This week I wrote about the life and journey of a ship that sparked a love of reading across the world, including Nigeria.

Podcast should return next week. Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

There might be a reckoning happening with the longstanding culture of ‘househelps’ across Nigeria:

A growing number of Nigerian families are raising the alarm over troubling experiences with domestic workers, with reports ranging from theft and negligence to allegations of abuse and violent incidents. While house-helps remain an essential part of many homes, a review of recent cases and personal accounts reveals a pattern of distrust and fear.

“Over a period of two months, I noticed that lots of my kitchen utensils had broken and appliances around the house had gone bad. When I asked, Sarah told me that it was my children and I ended up scolding them. I caught her breaking a plate, and when I asked, she blamed it on my kids, not knowing that I witnessed the incident.

“Sarah did not only make me scold my children, she stole from me. While searching her bags on the day I asked her to leave, I saw a pair of my nightwear, one of my wigs and a small clutch bag. These were items I had been looking for all around the house and she claimed she had no idea of their whereabouts,” Mrs Seyitan Adeyemi said while sharing a harrowing experience with her housemaid.

Mrs Adeyemi further said that when she was asked why she had been lying on the children while stealing from her boss, Sarah said, “I didn’t think my madam would notice the things I took because she has many of the wigs and bags.”

[…]

Data collated by Weekend Trust showed that between 2022 and 2024, many high-profile cases involving house-helps, drivers and other domestic workers made headlines, creating a public concern about safety within Nigerian homes.

In December 2022, a Lagos-based hotelier, Mr Gbenga Adeshina, accused his Togolese house-help of stealing jewellery and other valuables from his residence in Magodo. Just two months later, another employer in Ajah reported that a domestic worker allegedly disappeared with valuable household items.

In 2024, a house-help identified as Blessing Effiong was arrested for allegedly stealing $51,000 from her employer just three days after being employed in Lekki, Lagos State. Blessing commenced her duties as a domestic staff on December 23, 2023. However, within three days of her employment, she reportedly absconded with the substantial sum belonging to her employer and fled to Cross River State along with her husband.

Daily Trust

New renting technology just dropped:

Many landlords in Nigeria, particularly in Lagos state, are making life a living hell for tennants. These days they have abandoned the usual practice of renting out a whole apartment like flats to a single individual. The new method they devised is that of renting out a 3-bedroom apartment, for instance, to three different individuals who will share the rooms and live together as direct tenants to the landlord. This is now making it difficult for some people who do not have jobs or capability of renting their own apartments to squat with friends and families. It is also denying families the opportunity of renting apartments to stay together because landlords are said to make more money renting to different tenants than to a family bloc.

Economy & Lifestyle discovered that this dramatic shift is upending Nigeria’s housing market.

Driven by skyrocketing inflation, soaring building material costs, and a punishing cost-of-living crisis, this dual-occupancy rental model is transforming how young professionals and students survive in cities and off campus apartments.

The practice, locally referred to as “per-person leasing” or structured “co-tenancy,” means two people sharing a standard two-bedroom flat or a room no longer pool funds to pay one unified lease.

Instead, each occupant must sign an independent agreement with the landlord to pay a fixed, individual rate for their specific room and occupancy.

Vanguard

A small clue in the insecurity puzzle plaguing Nigeria:

A staff of Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and two other suspects have been intercepted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) for alleged money laundering.

The suspects, identified as Ali Baffa, an Inspector in Aviation Security section, Aushabu Nasidi and Mukhtar Muhammad Dan Zaria, were said to have been apprehended during a surveillance operation by the EFCC at Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport, Kano

According to source in the EFCC, the suspects were allegedly involved in the smuggling of gold and foreign currencies into the country through the Kano Airport.

The the anti-graft agency, the revealed the arrests were made on 11 June 2026, following a directive by the commission’s chairman to all zonal directorates to intensify efforts against the smuggling of mineral resources and bulk cash through Nigeria’s international airports.

Preliminary investigations revealed that Baffa allegedly concealed 22.2 kilograms of unprocessed gold bars valued at more than N4.4 billion inside his trousers in an attempt to evade security screening and facilitate the illegal export of the precious minerals through international passengers.

Guardian

The most low stakes crime ever? Posing as an Airforce officer just to rob a PoS agent really tells you something about Nigeria:

According to the complaint, the incident occurred on June 1 after the suspect allegedly visited Ogunpa Market where he bought some items, including a cooking gas regulator and air freshener, from a trader within the market.

“The suspect allegedly introduced himself as a sergeant in the Nigerian Air Force and convinced the complainant to hand over N150,000 in cash on the pretext that he would transfer the money electronically alongside payment for the items he had purchased.

“After collecting the cash and the items, he allegedly disappeared without making the promised transfer,” the source said.

Police sources said the suspect was later tracked and arrested on June 9 at about 1:40 p.m. while still wearing military camouflage.

Investigations further revealed that the suspect had allegedly been arrested previously by the same police division over a similar offence before he was handed over to the Nigerian Air Force Base in Akobo, Ibadan, for prosecution and disciplinary action.

Daily Post

This is a really bizarre story (assuming the suspects are not lying):

Members of an online networking group allegedly specialising in luring unsuspecting victims, particularly from Francophone countries, have claimed they work for a Malaysian national whom they have never met physically and communicate with only through the internet. Hundreds of victims within and outside Nigeria are believed to have fallen victim to the group’s activities.

Their modus operandi, according to investigators, involves luring victims with false business prospects. They promise non-existent wealth through participation in a marketing network scheme.

For this particular group, whose members were arrested by operatives of the Ogun State Police Command under the leadership of Commissioner of Police Olubode Ojajuni in Ifo Local Government Area of the state, the scheme was known as “Ignite”. The suspects allegedly went as far as creating false kidnapping claims to extort money from relatives of their victims.

A source at the Ogun State Police Command, who spoke to Saturday Tribune on condition of anonymity, said the gang members lured a Mauritanian national, Cheikh Mhedy, through one of their female members, Sole Nata. The victim was allegedly kept in a building in the Agbado area of Ifo while the suspects demanded 6.5 million CFA francs from his father after claiming he had been kidnapped.

Thirty-four-year-old alleged gang leader, Zadariah Sawadogo, a Burkina Faso national who relocated to Ivory Coast, claimed that the group worked for a Malaysian national operating from overseas and that none of them had ever met him physically.

Tribune

Non-Nigerian Media

Anola Johnson lost $850,000 to a Nigerian romance scammer who she met on Linkedin (of all places). She has now started a romance scam podcast:

In early 2023, Anola Johnson had just returned from a trip to Paris and life was good.

She had a job she loved, two adult sons with whom she was close, and a group of friends.

She was also in a healthy financial position—she not only had around $300,000 in retirement accounts, but her home north of Salt Lake City was only two years away from being paid off in full.

Then in March, she received a “hello” message out of the blue from a man on LinkedIn. “Pedro” was a handsome, well-dressed, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-to-late 50s, and his profile said he was a freelance oil rig engineer.

“He had a great smile,” Johnson tells Realtor.com®. “Like somebody you could totally trust. It was all very benign at first. I thought LinkedIn was safe.”

From that benign start on a professional platform, Johnson would become ensnared in a highly sophisticated international romance and investment scam of the type that steals at least $2.1 billion a year from unsuspecting victims, an eightfold increase since 2020, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Realtor

A report on how Nigerians on student visas are violating the terms of their visas by applying for full time jobs:

Elspeth McPherson, Journey’s chief executive, claims its recruitment procedures uncovered numerous applicants who submitted allegedly fraudulent CVs, including qualifications from Nigerian universities that could not be verified. It also raised concerns about the ability to carry out robust background checks on some applicants.

One applicant, from Nigeria, applied for a permanent full-time post despite studying a BSc at Teesside University and having a background in construction. His CV suggested he had worked in “operational management” for a London social care provider despite having no prior experience.

Another, a postgraduate Nigerian student at Gloucester University studying an MA in international relations, also applied for a permanent full-time post in breach of his student visa. Despite living in Tyne and Wear, within two months of starting his course, his CV suggests he was working in social care in Hemel Hempstead, Herts. He provided a reference from a non-existent organisation in Nigeria.

Telegraph

My mayor is muslim, my bagel is Jewish, my Christian’s Dior, my wing’s Nigerian. Knicks in 5:

Anunoby was born in London to Nigerian parents of Igbo descent. He purchased a minority share of the London Lions of Super League Basketball, the men’s pro league in Great Britain, and has spoken about his desire to inspire young players there.

However, in the Raptors’ locker room at Scotiabank Arena, where the flag of a player’s home country is beside the name at his stall, Anunoby’s featured the green-and-white Nigerian flag. His mother, Grace Ndidi Okereke, was a track and field athlete for the Nigerian team before dying of cancer when OG was just one. His father, with whom he shared a name, Ogugua, was a finance professor who moved the family to Jefferson City, Mo., when OG was just four to take a job at Lincoln University, a historically Black school in the city. Ogugua Anunoby Sr. died in September 2018, just before OG’s second season began. He missed two stints with the Raptors because of the loss — one for memorial services in Jefferson City, and another for the burial in Nigeria.

Ogugua roughly translates to “the one who brings peace” in some translations. Chigbo Anunoby, OG’s older brother by eight years, spent time with five different NFL franchises over four years as a defensive lineman, but was out of the league by the time the Raptors drafted OG with the 23rd pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. Chigbo was with OG when the latter met the Toronto media for the first time after the draft, and helped his younger brother with the transition to the league. However, OG showed he was ready for the league quickly, starting 62 of his 74 games for the Raptors, who went 59-23 and finished first in the Eastern Conference.

