the family returned to the UK.

Telegraph

And a similar sort of story:

A Nigerian with a 30-year criminal history can be deported after the overturning of an earlier ruling that it would be “unduly harsh” to separate him from his children.

Sydney Igbanoi racked up 22 convictions over three decades for drug offences, assault, harassment and cruelty to animals.

However, the 48-year-old was allowed to stay in the UK because an immigration judge had ruled that it would be unfair on his children if he were deported.

Home Office officials appealed against that ruling after Igbanoi was recently handed a 42-month jail sentence for possession with intent to supply cocaine and MDMA, supplying cocaine and MDMA and the supply of a class B drug.

The appeal tribunal was told that before his latest sentence, Igbanoi had a long history of offending, comprising 22 convictions for 33 offences primarily in relation to using and dealing drugs, that stretched back to 1997.

Igbanoi came to the UK as a 14-year-old in 1991, having travelled on a settlement visa to join his father, and has held indefinite leave to remain status since.

The tribunal was told that Igbanoi had four British children aged from ten to 26. A 17-year-old daughter lives in Finland with her mother, but she was said to have a “strong relationship” with Igbanoi.

A 16-year-old daughter was said to have been estranged from her father, while a ten-year-old son was said to be living in Italy, although the tribunal was told that the boy had been in touch with Igbanoi.

A letter from Igbanoi’s probation officer said that his expulsion from the UK “would harm his relationship with his children, who depend on his presence and support … with continued support and the stability provided by remaining in this country [he] will continue to make positive contributions to society and uphold the law”.

Igbanoi said he “had been “socially and culturally integrated” into the country. A first-tier tribunal agreed, but a deputy judge at the appeal level has overturned that ruling. Paving the way for Igbanoi to be deported, Judge Mark Symes, said he would not face significant obstacles to integration in Nigeria because he still had family there, including a mother and siblings.

The Times

The state visit is still generating content:

Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s daughter-in-law had royal watchers doing a double take at the Nigerian state banquet by rocking a gown that looked much like one in Kate Middleton‘s closet.

On March 19, Layal Jade Tinubu shared a glamorous video on Instagram that showed off her style from the state banquet at Windsor Castle the day prior.

Tinubu, who is married to the president’s son, Seyi Tinubu, attended the diplomatic dinner at Windsor Castle on March 18.

President Tinubu’s daughter-in-law sported a dark green velvet gown for the special occasion, and the frock’s fitted style with a folded neckline was reminiscent of the deep green Talbot Runhof gown that Princess Kate wore in November 2025.

People

Why do people in Ejigbo speak French?

Ejigbo is located north of Nigeria’s economic capital, Lagos and more than 350 kilometres from its French-speaking neighbour, Benin.

In the streets here, where the official language is English, one can hear what is called “petit français”: a mix of words in Yoruba and Baoulé, interspersed with French.

Although surrounded by French-speaking countries such as Benin, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, Nigeria has very few French speakers, even though teaching the language is in theory compulsory up to secondary school, although there is a severe shortage of teachers.

Since the early 20th century, the inhabitants of Ejigbo have been migrating to French-speaking countries such as Benin and Togo, but above all to Côte d’Ivoire.

Many residents hold dual nationality and divide their time between the two countries. Three times a week, buses cover the 1,200 kilometres between Ejigbo and Abidjan.

It is common for shopkeepers and restaurant owners to accept CFA francs to pay for a bowl of attiéké – fermented cassava semolina – a typical Ivorian dish frequently found in Ejigbo.

Akanbi Mudasiru Ilupeju is a professor of French and a sociolinguist at the faculty of arts at the University of Lagos, and hails from Ejigbo.

“In Ejigbo, people don’t just speak one type of French. It is, let’s say, a slangy French or a more relaxed French. There is standard French, the kind that everyone can understand well, which is reserved for the elite – those who have been to school, students, or nationals from French-speaking countries living in Ejigbo.”

But, he added: “There is also street French: a mix of the national languages of the country the speaker has lived in. Especially in Abidjan, where local languages such as Baoulé are mixed in.”

RFI

Excerpt from a new (critical) book about Meghan and Harry:

In 2024, Harry and Meghan travelled to Nigeria to promote the Invictus Games, a trip that caused criticism after it was styled as a quasi-royal tour despite the fact the Sussexes were no longer working royals.

Bower claimed that the pair believed Nigeria was “the perfect battleground on which to weaponise a portrayal of the royal family as racist”.

The director of Invictus was reported to have told Harry that the majority of Nigerians were convinced Meghan was a victim of the royal family’s racism, according to the book.

The Times

Who is Neff Giwa?

Neff Giwa has never played in a football game and has only watched highlights of the sport, but over the past two weeks, the 6-foot-7, 295-pound rugby player from Ireland has become one of the hottest commodities in college recruiting.

Miami was the first to offer Giwa, who projects as an offensive lineman, a scholarship after coach Mario Cristobal saw a video posted on X just last week. Several other Power 4 conference schools quickly followed with offers.

In that post, Brandon Collier, who runs Germany-based Premier Prospects International (PPI), predicted Giwa “will be a 1st round pick one day! Remember this tweet!!!”

Over the past decade, Collier, a former defensive tackle at UMass, has helped place approximately 100 international athletes at major college football programs. Many have been former track and field athletes, soccer players, basketball players and some were even alpine skiers and tennis players. PPI produced eight players who started in the SEC last season. Valdin Sone, a 6-3, 315-pound elite shot putter-turned-defensive tackle born in Sweden, became the organization’s first five-star recruit and signed with Georgia in December.

In early January, Collier received a tip from a former rugby player in England. “I got a kid you’re gonna love.”

[…]

Neff Giwa was born in Ireland. His father, a physiotherapist, and his mother, a nurse, emigrated from Nigeria. He grew up in Cashel, about two hours from Dublin, and started playing soccer when he was 4. He played for his local team, Cashel FC, in the U12 and U13 divisions, but as he started getting a lot bigger, his friends introduced him to rugby.

The Athletic

More Benin Bronzes on their way, this time from Zurich:

Zurich’s Museum Rietberg has transferred ownership of eleven objects from the Kingdom of Benin held by Museum Rietberg to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Museum Rietberg won’t be sending them all back to Nigeria; two will be repatriated, while nine will remain on loan in the musuem’s collections. The items are just a few of the thousands linked to a British raid on Benin City in 1897, and the looted treasures made their way into museum collections around the world.

Among the objects are those pictured above: a bracelet with horseman and animal figures (called a Ikoo akon’eni), a mask (Uhunmwu-Ẹkuẹ), and a carved ivory tusk from an ancestral shrine (Akon’eni Elao). All originate from the Kingdom of Benin.

Per a City of Zurich press release, the city is “acting in response to a restitution claim filed by Nigeria as the body responsible for colonial-era collections. The National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) filed an official restitution claim in July 2024 on behalf of the Nigerian government and the Kingdom of Benin for the eleven Benin objects held by Museum Rietberg.”

“This decision made by the City of Zurich will indeed go a long way in healing certain aspects of our fragmented colonial past and I have no doubt that the Benin Royal Palace, the Benin people, and all Nigerians will truly appreciate the symbolism of this significant return,” NCMM Director General Olugbile Holloway said.

Town and Country Magazine

Feature on a Nigerian ballet school:

Ayomi Tsalu’s love for dance all began with the 2001 film Save the Last Dance. The movie was Tsalu’s first introduction to classical ballet at age 12, and he was hooked—dreaming of one day studying dance but having no opportunities in his hometown in Nigeria.

Tsalu first stepped into a studio in 2010, when he attended university and discovered the local studio where he would begin his journey as a teacher. The studio’s instructors had little to no formal ballet training, which Tsalu says is common for teachers in Nigeria, and this ignited in him a passion for offering quality ballet instruction to Nigerian students.

Tsalu began Above Ballet Company in 2015, teaching classes around the country and creating cohorts of dancers for performance opportunities, while simultaneously seeking out more extensive training for himself. In 2019, as the founding director and CEO of Nigeria’s Above Ballet Company, Tsalu attained Level 3 certification in the Cuban Methodology of Ballet with Alicia Alonso’s Dance Foundation. In 2022, he began training with the Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing (ISTD) and attained his diploma in dance and ballet education the following year. In June 2024, Tsalu opened the Above Ballet Company Academy in Lagos, where he trains students through nine grade levels and presents them for ISTD graded examinations. In 2025, he completed American Ballet Theatre’s National Training Curriculum, which qualified him to teach pre-primary to grade 3.

The name “Above Ballet Company” comes from Tsalu’s desire to “be above the standard” and raise the bar of the ballet training that currently exists in Nigeria. “I know that there are a lot of ballet students who are in search of quality ballet training,” he says. “My vision is to bring [professional] ballet training to Nigerian students, trained entirely in the country by a Nigerian.”

Pointe

We come back to this story first picked up in June last year in BTH 100:

A 26-year-old man who was in the United States on a Green Card has been sentenced for laundering fraud proceeds through an unlicensed money transmitting business, announced Acting U.S. Attorney John G.E. Marck.

Ayobami Omoniyi pleaded guilty Aug. 19, 2024.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen has now ordered Omoniyi to serve 32 months in federal prison and pay $202,273.80 in restitution. Not a U.S. citizen, he is expected to be removed from the country following his imprisonment. At the hearing, the court heard additional information that Omoniyi had been committing crimes since arriving in the United States and that he had been a recruiter for the scheme.

In 2021, Omoniyi and others operated an unlicensed money transmitting business that received and transferred funds from business email compromise victims, including a fishing company in Australia. Victims received spoofed emails that appeared to come from legitimate businesses and were tricked into sending payments to accounts conspirators controlled.

As part of his plea, Omoniyi admitted he moved money through multiple bank accounts. The funds originated from fraudsters involved in a business email compromise wire fraud scheme.

Omoniyi also acknowledged receiving victims’ funds and, for a fee, transmitting the fraud proceeds to others.

United States Attorney’s Office

News from Ireland:

Two directors of a criminal gang have been jailed for what was described in court as “a worldwide, highly sophisticated money laundering scheme on a breathtaking scale”.

Elike Francis Ogbuefi, aged 42, from Clonard Road in Crumlin, Dublin was jailed for nine years while his co-accused 32-year-old Steven Silvester from The Paddocks, Morristown in Newbridge, Co Kildare was jailed for seven-and-a-half years.

The men were arrested and charged following a long running investigation by the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau.

Both men had denied the charges but were convicted by a jury following a trial last month.

Over €6 million was stolen and laundered in a variety of scams including romance frauds and smishing schemes and moved through a variety of accounts.

The two men were in charge of supplying and monitoring accounts where the stolen money was deposited. They received repeated requests worldwide for accounts to be used for all types of fraud.

The requests came largely from Nigerian phone numbers and details on Ogbuefi’s phone, which gardaí managed to access, included the type of jobs required, the amounts going through the accounts and specifications as to the type of accounts required.

Ogbuefi gave instructions that the type of account sought had to be in an Irish name, not an African name, to avoid suspicion.

He was the contact for those outside the country and a nine minute instruction video on how to engage in this activity was also found on his phone.

RTE

Enjoy the week’s selection below.

Nigerian Media

Report into how nature reserves and tourism spots have turned into criminal hideouts:

The forest thrived as a game reserve during the colonial period and was used for safaris in the 1970s, with a large population of leopards, lions, elephants and hyenas for tourism. In 1991, the Borno State government incorporated the reserve into the national park of the Chad Basin. But as years rolled by, poor management upended the operations of the reserve until Boko Haram insurgents who fled from Maiduguri town hijacked it in 2013.

Since then, terrorists have carried out a series of attacks from the forest and resisted military raids targeted at flushing them out of the zone. They frequently ambushed Nigerian military convoys and patrols operating around Sambisa, using roadside bombs, snipers, and hit‑and‑run attacks. In April 2021, the terrorists reportedly shut down a military jet, though the Nigerian Air Force insisted the Alpha Jet crashed. Its wreckage was eventually recovered from the forest one year later.

At the peak of a supremacy battle between Boko Haram and ISWAP members in May 2021, a fight broke out as the latter sought to take control of the forest in a fierce encounter.

In an article titled ‘Once Upon a Game Reserve: Sambisa and the Tragedy of a Forested Landscape,’ a political scientist at the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Prof Azeez Olaniyan, traced the descent of the reserve to a terrorists’ fortress to corruption and poor leadership of the military era.

“As was the case with several sectors of Nigerian life, corruption reared its head in park management to the extent that funds budgeted for the game reserve were mismanaged. The number of forest guards and range managers was not only inadequate, but they were also poorly trained and funded. The neglect resulted in an invasion of the reserve by hunters and poachers without many restraints. This was to have effects on the wildlife in the space.

Daily Trust

Another fake kidnapping:

The Anambra State Police Command has arrested two suspects after uncovering a case of conspiracy and staged kidnapping done in collaboration between the victim’s boyfriend, after extorting the victim’s parents of ₦240,000.