New York Times

Bizarre story:

A Nigerian man who won €500,000 in an Italian lottery – but was barred from collecting his windfall because he was undocumented – said the hardship of his more than decade-long immigration journey had been eased after he was finally granted a residency permit.

“I’ve been praying for this moment ever since I arrived in Italy,” said Imagbe Ehizomwengie, 36. “It’s a huge relief. You might think it’s incredible, but receiving the permit means more to me than winning the money. I want to work and contribute to society.”

Ehizomwengie bought the €5 Gratta e Vinci – Italy’s official instant scratchcard lottery – last October with money scraped together from selling handkerchiefs and begging outside a supermarket in Turin.

He cried tears of joy and relief when he discovered he had hit the jackpot, only for the win to be overshadowed by his bureaucratic quagmire.

Speaking to the Guardian, Ehizomwengie said he had arrived in Italy in 2016 after a treacherous journey across the Mediterranean from Libya, where he had been held captive for two years and was only released after a ransom was paid.

Guardian

How Stears gathers data in a place where there is no data:

Few foreigners are willing to do the legwork, which helps explain why Africa gets around 5% of the world’s foreign direct investment and accounts for less than 1% of the market capitalisation of its listed companies. Stears, a nine-year-old Nigerian company, offers to go the extra mile. At the Nigerian bourse, one of its executives even cosied up to the stock exchange’s librarian, begging him (in the name of God) to release a USB drive where he was rumoured to store company details as a pastime.

The company’s co-founders dreamed up the idea in the mid-2010s while studying in London.“We saw Bloomberg and thought it was sexy,” recalls Preston Ideh, the chief executive. They initially copied the American company’s mix of news and data. Yet when subscriber growth turned out to be insufficient to support the media operation, they focused squarely on financial information.

Not all of it is as inaccessible as Nigerian stock-market secrets. But little is readily available. Stears analysts have, among other things, had a loose-lipped employee slip them a ballpark figure of an undisclosed deal; monitored podcasts with startup founders who might share a bit too much; reverse-engineered the website of Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics to scrape it for historical macroeconomic data; and even become citizens in countries where, as in Kenya, a domestic passport eases access to official repositories (and where hiring a local would cost more).

The firm can afford to go to such lengths because a lot of the data it gathers is for bespoke projects where customers such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or private-equity firms interested in Africa’s sports-betting market pay up to $100,000 a pop. But further information, plus contacts collected in the process, feeds its digital platform, where the volume of data added increased fivefold last year. This is available to clients on a subscription basis similar to Bloomberg and other Western rivals such as S&P Global’s Capital IQ and PitchBook (from which Stears has poached staff).

Economist

Jollof now available in San Jose:

When Folake Adewole first moved to San José in 2017 to take a job as a travel nurse, there wasn’t a single Nigerian restaurant in the area. For the past 10 years, whenever she was craving beef suya or jollof rice, she had to drive up to Hayward — or, more likely, just cook it herself.

In March, Adewole finally decided to take things into her own hands: She opened FolaFela, a small Nigerian restaurant tucked into a strip mall in East San José. It’s the South Bay’s first proper brick-and-mortar Nigerian restaurant.

The shop has only a handful of tables, along with a mini African grocery store in the back. But the menu is surprisingly expansive, featuring dishes like gizz dodo (fried gizzards and plantains) and asun coconut rice. The main draw is the assortment of fourteen Nigerian soups, served with starchy dough balls known as swallows or okele. Already, the thick, complex soups have been a hit, drawing flocks of diners from as far away as Santa Cruz.

Adewole didn’t have any restaurant experience before opening FolaFela, but she has been selling Nigerian dishes since her youth. Growing up in the city of Ile-Ifẹ, in Nigeria’s Osun state, Adewole would help her mother prepare and sell ofada rice — a rice dish topped with a crayfish and pepper stew that now serves at the restaurant, using the same recipe. Soon after she settled in San José, she decided to fill the culinary void by making Nigerian plates to share with coworkers and friends from church. By 2021, she was catering for events with as many as 300 guests. So, after much encouragement from her customers, she decided to open the restaurant while still juggling her day job as a registered nurse at the Stanford hospital.

KQED

How Nigerians are adapting for EVs in a country with no ‘E’:

”When it comes to the electricity supply in Nigeria, it’s, I would say, location-based, because some sides (of town) have more light than others,” said EV owner Khalifa Abubakar Alhassan, speaking diplomatically.

Some 90 million Nigerians -- a third of the nation -- don’t have access to electricity at all, according to the World Bank. In May, a former energy minister was jailed for 75 years for money laundering linked to two failed hydropower projects.

But the government is pushing forward, aiming to make the country a hub for EV manufacturing while signing zero emissions pledges to slowly phase out new sales of autos with internal combustion engines.

For 22-year-old Alhassan, his neighbourhood in Abuja typically has “light”, the Nigerian English term for grid power, consistently overnight -- perfect for charging his sleek, black sedan from China’s Neta Auto.

“I enjoy not buying fuel,” he added -- not a small expense in a country where pump prices have jumped some 650 percent since 2023, following the removal of a fuel subsidy, rampant inflation and shocks from the Iran war.

According to the International Energy Association, more than one-in-five new cars sold worldwide in 2024 were electric, though almost all of that occurred in China, Europe and the United States.

But Mosope Olaosebikan, CEO of NEV Electric, a manufacturer specialising in buses and three-wheeled tuk-tuk or “kekes”, is bullish on the sector’s growth: the charging station he is building will be capable of charging 3,000 vehicles a day -- the largest on the continent, he reckons.

Challenges remain. Nigeria’s GDP is the fourth largest in Africa, but after years of mismanagement and corruption, its grid is often shakier than that of neighbouring, poorer countries.

When Olaosebikan was starting his company four years ago, a nagging question was, “Oh, there’s no ‘E’. So where would they charge?” he told AFP.

AFP

Let’s check in on what is going on in Grenada:

The NDC-led government in Grenada has decided to grant visa-free entry to Nigerians.

This has sparked some debate, especially on social media, with a small, but vocal minority yelling loudly and making noise condemning the government’s action. This is particularly disturbing given the serious and unfounded stigmatisation of Nigerians as a whole, and by extension Africa specifically. I want to believe that this is based simply on ignorance and race-bias that is the end-result of years of colonial conditioning that relentlessly portrayed Africa as primitive, backward, unintelligent, and in the case of Nigerians, a nation of schemers, con-artists and terrorists that kill Christians.

Yes, Nigeria like any emerging economy does have its own problems and challenges related to internal social-economic and political situations. But to lump all Nigerians in one basket of “bad people” is not just stupid but demonstrates a marked level of ignorance that is embarrassing for Grenada and Grenadians. For starters, the government’s decision is best understood as an economic and diplomatic strategy, not a random foolish, erratic gesture. Based on the reporting available, the policy is being framed to boost trade, tourism, education, investment, and wider Nigeria–Grenada relations, with implementation said to begin in July.

Grenada Now

Barbing and mentoring in Kano:

In a narrow room that smells of talcum powder and aftershave, four boys are crowded around a chair. With electric clippers buzzing in one hand, Abdulmajid Bala tends to a customer, who sits with his eyes closed in complete trust.

Suddenly, the clippers stop. Nothing is wrong; the barber just wants the boys to take in the lesson.

“You see what I did there?” Mr. Bala says in Hausa, the local language, as he tilts the clippers toward the curve behind the customer’s ear. The boys inch closer. Mr. Bala adjusts his grip and continues.

“Soft hand,” he says quietly. “Always soft hands near the skin.”

Mr. Bala has plied his trade in Kano’s Brigade neighborhood for more than two decades, and many say he is one reason that some boys here have not been swallowed into a life of crime. When a boy first wanders in from the streets lacking direction, Mr. Bala sits him in a chair, gives him a haircut, and talks. Then, when the boy keeps coming back, Mr. Bala puts clippers in his hand and teaches him a skill with which he can build a life.

“When a boy has a skill,” Mr. Bala says, “that life of crime is no longer attractive.”

Kano is Nigeria’s second-most populous city and the commercial capital of the country’s north. It is also a place where many young men grapple with unemployment and substance abuse.

The city has one of Nigeria’s highest concentrations of almajiri, boys who have been sent away from home for Quranic education but often end up on the street with no supervision. These boys, and others like them, provide a steady supply for gangs that have long terrorized neighborhoods across Kano.

Christian Science Monitor

Update on the cocaine ship of 6 months ago:

A Nigerian court has convicted 11 Indian sailors and their vessel over the trafficking of cocaine into the country, imposing fines totaling $6 ​million, the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) said on Thursday.

The ‌Federal High Court in Lagos found the crew of the merchant ship MV Aruna Hulya guilty after authorities discovered 31.5 kilograms of cocaine concealed aboard the vessel at Apapa ​port earlier this year.

The case forms part of a broader crackdown ​by Nigerian authorities on drug trafficking through key commercial entry ⁠points such as Lagos..

Nigeria has been working to strengthen enforcement against drug ​trafficking networks, which often use the country as a transit route for ​illicit substances destined for Europe and other markets.

The crew, including captain Sharma Shashi Bhushan and 10 other Indian nationals, were arrested on January 2 after NDLEA operatives found the ​drugs hidden in one of the ship’s storage compartments, the agency said.