In a press statement released on Saturday, the spokesman for the command, SP Tochukwu Ikenga, said the arrest was made after a significant breakthrough in several reported cases under investigation in the command within the last two weeks.

Ikenga said the operatives of the Rapid Response Squad, Awkuzu, carried out the arrest on March 14 and also recovered several items, including cash, from the suspects.

The statement read, “The Anambra State Police Command has recorded significant breakthroughs in several reported cases under investigation within the last two weeks.

“Among the feats recorded, the notable ones include the following: The operatives of the Rapid Response Squad Awkuzu on March 14, 2026, uncovered a case of conspiracy and staged kidnapping with the arrest of two suspects, namely: Chinedu Chineye Nwobi ‘M’, aged 25 years and Okwudili Nweke ‘M’, aged 25 years, respectively.

“The victim, Miss Mmesoma Ifediora, aged 18 years, was rescued unharmed in a forest popularly known as ‘Malaysia Forest’ located at Iruayika, Awkuzu.

“Upon interrogation, the rescued victim confessed that the kidnapping was staged in collaboration with her boyfriend, Obiora Okoye, with the intent to extort the sum of ₦3 million from her parents.

Punch

Story that’s gone under the radar:

The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has secured the conviction of 10 Filipino sailors and their merchant vessel, MV Nord Bosporus, over the importation of 20 kilograms of cocaine into Nigeria through the Apapa seaport in Lagos.

The agency’s spokesman, Femi Babafemi, disclosed on Wednesday that the Federal High Court in Lagos also imposed fines and restitution totaling $6 million, alongside an additional N1.1 million penalty on the convicts.

The vessel and its crew were arrested on November 16, 2025, following the interception of the cocaine consignment concealed onboard the ship, which originated from Santos, Brazil.

Subsequently, the NDLEA filed a four-count charge against them in suit number FHC/L/1232C/25 before the Federal High Court 2, Lagos, led by the agency’s Director of Prosecution and Legal Services, Theresa Asuquo.

The defendants, however, pleaded guilty and entered into a plea bargain agreement.

Delivering judgment on Wednesday, Justice Ayokunle Faji found the vessel guilty under Section 25 of the NDLEA Act and ordered it to pay a N100,000 penalty and $5.35 million in restitution to the Federal Government.

Three principal officers of the vessel—the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th defendants—were each fined N100,000 and ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution, while the remaining seven crew members were fined N100,000 each and $50,000 in restitution apiece.

In total, the vessel and its crew are to pay $6 million and N1.1 million as fines and restitution.

Vanguard

Why would anyone do this to a cocoa research institute:

The Member representing Oluyole Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, Tolu Akande-Sadipe, has expressed deep concern over a reported security breach at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria headquarters in Oluyole, Ibadan.

According to verified reports, the incident occurred on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, when unidentified armed individuals attacked the nursery section of the facility, resulting in injuries and the abduction of several persons.

Hon. Akande-Sadipe strongly condemned the act, describing it as a senseless attack on innocent individuals.

She disclosed that security agencies, including the Nigeria Police Force and other relevant authorities, have been swiftly mobilised to the area to restore order, secure the facility, and ensure the safe rescue of those abducted.

Tribune

What a horror story:

Tragedy struck Uli community in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State on Sunday night as a man identified simply as Gozie allegedly killed his lover’s only son for opposing their relationship.

The victim, said to be in his 20s, was reportedly attacked in his room following repeated disagreements with his mother’s lover over his frequent visits to their home.

Residents told PUNCH Metro on Thursday that tensions between the deceased and the suspect had persisted for some time, often resulting in heated altercations.

According to an eyewitness, who identified himself simply as Somto, neighbours became suspicious after not seeing the occupants of the compound for days.

“The incident happened on Sunday night at a compound near the Uli campus of Anambra State University. Neighbours said they heard unusual noises that night, but it was when no one was seen for about two days that they decided to check,” he said.

He explained that residents searched the rooms in the compound and discovered the victim’s lifeless body in a pool of blood.

“When they entered the young man’s room, they found his corpse with deep machete cuts on the head and other parts of the body. This drew a crowd, and youths in the area immediately launched a search for the suspect and the boy’s mother, but they had fled,” Somto added.

The incident was subsequently reported to the police, while the remains of the deceased were deposited in a morgue.

Punch

Non-Nigerian Media

Yours truly was in the FT this week with an opinion piece on the Dangote Refinery and what it means for Nigerians:

Nigeria has had a troubled relationship with crude oil since the first commercial well flowed at Oloibiri in 1956. Time and again, the promise of easy money has resolved into a pattern of windfalls that enrich the state without strengthening it.

The “cement armada” — the mid-1970s oil-boom-generated fiasco when Nigeria ordered far more cement for public works than it could handle, leaving hundreds of ships stranded offshore — is only one, vivid example. From the mismanaged windfall of higher prices pushed up by the 1990-1991 Gulf war to perennial controversies over what the national oil company collects, spends and remits to the treasury, straightforward national progress has not transpired.

Yet the most corrosive and lasting aspect gets less attention: the humiliating inability to add value to the barrel before it leaves Nigeria. The embodiment of this is the state-owned refineries that stand idle for long stretches, despite repeated turnaround plans.

Financial Times

Everyone embellishes their CV but this is taking it to a completely different level:

A dietician who bluffed her way into a senior NHS job by exaggerating her experience has been struck off after colleagues found she did not know ‘basic anatomy’ and could have put patients at risk.

Ifenyinwa Chizube Ndulue-Nonso was hired as a dietician at Manchester Royal Infirmary in 2024.

Having moved from Nigeria, she claimed to have experience working with a range of different health problems and nutrition-related diseases as well as working with people with eating disorders and cancer.

However within days of beginning her role, colleagues quickly discovered worrying gaps in her knowledge and inconsistencies with her application.

They found she could barely answer questions about dietetics, struggled to calculate BMI and had only a ‘basic understanding of human anatomy’- even mixing up the small and large intestine.

Mrs Ndulue-Nonso also could not identify a feeding tube, explain what coeliac disease was and believed radiology was used to treat heart failure.

Concerned by her lack of knowledge, the Trust launched an investigation and suspended her within weeks, fearing she was unsafe to practice.

At a disciplinary hearing, the Trust found her guilty of gross misconduct. She was sacked and her appeal failed.

Daily Mail

Christianah Ebenezer took photos during this week’s state visit:

A new portrait of the Prince and Princess of Wales taken by a British-Nigerian photographer on Wednesday at a state banquet was released on Thursday night by Kensington Palace.

The photograph was taken by the photographer Christianah Ebenezer, 34, in Windsor, when members of the royal family welcomed Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the president of Nigeria, and his wife Oluremi Tinubu on a state visit to Britain.

The Princess of Wales showed her skill for diplomatic dressing, wearing a dress by Andrew Gn in the evening in the green of the Nigerian flag and a coat dress during the day by Tolu Coker, a British-Nigerian designer.

Ebenezer also took the Duchess of Edinburgh’s 60th birthday portraits last year, and photographs of the actresses Michaela Cole and Letitia Wright that have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria, before moving to London as a child.

The Times

The story of Kauna Luka who sent 8 years in Boko Haram captivity:

One night four years ago a group of young soldiers were manning a checkpoint along a remote road in northern Nigeria when a figure began to emerge from the forest. Nervously they raised their weapons, fearing an attack from the terrorists who plague the region.

But as the figure came nearer they saw that it was a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. What was she doing in the forest all alone, they shouted to her. “I’ve been lost for eight years,” she called back. “I’m one of the Chibok girls.”

Abducted from their school in April 2014 by the Islamist militia group Boko Haram, the 276 teenage girls quickly became an international cause célèbre. Known as the “Chibok girls”, after the town in Borno state from where they were snatched, their plight was taken up by prominent figures including Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie and Pope Francis.

Kauna Luka was one of them. At 16 years old she had been on the verge of going to university and beginning her adult life when the course of her future was suddenly diverted in the most savage way imaginable. For almost a decade she lived as the captive of men whose guiding principle was their rejection of secular education and female emancipation. She subsisted on leaves and rainwater. She was married and gave birth to one of her captor’s children. And then, eventually, she escaped.

Now aged 27, Luka has just begun university. Having spent the four years since her escape going through rehabilitation and relearning much of what she had forgotten from her schooldays, she has this year embarked on the public administration course at Maiduguri University that she had been due to take up before she was kidnapped. She hopes to become a journalist one day.

The Times

Who is Zuby Ejiofor?

The minute news broke that Michigan’s star big man, Hunter Dickinson, was transferring to Kansas, Andy Philachack decided he had seen and heard enough. He rented a U-Haul truck that day and drove 500 miles from Dallas to Lawrence, Kan., for the sole purpose of extracting his son from Bill Self’s program.

Zuby Ejiofor did not want to leave. In fact, nearly everyone in Ejiofor’s life outside of the father figure and mentor he calls “Pops” and “Dad” wanted the barely used freshman to stay.

“I had not one person on my side,” Philachack said. “I had to do this myself.”

So, while Ejiofor was taking an exam on this May day in 2023, the AAU coach, chiropractor and professional poker player who first saw him play in middle school entered his apartment, packed up his possessions, and loaded them into the truck. Zuby was stunned when he returned home to find a bare mattress and nothing else.

“We’re leaving,” Philachack told him.

“What do you mean we’re leaving?” Ejiofor responded.

“You can’t make this decision,” Philachack said. “I’m making it for you.”

The 5-4 coach born in Laos and the 6-9 forward raised in Texas and Nigeria met with Self for an hour. According to Philachack, the Kansas coach offered Ejiofor a $200,000 NIL deal for his sophomore season. Philachack explained that money couldn’t solve their problem. He had repeatedly watched Zuby cry on the floor of his room after sitting out entire games.

The Athletic

Fred Akinsanya and Daniel Raji are going to jail:

A predator and his accomplice have been jailed for a total of 21 years after raping a 15-year-old schoolgirl who was plied with alcohol and drugs.

Nigerian national Fred Akinsanya, 34, and 29-year-old Daniel Raji targeted their victim after buying her drinks at Irish pub Paddy’s Yard in Brixton, south London, on February 8 last year.

They invited the girl and some of her friends back to Raji’s flat to smoke cannabis and dance.

The victim’s friends tried to persuade her to leave with them as they felt uncomfortable but she started blacking out and collapsed, Inner London Crown Court heard.

The defendants then put the girl through a prolonged ordeal, with Raji filming her.

Prosecutor Diana Wilson read to the court the victim’s impact statement, in which she told of now finding it ‘hard to trust people’.

The schoolgirl described her attackers as ‘disgusting’, while also rejecting the offer to watch the footage of what happened because it was ‘too stressful’.

Akinsanya, from South Croydon, denied but was convicted by a jury of rape and has now been jailed for 10 years.

Daily Mail

Remi Tinubu gets a glowing profile in Tatler with plenty of photos too:

Born in 1960, she has served as Nigeria’s First Lady ever since her husband, Bola Tinubu, was elected President in 2023. No stranger to politics, Oluremi served as the senator representing Lagos Central Senatorial District at the Nigerian National Assembly between 2011 and 2023, as a member of the All Progressives Congress party.

Prior to that, she had been the First Lady of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007, during the period that her husband was the Governor of the Nigerian capital. During her tenure in the role, she set up the New Era Foundation, which aims to support the ‘all round development of young ones and promote public awareness on environmental health and community service.’

[…]

This latest trip to Britain will be another display of the First Lady’s diplomatic prowess, as well as her impeccable style. She will also deliver a sermon at the Lambeth Palace Chapel and join a reception with representatives from the Church of England.

With decades of experience in the political arena, hers is a star that has long been on the rise. Now, it’s time for Brits to get to know the First Lady of Nigeria.

Tatler

Why are Nigerian archives being buried in the Arctic?

A decommissioned coalmine near the north pole is the last place you’d expect to find Indigenous stories from rural Nigeria, but deep below the Arctic permafrost of Svalbard a storage unit contains a cache of cultural and literary records from the West African country.

The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records kept on specialist digitised film called Piql that lasts up to 2,000 years. On 27 February, Nigeria became the first African country to place archives at the facility 300 metres beneath a mountain where the cold, dark, dry conditions are perfect for preservation.

Inspired by the nearby Svalbard global seed vault, a collection of more than a million seed samples stored as an insurance policy against catastrophe, AWA was established to hold the “world’s memory” for future generations. Started in 2017 by the Norwegian technology company that developed Piql, it contains an eclectic range of historical and creative records originating in 37 countries, from sources including the Vatican Library and the European Space Agency, and works as diverse as Chopin’s manuscripts and the work of Belgian photographer Christian Clauwers, who has documented the Pacific’s disappearing Marshall islands.

The Nigerian records are a mix of social and cultural history, and archives from its creative industries, drawn from 12 Nigerian organisations, including private art foundations, museums and libraries.

The collection was initiated by historian Nze Ed Emeka Keazor when he was appointed chair of Piql’s first Africa office in Lagos in 2022, and started to approach cultural organisations in Nigeria to encourage them to preserve their records.

“It took me a year and a half of going to Abeokuta in Ogun state to speak to the head of archives at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library,” says Keazor who travelled to Svalbard last month with colleague Esona Onuoha to hand over the archives.

The Guardian

New mocktail (if you’re a mocktail connoisseur like me) just dropped:

A mocktail inspired by a classic Nigerian beverage has been specially created for the King’s banquet as the monarch hosted the first state visit by a Muslim leader during Ramadan in nearly a century.

Guests at the opulent dinner held in honour of Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is Muslim, and his wife, first lady Oluremi Tinubu, will be offered a non-alcoholic after dinner tipple called Crimson Bloom.

England rugby captain Maro Itoje and his wife Mimi, Olympic 400m gold medallist Christine Ohuruogu, former Lioness and football pundit Eni Aluko, space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin, broadcaster Ade Adepitan, singer Tiwa Savage and the UK’s first black female Michelin-starred chef Adejoke Bakare were among the 160 guests who gathered with the King, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales.

The special mocktail is one of a number of adaptations made at the banquet in St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle because it falls during the holy month of Ramadan.

For the first time in living memory, canapes will be offered ahead of the dinner to offer sustenance to Muslim guests who were unable to partake in iftar – the breaking of their fast – earlier at sunset.

Independent

Quite the escalation in punishment here. This guy is having his citizenship revoked for fraud:

Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has filed and served a civil denaturalization complaint in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, against Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, a native of Nigeria who organized a vast conspiracy to steal identities and file fraudulent tax returns. In 2017, he was convicted of 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But in 2024, then-President Biden commuted his sentence after only six years.

“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship that they were never entitled to in the first place,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “U.S. Citizenship is a privilege, and we will continue to ask courts to revoke a status that was obtained through fraud and deceit.”

The newly filed denaturalization complaint alleges that Kazeem’s fraud scheme, which he committed in the years before and after his naturalization, along with his concealment of his crimes, precluded him from obtaining his naturalization lawfully. The complaint also alleges that Kazeem had, prior to his fraud scheme, engaged in a sham marriage to obtain permanent resident status and then married a second woman, further disqualifying him from naturalization.

According to court documents and evidence presented at Kazeem’s criminal trial, in May 2013, a victim in Medford, Oregon, notified the IRS that false federal and Oregon state tax returns were filed electronically using her and her husband’s personal identifying information (PII) including social security numbers and dates of birth.

An IRS investigation led to search warrants of residences in Illinois, Maryland, and Georgia and to numerous email and instant messenger accounts used by Kazeem and other co-conspirators. At a Chicago residence, agents seized approximately 150 prepaid debit cards and $50,000 in money orders. In Maryland and Georgia, agents seized more than 50 electronic devices, 40 money orders in amounts exceeding $29,000, $14,000 in cash and numerous prepaid debit cards containing over $12,000 in fraudulent tax refunds. The search warrants helped agents identify Kazeem as the leader and mastermind of the scheme.

DoJ Office of Public Affairs

In this episode, we sit down with him for a wide-ranging conversation covering the historical legacy of slavery, the critical distinction between growth and economic development, and what the future holds for the intellectual relationship between Africa and the Caribbean.

We hope you enjoy it.

Fingers crossed, the podcast should return next week. In the mean time, enjoy this week’s selection.

Nigerian Media

And they say manufacturing is not thriving in Nigeria:

In a quiet community in Jos, north-central Nigeria, a middle-aged blacksmith uses an axe to scrape a tree branch into the shape of a rifle buttstock. Behind him, two young apprentices pump manual bellows and hammer glowing metal into form. Around the workshop lie iron scraps, unfinished gun parts and crafted stocks, evidence of a traditional craft quietly evolving into an illicit activity.

Bitrus Pam, known locally as Oga, has long forged his craft as a blacksmith. But apart from farm tools, he now often designs and fabricates firearms, a more lucrative but illegal venture that has become an increasing concern in conflict-plagued Nigeria.

In Nigeria, the Defence Industries Corporation of Nigeria (DICON) is statutorily responsible for weapons production, but the law also allows licensed private firms, such as Proforce. Yet, alongside this official and lawful system, a shadow industry has taken root. Illegal networks, drawing on traditional blacksmithing skills and modern electric welding, are producing arms beyond regulatory control.

[…]

“In Kwan Pan LGA of Plateau State, we uncovered a blacksmith who once specialised in crafting farming tools but later turned to producing firearms without a license,” said a military source who asked to remain anonymous because he had no clearance to speak on the issue.

He said recent arrests in Plateau State suggest a broader trend: “Electric welders are increasingly shifting into clandestine weapons fabrication, selling their work to criminal networks. Also, among the suspects we have arrested are graduates of technical schools where they learn electric welding and are now applying it illegally.”

Investigators say materials are sourced from everyday markets.

“They use metals, iron water pipes, gas cylinders and welding equipment, most of it purchased where building materials are sold,” another military officer said, adding that in some cases, gunsmiths repurpose motorcycle exhaust springs to assemble pistols. “Some construct weapons from scratch, while others adapt original components, such as the skeletal frame of a foreign-made AK-47, modifying it into a new firearm.”

Daily Trust

A very confusing story. It’s not clear why the “youths” carried out the abduction other than that it was an opportunity too easy to pass up to make some money?

A mortuary attendant at NKST Hospital located at Jato Aka, headquarters of Kwande Local Government of Benue State, MT Tiga, was on Thursday abducted by thugs who wanted to prevent a planned mass burial for the victims of bandit attack on Tyungu Jam and Mbaav communities.

Saturday PUNCH gathered that the abduction prevented families of the victims from access to the corpses which had been deposited at the mortuary as there was no official to attend to them.

Bandits had invaded Tyungu Jam and Mbaav in Yaav and Mbadura Council wards of Kwande LG on March 5, killing several people and injuring many others.

The State Governor, Hyacinth Alia, described the killings as “senseless and barbaric” in a statement issued by his media aide, Solomon Iorpev, and called on security operatives to apprehend the attackers.

Saturday PUNCH gathered that 11 victims were scheduled for mass burial on Thursday, an event that had drawn people and priests from within and outside the state.

However, the process was disrupted when some thugs allegedly invaded the hospital, abducted the mortuary attendant, and sealed the mortuary, denying families access to the bodies.

[…]

When contacted, Chairman of Kwande LG, Neji Terhile, said those mobilising for the mass burial did not consider the volatility of the area.

He added that some victims had already been buried.

“You are aware that these people slept in their houses and were attacked by Fulanis. Mobilizing a mass burial in such a community is a death trap,” the chairman said.

Punch

A rant of an article about the menace of Yahoo boys and what they are doing to young girls:

Every money these boys make is almost wasted on girls, booze, hair plaiting and maintenance, and looking dope like yankees; nothing meaningful. However, the police will not allow them to enjoy the stolen money. It’s like by their appearance yee shall know them – once you are a boy with ear and nose rings, plaited hair, no belt and bogus attire, the police come unto you. Most often, we see them being pushed into police vehicles after their phones and bodies were searched. They are released after they settle. How do we move forward like this?

Now, they are not only taking over our girls but communities. Once they blow, they rent rooms in virgin areas in the cities. The place becomes their ‘hideouts’. Greedy landlords now use the opportunity to jack up house rents, making rents very exorbitant for the common man. And, of course, the young girls flock around them like vultures. They actually serve as live-in lovers. They are not ashamed of street fights. So disrespectful. So spoiled. We are losing these girls, honestly. With them in any community, there’s always a party. Whatever they’re celebrating is unknown to other community members. But you can’t be unaffected by the heavy sounds from the speakers. It gets worse if you despise the lyrics of the music. It’s possible for you to absent-mindedly spend more than two minutes listening to ‘Omblee, Omblee, Omblee’. Whatever that means. After partying, the area is left littered with disposable cups, pure water satchets, and bottle water containers. Indeed, these boys are becoming a nuisance to society.

It will shock you to know that boys in secondary schools are now also into Yahoo business. It’s no longer for jobless people. At a CBT Centre recently, after filling out his JAMB form, a boy ran back to the coordinator and begged him to allow him to make changes in his form. Guess what? The boy said he mistakenly put his Yahoo Yahoo email instead of the one he uses for school purposes. This is the level of moral decadence amongst the youth.

Vanguard

New police campaign just dropped:

As part of effort to wage war against cybercrime, the Ogun State Police Command, has launched the Nigeria Police Force-National Cybercrime Centre (NPF-NCCC), tagged “Real Odogwu No Dey Hide Face”.

The move is to safeguard the digital cyber space, an initiative of the Inspector General of Police, IGP Olatunji Disu.

The IGP, in a statement signed by the Police Public Relations Officer, DSP Oluseyi Babaseyi, was represented at the introduction by the Director NPF-NCCC, CP Ifeanyi Uche Henry.

He said that the Real Odogwu No Dey Hide Face campaign is being introduced across the Commands, to address the borderless nature of cyber threats, including Identity Theft, Romance Scams, Phishing, Business Email Compromise(BEC), among others.

Tribune

A truly funny story from Anambra:

Nnewi-based native doctor, Ikechukwu John Paul, popularly known as Aka Mmuo has pleaded with the Anambra State Governor, Charles Soludo for pardon.

DAILY POST reports that following his arrest, the native doctor was on Friday taken by operatives of Agunechemba to the river where he allegedly performs rituals.

He was accused of performing rituals, including bathing internet fraudsters, Yahoo Boys to scam their victims.

Speaking after he was paraded by the local security operatives, Aka Mmuo begged the governor for forgiveness, stating that he will not indulge in such activities again.

He said, “I want to plead with our able governor, Professor Charles Soludo and all citizens of Anambra State. I didn’t know how the law works.

“I will never go to the River to make sacrifices again. I’m pleading with the governor and the Anambra government that there is a means of forgiveness, they should forgive me. I will never do it again”.

Daily Post

The decade old menace of tuta absoluta may finally be over?

Tomato farmers in parts of northern Nigeria are reporting improved pest control and higher yields following the introduction of a new pest management initiative designed to tackle the destructive Tuta absoluta pest that has devastated tomato production in recent years.

The initiative is being implemented by the National Horticultural Research Institute (NIHORT) under the coordination of the Agricultural Research Council of Nigeria and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security.

The programme is being carried out in collaboration with international partners, including Razbio UK and the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.

According to the lead researcher on the project, Dr Oke Abiola, the programme is funded by Innovate UK Business Connect and is aimed at strengthening Nigeria’s food security by protecting tomato production across the value chain.

Abiola explained that the invasive pest, Tuta absoluta—locally known as “Sharon”—has remained a major threat to tomato farms since it first appeared in Nigeria in 2015, causing severe losses for farmers across the country.

To address the problem, NIHORT developed an indigenous Integrated Pest Management (IPM) package designed to control the pest while reducing farmers’ reliance on chemical pesticides.

The package includes two patented bio-pesticides—NIHORT-Lyptol and NIHORT-Raktin—solar-powered Tuta trap trays and an improved tomato seed variety known as HORTITOM 1.

Daily Trust

Non-Nigerian Media

Ije Nwokorie is the only black boss of a FTSE 250 company:

Nwokorie joined the board as a non-executive around the time of the IPO, became chief brand officer and then chief executive. He is the only black chief executive on the FTSE 250.

Before there is time to ask whether Dr Martens might have been better off listed in New York, he answers the question pre-emptively. “People ask if we want to list in America. We’re in Britain. Why would we not big-up our own markets?”

He continues: “I don’t find any limitations on growing this business because we’re listed on the British stock exchange. When I look at the reality of where we are and where we need to go, there’s nothing broken here.”

Nwokorie finds the broader national pessimism towards business baffling. “Why are we in Britain not more excited about the companies that we have?” he asks. “The default position is cynicism as opposed to optimism.”

The waitress interrupts with the first dishes: green plantain chips (his wife’s favourite), aubergine sauce, crispy onions, rice cakes with black-eyed bean hummus, and both prawn and short-rib akara fritters.

Nwokorie, 55, was born in the United States and grew up in Nigeria. He studied architecture at Columbia University in New York before moving to London to follow his then-girlfriend, who had relocated for work. He expected it to be a short stint, but it turned into a permanent move — and a marriage.

“The mythology of Britain in my family wasn’t positive,” he says. His father had spent time in London after getting stuck there during the Nigerian civil war. “He [was in a] bedsit in Cricklewood putting a 5p coin in the heater every two hours. He was freezing himself to death. Growing up my dad never said anything positive about London.”

The Times

Big report on the children who have been taught to fight in Nigeria’s north east:

Yusuf is 15 years old. He is small for his age. His shoulders are narrow and his voice has yet to fully break. But all across his body there are scars. A deep gouge on his shin where he was struck by a piece of burning shrapnel. Another above his right hip where a bullet entered and remains lodged to the day. Marks that will forever remind him of the years he spent serving in Isis’s army of child soldiers.