In ​its ruling, the court convicted all 12 defendants – including the vessel itself – under Nigeria’s anti-drug ‌laws. The ⁠ship, which transported the drugs, is also tried under the local law. A spokesman of the drug enforcement agency said the defendants had agreed the terms of the conviction and it was presented to the judge for the ​seal of the court.

Reuters

A German Nigerian wedding in Australia. Lots of great photos at the link:

Hamilton and War Machine actor, Victory Ndukwe, and human resources advisor, Nina-Louise Dean-Ndukwe, née Dean, had their first date in a boardgames bar in Melbourne, back in 2020 after they connected over Hinge—but they didn’t end up playing many games. “The conversation just flowed from the get-go,” Nina-Louise tells Vogue of their instantaneous connection, the pair so happy chatting that the cards and parlour games on the table went largely untouched. “Within just a few dates,” she confirms, “we were inseparable.”

Four years later, Victory proposed in Spain at the hotel Terra Dominicata, during a trip to Europe to visit Nina-Louise’s family in Germany. The morning of the proposal, which Victory had planned with a picnic in the vineyards, it was raining. Fortunately, the clouds parted, and the rain stopped just before they headed off. “We had the most beautiful view across the vineyards and mountains,” Nina-Louise recalls. “We had lunch together and then Vic put on our song by Leif Vollebek, and went down on one knee,” a custom sapphire ring in his hand. (“My mum also has a sapphire engagement ring,” Nina-Louise adds, “so it felt like a really meaningful choice.”) “It was my dream proposal: intimate, just the two of us, surrounded by nature,” the bride muses.

With their loved ones set to travel all over the world for the wedding, the couple planned a multi-day celebration—with the help of wedding planners Paloma Events—that honoured both their German and Nigerian heritages, in a place where everyone could stay together for the weekend. “Mona Farm has so many beautiful corners across the property, which meant every event could take place in a different location and feel like a completely new setting,” the bride explains of the beloved Braidwood estate that blends farm, garden and contemporary open-air art gallery.

Vogue Australia

Who was Joseph Ana?

My friend Joseph Ana, who has died aged 73, spent the best part of two decades in the UK working for the NHS as a urologist and then as a GP. But his heart was always in his native Nigeria, to where he returned to become a health commissioner. He used the knowledge and experience he had gained in the UK to help rebuild faith in the local healthcare system, overseeing, among other things, improvements in vaccination rates and the introduction of a state-wide ambulance service.

Joseph was born in Zaria in Nigeria, to Onun Onebieni Uguana Ana, who worked on the railways, and Ubu Ana, his first wife. The family compound was in Ikot-Ana in Cross River state, and his family were kingmakers, choosing a king from among the two royal families.

Joseph fought in the Biafran war as a teenager, and his schooling was interrupted as a result. After the war he restarted his education at Duke Town school in Calabar. Following the death of his two older brothers, he became the head of an extensive family.

He graduated from the University of Nigeria Medical School in 1978 and worked as a junior doctor at St Margaret’s hospital in Calabar. He then had a surgical residency at the University of Calabar teaching hospital from 1980 to 1982 before deciding to travel to the UK to extend his knowledge.

His wife, Arit Akak, a public health nutritionist, whom he had married in 1977, and their three children joined him in 1984, and he worked for his first 10 years as a doctor and urologist in various hospitals in the south-east of England. He became a GP in 1992, joining a practice in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, where he was mindful that his work in primary care would be useful on any return to Africa.

Guardian

The story struck me as incredible. But I made a mental note of it and said nothing further, because I wanted to check it for myself.

Medina

In 1914, with the loss of the Titanic still fresh and the first Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention only just drawn up in answer to it, a new American freighter, the Medina, was completed at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Virginia. She was a workhorse, a Mallory Line carrier for the New York - Galveston run, built to transport fruit, vegetables and other perishables along the Atlantic coast. International Marine Engineering put her and her sister, the Neches, at 421 feet and counted them among the largest and most modern freight steamers then working the coast.

She had side cargo ports and wide hatches, mechanical ventilation, and electric fans for the onions. She measured 130 metres and weighed 5,426 gross tonnes at launch; the larger figure of 6,818 came later, after she was rebuilt to carry passengers.

The Newport News yard also had a motto, one that has since passed into something like legend. When the Allies occupied Japan after the war, General Douglas MacArthur discovered that the country’s communications were in such disarray that he could not issue commands across it. To fix this he hired a thirty-three-year-old engineer named Homer Sarasohn, who soon concluded that everything would have to be built from scratch. He wrote a textbook, designed an eight-week course in industrial management, and made it compulsory for every Japanese manager. And to impress upon them that quality mattered in all they did, he handed them, as a guide for writing their mission statements, the motto of Newport News Shipbuilding:

Back to the Medina. In 1948 she was bought by a Panamanian company, renamed Roma, and converted to carry passengers - cabins for 287, with dormitories for another 694. During the Roman Catholic Holy Year of 1950 she carried pilgrims to Rome, and afterwards emigrants to Australia. In 1952 she passed to the Costa Line, was renamed Franca C, and worked the route between Italy and Argentina. In 1959 she was remade as a first-class luxury liner, cruising the Mediterranean and the Black Sea before pioneering cruise operations out of Miami.

In 1977 the Franca C was put up for sale.

Gute Bücher für Alle

It was at this point that it became the property of Gute Bücher für Alle or Good Books for All (GBA), which was itself the brainchild of George Verwer, the founder of a Christian NGO called Operation Mobilisation (OM). GBA signed the purchase on 4 November that year, renamed her Doulos, took out the swimming pool, built a covered book exhibition on deck, fitted her out in Bremen, and sent her into service on 3 June 1978.

George Verwer was one of the great evangelical mobilisers of the late twentieth century, a restless American missionary organiser who turned book distribution, short-term missions, volunteers, ships, spectacle and religious urgency into a global machine. His origins were ordinary enough. Born on 3 July 1938 to Eleanor Caddell Verwer and George Verwer Sr, a Dutch immigrant electrician, he grew up in Wyckoff, New Jersey, just outside New York City. The family attended a Reformed Church in America congregation, though Verwer would later recall church as something closer to a social club than a living faith. As a boy he was an athlete, a Boy Scout and a troublemaker, awkward with girls, and once in trouble with the police for breaking into a house.

The origin myth of his life turns on a woman named Dorothea Clapp. When Verwer was fourteen, Clapp gave him a copy of the Gospel of John and prayed, for years, for the students at his school. Three years later he attended a Billy Graham meeting in New York and made a personal Christian commitment. Clapp, he liked to say, had put him on her “Holy Ghost hit list.” After his conversion he became evangelical in the most literal sense, handing out texts, organising meetings, converting classmates; within a year some two hundred of them had come to faith. As student council president, he distributed a thousand copies of the Gospel of John at school and began giving away Christian books, a habit that lasted nearly seventy years.

In 1957 Verwer and two friends, Dale Rhoton and Walter Borchard, sold their possessions, loaded a van with tens of thousands of pieces of Spanish-language Christian literature, and drove to Mexico. When he married Drena Knecht in 1960, the couple skipped the honeymoon and went straight back to Mexico for mission work. On the way he tried to barter their wedding cake for petrol. The first attendant filled the tank and let them keep the cake; the second simply took the cake.

The name Operation Mobilisation came out of failure. Smuggling Bibles into the Communist countries of Europe, Verwer was arrested and deported, and in the reflection that followed - at private prayer in Vienna - he watched young people boarding a bus. The name arrived with the idea: to mobilise “busloads” of them into mission. In a 2017 interview he traced the word to post-war Europe, where the French, Germans and British had lately been killing one another, and where he wanted a “Revolution of Love” that turned a word once reserved for war to the work of the church. In Franco’s Spain, open Protestant evangelism was restricted, so his team improvised. They ran a stamp shop, scattered Bible verses around Madrid, drew those verses from the Catholic Bible so that priests and nuns might join in, handed out “commercial” leaflets rather than overtly religious ones, and kept a secret evangelical bookshop for trusted contacts.

The work expanded through Europe, the Middle East and Southern Asia, with emphasis on local leadership and collaboration with churches and other missions. In 1962, the first formal “Operation Mobilisation” campaign involved 300 young people distributing about 25 million tracts across European cities; by 1963, 2,000 participants from 30 countries were involved in literature distribution across 80,000 towns and villages.

Messiology

The ship idea came later, and it was essentially a logistics hack. Verwer first floated it at a prayer meeting in Bolton, England, in 1964, because OM’s work in India and the surrounding regions depended on dangerous, months-long road journeys in battered vans loaded with literature. A ship could house people, carry books and vehicles, host events and serve as a base for community work. The first, Logos, was bought in 1970, and the funding story is revealing: no one in the organisation had ever owned or run a ship. When the contract was signed they had only half the money and needed the rest of the £70,000 fast. It came, in the end, through “many small gifts from many nations” - among them OM’s own workers and alumni.

Verwer’s gift was not theology but mobilisation. Christianity Today calls OM one of the largest mission organisations of the twentieth century and reckons that some three hundred other agencies were founded by people it had influenced or by former OM workers. He also helped make short-term missions ordinary. His model lowered the barrier to entry: you did not have to commit your whole life first; you could go for a summer, a year, two years. Such agencies, he argued, took young people with little experience and trained them through mentoring in the field - and he claimed the short-term movement had launched more long-term missionaries than any other in the previous forty years.