One night a decade ago, a group of men arrived on motorcycles at his village in Nigeria and abducted him. They carried him off to their stronghold in the bush where they spent the next few years filling his mind with extremist doctrine and training him how to kill. By the time he was ten years old, he was regularly involved in raids against the Nigerian army and skirmishes with rival jihadi groups.

Now, after five years of relentless fighting, he considers himself an experienced soldier. “I should be the one training them,” he said with a smirk when asked what it was like for him to fight against trained military professionals. He may well be right.

The men who kidnapped and groomed Yusuf, whose name has changed to protect him from reprisals, belonged to Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), which since Isis’s defeat in Syria in 2019 has emerged as the pre-eminent branch within the group’s global network and the torchbearer for its ambitions of re-establishing an Islamic caliphate.

Headquartered on the shifting islands of Lake Chad in Nigeria’s northeastern borderlands, ISWAP is estimated to comprise more than 10,000 fighters, making it by far the largest of any of the group’s provinces.

That the group could have expanded to such a size is more remarkable for the fact that unlike other Isis provinces, such as those in the Middle East and East Africa, almost none of its members are foreign nationals, due to the remoteness of its location. Instead, ISWAP recruitment relies heavily on a programme of mass abductions and forcible conscription. And like Yusuf, many of those who are abducted are children.

The Times

Tech Bros in Lagos be doing too much:

Tunde, determined to impress, once planned a “tech-forward” romantic gesture. He hired a drone to deliver grilled skewers of suya to my balcony because “flowers are too analog.” The drone misread the GPS, crashed into the neighbor’s laundry line and scattered spicy beef across their freshly washed bedsheets. The ensuing shouting match involved three households and one irate landlord waving a broom like a machete.

I laughed until my ribs hurt. Tunde called it “an unexpected product pivot.”

Later, over drinks, he asked if I thought we were “scalable.” I told him love isn’t a start-up. He countered that neither is Lagos, which has an established tech industry. Yet here we are.

A month later Tunde came with me to a cousin’s wedding in Ibadan — a high-stakes mission, as weddings are where aunties sharpen their matchmaking claws. He survived the onslaught of “When is your own wedding?” questions with a polite smile and several small bottles of stout.

During the after-party, as Fuji music vibrated the ground, he whispered, “Your family is like a lively app — no off button.”

I almost kissed him then, swept up by the absurd tenderness of the moment. But my mother appeared, armed with more questions about our future plans, and the spell broke.

New York Times

The race to save Pangolins and other wildlife in Nigeria and Africa:

Last year, I traveled to Nigeria to report on the trafficking of apes out of Africa — a growing problem, driven in recent years by social media videos of chimpanzees and gorillas being kept as pets. While there, I learned about Bili, a baby gorilla who narrowly avoided such a fate. But the selling of chimps, gorillas and bonobos makes up only a small portion of the illegal wildlife business. These images, captured by the Congolese photojournalist Arlette Bashizi, show the breadth of the trade in Nigeria, as well as the efforts to police it.

Above, staff members at the Nigeria Customs Service’s storage facility in Lagos, Nigeria, weigh bags of pangolin scales seized by officers from the agency’s Special Wildlife Office. In one of the largest such seizures, officials intercepted 196 bags filled with scales, possibly representing as many as 38,000 pangolins, which are also known as scaly anteaters. A major factor behind the demand for wildlife products is an array of beliefs about their medicinal powers: The perceived health benefits of rhino horn, for instance, made it more valuable than gold a decade ago, fetching around $30,000 per pound at its peak. Pangolin scales, in traditional Asian medicine, are believed to have the power to treat a variety of ills, from abscesses to cancer.

Some 350 miles to the east, in Calabar, officers from the Nigeria Customs Service lay out animal parts seized from traffickers near the border with Cameroon. The crossing there is part of a route often used by animal traffickers to bring illicit wildlife products and live animals from Cameroon and other African countries into Nigeria, where they are then smuggled to other parts of the world. Last March, customs officers arrested a person entering Nigeria from Cameroon with parrot heads, packs of parrot feathers, heads of African hornbills and chimpanzee parts including hands, feet and heads.

New York Times

Princess of Wales will play a major role in next week’s state visit:

The Princess of Wales is set to play a major role in the upcoming Nigerian state visit, Buckingham Palace has revealed. Between 18 and 19 March, the President of Nigeria, Mr Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his wife, First Lady Oluremi Tinubu, will make their way to Britain at the invitation of King Charles and Queen Camilla.

In a sign of their ever-growing influence within the royal family, however, it is Prince William and Catherine who will be the first Windsors to welcome the couple ahead of a dazzling state banquet.

The President and First Lady are scheduled to arrive at London Stansted Airport on the afternoon of 17 March. There, the couple will be greeted by Mark Bevan, Deputy Lieutenant of Essex, on behalf of the King, as well as Ambassador Mohammed Maidugu, the Acting High Commissioner of the Nigerian High Commission.

The following morning, the Prince and Princess of Wales will officially welcome the President and First Lady at the Fairmont Hotel Windsor. Their Royal Highnesses will accompany the couple to Datchet Road in Windsor, where they will receive a Ceremonial Welcome before a formal welcome from the King and Queen at the Royal Dias. A Royal Salute will be fired at Windsor Home Park and the Tower of London, ahead of a Salute from The Sovereign’s Escort and the playing of the Nigerian national anthem.

Tatler

News from Kano:

As the son of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei takes over as Iran’s supreme leader after the assassination of his father in a United States-Israeli attack, hundreds of mourners gathered in a mosque far away from the war in the Middle East to grieve the late leader.

The adherents in northern Nigeria’s Kano State solemnly chanted prayers. At one point during the recitations, the voice of the religious leader that carried over the microphone to all corners of the hall, cracked with grief. Among the crowd, one young man wiped his eyes.

On Sunday, Iran named Mojtaba Khamenei as his father’s replacement. In Kano, the community sees it as a move ensuring the “continuation of his father’s resistance”. The assassination of the elder Khamenei last week in an air strike has stirred deep emotions among Nigeria’s minority Muslim Shia, a group that sees its faith and identity intertwined with that of the larger Shia community in Iran.

For 60-year-old academic Dauda Nalado, the elder Khamenei’s killing was not merely another event in foreign politics; it was the silencing of a revered spiritual teacher.

“Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is not only a leader of the Shiite community or even Muslims alone. He is regarded as a leader of oppressed people across the world,” the university professor told Al Jazeera. “If you look at Iran’s involvement in issues concerning Gaza and Palestine, you will understand why many people admire his leadership.”

Al Jazeera

We’ve covered this company on BTH in the past:

Shares in Chariot Resources soared as much as 55 per cent to a high of 15 cents in early trade after the government approved the transfer of six licences into a joint venture with local partners, clearing a significant regulatory hurdle for its Nigerian lithium portfolio.

The approvals cover four exploration licences and two small-scale mining leases previously held by Continental Lithium, which will now be incorporated into a new company called C&C Minerals.

The company says that only routine administrative steps now remain to finalise the transfers, which will allow Chariot and its partner to move straight into active field programs at the projects.

Chariot will hold 66.66 per cent of C&C Minerals, with local partners Continental Lithium retaining a 33.33 per cent stake.

Chariot says it will now move swiftly to systematically validate drill targets in the field so it can get the rods turning across the largely undrilled ground as soon as possible.

The company says the ground already carries a documented history of artisanal production and represents the first time an ASX-listed pure-play lithium company will ever drill for lithium in Nigeria.

The joint venture’s 254-square-kilometre portfolio spans four project clusters dubbed Fonlo, Gbugbu, Iganna and Saki in the Nigerian states of Oyo and Kwara.

The West Australian

One of those stories forever seared in my memory. It happened a few years before I moved to the UK but the investigation was still a big topic when I got here. I recall the Met Police spent something like £6m on the investigation at the time:

The longest unsolved child murder case in modern UK history could still be answered because ‘someone out there knows what happened’, a retired detective has said.

‘Adam’ was a name given by Scotland Yard to a young boy whose dismembered body was discovered floating in the River Thames in London on September 21, 2001.

The child’s identity remains unknown 25 years later with no one ever charged despite an investigation that took police to South Africa, Holland, Germany and Nigeria.

Adam, who is thought to have been a Nigerian boy aged five or six, is believed to have been trafficked to the UK via Germany then murdered in a ritualistic killing.

His body, which had the head and limbs severed, was discovered near the Globe Theatre and numerous high-profile appeals followed, including by then President of South Africa Nelson Mandela.

Now, a new Channel 5 documentary called ‘The Body in The River’ which aired last night has re-examined the heartbreaking and disturbing story of Adam.

Despite a series of people being arrested, there has never been a charge over his murder - but police still believe the evidence they need is somewhere in London.

Andy Baker, a former Metropolitan Police commander who worked on the investigation, has told the programme that the case could still be solved.

Daily Mail

Oxtail and jollof are now available in Oakland:

At 9jaGrills, a newish Nigerian spot near Oakland’s Jack London waterfront, the main dining room follows the standard blueprint for today’s shiny, Instagram-optimized restaurants: the lush faux greenery wall, the neon-lit catchphrase (“Food 🔥, Drinks & Vibes”) in glowing pink cursive. The space is tidy, bright and perfectly pleasant — but, at 10 o’clock on a recent Friday night, it was also totally empty.

Instead, a couple dozen people had crowded out on the small tented patio in back, which was a distinct ecosystem unto itself: a haze of hookah smoke, disco lights, cheap furniture and mystery drinks in red plastic cups. On the big-screen TV, two identical twin DJs from Nigeria spun Afrobeats on stage in Lagos. Everyone else on the patio appeared to be West African, and apart from one table of middle-aged gentlemen dipping fufu into a big bowl of stew, no one else seemed to have come for the food at this hour.

It was more of a backyard party vibe. A kick back with a couple of cold Trophy Lagers vibe.

Not that we were going to let that deter us from our mission. We had made the trip because we had a wicked craving for oxtails, and we’d heard on good authority that this food-truck-turned-brick-and-mortar-lounge was the spot in Oakland for Nigerian-style oxtails and jollof rice — and maybe the only spot where you can reliably score those dishes until midnight on the weekend.

KQED

At the end of February this year, Vanguard carried a story about communities in the area being cut off by infrastructure neglect - poor rural roads, the report claimed, leave many settlements isolated from major markets and economic opportunities. That same month, several papers covered the commissioning of the Aiyegunle–Iwaro Oka Road in Oka-Akoko. BusinessDay noted that the governor acknowledged persistent demands for intervention in the Akoko axis; THISDAY reported him describing the road as critical for moving agricultural produce, while the Olubaka of Oka observed that successive administrations had started and abandoned it before this one saw it through.

In June 2025, the Ondo governor flagged off the dualisation of the Akungba–Ikare Road. Tribune quoted him describing the corridor as a lifeline for Ondo North, framing the existing road as narrow, congested, and prone to fatal accidents. Two months later, residents of Ogbagi-Akoko protested over the Ikare–Ogbagi–Irun Akoko–Ado-Ekiti Road. BusinessDay reported that protesters described the 40.2-kilometre stretch as abandoned, in total disrepair, and unmotorable; TVC News said residents called it a daily nightmare, and quoted the Federal Controller of Works acknowledging that only eight kilometres had been completed so far. In August 2024, Leadership reported that the governor had ordered the rehabilitation of an alternative road into AAUA after the main entrance became unsafe following repeated fatal crashes - the story tied the danger explicitly to the road’s topography and the need to divert heavy vehicles. Then, after another deadly crash in October 2025, Arise reported that the governor ordered the restoration of damaged barricades and access ramps along the Ikare–Akungba highway. Finally, in April 2024, Nigerian Tribune reported that residents of Arigidi Akoko and Iye-Akoko said the major road to Iye-Akoko had deteriorated so badly that their only link to neighbouring communities was effectively severed. Most were farmers, the report noted, and the road’s condition was preventing them from moving produce to Ikare-Akoko and other urban markets; after rain, even motorcycles struggled to pass.

Run for the hills

In a 2018 paper titled Nupe Hegemony in Akokoland in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Local Imperialism in Pre-Colonial Nigeria, 1845-1897, the authors - Johnson Aremu and Sola Oniye - describe how people in Ikare reacted to constant raids by the Nupe. Here is a section:

A common axiom says that if there is war in any area, there must be unrest and all social activities must be grounded to a halt. Akoko was not an exception in the 19th century. The 19th century invasions, most especially the Nupe imperialism, had demographic impact on the Akoko people. During the period, a significant number of Akoko people shifted from one place to another. While the unconquered Oka Akoko possibly fluctuated in population according to the degree of security which prevailed in the surrounding countryside, other Akoko towns and villages such as Afa-Etioro almost went into extinction due to incessant raids. Due to the Nupe invasions in Akoko, an appreciable number of people went into exile. For instance, some of the Ikare people went into hiding in places like Owa-Ale’s hill. The hill served as a safe abode for the people during the period. […] The abandonment of traditional village sites and the dispersion of the villagers were reactions of people unable to defend themselves more effectively. Many villages probably remained dispersed until the Royal Niger Company troops had restrained their Nupe imperialist.

It is an argument I have often made that the dispersal of people across Nigeria is one of the more visible legacies of slavery still hiding in plain sight. Slave raiding and nineteenth-century warfare made defensibility, not convenience, the organising principle of settlement across large parts of what is now the country. Travel through Nigeria and the pattern becomes unmistakable.

Much is made of colonialism and its legacy in Nigeria, yet it is slavery's imprint that stares you in the face as the force behind some of the country's hardest challenges today. As I have written before, this is a problem to be solved - not merely a fact of life to be accepted.

This ought to make intuitive sense: the whole of colonialism lasted well under a century, whereas slavery was a fact of life for at least four hundred years. There are many examples beyond Akoko. Joint Nupe-Ilorin slave raids and tribute exactions drove Yagba people out of their towns and into inaccessible hills, and pushed others into Ilorin itself. Kabba's local memory adds vivid detail that people fled to Obangogo hill, smeared shea butter on the rock face so attackers could not climb, and rolled boulders down on those who tried. A detailed history of pre-colonial Eggonland records that Fulani slave raiding in the nineteenth century was so intense that most Eggon people abandoned the plains for the safety of the hills. Those who remained on lower ground hid in forests, placed settlements behind thorn bushes and trenches, posted sentries on rocks and tall trees, and used buffalo horns to warn of approaching raiders.

A 2015 archaeological investigation of abandoned Zangang hilltop settlements in southern Kaduna found caves and rock shelters, house and granary foundations, shrines, and potsherds. The study notes that oral tradition consistently explains the retreat to the hills as a security response to slave-raiding expeditions, followed only later by movement back down onto the plains. Scholarship on the Mandara region tells a similar story - the mountains served as refuge from slave raids, with raiding states on the plains driving people steadily upward. UNESCO documentation records that Sukur itself was raided and devastated between 1912 and 1922, and later research notes that significant movement down from Upper Sukur to the plains began only after slave raiding ended in the 1920s.

The point should by now be clear. If people once had reason to scatter themselves across difficult terrain as a defence against slave raiding, it will be far more difficult - and costly - to deliver infrastructure to them today if they remain in those places. Akoko's modern infrastructural challenges can be read in this light. My argument has always been that Nigeria needs to physically build its way out of slavery's legacy: constructing new towns and cities on easier terrain, consolidating them into larger urban areas, and then persuading people to move there - on the straightforward grounds that slavery is over, it is not coming back, and there is no longer any reason to hide in the hills.

Be careful what you wish for

What prompted this post was coming across the YouTube channel of a young man called Olaoluwa Ojeleye. He visits towns, mainly in south-western Nigeria, and documents what he finds, largely unfiltered. In one video, he visits a town called Faji in Osun State, and it has the unmistakable feel of a ghost town - abandoned schools, empty houses, even the “palace” seemingly deserted. There are dilapidated buildings everywhere. The town’s mobile network is poor and the only place where he seems to run into a number of people is because that is the spot where the network is good and so people congregated there.

The situation is not much different in another town called Okua, save that the “king” has apparently migrated abroad to work. One man tells him that farmers have been discouraged by the downturn in cocoa prices, though he concedes that lower food prices are good for consumers. He asks for government help with mechanised farming - the manual kind is simply too hard, he says, and people end up in hospital doing it. Another man tells him they have no electricity or roads, and that the last time they felt any government presence was when Olagunsoye Oyinlola - who happened to be from the area - was governor. You may recall that Oyinlola served as Osun governor from 2003 to 2011. Once elections are over, the man says, politicians dump them like a bad habit. Much as I sympathise with their plight, I can’t shake off the nagging question in my head - what is the point in delivering infrastructure to places that have been depopulated?

There are several other videos on his channel, and after watching a number of them, the same story emerges: towns across the south-west are being steadily depopulated. What goes unspoken is that anyone with any sort of agency has left for a bigger town or Lagos, Nigeria's economic capital.

But the spectre that truly haunts these places is insecurity. Slave raiding was its own form of insecurity, and isolation once made sense - the better to be hard to reach than to be carted off as a slave. Today's insecurity is of a different kind: bandits who rob, kidnap, or kill, and in some places religiously fuelled violence. In this latest iteration of Nigeria's longest-running story, isolation no longer offers protection. There is strength in numbers, and so the logic now runs the other way - flee to a bigger town.

Plenty of news reports corroborate what Mr Ojeleye is seeing on his travels. A broader regional piece in The Guardian in May 2025 offered a good overview, describing a silent reign of terror across the interiors of Ondo, Ekiti, Osun, Ogun, and Oyo - farmers and investors shutting down farms, activity in parts of the region falling sharply under the weight of killings and fear. For Osun specifically, Punch reported in January 2024 that many residents of Ifon and Ilobu fled their homes after renewed clashes. When violence escalated again in March 2025, the Osun government imposed a twenty-four-hour curfew and extended it to Erin-Osun; Punch then reported that displaced residents fled to Okinni, Osogbo, and Ido Osun, while Vanguard described the three towns as appearing deserted, with only a few people peeping through windows. AIT used similar language - streets deserted, residents displaced.

This phenomenon is of course not confined to the south west. Reuters has described villagers fleeing attacks in Niger State, farmers abandoning land after repeated raids, and the depopulation of rural areas in Borno after prolonged conflict.

Full circle

I seem to be getting my wish - though this is, of course, not how I wanted it to happen. I have no desire to make excuses for Nigerian leaders and officials, who can do far more than they currently even attempt. But as we have seen with Akoko in particular, even with the best will in the world, delivering public services to remote and forbidding terrain that was chosen precisely because it was hard to reach is a very difficult task. And it is not clear that it makes any sense to do it anyway.

But as with everything else, there are no shortcuts. While denser urban areas may be far more efficient for public service delivery, they bring their own formidable challenges. As Lagos and other large Nigerian cities have shown, without serious thought and sustained effort, rapid urbanisation outruns service delivery and whole cities slide into slums.

Yet there is, without doubt, an opportunity buried in the harrowing insecurity that is forcing people across the country to unpick, at great cost, the long-run legacy of slavery. Four centuries of dispersal are being reversed - painfully, chaotically, and with no guiding hand. Whether that opportunity can be contemplated, let alone grasped, is of course another matter entirely. But the movement is already under way, and it will not wait for Nigeria’s leaders to catch up.

At last, we arrive at the section I had been waiting for - though Studwell made us suffer for it. Reaching his discussion of manufacturing required wading through several hundred pages on agriculture, farm by painstaking farm. This reflects his rigid policy sequencing: in Studwell's schema, agriculture (done in a very specific way) must come first, and everything else must wait its turn. The trouble is that the story is not nearly as compelling as he imagines, and in telling it he falls into a familiar trope - one that has been a signature of writing about African agriculture for decades.

The durable template for writing about African agriculture goes something like this. Open with a vivid farmer vignette - typically a "noble" smallholder or, for variety, a surprisingly polished "professional farmer." Assert latent abundance: unused land, underexploited potential, the "last frontier," the "sleeping giant." Promise imminent take-off: Africa is "on the verge," this is "Africa's moment," now it is finally the continent's turn. Enumerate the familiar bottlenecks - inputs, roads, finance, tenure insecurity, missing markets, weak institutions. Close with an implicit (or explicit) pitch for investment or programmatic intervention. It is a genre unto itself, and once you learn to recognise it, you see it everywhere. In a section titled "Every Professional is at It," Studwell delivers a textbook example: the respectable modern farmer (civil servant, Toyota pickup, expanding acreage) is deployed to signal a new era, before the narrative pivots to the usual contrast with struggling smallholders and the case for state-led reform.

The telling detail is how long this template has remained publishable. You can find versions of it from the 1960s [William Allen’s The African Husbandsman PDF, page 2], the 1980s [Robert Chambers “the single largest resource not yet mobilized” PDF, page 14], 2009 [Awaking Africa’s Sleeping Giant?], 2011 [TIME Magazine “now it’s Africa’s turn”], 2012 [Reuters “blueprint for a 21st century agrarian revolution in Africa”], and now - with Studwell - in 2026: “the sector as a whole is in the best shape ever and at the vanguard of African development”. Something is wrong, and it ain’t the prose style.

The persistence suggests three things. First, the promised take-off is never institutionalised at scale; if it were, the genre would shift from anticipation to retrospective. Second, journalists and researchers can always locate pockets of change - a cooperative here, a commodity exchange there, a cohort of medium-scale farmers with Toyota pickups - but the system keeps producing exceptions rather than a new baseline. Third, the narrative survives because it is structurally useful to donors and investors ("last frontier," "sleeping giant"), and conveniently silent on the political economy of why scaling never happens. This is the permanent future tense of African agriculture. If, for more than sixty years, the sector is perpetually "on the verge," then the verge is not a stage of development but the story itself.

In How Asia Works, Studwell can write about agrarian transformation as settled history - the verge was crossed long ago, and farming sits firmly in the prologue, not the plot. In How Africa Works, the same take-off is still narrated in the present tense, as though the continent were permanently buffering at the starting line. This raises an awkward question. If Studwell's policy sequencing really is as rigid as he claims - agriculture first, then manufacturing - what are we to conclude when Africa keeps glitching at the agricultural verge? That the continent's manufacturing future is simply not going to happen? I do not think so. My own view is that the "agriculture leads development" story in Africa is finished, in the only sense that matters for strategy: we have learned, repeatedly and painfully, that waiting for a continent-wide farm take-off before doing anything else is a recipe for waiting forever. Which is precisely why manufacturing now feels more like urgent work that must proceed whether or not agriculture ever leaves the blocks.

I must be fair to Studwell, he does set up the manufacturing chapter by declaring that agriculture is now "on the move." The premise is that the agrarian precondition is being met and manufacturing is therefore free to begin its own journey. "The biggest developmental question that hangs over Africa today," he writes, "is whether substantial parts of the continent can begin a transition to manufacturing-based growth." So what, exactly, is holding it back? And why, after all this time, does Mauritius remain virtually alone in having made the transition?

Studwell’s account of manufacturing in Africa is essentially a story of structural disadvantage compounded by state failure. At independence, the continent’s sparse rural populations meant wages were roughly double those in Asia at comparable levels of development - a gap that made infant industries uncompetitive from the start. The import-substituting factories built in the 1960s and 1970s survived only behind rising tariff walls, and when structural adjustment arrived in the 1980s, most were swept away. Manufacturing’s share of GDP halved across much of the continent. Where enclaves did take root - garment sectors in Lesotho, Madagascar, Morocco - they often remained shallow: dependent on foreign capital, starved of local supply chains, and vulnerable to shifts in trade preference or investor sentiment. Infrastructure was poor, electricity unreliable, and logistics punishing. Meanwhile, most African governments either ignored industrial policy altogether or pursued it fitfully, producing little structural change.

Yet Studwell sees grounds for cautious hope. From the 2010s, Africa began turning a demographic corner: labour forces are doubling every twenty years, wages in several countries have fallen to between a tenth and a half of China’s, and exchange rates have become more competitive. Multinationals are testing the continent as a new frontier of cheap labour, Chinese firms already account for more than a tenth of African manufacturing output, and the African Continental Free Trade Area promises, in time, to knit the continent’s scattered megacities into something closer to a single addressable market. The conditions, in short, are shifting - though whether African states will supply the sustained industrial policy needed to exploit them remains the open question.

There is something glaring, to my mind, missing from all this. To make sure I was not imagining it, I went back to the relevant sections of How Asia Works - a book that was deeply formative for how I think about economic development. In it, Studwell recounted example after example of deliberate technological learning. In South Korea, Hyundai began by assembling Ford knock-down kits in 1967; Korean planners then ratcheted up the local-content requirement - from kit assembly to 20 per cent Korean-made components, then 60 per cent, and by 1973 to wholly indigenous passenger cars. Hyundai used cash flow from shipbuilding, a less complex industry, to keep funding the far harder learning curve in automobiles. POSCO, the steelmaker, initially rejected full computerisation so that its engineers could understand the manual workings of steelmaking first; within a decade, Nippon Steel no longer wished to cooperate because Korea was becoming a competitor. Japan's MITI compelled IBM to license its technology to Japanese firms in exchange for access to the Japanese market. Taiwan's semiconductor industry was built in part by returnees from the American West Coast who brought back not only technology but process knowledge.