His own favourite theological idea seems to have been “messiology” - not “missiology” in the polished academic sense, but the notion that Christian work is messy because people are messy. Spirit-filled people, he said, remain human, with their beautiful and their messy sides, and he counted himself among those who had erred in life and ministry. He framed it as a theology of grace: God working through flawed people and flawed institutions. The “rough and ready” approach brought real trouble. Logos was wrecked in 1988 along with $125,000 worth of Christian books; OM workers were injured or killed in accidents (a grenade was thrown on to Doulos in Philippines in 1991); teams ran foul of the authorities; and Verwer himself admitted that some of his ideas had been bad. He spoke of anger, fear and doubt, of being too hard on his wife, of the need to repent quickly. And he spoke openly about his struggles with sexual temptation.

Verwer stepped down from the leadership of OM in 2003 and twenty years later, he died near London at the age of 84.

Doulos

The Doulos spent thirty-two years in GBA’s service, and in that time she welcomed more than 22 million people across 601 port calls in 108 countries, sailing over 360,000 nautical miles. For all that she gave books away, the official figures record 16.9 million books bought on board - selling them was central to the model. Many more were donated in port to establish or enrich libraries for the public, for schools, colleges and universities, with a large selection set aside especially for children.

From 17 to 29 October 2002, the Doulos lay docked in Port Harcourt. Here is how the Daily Trust reported it on 22 October:

(Another GBA ship, Logos II, also visited Port Harcourt three years later in January 2005).

Afterlife

By 2009 the Doulos was ninety-five years old. The Titanic’s long shadow finally caught up with her when the safety regime it had forced into existence meant the cost of bringing it up to modern SOLAS standards was judged too high. A safety survey found that keeping her in service would cost more than €10 million in repairs, and OM’s leadership decided that, given her age and her limited future, the money could not be justified. The ministry closed on 31 December 2009; her last public book fair had been held five days earlier, in Singapore.

In 2010 a Singaporean, Eric Saw, bought her for S$2 million, renamed her Doulos Phos, and in time converted her into a ship hotel on Bintan Island, Indonesia. After nearly a decade of planning and heavy repairs, she soft-launched as a hotel at Easter 2019.

Saw was a Singaporean businessman whose background lay in human resources and training, not shipping. He spent his first two working decades in corporate HR, with a leaning towards training, and liked to joke that for a man who had studied Business Administration he was “neither interested in business nor administration.” The turn came around 1998, when he acquired the Stewords Riverboat, a floating restaurant on which he also ran training programmes.

The Stewords Riverboat was a Mississippi-style replica built in Singapore in 1991, left vacant and decaying after the American chain A&W moved on, before Saw bought it. Having no experience in food and drink, he first set up the Santa Fe Tex-Mex Grill to learn the restaurant trade before taking the Riverboat on.

He knew the Doulos before he owned her. He had visited her book fair several times with his family when she docked at HarbourFront, taking his children aboard with no notion that he might one day own the ship. As it turned out, he bought her before he had anywhere to put her. For three years after the purchase the Doulos Phos sat in a Jurong shipyard while Saw was turned away by one government agency and private developer after another; he later confessed he had been “naïve” to expect a smooth approval. Idleness alone cost him around $25,000 a month in basic upkeep, berthing fees and a skeleton crew.

The Bintan solution arrived after Singapore had failed him. Someone in his prayer group suggested he speak to Frans Gunara of Bintan Resorts, and in 2013 Bintan Resorts International agreed to convert the Doulos Phos into a land-berthed hotel. In October 2015 the ship was towed to a 1.4-hectare spit of land near the Bandar Bentan Telani ferry terminal. Some 90,000 metric tonnes of sand were reclaimed to create Anchor Isle, and a small army of civil engineers, structural engineers, naval architects and land architects went to work. Ninety-nine piles were driven forty metres into the seabed and capped with a half-metre layer of concrete; then, riding fifteen giant airbags and hauled by winch cables “as thick as a human arm,” the ship was dragged 170 metres into her final position on land. By the end Saw had spent some S$23 million (US$18 million) of his own money across fifteen years to see it through. The 2019 opening proved a false start: Indonesian and Singaporean Covid restrictions soon brought operations to a halt, and Singapore did not fully lift its border measures until 2023. Having survived two world wars, a parade of owners, decades of missionary service and the threat of the scrapyard, the ship began her new life and was met at once by a pandemic.

But he does not present it as an ordinary return-on-capital venture. His vision, he says, was to channel the profits to charities and ministries. He answered to a board that included Canon James Wong and a former Doulos captain, PJ Thomas; he drew a nominal salary of $1 a year; and the operating profits, he insists, go to Christian charitable causes whether or not he ever recovers his investment. What he hoped the hotel might pay for was wells in India - he spoke of the daily journeys women make for water, and of what contaminated water does to those who drink it, as the things that drove him. The first profits, he planned, would go towards clean-water wells in a single Indian village.

Saw renamed her Doulos Phos, usually rendered “Servant of Light” - a name drawn from Isaiah 49:6, inspired, he says, by Jesus as both servant and light. In 2024 he published a 180-page account of the whole endeavour, The Ship And I: In Pursuance Of The Grand Old Lady Of The Seas.

The world turns on such small things - though rarely on them alone. A ship, docking at Port Harcourt almost by chance, and a boy left with a lifelong love of books. But chance was only half the story. The ship provided the occasion; his mother, an educator who needed no convincing of a book’s worth, provided the rest.

That, in miniature, is the life of the Doulos. She began as a cargo ship, then a passenger liner, then a floating evangelical bookshop, and finally a Christian entrepreneur’s hotel and act of philanthropy. The thread running through is not books but the patient repurposing of a single steel hull for one moral economy after another: commerce, migration, leisure, evangelism, charity, and now heritage tourism. The same ship that once carried cheap paperbacks into Port Harcourt now sells sea-view cabins at Bintan. She is a destination now, not a vessel. Yet she also remains loose in the world, lodged in people - including the young man I met at dinner.

Eric Saw would say the mission continues through profit and memory.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Daily Trust went to investigate the aftermath of an airstrike on a market in Borno in April that killed hundreds of people:

One of the most emotional accounts came from Ibrahim Mohammed, a survivor who said he nearly lost his entire family in the strike. Standing amid the ruins, he recalled arriving at the market after the attack in search of his relatives.

“I discovered that my siblings had been killed. My father and brothers had gone to trade that day. I saw many dead bodies, tea sellers, bean cake vendors and traders all lying there.

“People like Shoni, Bamori, Babari Chonlu, Umaru, Warsu, Gimsimi, Abubakar, Modu Bukar, Bulama and many others were killed,” he said, describing the situation as unforgettable.

Mohammed also said the tragedy was not only personal but deeply political.

“For over 10 years, we have been fleeing from Boko Haram and ISWAP. But now, even the military meant to protect us is bombing us,” he said.

He strongly rejected claims that insurgents were present in the market, saying,

“We confirmed from the bodies that no one had a gun. These were ordinary villagers. The military only said these things to defend themselves,” he alleged.

A visit to Jilli revealed a landscape of destruction as burnt wooden stalls stand where traders once gathered. Charred remains of structures are scattered across the sand. The silence is heavy, broken only by the wind moving through the ruins. The market is barely recognisable.

Daily Trust

Nigeria Police and their favourite money earner:

The Federal Capital Territory Police Command has impounded more than 30 vehicles for operating with tinted glasses, obscured number plates, and improper registration as it commenced the enforcement of the ban on tinted vehicles across Abuja.

Addressing journalists at the command on Friday, the FCT Commissioner of Police, Ahmed Sanusi, said the operation was aimed at tackling the growing use of such vehicles by criminals involved in one-chance robberies, kidnappings, and other violent crimes within the territory.

According to him, the Inspector-General of Police, Olatunji Disu, has given the command the go-ahead to enforce the ban.

Sanusi said intelligence reports indicated that criminal elements deliberately use tinted vehicles and concealed number plates to hide their identities, evade detection, and frustrate law enforcement efforts.

He said: “The IG has given us the mandate to begin the enforcement of the ban on the use of tinted vehicles and other offences as earlier stated.

“Intelligence reports at the disposal of the command indicate that many criminal elements deliberately use such vehicles to conceal their identities, evade detection, and frustrate law enforcement efforts. This poses a serious threat to public safety.”

Punch

I feel like I have an article to write about this:

Fresh panic gripped residents of Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, on Wednesday following another reported gas leak at Our Lady of Apostles Secondary School, Epe Garage, and Anglican Girls Grammar School, Obalende, leaving scores of students and staff requiring medical attention at the General Hospital, Ijebu-Ode.

The latest incident marks the third occurrence of the mysterious gas leak within two months, heightening concerns among residents over its potential health implications and environmental impact.

The first incident, recorded in April, reportedly left about 40 students hospitalised, while another gas leak last month affected nearly 100 students who were subsequently treated for exposure-related symptoms.

The state government had earlier disclosed that monitoring equipment deployed to the area detected the presence of methane gas, which officials identified as the substance responsible for the recurring incidents.

A resident, who spoke with newsmen on condition of anonymity, said the latest episode occurred during school hours when students and teachers suddenly perceived an offensive odour that triggered panic across the school premises.

“The gas leak incident occurred again during school hours when students and teachers suddenly perceived an offensive smell, causing discomfort, breathing difficulties and panic within the school premises,” the resident said.