Indeed, a feature of How Asia Works is that Studwell often explained success through failure. Malaysia's Perwaja was meant to produce high-value automotive steel for the national car, Proton, but ended up making protected construction steel instead - production without meaningful technological learning. Proton itself, shielded from export pressure and real domestic competition, never underwent the forced upgrading that transformed Hyundai. Throughout the book, Studwell's manufacturing examples are rarely just "country X made cars" or "country Y made steel." They are stories of how states compelled firms to move from assembly to components, from borrowed technology to process mastery, and from simple products to complex ones - always under the discipline of export markets.

I should be careful not to project Nigeria - a loud, overconfident country that talks far more than it delivers - onto the rest of Africa. But I have seen little to suggest the underlying problem is very different elsewhere. What is striking, above all, is the absence of technological learning and upgrading as a policy ambition. Manufacturing is treated as something you do by buying machines, importing equipment and starting production. The harder question - how to learn the technology, master the process, deepen local capability and move into more complex production - barely seems to arise. Many African “industrialists” take their cue accordingly. Technology is rarely discussed in political life, and almost never as a matter of national strategy. I have written about this before, most notably in cement, where after two decades of state protection and two dollar billionaires minted in the process, Nigeria remains technologically hollow in the actual making of the product. Seen in that light, it is no surprise that so many of Studwell’s manufacturing examples in this chapter are textiles. Africa is in no position to sneer at any manufacturing, and the employment effects of textiles matter. But textiles as a starting point are one thing; textiles as a horizon are another.

And this is not some new weakness produced by recent deindustrialisation. It is a long-standing problem, which only makes its persistence more damning. Discussing Wolfgang Stolper’s Inside Independent Nigeria with a friend this past weekend - he of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem - he pointed out how much technology and foreign technical expertise Nigeria and Africa already had access to in the early independence period. On a single page, Stolper moves from Rockefeller Brothers Fund feasibility studies, to an American-backed radio and TV assembly scheme aimed at the US market through Sears, to Westinghouse surveying a steel mill, to Krupp trying to sell another, and then to arguments over cement equity and government ownership. He even records the frustration in plain terms: “Every time you try to do something, government interferes.” The problem, in other words, was not that Africa lacked access to industrial technology or foreign know-how. It was that political elites never really treated those things as a school for domestic mastery. That makes it all the more disappointing that, sixty years later, a chapter on African manufacturing still ends up leaning so heavily on textiles.

One of the most interesting passages in the book came in Studwell’s account of Ethiopia, where he describes Meles Zenawi - channeling Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony - wanting economic development to become “hegemonic” in national life: not just a government programme, but the default national position that requires no thinking. I kept returning to that idea while reading this chapter. Because technological learning - mastering process knowledge, moving from assembly to design, from installation to competence - is what needs to be made hegemonic in African policymaking. There is no shortcut around this. Without it, someone will write another book about manufacturing in Africa in a few decades and find the continent still circling the same low-skill activities and still reliant on foreign firms for the knowledge that actually matters. That a voice as respected in policy circles as Studwell’s should choose, on this point, to pull his punches is a real missed opportunity.

This is my last entry in this read-along, and I cannot say this book met my expectations. Partly that is because How Asia Works set an almost impossible standard; whatever latter-day criticism has been thrown at that book, I still think it was a formidable piece of work. And to be fair to Studwell, the record he had to work with here is bleak. Africa’s failures of leadership are not his invention, and the references make clear how much reporting, travel and interviewing went into the project.

But some of the book’s weaknesses are self-inflicted. The deliberate decision to bracket corruption out of the analysis - as if one might discuss weight loss while ruling out calories - is absurd. And the habit of framing so many of the continent’s failures as inherited, structural or otherwise outside the choices of African rulers lets far too many of them off the hook, not least the one on the front-cover blurb.

This was a chance for the writer who, for my generation, did more than most to lift the hood on how Asia got rich to show, with the same clarity, what African success might look like amid African failure. Instead, I closed it with the nagging sense that Studwell had done for Africa what he never did for Asia: produced a taxonomy of constraints where he once offered a theory of transformation.

-Feyi

Hello, Africa

Joe Studwell concludes his book, How Africa Works, by synthesising his core developmental theory into a practical checklist for the continent. Build a developmental coalition that can rise above ethnic fragmentation. Back smallholder agriculture. Move into export manufacturing. Use finance in a practical, state-directed way to support the whole process. This is the formula the book (and his work) is built upon, albeit with a reluctant dose of politics. Studwell's main strength is the rigid clarity of his prescription. He is explicit in his rejection of the idea of African exceptionalism and maintains that the same broad strategies that transformed East Asia are valid for Africa, provided that leaders can navigate the specific demographic and political constraints of their home countries. He argues that the historical constraint of low population density is finally easing, as the continent approaches the labour density that Asia possessed in 1960. This shift makes infrastructure and internal trade more viable than at any previous point in history.

The final chapter also addresses the role of international aid, arguing for aid as a useful but often mismanaged resource. Studwell rejects the polemical views that aid is inherently destructive, instead arguing that it has provided significant gains in public health and basic welfare. However, he critiques the aid industry for its fashion-driven nature and its tendency to bypass state institutions in favour of non-governmental organisations. He points to the East Asian experience as evidence that large-scale planning and aid can work when the recipient government remains in control of the agenda. Overall, Studwell is cautiously optimistic that Africa's time has come, and that adherence to his policy prescriptions is the key missing ingredient.

As I have written over the course of this read-along, a closer reading of Studwell exposes the limitations of his framework. However, what surprised me was how inflexible he is, such that his framework admits very little updating in the decade since he wrote How Asia Works. Economist and blogger Noah Smith had this to say:

Studwell’s model is so complex that it’s hard to test all the pieces together. And if you need all the pieces in place — for example, if export promotion doesn’t work without the “discipline” of winding up failing firms, or if land reform fails if you don’t allow farmers to sell their land, or if export discipline itself doesn’t work without land reform — then testing the pieces individually won’t give us the answers we want.

Because it’s so hard to test, the theory serves less as a tried-and-true policy prescription and more as a launching point for ideas about how to manage a developing economy. Encouragingly, the book looks to have sparked a change in economists’ attitudes toward industrial policy — even the IMF, which Studwell castigates for having discouraged smart pro-growth policies, is now thinking carefully about the ides in Studwell’s book.

But despite its value as a source of ideas, How Asia Works shouldn’t be treated as the Bible of development. Not only are its ideas hard to verify in their totality, but Studwell does make a few mistakes in his analysis of the economies of East Asia.

I doubt Studwell views himself as capable of mistakes because it is one thing to look back at the success of Asia, and divine what worked. But it certainly takes some form of superhuman confidence to look at Africa and boldly propose the same thing. The problem is not that agriculture, manufacturing, and finance do not matter. They do. The problem is that Studwell turns them into a rigid developmental script, and the evidence does not support that level of certainty.

The treatment of manufacturing provides a clear example of the limitations. Studwell argues that manufacturing is the decisive escalator because it raises productivity, absorbs labour leaving agriculture, and gives poor countries a route to catch up with richer ones. He leans on the familiar claim by economist Dani Rodrik that manufacturing is the sector of unconditional convergence1. He then adds his own African gloss. In his account, Africa historically missed the factory phase because it was a poor region with unusually high wages, thin labour markets, and high costs. East Asia had dense reserves of underemployed rural labour. Africa did not. So what worked in one region was much harder to pull off in the other. Studwell is right that factor endowments mattered. He is also right that many African states industrialised badly, through protected assembly, prestige projects, and weakly disciplined firms. But his larger claim, that manufacturing still has a uniquely privileged developmental status of the old East Asian kind, is much less secure than he suggests.

The first problem is empirical. The older Rodrik claim about unconditional convergence in manufacturing has not aged well. A recent reassessment argues that Rodrik relied on data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), which covers the formal sector. Including data from small and informal firms weakens the headline results sharply. Newer and better data not only weaken the claim that poor countries naturally converge with rich countries in manufacturing, but the evidence also suggests more convergence in the service sector than in manufacturing2. This is just one result, and it does not prove that manufacturing is no longer important. But it does strip away the strongest version of Studwell’s case. Dani Rodrik himself has moved toward a position in which manufacturing remains important, but is no longer the sole or even necessarily the main mass-employment route for development.

The second problem is historical timing. Even if one grants that manufacturing once played that role, the world economy that made East Asia’s export miracles possible is less available today. The changing nature of international trade today, with several interwoven factors like automation, digitisation, climate policy, resurgent industrial policy in rich countries, and a fragile geopolitical environment have all made the old export-led route harder to repeat. It is not impossible, but the scope has narrowed because the two main drivers, which are access to markets of rich countries and knowledge transfer, have come under intense pressure. This matters directly for Africa, because Studwell often writes as though Africa has now reached the point where it can finally do what East Asia once did.

Beyond empirical complications and historically frozen assumptions, there is a deeper inconsistency in this book. In the early chapters, Studwell spends a great deal of time explaining Africa’s harder structural inheritance: lower population density, weaker educational foundations, colonial distortions, ethnic fragmentation, and conflict. He explicitly says that Africa and East Asia cannot be compared because they began from different structural conditions. Yet Studwell insists throughout the book that there is no African exceptionalism in policy, and that following his policy sequence will yield the same results it did in Asia. If structural conditions matter as much as he says, then they cannot simply sit in the background while policy keeps explanatory primacy.

Studwell treats politics the same way he treats history, a background force that leaves his policy formula untouched. He does say in the last chapter that developmental coalitions are the preconditions for everything else, and that this is what most sharply distinguishes Africa from East Asia. If this is true, then I wonder what is left. Political development bargains, bureaucratic capability, and their role in successful policies play a very small role in Studwell's framework. One can only imagine Studwell, as the bearer of the only secret recipe to economic development, having a conversation with an African political leader.

African President: So, Mr Studwelli, I am told you possess the key that can solve all our problems. You have to share it with us o. Our people are complaining that the suffering is too much.

Joe Studwell: Yes sir, Mr President. The secret is with me in this book I have with me. But Mr President, the first thing you must do is to assume your country is in Asia.

Politics is not just a precondition, but it also determines which policies are possible and the institutions that implement policies. A study of export promotion in South Korea showed that the effect of industrial policy depended heavily on who implemented it. Better bureaucrats produced much stronger export outcomes.

In the end, this book is best read as a very good piece of storytelling. We are reminded that Africa is not hopeless, even better, that its moment to shine is at hand. It is also a familiar story. We have been telling it for 25 years. If Africa's development is truly delayed, then bringing the clock forward requires hard work. The problem is that the clocksmiths who are required to do the hard work are constantly being told it is their turn. Mr Studwell is merely the latest addition to this long line of fortune-tellers.

-Tobi

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Remember that disease that ravaged Nigeria’s ginger crop? It has done a crazy number on prices as expected:

Our correspondent gathered from various major markets across the North that a bag of dried ginger, which used to sell at N180, 000, now costs N600,000 to N610,000. Three years ago, a measure (mudu) was sold at N2, 700, but today, it costs N28,000.

However, the price of ginger varies based on the type and its purity, in terms of dust and other unwanted particles. Although some people prefer fresh ginger, most users and exporters depend on the dried type.

Alhaji Isah Garba, a major player in the Yankaba spice market and a ginger farmer in Kaduna State for decades, said the surge in ginger price was due to increased global demand.

He also said the discovery of numerous health benefits associated with ginger was another factor contributing to the commodity’s price increase.

Garba explained that pest infestation, which started in 2023, significantly reduced ginger production, resulting in a severe scarcity of the commodity in Nigerian markets.

Daily Trust

Baby price watch:

The Police Command in Lagos State has arrested a 30-year-old man who allegedly sold his sister’s one-month-old baby for N2 million.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the suspect, a resident of Igbogbo in the Ikorodu area of the state, claimed that he sold his younger sister’s baby to fund their mother’s burial.

The mother of the baby reported the incident to the police leading to the arrest of the suspect.

The Commissioner of Police in the state, Mr Olohundare Jimoh, has ordered the transfer of the case to the State Criminal Investigation Department (SCID), Panti, for further investigation.

Speaking with NAN on Friday in Lagos, the suspect who confessed to the act, blamed poverty for his actions.

The suspect claimed that he met the woman who bought the baby on Facebook.

“Hardship pushed me to commit the act. My sister agreed to the idea.

“I met the woman who is in need of a child on Facebook, and after negotiations, she asked me to bring the baby to Mile 2.

Punch

A very sad story of nominative determinism:

A 56-year-old civil servant, Mrs Cordellia Onuwabagbe, yesterday narrated before a Lagos High Court sitting in Igbosere how a romantic relationship between her daughter and Benjamin Best Nnanyereugo, popularly known as Killaboi, allegedly ended in the death of the young woman.

Nnanyereugo is standing trial before Justice Ibironke Harrison over the alleged murder of Miss Augusta Oseodion Onuwabagbe.

Testifying as a prosecution witness, Onuwabagbe told the court that she first met the defendant in 2021 after her daughter introduced him as her boyfriend. According to her, Augusta had sent her a message on December 1, 2021, informing her that she was in a relationship with him.

“As a single mother trying to be safe, I asked her to bring him home. She brought him on December 8, 2021,” she said.

She added that she accepted him as part of the family after meeting him. “I saw him, and my daughter said she loved him. I accepted him as a son. He used to come to the house often. We would talk and sometimes eat together,” she said.

Onuwabagbe told the court that her daughter was a 400-level student of Medical Laboratory Science at Lead City University and was on course for a first-class degree.

According to her, the relationship later showed troubling signs. She recalled that on November 22, 2022, Augusta and the defendant travelled abroad for a holiday. She said she had questioned him about the source of the funds for the trip, to which he claimed he won a sports bet.

However, about a week into the trip, she received a disturbing video from the defendant. In the video, Augusta appeared angry following an alleged quarrel between the couple.

“He did not record the part where he beat her. My daughter later told me he abused her, smashed her phone, pulled her hair and beat her,” she said.

“But when she became angry and threw pillows at him, he recorded that part and sent it to me.”

Guardian

A story from Ilorin. See if you can count the number of failures that led to this tragedy:

Details emerged on Monday on how a man died in a fire incident which occurred at Lafia Hotel, in Ilorin, last Thursday.

The fire outbreak occurred at about 23:38 hours at the hotel along Coca-Cola road in the state capital, in an apartment used for short-let purposes.

The unidentified man was burnt beyond recognition according to graphic pictures on the incident.

Details of the incident indicated that the man allegedly lodged in the room of one of the female occupants engaged in commercial sex to probably pass the night.

Findings by DAILY POST revealed that before the fire outbreak, the lady who went out to buy some items, locked the man inside the room as it was against the rules of the hotel management for women to keep men overnight in the facility.

Operatives of the Department of State Services, DSS, have commenced investigation into the incident, as all the sex workers have deserted the facility.

The fire incident which was reportedly triggered by power surge involved a building comprising two flats with three bedrooms each, all of which were affected by the fire.

Daily Post

Really don’t want to sound harsh but why are you patronising a ‘cleric’ for a passport?

A wave of indignation has swept through the Nigerian diaspora in the United States following allegations that a Texas-based man, identified simply as “KO”, has defrauded numerous citizens of thousands of dollars under the guise of a Nigerian passport intervention exercise.

The suspect, who presents himself as a clergyman and “Prophet of the Most High God,” reportedly operates under the company name Global Tours and Partyride LLC through which he runs what he calls a “Passport Intervention Program”. The phone number on a flyer advertising his services – +1(682) 717-3360 did not connect as of the time of filing this report. He did not also respond to a message sent to his Facebook Messenger. Interior Ministry officials in Nigetia said they were analyzing the complaints and actively looking into the case.

‘Not one of us’

The Nigeria Immigration Service NIS has however denounced activities of the said cleric, saying he is neither their personnel nor vendor.

A senior official of the Service who spoke to Saturday Vanguard but begged that his name should not be mentioned because his brief does not include speaking to the Press, said the fraudster was being tracked.

He however admitted the difficulty in tracking him for now because he has discarded his known telephone line and vacated the address he gave to his victims.

The official also blamed the development on the usual attitude of many Nigerians to seek “quick fixes” even in situations where government has provided a seamless, legal route for certain services.

“Most of our processes are digitized. Payments can be made online after filling the necessary forms online.

“People have been using this option including Nigerians resident in Nigeria. It is a simple, do it yourself process. You just visit our website and follow the necessary prompts.”, he said.

Vanguard

Same energy:

Seventy-five Nigerians are counting their losses after being scammed out of over N100 million by fake visa agents, promising them Canadian visas. The victims, desperate for a better life, sold their assets, rented out apartments, and even borrowed money to meet the N3 million to N12 million demanded by the scammers.

One of the victims simply identified as Mr. Promise, allegedly paid N11 million and resigned from his job, only to realize that it was a scam. He’s not alone; many have been left with nothing, and refunds seem unlikely.

Mr. Promise sold his available property and also convinced his younger brother to “utilize this golden opportunity” to relocate to Canada. A source close to him said, besides losing his job, “the man is in a dire strait as he cannot afford his children’s school fees and he is also very sick as a result of the loss of his money. He shuttles between Port Harcourt and his village just to make ends meet”.

At the center of it all is Dr Nekebari Nathan Dambere, a self- acclaimed travel trainer, a medical doctor who was arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crime Commission, EFCC, over an alleged N39.1million visa scam in Port Harcourt.

When contacted, Dambere admitted that he is not a travel agent but a travel trainer. He said, “sometimes people pay money through me to the middlemen some of who are in Nigeria while others are outside the country”. He owned up to the fact that money paid through him so far “is about N100million”, adding that the agents involved are “talking of paying back the money in percentage”. He appealed that both the EFCC and the Nigeria police are working hard to ensure that the money is collected from the agents and paid back to the owners. He didn’t give a specific time frame for the refund.

Vanguard

Non-Nigerian Media

As you must know by now, this letter is a fan of Joke Bakare and Chishuru. Here she is hosting a West African dinner for friends at her home. Warning, the article may leave you seriously hungry (gift link below):

The funny thing about my approach to hosting is that when I have my Nigerian friends over, I don’t often make Nigerian food, I’ll usually make something else. So the people I’ve usually invited for a traditional west African meal aren’t always as familiar with the food, and they’re often surprised, not having realised it can be this nuanced and layered.

The typical representation of west African food tends to be that it’s mainly one-pot dishes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There aren’t courses as such, but there are distinct elements; the food is far more elevated and complex than people sometimes give it credit for.

That’s true of the dishes specifically, but also more broadly speaking in the foodways. I’m Nigerian, but I always say my cooking and restaurant are west African. Moi moi is a Nigerian dish, but you’ll find similar steamed bean puddings across other west African countries. Mburu fass is a Senegalese dessert, yet there’s a variation of it made in northern Nigeria, where I grew up. Different countries have their own interpretations of the same foods.

I don’t get to host dinners at home as often as I once did, so I really enjoy when I get the chance to welcome people into my home. The most important thing for me is that everyone has a good time and that they’re fed and watered.

Financial Times

You may have heard there’s a war going on in the Middle East:

A tanker carrying liquefied-natural gas to Europe has changed course, according to data platform Kpler, an early indication that a bidding war for energy between Asian and European buyers is underway.

The BW Brussels, carrying 71 kilotonnes of LNG from Nigeria, was signaling France as its destination but U-turned on Tuesday. The vessel is now heading toward the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, according to Kpler, suggesting it is on route to Asia.

Ships are increasingly diverting around Africa to avoid the Suez Canal.

WSJ

Nine women talk to The Times about their approach to leadership. One of them is 31 year old Eva Chisom Chukwunelo from Abuja:

How She Leads: An amputee who has used a prosthetic leg since 2013, after having osteomyelitis, a bone infection, Ms. Chukwunelo is a disability advocate who speaks globally about disability inclusion and feminism. She is also the founder of The Body as Canvas, an initiative that stages art exhibitions celebrating disabled bodies and the stories behind them.

What has been hardest about bringing lived experience and storytelling into policy conversations?

In Nigeria, where disability is often discussed at a distance from the lived realities of disabled people, the obstacle is that stories are welcomed for inspiration but resisted when they challenge power, funding priorities or existing systems.

As a woman with a disability, I have spoken in cultural, advocacy and leadership spaces about navigating inaccessible environments, exclusion from creative and professional opportunities and the cost of visibility as a disabled woman. In many of these rooms, my story is received with admiration. The response is often emotional and affirming, but it stops there. What rarely follows is structural action: no reconsideration of access, no shift in programming, no reallocation of resources. It shows how systems fail in real life.

NYT

Feature on raves in Lagos rewriting the rules of nightlife. This is a topic we discussed on our podcast with Odun Eweniyi last year (LINK):

On a recent Friday night, thousands of mostly young people trooped into a large auditorium in Lekki, an upscale part of Lagos.

Inside, it was hard to discern the faces of people just meters away. The whole hall was dark, lit only by flashing green strobe lights from the stage. Those gathered had come together for therapy.

But this was Group Therapy, a popular rave in Lagos, where revelers come seeking a different party scene they wouldn’t find anywhere in Nigeria’s commercial heart of Lagos.

Lagos’ nightlife scene had, for decades, been dominated by table culture, a club experience that prioritizes how much people spend on drinks and prime seating. The party environment encourages a competitive atmosphere that young people who live in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, say has shut them out amid skyrocketing inflation.

At Group Therapy, there are no tables. Revelers in Lekki danced shoulder to shoulder. There was only one small bar, selling drinks for much less than the typical Lagos nightclub.

“At raves, the dance floor is present. You go to a usual Lagos party, and there is no dance floor,” DJ Aniko, the founder of Group Therapy, told The Associated Press. “We barely have spaces to just dance, spaces you can just go to literally have a nice time. Most places you have to make a reservation, or book a table, it is a lot more complicated.”

Independent

Long time no Tems:

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this today…” Tems confesses with an awkward giggle. What she’s referring to is the spirit of evangelism that seems to take over her during our call. Within minutes of getting on the phone, she’s instructed me not to truncate my name from ‘Solomon’ to ‘Sol’ because “if you have a king’s name, you mustn’t shorten it,” declared that the secret to happiness is submitting yourself to God, and stated that “Seek God first” is the best advice she’s ever been given. “I became Tems after that,” the 30-year-old Nigerian singer reflects.

Given that Tems’ warm and earthy vocal tones have captivated listeners around the world in the six years since her breakout feature on Wizkid’s “Essence” in 2020, these aren’t words to be taken lightly. Over the years, the alté pioneer has transformed from a self-described “quiet child” whose only dream was to be heard, to shattering records in every direction. With her feature on Future’s 2022 single “With U”, she became the first Nigerian artist to debut at number one on the Billboard 100, and in 2025 she became the first female African artist to accumulate over one billion streams. Most recently, she topped charts once more with Dave collab “Raindance”, presented at the Brits, and was named Hennessy’s latest brand ambassador. Whatever Tems is doing, it’s working.

DAZED

Update on this story we covered here last year. Kindly note that I had nothing to do with this:

A drug dealer has admitted beating a vulnerable former chef to death after allegedly forcing him to sleep beside dogs.

The body of 55-year-old Dimitrios Tsavdaris was found in a foetal position inside a “cuckoo” flat in Hackney, north London, after he succumbed to weeks of violent attacks, the Old Bailey was previously told.

He had been taken there from the home of Bamidele Fawehinmi in Wickford, Essex, where he allegedly slept on a mattress in a garage beside American pitbull cross-breed dogs.

Weighing just over eight stone, the victim was a frail “vulnerable person” who may have been dead or dying for several days before his body was found on January 29 2024, jurors heard.

He had suffered multiple fractures to his ribs, face and breastbone as well as old and new bleeding on the brain and internal injuries.

On Thursday, partway through his retrial at the Old Bailey, Fawehinmi, 33, from Haringey, north London, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and causing grievous bodily harm.

Judge Mark Lucraft KC discharged the jury from returning a verdict on a third charge of servitude.

He was remanded into custody to be sentenced on May 8.

Detective Superintendent Kelly Allen, who led the Met’s investigation, said: “I cannot imagine the pain and suffering Dimitrios must have gone through in the final weeks of his life, enslaved by Bamidele Fawehinmi and living in fear for his life.

“Dimitrios was a frail man who did not pose a threat to Fawehinmi. His initial claim in police interview that he acted in self-defence is utterly preposterous, and the words of a coward.

“Fawehinmi is a violent bully, who preyed on vulnerable people to exploit them for his own gain. His conviction will not erase the pain felt by Dimitrios’s family but I hope the fact he will spend a significant period of time behind bars brings them some small sense of justice.”

Daily Mail

Kano’s female keke riders:

Sporting a pink knee-length veil, Umma Hani Yusuf Khalid has recently found financial stability as a rickshaw taxi driver, a trade that was unthinkable for her in Nigeria’s conservative Muslim city of Kano two years ago.

As more women are having to fend for themselves amid economic hardship, they are increasingly venturing into trades previously dominated by men.

Khalid’s pink three-wheeled electric rickshaw stood out on the frenetic streets of the region’s commercial hub, as she pulled over to pick up women passengers.

The 35-year-old divorced mother of two is one of 100 women rickshaw taxi drivers plying the city’s chaotic roads under Mata Zalla, a cooperative promoting women’s empowerment.

“As a female rickshaw operator, you need to be strong because you made the resolve to go through all kinds of challenges,” Khalid told AFP.

AFP News

We also talked about the Soviet Union and electric vehicles.

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Rwanda is the kind of country the world would scarcely mention were it not for the catastrophe of 1994 - and for what has been built in its wake under Paul Kagame. It is a country of modest scale (some 13 million people) and unusual population density at the heart of the continent. But this chapter cannot escape, nor does it try to escape, the brutal fact that dominates Rwanda's global reputation: the genocide, in which around 800,000 people were slaughtered, many hacked to death with machetes. It is difficult to read anything about Rwanda - growth statistics, clean streets, investor roadshows - without sensing that it is all written in the shadow of that abyss.