“Some of the affected students and staff members were subsequently taken to the General Hospital, Ijebu-Ode, where they received medical attention. Some of the students were still on admission. The general complaints were discomfort and weakness, while some of them even fainted.”

The resident urged the government to urgently investigate the recurring phenomenon and provide a lasting solution.

Vanguard

Please note that, on behalf of all well meaning accountants everywhere in the world, we categorically reject this fella as one of us:

The collaboration between the Nigeria Police Force Zone 2 Command and the International Criminal Police Organisation, INTERPOL, has resulted in the arrest of a 50-year-old accountant, Olusola Ajayi Joshua, nearly a year after he allegedly left the country while under investigation for a high-profile burglary case.

Joshua was apprehended following investigations into a petition dated July 11, 2025, submitted to the Office of the Assistant Inspector-General of Police, Zone 2 Headquarters, Onikan, Lagos, by a woman who reported a burglary at her residence on Sesayon Street in the Government Reserved Area, GRA, Ikeja.

The petitioner alleged that unknown persons broke into the property and made away with household items and other valuables estimated at over N150 million.

She reportedly suspected Joshua, who had worked as an accountant in her late father’s company for more than 17 years, along with six other individuals, of having links to the incident.

According to the complainant, she had entrusted Joshua with a spare key to the apartment in 2022 to enable him gain access to the property when necessary, particularly during the rainy season, to assist in clearing water caused by roof leakages.

She stated that upon visiting the apartment in July 2025, she discovered that it had been broken into and several valuable items were missing.

Following the complaint, detectives attached to the Zonal Servicom Team, formerly known as the Zonal Strike Force Team, launched an investigation that led to the arrest of six suspects who allegedly had access to the residence.

The six suspects were later arraigned in court after investigations were concluded.

Police, however, said further inquiries revealed that Joshua, who also had access to the property, had travelled to Canada in July 2025 shortly after the alleged burglary and was subsequently declared wanted.

Daily Post

“Only”:

THE police in Lagos State have recorded a major success in the fight against the rising wave of violent killings and attacks by rival cult members in Ishashi, Shibiri, Ajangbadi and Ilogbo, all in the Ojo area of the state. More than ten people have been killed during attacks and reprisal attacks by rival cult groups. One of those arrested is Emmanuel, alias Oblo, chairman and one of the leaders of the Neo Black Movement, popularly known as the Aiye Confraternity.

Emmanuel has claimed that he was only involved in the killing of four members of rival cult groups, but his gang has been linked to the killing of more than ten people around Ajangbadi, Shibiri, Ishashi, Ilogbo and other communities.

Emmanuel, who holds the position of chairman in the cult group, and three other members of his gang – Ayoola, Ebuka and Chinedu – were arrested by operatives of the Lagos State Police Command Tactical Squad in Ajangbadi on the order of the state Commissioner of Police, CP Fatai Tijani, following the incessant cult clashes in the area. The police are also on the trail of other leaders and members of the group, including David, Emma, Paragon, Fela, Santa and AB, alias Awilo.

Tribune

Non-Nigerian Media

Tomi Adedeji has been doing a YouTube series on the history of Christianity in Nigeria. For the final part on the Nigerian church going global, I sat down with him to share some of my thoughts.

Quarter of a century divorce battle now over:

A mum-of-three embroiled in what is believed to be Britain’s longest-running divorce has been awarded £6.6 million from her fraudster ex-husband’s fortune, concluding a 24-year battle.

Varsha Gohil, 61, from north London, first filed for divorce from her solicitor ex-husband Bhadresh Gohil in May 2002, citing adultery and unreasonable behaviour. She had at the time accepted a financial settlement from her then-husband, a £270,000 payout and the family’s Peugot, but had suspected Gohil was hiding the true extent of his wealth.

She was proven right over the following two decades, and has now been handed a major court victory after multiple battles exposed her ex-husband’s concealed fortune.

[…]

Bhadresh, a former solicitor who previously acted for associates of James Ibori, the controversial former Nigerian governor, was the central figure in a significant fraud and money-laundering scheme. Lawyers prosecuting the case said he had helped aid the scheme by laundering millions through his firm’s client accounts, and the Crown Prosecution Service subsequently froze assets amounting to approximately £28 million.

The funds were found stashed away among a network of companies and entities around the world, sparking a new round of legal battles that in 2015 reached the Supreme Court. Justices at the UK’s highest court ruled then that Mrs Gohil could challenge her original settlement, finding that spouses who failed to provide full financial disclosure should not be able to offer deceptive settlements.

Mirror

A sad story that seems to involve two people of Nigerian origin:

A man has been charged with murder after an assault in Lewisham.

Police were called at around 04.40hrs on Sunday, 24 May to Lewisham High Street following reports of an altercation.

Officers attended the scene and discovered a 41-year-old man with a serious head injury. He was treated at the scene by colleagues from the London Ambulance Service and taken to hospital. On Saturday, 30 May he was sadly pronounced dead.

He can now be named as Taiwo Ekerin. His next of kin are being supported by specialist officers.

Maxwell Oguanaya, 32 (21.07.1993), of Eastfield Road, Enfield, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Thursday, 4 June. He was charged on Friday, 5 June and appeared at Ealing Magistrates’ Court on the same day. He was remanded in custody and will next appear on Tuesday, 9 June

Metropolitan Police

Éwèdu and ìlá in the NYT:

In West and Central Africa, many soups and stews are built on vegetables, fruits or seeds that add an elemental viscosity, an incredible (and sometimes startling) stretchiness described as “draw.” Éwèdu soup, for example, uses a leafy green vegetable with a sublime pull. There’s ogbono soup, which uses àpọ̀n, a type of ground wild mango seed with a similar heft, and ìlà àlàsèpò, which uses the okra fruit and means “okra cooked together.” All possess this magnificent quality.

Growing up in Lagos, I knew okra as just ìlá, its name in Yorùbá, which can also refer to any soup from southwest Nigeria where okra is the star ingredient. For this take on draw soup, I let okra lead. With that in mind, you’ll want to find the freshest okra, which is essential to this dish’s success. But if you can’t find it — or don’t have time to get the plump, ripened pods from farm stand to pot before they start turning woody — then frozen will do just fine.

The dish begins with okra pods, chopped into confetti-like bits and releasing their fragrant grassy notes with every cut. They’re then brought to a simmer over low heat. Whole bean írù or dawadawa powder (both fermented locust beans) and dried crayfish season the broth with a robust umami.

Of course, okra loves balance, and here, plump, saline shrimp accentuate its heft. Fresh chopped spinach leaves wilt lovingly into the soup when added. A finish of red palm oil melts, slicking and coating all in the path of its gentle flow and complimenting okra’s springy bounce. It’s also essential for adding a creamlike richness to the soup. This recipe guides you toward an essential balance of textures and a layering of flavors that are evident within each spoonful. When served with a starchy swallow or a simple steamed grain, the soup is a delight, a full meal to ease you into the next moment in your day.

Your ìlá can be yours to define. Add meat, tripe, smoked fish or roasted mushrooms. Your goal is to understand okra’s flexibility, to grasp what it can or can’t do. Whether okra is new to you or a staple of your spring and summer soups, with this recipe it’s yours to discover multiple times over.

New York Times

Nigerian Christians are lobbying MAGA:

Thousands of people, both Christians and Muslims, are killed in attacks in Nigeria every year, mostly in the north, where the state is weakest. The violence stems from jihadism, banditry and conflicts between herders and farmers. Only a small fraction of incidents involve Christians being directly targeted for their faith.

Yet pressure groups claim that Christians are systematically persecuted and demand American intervention. “If international attention is what is required to spur decisive governmental action, then the Christian community in Nigeria welcomes it,” says Archbishop Daniel Okoh, who leads the Christian Association of Nigeria.

The archbishop and others echo a narrative forged in America that resonates with officials in the Trump administration. MAGA-friendly missionary groups argue that “mainstream media” underplay the threat to Nigerian Christians. To counter this, the groups package violent scenes into videos for social media to show “the truth” about persecution. “Not every video we see is doctored or manipulated,” says Ebenezer Obadare of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think-tank, “but at some point, you find it impossible to tell the difference.”

One source of viral content is Equipping the Persecuted, an Iowa-based missionary group that runs a website called Truth Nigeria. The site says it reports on violence in Nigeria “with fearless honesty”. But it pursues a clear narrative of Christian victims and Muslim perpetrators, mixing reports of attacks in Nigeria with MAGA-minded content such as reports on supposed mass vigils in Africa for Charlie Kirk, an American right-wing activist who was murdered last year.

Christian activists approve of the country’s re-designation by America late last year as a “country of particular concern” for religious freedom. They have also welcomed American air strikes against terrorist groups in northern Nigeria and the dispatch of American soldiers to help the army fight militants.

Other benefits may come in the form of money and power. The bill making its way through the House recommends that some funds be dispensed to “faith-based organisations”. Nigerian groups may get a slice of this pie, as well as a bump in donations from sympathetic American Christians. They may also hope for America to boost their influence vis-à-vis prominent Muslim politicians from northern Nigeria.

Economist

The National Museum in Lagos has had a quite snazzy makeover:

Gazing at two large engraved 16th-century elephant tusks on display at Nigeria’s National Museum Lagos, a guide surprised visitors by telling them: “You can touch them gently”.