Studwell refuses to treat "Hutu" and "Tutsi" as different ethnic groups in any real sense. There is no clear evidence, he notes, that the groups have distinct ancestry; all Rwandans speak Kinyarwanda. Belgian administrators, captivated by the pseudoscientific "Hamitic thesis," designated the Tutsi minority as racially superior and the Hutu majority as inferior - then froze the distinction into identity cards from 1933, backed by skull measurements and other anthropometric nonsense. That history helps explain why 1994 keeps yielding fresh horrors no matter how many times one returns to it. Every reading seems to surface something new to me. This time it was Robert Kajuga: the leader of the genocidal Interahamwe militia was himself born to a Tutsi father and a Hutu mother, a fact he concealed while directing the slaughter against Tutsis.

Three decades on from that atrocity, there remains a central moral problem about Rwanda: Kagame himself. Rwanda's post-genocide recovery is popularly understood as a miracle of discipline and will, and Studwell concedes that "much of the developmental progress" is real. Yet he also calls Rwanda "an unsettling place." Citizens are surveilled constantly through phones and computers; the security services have penetrated not only Rwanda but, in Studwell's words, "many places outside"; and a trail of kidnapped and murdered exiles attests to the regime's long reach. Kagame emerges from these pages as extraordinarily vindictive - so ruthless that during the Ugandan war his comrades nicknamed him "Pilato," a nod to his readiness to order executions (much of the chapter relies on Michaela Wrong’s 2021 book, Do Not Disturb).

This ambiguity about Rwandan is further sharpened by Studwell's framing of the country as "Singapore in Central Africa". Kagame has long admired Singapore's one-party dominance and what he calls "no nonsense" governance - the willingness to crush opponents while co-opting talent into the state. Rwanda adopted both the aesthetic and the methods: immaculate streets, a ruling party that tolerates no rivals, a civil service capable of actually delivering. The economic analogy seems counterintuitive at first - Rwanda is landlocked, far from any port - but Studwell argues that Kagame sought to turn that very remoteness into leverage. High transport costs into Central Africa shield local producers from import competition while the same geography allows Rwanda sell logistics and financial services into a vast, underserved hinterland. Isolation, in that sense, has become its moat.

The problem is what that hinterland contains. Studwell is unsparing about Rwanda's treatment of eastern Congo as a resource-rich backyard. The post-1994 interventions make for grim reading: attacks on refugee camps in the DRC in 1996 that killed thousands of civilians; a subsequent UN report cataloguing hundreds of incidents and raising the spectre of genocide; and the second Congo war, which metastasised into one of the deadliest conflicts since 1945 - one estimate puts deaths from disease and hunger alone at 4.7 million. Whatever the exact details of these foreign adventures, their pattern is not contested. Rwanda's internal stability has been purchased, at least in part, through external violence and extraction from eastern Congo in particular. Kagame’s developmental state casts a long shadow.

Western donors, desperate for an African state that could actually deliver, have backed Rwanda heavily: since the early 2000s, aid has averaged around 40 per cent of the annual budget. Kagame built the Strategy and Policy Unit to absorb all that aid and monitor delivery, and a Rwanda Development Board modelled on Singapore's Economic Development Board. The results, under Vision 2020, were impressive: GDP growth averaged 7.8 per cent annually from 2000 to 2019, and GNI per capita climbed from roughly $270 to around $1,040 by 2024. But Studwell is sceptical of Vision 2050, the successor plan, that sets targets he dismisses as a "pipedream" - achievable only through sustained double-digit growth of a kind no country has managed for long.

Sector by sector, the picture is mixed. Agriculture has received genuine attention in the form of centralised fertiliser purchasing, improved distribution and extension services. But Kagame also dictates to farmers what to grow and where. Output has risen, though the gains remain modest. Industry tells a similar story of ambition meeting constraint. "Made in Rwanda" established industrial zones and courted foreign manufacturers; government-linked firms like NPD and Horizon moved into construction materials and road building. Yet manufacturing keeps colliding with fundamentals: electricity is ruinously expensive at $0.11/KwH (almost five times what it costs in Ethiopia), and in goods trade Rwanda imports vastly more than it exports. The export growth that has materialised comes largely from services rather than factories. Rwanda's Singapore wager, it turns out, works everywhere but on the factory floor.

The biggest warning sign, according to Studwell, is in politics not economics. Rwanda's "developmental coalition," he argues, is a "chimera." After a brief period in which Hutu politicians served as figureheads, Kagame took direct control. In a country that is overwhelmingly Hutu, genuinely free elections would not keep a Tutsi-led regime in power indefinitely; democracy, therefore, is something of a sham. The chapter's descriptions of staged "National Dialogue" spectacles and ritualised performance contracts ("imihigo"), conducted under the watch of an intimidating security apparatus, reinforce the point. What is called reconciliation looks less like organic healing than coexistence enforced at gunpoint.

So how should we judge Rwanda? I come away convinced that the usual postures - hagiography ("the Singapore of Africa!") or dismissal ("too small to matter") - are both unsatisfactory. Rwanda demonstrates what disciplined state capacity can achieve: execution, infrastructure, a stability compelling enough to attract donors and investors alike. But it also reveals how swiftly "development" can become an alibi for permanent coercion at home and predation abroad.

And if this is a "model," it is one built around an exceptional leader, an exceptional trauma, exceptional donor largesse, and a regional security environment that Rwanda has shaped in deeply troubling ways. In that sense, Rwanda does not solve Africa's development riddle. There isn’t much to copy here.

- Feyi

Agriculture

In the eighth chapter, Joe Studwell turns towards what has become his singular, uncompromising obsession: the transformative power of the smallholder farmer. Having explained Africa’s structural inheritance and examined four early movers, he turns to the continent as a whole and asks where development must now begin in practice. He argues that agriculture is not just a sector of the economy; it is the bedrock and critical early driver of all successful development. He presents a vision where the humble family farm is the only engine capable of kickstarting a national economy, reducing mass poverty, and creating the domestic demand necessary for industrialisation. It is a compelling narrative, but as I have noted throughout this review, there is some distance between Studwell's prescriptive policy logic and reality. I have written quite a bit on agriculture (too much to link individually, so curious readers can go to the archives page), so I will not repeat some of my previous arguments. Also, since there is only one more entry for this read-along, I will restrict myself to just two parts of the chapter that I consider most important, which are labour and farm size.

The Yield "Paradox"

Studwell's views on agriculture rest firmly on what he believes was the East Asian playbook. He argues that in a labour-abundant, capital-poor environment, smallholder family farms are objectively more efficient than large-scale, mechanised commercial operations. The assumption here is about the incentives of ownership and hired labour. On a small plot, a family will work every square inch with a degree of care and "self-exploitation" that a wage labourer on a plantation never will. By maximising yield per hectare rather than output per worker, a country solves the immediate problem of food security while creating a massive multiplier effect. Studwell notes that in Ethiopia, every 1% growth in agricultural value-added correlated to a 0.9% drop in extreme poverty.

This is the foundation of what he calls the "Birth of Demand." When millions of farmers move from subsistence to surplus, they buy tools, clothes, and processed goods, providing the initial spark for local manufacturing. For Studwell, this is a universal law of development, a sequence that cannot be bypassed. He insists that East Asia's success started with a rural transformation process - and the backbone of that process was labour-intensive agriculture, small plots, state support, and relentless pressure to increase productivity.

An Important Distinction

One of my favourite scholars on this subject is the economist John Mellor. Much of Studwell's policy blueprint can be found in Mellor's work, though Studwell rarely cites him. Ethiopia's agricultural transformation found approval from both men, to which I am in complete agreement. Under Zenawi's leadership, the state put agriculture before and above all else. It created a science-based modernisation checklist: state-provided fertiliser, high-yield seeds, and a massive army of extension workers. This meant doubling grain production in two decades and effectively ending famine as a mass phenomenon. However, Mellor departs from Studwell in one simple but important way. The true engine of agricultural transformation is not just any farmer, but the "small commercial farmer" and not the subsistence farmer.1 These farmers are the ones with enough land to produce a marketable surplus, adopt new technologies and, crucially, spend their increased income on local, non-tradable goods and services. This is what creates an employment multiplier that absorbs the rural poor who do not own enough land to be farmers themselves. While Studwell emphasises smallholder farmers as the key factor, Mellor argues that the type of smallholder also matters.

Does Size Matter?

This is an important question in many development seminars and conferences, as it is in the bedrooms of many romantic partners. Central to Studwell’s thesis is the Inverse Farm-Size Productivity (IFSP) relationship - the idea that small is always better. He uses this to justify land redistribution as a necessary policy. However, careful surveys of the evidence suggest a more nuanced position. Analysis by economist Dietrich Vollrath has shown that IFSP has a "U-shaped twist". 2 While yields fall as farms move from small to medium, they start rising again once farms exceed 10 hectares and can leverage capital such as tractors and modern irrigation.

This U-shape suggests two different peaks of efficiency: high yields driven by cheap family labour on the one hand, and high yields driven by machinery and capital on the other. One implication of this is that Studwell’s insistence on the smallholder-only path risks trapping African agriculture in a "valley of death", with medium-sized farms that are too big for family labour but too small for modern capital. If this dynamic holds, then a country that breaks up large, mechanised farms into medium plots will not get the Asian Miracle - they get a productivity collapse. This logic can be extended to argue that the efficient policy in such contexts might be to foster agricultural consolidation. Encouraging large farms that can leverage modern capital may be a better way to raise aggregate output, provided the landless small farmers have manufacturing jobs to move into. This is a transition that has eluded Ethiopia.

Africa is not Asia

I have said that one consistent theme in this book, perhaps inadvertently, is that Africa is not Asia. What makes Studwell interesting is his insistence that Africa must be Asia. I believe this to be wrong, but it is to a writer's credit that they are wrong in interesting ways. His model of agriculture and how it links to manufacturing is built on land-scarce Asia, where an abundance of low-cost labour and a scarcity of land made labour-intensive manufacturing the logical path. Economist David Ndii has criticised this model of Africa as a "Factor Endowment" category error3. He argued that in Africa, land is abundant and labour is scarce in relative terms. This makes Africa’s endowment more similar to Latin America. Because African agricultural productivity is so low, food is expensive. Because food is expensive, the reservation wage for factory workers is high, making African manufacturing globally uncompetitive.

The relevant argument here is that Ndii suggests that focusing on agriculture should not be a stepping stone to building garment factories, but a way to leverage Africa’s unique land abundance into a sustainable middle class. Trying to force an Asian labour-intensive model onto a land-rich continent is a faltering experiment that has led to a new wave of debt distress without stimulating private industry. There might also be something wrong with the specifics of this argument, but I agree with the general spirit that importing the Asian model of development to Africa has met with some hard constraints. Perhaps the greater wrong here would be to keep increasing the dosage of that formula.

Missing the Big Lesson

Before the birth of this publication, Feyi and I both watched Asia in our own ways and agreed that there are useful things to learn. But one important belief we both share, and which might be the most important lesson from Asia's success, is that creating markets works. Studwell's vision often glides over the granular frictions that development researchers have documented about agriculture in Africa4. They identify a "Yield Gap" that isn't just a result of poor policy, but of deep market failures. The most significant is risk. A smallholder farmer is not just a keen optimiser; they are also an extremely risk-averse survivalist. Research shows that without index-based weather insurance, a farmer is rationally justified in rejecting high-yield seeds.

Farmers are often cash-rich at harvest when prices are low and cash-poor at planting when inputs are needed. The cash-poor cycle of African farming means that even if a farmer wants fertiliser, they rarely have the liquidity at the right time to buy it. While Studwell calls for state credit, recent observations in Ethiopia and elsewhere show that it only succeeds when it creates an efficient credit market - otherwise state-led credit often becomes a monopoly for the elite, starving the very smallholders and SMEs it was meant to empower.

Research has also shown that the agricultural input market has a "market formation” problem and not a household optimisation problem. Agrodealers are often the final link between global input producers and farmers. They are often the only firms in rural areas. They are also often small, credit-constrained, and exposed to bankruptcy risks. Hence, if agrodealers do not have the finance to stock and do not trust the market, then farmers do not get inputs. Ultimately, this implies African agricultural stagnation is not primarily a farmer problem, nor a land reform problem, but a market formation problem on the supply side of inputs. While policy sequencing matters, policies must address the relevant constraint to work.

What becomes clear is that Studwell is too rigidly attached to his thesis and policy sequence, so much so that the three parts of the book read like three different books. He is right to stress the importance of agriculture, but beyond that, he had nothing relevant to say about agriculture in Africa.

Next week, which is the end of this read-along, I will outline my reasons why Studwell is wrong about everything.

-Tobi