One of the three galleries at the museum in Nigeria’s cultural and entertainment hub has been remodelled to allow visitors to interact with some artefacts, reversing the typical ban on touching exhibits, as well as take unrestricted photographs in an effort to engage younger audiences, curator Nkechi Adedeji told AFP.

As the group felt the texture of the elephant tusks to the tune of Afrobeats softly playing on overhead speakers, a young photographer was busy snapping away, likely for a social media post.

According to Tinuke Odunfa, the interior designer of the gallery, the plan was to modernise the space and present Nigerian history in an “intentional” and “immersive” environment.

“Everything was intentional in terms of how the space should be experienced, in terms of the colours, how the space leads you,” Odunfa told AFP.

AFP

I wonder if Nigerians even know some climate groups are fighting to stop a multibillion dollar investment in the country:

What if one of the world’s biggest meat companies expanded into Africa with a multibillion-dollar plan, but offered few details about what it would actually build, where it would go, or who would benefit?

That question is driving a growing backlash against JBS, the world’s largest meat company, over a still-murky proposal to build at least six slaughterhouses in Nigeria.

According to Inside Climate News, environmental groups and civil society advocates have said the company’s secrecy is raising urgent questions about pollution, land use, and the real impact on local communities.

The proposed $2.5 billion investment would mark JBS’s first major move into Africa, but critics have said it could deepen climate and food-system problems rather than solve them.

JBS said in 2024 that it had reached an agreement with the Nigerian government as part of a broader $6 billion global expansion plan.

But advocates said the company shared few details about what it intends to build, how the projects could affect nearby communities, or where the meat would ultimately go.

That lack of transparency is now at the center of a legal challenge. In April, Greenpeace International sent JBS a formal letter arguing that the company’s reincorporation in the Netherlands could subject it to a legal “duty of care” over environmental and human rights harms.

Scrutiny intensified after protesters gathered outside JBS’s first annual meeting in the Netherlands, holding a banner that read, “JBS: Keep your bloody business out of Africa.”

Greenpeace’s letter also asked the company to turn over information about its Nigeria plans, but JBS declined, saying it complies with the law and is helping support food security.

The Cool Down

Remember the couple who fled to Nigeria after their child died?

A couple who fled the country while under investigation for the murder of their eight-month-old son have been jailed over his death.

Devaun Rose-Turner, had suffered more than 80 separate injuries during the eight weeks leading up to his death in Biggleswade in December 2021.

On Wednesday his father Emmanuel Turner was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 22 years for the murder of his son.

Devaun’s mother, Shandies Rose, was cleared of murder but convicted of manslaughter, and was jailed for 12 years.

In sentencing the pair, the judge, the Honourable Mrs Justice Farbey KC, said: “Both of you knew about his pain. Both of you decided to keep it hidden so he received no medical help.”

Luton Crown Court heard that emergency services were called to the family home at around 7am on 11 December 2021 after Turner reported Devaun was not breathing. He was taken to hospital but died later that morning.

Medical examinations found that the youngster, of Biggleswade in Bedfordshire, had suffered extensive injuries during repeated episodes of physical abuse which took place over several weeks, including just hours before his death, prompting a murder investigation.

Detectives also established that Devaun had been in the sole care of his parents throughout that period.

The pair were arrested on suspicion of murder in 2022 but were released under investigation as detectives continued to build the evidential case.

However, in August 2022, officers learned Turner and Rose had travelled to Nigeria, despite the investigation remaining ongoing.

They eventually returned to the UK on 10 May 2025, where they were met by arresting officers at the airport and subsequently charged and remanded into custody.

iTV News

News from Saskatoon:

Businesses and non-profit organizations regularly open and move in Saskatoon. Today, the StarPhoenix spoke with Olugbenga and Oluwatoyin Fakoyejo who recently opened Royal Premium Restaurant Pastries and Lounge in Stonebridge.

The couple came to Canada from Nigeria about eight years ago and started catering events in both Saskatoon and Calgary about five years ago. They decided to open their own restaurant, offering the flavors of Nigeria and West Africa, as well as Caribbean and American Cuisine.

We opened our restaurant based on our client’s request. They wanted more of the quality and menu style we offer, on a daily basis. We got the encouragement from our client base to open and offer them something exciting.

We were able to look at what would be our contribution to the province in terms of also promoting trade and tourism by bringing the best of African flavors to Saskatoon. We have variety with quality and an upscale restaurant to have your dinner and your lunch and breakfast, that will also be affordable. More importantly, we are able to offer different segments of the Saskatoon community the best tastes of Africa.

Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Oriyomi did not end up living up to his name:

Neither the TSA nor United Airlines is answering questions about how a man managed to sneak on board a plane at Bush Intercontinental Airport last month.

According to a criminal complaint, Abdulrahman Oriyomi’s flight reservation had been canceled, and the boarding pass he had appeared to be a forgery.

Police say surveillance video showed him speaking with a TSA agent the morning of May 18. He was then escorted to another TSA booth where his picture was taken, and he was allowed to pass through security.

Michael Matranga, a former Secret Service agent who now runs the consulting group M6 Global Defense, said TSA agents should never have allowed Oriyomi through security without a valid boarding pass.

“I think this is a pretty significant breach, not just because of the fact that he ended up on the plane; it’s the multiple layers and failures to even get on the plane,” Matranga said.

Police say Oriyomi then approached a gate and tried twice to scan the fake boarding pass, but to no avail.

More than an hour later, they say he showed up at another gate where United gate agents were scanning boarding passes.

Police say Oriyomi walked right past the agents while they were busy with other passengers.

“They’re not paying attention to his diversionary tactics. They’re distracted, they’re not situationally aware,” said Matranga.

Police say Oriyomi hid in the plane’s restroom as it taxied to the runway, and that a passenger alerted flight attendants to his presence.

Once the flight crew realized he wasn’t supposed to be on the plane, it returned to the gate where it was met by police, an explosive device unit and the FBI.

ABC

We explore his expansive career across television, radio, and creative training, and dive into the central themes shaping his long-awaited first feature film, Aloma.

This was an enlightening episode and we had a lot of fun recording it. We hope you enjoy it.

Chris has not asked us to do this but if you’d like to invest in bringing Aloma to screens, there is still a small window to do so. Drop us an email at 1914readr@gmail.com and we will put you in touch with the film’s finance people.

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly

Chapter 4: ‘His Name Is Dore’

In 1964, in a storeroom at Mkar in central Nigeria, a Tiv labourer sweeping out boxes and old paper picked up a document whose cover termites had already started to eat. He set it to one side. Later, doing yard work for the principal of the secondary school down the road in Gboko, he produced it and asked: should this be thrown away with the rest of the rubbish?

The principal opened it. The first line, in Tiv, read: “It was almost twenty years ago when I first contemplated writing this book.” The next page was a torn cover sheet, hand-printed, that said AKIGA’S HISTORY, and beneath it, in ink, History of the Tiv By Akiga. As luck would have it, one of the teachers at the school was a man named Ezekiel Akiga - a son of the author. Together they decided the document should not go in the bin. In September 1964 they carried it to the library of the University of Ibadan and deposited it there, where it sat, quietly, for the next half-century.

The rescue from the rubbish was not the first time the text had been saved, nor the last. A dozen years earlier, in 1952, an American anthropologist working at the same Mkar mission station had come across another copy and had it typed out with the help of a Tiv typist. The paper survived through a relay of fragile custodies - a copyist here, a sympathetic principal there, a son who recognised his father’s name, a university shelf - each handing it on before it could be completely damaged. A history of a people who built their world on speech very nearly perished as a pile of insect-eaten paper. It kept being passed, hand to hand, by people who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

What had nearly gone into the dustbin was the longest book a Tiv man had yet written about the Tiv: some 380 pages of typescript, around 190,000 words, finished in manuscript in 1935. Its author was Benjamin Akighirga ‘Akiga’ Sai, a mission houseboy turned evangelist, translator, witness and historian. He had set down the genealogies and the clans, the names of plants and the preparation of food, the marriage customs and the rituals, the arrival of the white men with their wire and their guns and their courts - and, more dangerously, the conduct of the chiefs those white men appointed. He wrote it so that the new generation of Tiv who could read might read it and tell those who could not.

For seventy years, almost nobody read what he actually wrote. What they read was a different book. In 1939 the International African Institute published, through Oxford, an English version edited and annotated by a colonial education officer named Rupert East. It was a genuine act of preservation and a genuine act of reduction. East cut the text by more than a third, rearranged it, supplied his own notes and headings, and conceded with disarming honesty that he had chosen what to keep “not so much for their intrinsic merit as for their general interest to Europeans.” He also changed the title. History of the Tiv became Akiga’s Story: The Tiv Tribe as Seen by One of Its Members. In four words, the author became an informant.

Only in 2015, when the rescued typescript was finally translated whole - no section omitted, the order left as Akiga laid it down - did the full book reach the world. The half-century between the rubbish bin and the complete translation is, in a way, the subject of this chapter. So is the quarter-century before it, when a one-eyed boy given away to a mission learned to read the new system of wire and court and Bible, and to explain it, in both directions, to people who could not.

That is what the manuscript contained: a memory of conquest. Telegraph poles going up through the bush and being cut down again. A market quarrel that became a massacre. A burning trading store on the Benue. Chiefs put on a train to Kaduna and shown the size of the thing that now ruled them. Wives seized, taxes counted on tally sticks, a gallows, a Bible rendered into a language that had never had one. To understand why a Tiv man came to write all this down in the first place, you have to begin with the wire and the fire.

Read more

We should be back with another podcast episode soon. Plus the next chapter of The Whispering Class drops on Monday. This time we are going to Tivland.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Things are happening in the Canadian Loud market:

The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency has arrested a 63-year-old Chinese woman for allegedly attempting to smuggle a large consignment of Canadian Loud, a synthetic strain of cannabis, into Nigeria.

The suspect, identified as Ting Kiong, who naturalised in Malaysia, was arrested on Sunday, May 17, 2026, upon arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, from Thailand via Dubai on an Emirates Airline flight.

This was contained in a statement issued on Sunday by NDLEA spokesperson, Femi Babafemi.

According to the agency, NDLEA operatives attached to the Terminal 2 Arrival Hall intercepted her after she was found with two large travel boxes containing 31.0 kilograms of the illicit substance.

“During an interview, the 63-year-old suspect, who claims she works as a carer in Malaysia, stated that her daughter sponsored her trip from Malaysia to Thailand and subsequently to Nigeria.

“She further disclosed that she spent two weeks in Thailand before she was handed the illicit consignment at the Thailand airport to deliver in Nigeria,” the statement read.

Meanwhile, the NDLEA also announced the interception of another major drug shipment at the Lagos airport import shed.

“Following close monitoring of the consignment by NDLEA operatives since its arrival from India aboard an Emirates Cargo flight, the 29 large cartons containing 1,825,710 tablets of Tapentadol 250mg, worth N2,190,852,000, were eventually handed over to the NDLEA by the Customs Service on Friday, 22nd May 2026,” it said.

Punch

There are now ‘ajo’ cows:

Mr. Idris Garuba, a trader said: “I can hardly take care of my bills. School fees, rent and other expenses this year.

“I just bought a bag of rice and 25 litres of vegetable oil, which I sent home to my mother. Myself and my extended family recently held an emergency financial meeting to plan for the upcoming festival.

“Instead of the three rams typically purchased by different households within the family, ten members contributed N100,000 each to buy a single medium-sized cow.

“If you look at the economy right now, individual sacrifice has become a luxury that honest salary earners cannot afford.”

“We had to be realistic. Food prices are rising weekly, electricity tariffs are high, and transport fares have eaten up our disposable income.

“By coming together, we ensure that our children can still enjoy the spirit of Ileya without plunging our households into deep debt.”

Vanguard

More on Canadian Loud:

OPERATIVES of the Zone 2 Command of the Nigeria Police Force have uncovered a major drug trafficking syndicate in Lagos, seizing suspected illicit drugs estimated at ₦7.8 billion and arresting several suspects, including the alleged kingpin, Eke Henry Ifeanyi.

The operation, carried out by officers of the Special Protection Unit (SPU) in collaboration with divisional police detectives, followed months of surveillance and intelligence gathering coordinated by the Zone 2 Headquarters.

The raid, which took place in an apartment within an estate in Mende, Maryland, Lagos, led to the recovery of hundreds of bags of suspected Canadian Loud, allegedly stored in the residence of the prime suspect.

Addressing journalists at the scene on Saturday, the Assistant Inspector-General of Police in charge of Zone 2, AIG Olohundare Jimoh, disclosed that the suspect was apprehended on May 19 after weeks of strategic monitoring by operatives.

According to him, the operation was executed with technical support and guidance from the Inspector-General of Police, IGP Olatunji Disu, alongside coordinated efforts between the SPU and divisional police teams.

Jimoh revealed that during the operation, the suspect allegedly attempted to bribe the SPU commander with ₦500 million to compromise the mission and allow the movement of the drug consignment.

He said: “The suspect offered ₦500 million to the SPU commander in an attempt to make the team stand down and allow him to contact his associates to move the consignment elsewhere. The offer was rejected immediately and properly documented for further investigation.”

Vanguard

The Helen Ukpabio story rumbles on:

The High Court of Cross River State sitting in Calabar has heard extensive testimony on alleged witchcraft-related abuses in the N200 billion libel suit filed by Helen Ukpabio and her daughter against singer Bloody Civilian.

Justice Ukpai Ibitham adjourned the matter to July 6 and 7 for continuation of hearing after arguments by counsel to both parties.

A human rights advocate and religious studies scholar, Leo Igwe, testified for the defence, alleging that Ukpabio’s teachings, films and ministry activities contributed to witchcraft accusations and abuses against vulnerable persons, especially children.

Igwe told the court that he had spent nearly three decades researching and campaigning against witchcraft accusations across Africa, adding that some evangelical teachings fuel fear, suspicion and violence against persons accused of witchcraft.

He referenced Ukpabio’s film End of the Wicked and several church programmes centred on deliverance from witchcraft, arguing that such messages reinforced harmful stereotypes associated with Cross River and Akwa Ibom states.

Guardian

A most unusual divorce case. Or should that be un-divorce:

A 40-year-old businessman, Auwal Musa, has prayed a Sharia court sitting in Magajin Gari, Kaduna, Kaduna State, to order his ex-wife, Hauwa, to return to their matrimonial home.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Auwal, in his petition, said that his ex-wife forced him to divorce her after a year of getting married to her.

“I signed the divorce papers under duress. I gave one pronouncement of divorce to her and later went to their house to cancel the divorce before she finished the Iddah, but she refused to come back.

“She had left with my plasma TV, gas cylinder, electric kettle, two caps and documents belonging to my father. I want them back,” he said.

In her defense, Hauwa said he came back too late.

She explained that she had already finished her waiting period (Iddah) before Musa asked her to come back.

“I only took his plasma TV and gas cylinder. I am keeping the items pending when he pays me the N31,500 he owes me.

“He gave me the electric kettle as a gift while we were courting.

“I have no idea where his caps and father’s documents are,” she said.

The judge, Malam Murtala Nasir, advised Musa to go home and search for the documents.

He then adjourned the case.

Tribune

Amazing how much people will pay for ‘Hajj slots’:

The Kebbi State Police Command has arrested four suspects for allegedly defrauding two intending pilgrims of N9.290 million under the guise of securing Hajj slots for the 2026 pilgrimage.

The command’s spokesperson, SP Bashir Usman, disclosed this in a statement on Friday.

According to the statement, the suspects identified as Aminu Hassan Zauro, Tabiu Abubakar, Usman Attahiru and Mustapha Sani Zauro were arrested following a complaint lodged by the Kebbi State Pilgrims Welfare Agency.

Usman said four other suspects identified as Bello Jos, Atiku Stores, Umar Gimba and Usman Bunza are currently at large.

He explained that the principal suspect, Aminu Hassan Zauro, allegedly collected N8.6 million from one of the victims with a promise to secure two Hajj seats for the 2026 pilgrimage.

The police spokesperson added that the suspect also allegedly received N690,000 from another victim as deposit for a Hajj slot and later presented fake pilgrimage materials, including bags and medical records, to the victim.

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

Latest Nigerian export:

Nigeria is the second most popular place for parents in England who use foreign surrogates to have babies, official figures reveal.

The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) disclosed that the number of applicants applying to become parents of children born to Nigerian surrogate mothers rose from 6 to 59 between 2015 and 2025.

This data, released under freedom of information laws, places Nigeria second only to the United States in its popularity among English “intended parents” having babies through international surrogacy arrangements. Last year, 125 court applications for legal parentage of babies born in the US were recorded.

Previously, Georgia and Ukraine were the second and third most popular places for international surrogacy with people in England. In 2023, the number of parental order applications for children born to surrogate mothers in these countries stood at 42 and 27 respectively.

These latest figures reflect a growing trend of people turning to foreign surrogacy to have children. In 2018, there were more than 150 applications for parental orders for children born to surrogate mothers abroad. By 2024, this number had increased to more than 300.

Family lawyers say Nigeria’s rise in popularity is being driven by “intended parents” with family ties to the country and the lower cost of the surrogacy process compared with the US.

Louisa Ghevaert, a surrogacy law expert, said: “For some, they have personal connections and family in Nigeria, providing them with a ready-made support network and help with logistics.

“Given limited availability of African donor eggs and surrogates in the UK, Nigeria can also offer more options for ethnically matched donor eggs and surrogates for people of African heritage. The costs of surrogacy in Nigeria are also lower than in other places, particularly the US, making it more affordable.”

However, both Ghevaert and other family lawyers warned “intended parents” to guard against unethical and unregulated surrogacy practices in Nigeria.

The Times

Hammed Danmole is a hero:

The heroic bystander who broke up a machete brawl in a London park in broad daylight explained he risked his life because he ‘wouldn’t have forgotten’ if ‘one of those boys died’.

Hammed Danmole ran towards the blade-wielding teenagers while others scattered in horror at Burgess Park on Sunday, May 17.

The 45-year-old Nigerian south Londoner had been playing his weekly Sunday league football match when he saw the youths take out the massive knives and start hacking at each other.

Instead of recoiling in fear, Mr Danmole couldn’t help but imagine his own teenage son in that situation and raced towards the fray.

He had noticed two black-clad hooded youths come into the park while taking a break behind the goalposts.

Another boy arrived on a scooter five minutes later but then an argument broke out, and two of the boys pulled out machetes, Mr Danmole said.

A video of the fight shows the first two slashing at each other and then a third pinning one of the boys to the ground while both chop at him with their knives.

‘I’ve got a 17-year-old boy and when I looked at them, I saw him. I would do anything to stop these young boys from killing each other,’ he told The Times.

While others cried out in fear or recorded the fight on their phones, Mr Danmole ran in to stop the brawl and forced them to separate.

Footage shows him running in and shouting: ‘Oi, stop that, what are you doing?’

He managed to get the boy pinning his victim to the floor off him and two of the knifemen run one direction while the third runs the other. Mr Danmole shouts at them to ‘Go away’.

Three teenagers were arrested at the scene and a fourth on Sunday, all aged between 16 and 17. They were charged with several offences, including possession of a bladed article, affray and possession of an offensive weapon in a public place.

Mr Danmole - a property investor living in Beckenham after arriving in London from Nigeria - said: ‘After I did it, people said I shouldn’t have done that and I should have left them.

‘But if I didn’t stop it, and one of those boys died, I wouldn’t have forgotten it for the rest of my life.’

Daily Mail

Meanwhile on Masterchef Australia:

Throughout his time on MasterChef Australia, Olaolu Olorunnimbe has been determined to put Nigerian cooking front and centre.

Born and raised in the country’s bustling city, Lagos, the 34-year-old has always considered it home.

While he has been showcasing his culture throughout the competition, the turning point came when cooked beef efo riro with semo (semolina). The traditional Nigerian stew, which usually features spinach, was one of his late father’s favourite dishes.

The dish also earned him the $10,000 prize during Nostalgia Week, where the contestants were tasked with showcasing their family trees.

When asked how it felt to win that prize with a dish that was close to his heart, Olaolu exclusively told New Idea that it “feels like something from a movie”.

“I’ve had an up and down time in the kitchen, and I’ve often found myself overawed by the amazing chefs around me,” he explained.

As for what he’d spend the money on? He isn’t sure yet, but it’ll “almost certainly be food related”.

New Idea

This sounds like a crazy idea. I will be there:

A romantic comedy spanning Nigeria, the U.K. and Hong Kong was unveiled at the Cannes Film Market, with A13 Films founder Chidozie Christian Ahaiwe and U.K.-based Hong Kong creative Hiu Man Chan attached as executive producers on “My Nigerian Fiancé.”

The project follows a successful London-based Nigerian man who enlists an Asian dancer to pose as his fiancé at a family anniversary celebration in Lagos. When the arrangement gives way to genuine feeling, both characters are forced to confront family pressure, ambition and identity. The film will draw on Nigerian music and fashion throughout.

“This is a rare opportunity to take a global relatable romantic comedy and reinterpret it through the richness, humor, complexity, and emotional energy of both Nigerian and British culture,” Ahaiwe tells Variety. “The themes of love, identity, family pressure, migration, and cultural collision are deeply universal, but we also believe there’s something fresh, commercially exciting, and globally relevant about telling this story from both a Nigerian and U.K. perspective.”

Variety

A new arrival into Nigeria from Britain:

A migrant sex predator who attacked lone women avoided deportation for almost a decade through ‘impermissibly speculative’ human rights judgments about what could happen to him back home, a court has found.

The man, 40, who came to Britain illegally, is finally being deported after lengthy legal wrangles dating back to 2017.

The hiatus continued despite a mental health tribunal concluding the paranoid schizophrenic still posed ‘a serious danger’ to the public after an incident with a knife three years ago.

The Home Office successfully overturned the most recent rulings allowing the man, named only as OSB, to stay on the grounds that if he is deported he may forget his medication, commit further offences and end up in prison in his homeland.

Appeal Court judge Mr Justice Bean said of the most recent previous ruling, by a first-tier immigration tribunal judge and backed by an upper tier panel of judges, said: ‘This is in my view impermissibly speculative.

‘It is not a sequence of events for which the UK can sensibly be held responsible. The consequences which are said to breach Article 3 (which prohibits inhuman or degrading treatment) are too remote.’

The Nigerian national, granted anonymity by the immigration courts and known only as OSB, had committed attempted rapes in 2009.

At Southwark Crown Court later that year, he was convicted of three attempted rapes and kidnapping with intent to commit a sexual offence, and detained in hospital due to his mental condition.

Daily Mail

A sad story:

A driver and passenger who filmed themselves at speeds of over 130mph (209kmh) in a 30mph zone have been jailed over the death of a man they crashed into.

Uways Hussain and Usmon Mahmood filmed themselves inhaling nitrous oxide from a balloon, running red lights and weaving through traffic before hitting 50-year-old Sylvester Abayomi, who was on his way to work.

Hussain was jailed for 11 years and eight months for causing death by dangerous driving, while Mahmood was jailed for 12 years and nine months for aiding and abetting causing death by dangerous driving.

Greater Manchester Police said the crash on Manchester’s Kingsway was “one of the worst disregards of speeding” officers had seen.

Sentencing at the city’s crown court earlier, Judge Nicholas Dean said the collision on 9 March was “wholly unnecessary and entirely avoidable”.

“It was a sustained, deliberate and escalating course of highly dangerous conduct over a prolonged period,” he said. “It was terrifying.”

The victim’s partner Denise Doyle described him as “the most caring soul and gentle person you could ever meet”.

“Sylvester was simply on his way to work,” she said. “An ordinary hard-working man. He should have returned home to me safely that day. Because of your actions he never did.”

BBC

In this episode, we sat down with Funso Doherty, an investment professional and public-policy advocate who has emerged as one of the most persistent opposition voices scrutinising Lagos State's governance.

As he prepares for the 2027 gubernatorial race, we interrogate his vision for the city that formed him.

We experienced technical challenges during this live recording, which meant we had to stitch together multiple different video and audio clips to bring this to you. We apologise for the variations in audio and video quality, but hope the substance of the conversation makes it more than worth the time and effort.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

A story that contains every social ill:

A male adult identified simply as Golden has been confirmed dead after he was shot by unknown assailants in the Igando area of Lagos State.

PUNCH Metro learnt from a police source on Thursday that the incident occurred on Tuesday in the Fatoki area of the community.

It was gathered that the assailants, numbering about two, rode into the community on a motorcycle in search of the deceased.

The assailants thereafter located him in the area and allegedly shot him in the process.

“We got a report that someone was shot on Fatoki Street, and when our men were deployed to the scene, the deceased was found lying lifeless in a pool of blood. He was taken to the hospital, where he was confirmed dead and later taken to the morgue,” the source disclosed.

The police, however, could not disclose the cause of the incident, noting that an investigation was ongoing.

Meanwhile, an anti-cultism advocacy platform, Confra Naija, in a post on Thursday, noted that the incident was business-related.

It wrote, “The victim in that incident was identified as Golden. Although two cult groups (Aye and Vikings) were mentioned in this incident, sources confirmed that the attack was not cult-related but rather a case of a business dispute involving Yahoo money.”

Punch

The silliest story I’ve read in a while but you can get anything published in Nigerian papers these days:

A shocking scandal is currently unfolding in Lagos after a popular billionaire businessman from Southern Nigeria (names withheld) was allegedly caught with his lover’s used sanitary pad hidden inside his pocket.

According to sources familiar with the matter, the wealthy man had reportedly been in a relationship with the lady for over seven years with the businessman reportedly sponsoring her lavish lifestyle, trips, and even purchasing a house for her in Lagos.

Trouble, however, started early this year after the businessman said to be a highly influential player in Oil and Gas ecosystem in the country visited the lady at her residence in highbrow Ikoyi area of Lagos state while she was on her monthly period.

Sources claim that after the man, who reportedly lives in Banana Island, Lagos left the house, the lady slept off, only to wake up later and discover that the menstrual pad she had discarded in the waste bin inside her bathroom the previous night had mysteriously disappeared.

Suspicious, she reportedly contacted the billionaire and asked him to return to the house immediately.

When confronted over the missing sanitary pad, the businessman allegedly denied taking it. But the terrified woman reportedly searched his bag and allegedly discovered the soiled sanitary pad hidden inside one of his pockets. She claimed that the circumstances surrounding the incident led her to strongly believe it was connected to ritual purposes and she questioned the chief why he took the pad but his explanation was unsatisfactory.

Vanguard

This is the lowest price I’ve seen in many many years of tracking such prices:

An Akure Magistrate’s Court in Ondo State, has heard how two minors were allegedly sold for N18,000 each and forced to hawk goods on the streets of Benin City, Edo State.

Two men, John Ushie, 32, and Innocent Ushie, 50, along with a woman, Evelyn Innocent, 38, were arraigned on charges of child trafficking, abduction and slave.

Police prosecutor, Augustine Omheneimhen told the court the offences occurred about 9 a.m., at 1, Chama Street, Ute, Ondo State.

The defendants allegedly lured two boys, aged 15 and 17 at the time of trial, from a riverbank in November 2025 when they were 14 and 15.

They said the men deceived them by claiming their father wanted to see them in Ogbese.

The victims were first taken to Utesi, where they spent a night, before being transported to Benin City, Edo State.

They were allegedly sold for N18,000 each to the wife of one of the defendants’ brothers and given trays to hawk goods on the streets.

The victims testified that they spent about four months in captivity and were separated for two months before being resold to another person for N76,000.

The defendants later contacted their parents and collected N10,000 before police traced and reunited the boys with their families, the court heard.

Vanguard

Interesting article on tomato growing in Nigeria. It is a very stressful and high maintenance crop, attributes which make it really hard to grow successfully in a country that loves jollof rice and stews. I believe this to be another manifestation of Psychological Dutch Disease:

However, the Chairman, National Association of Tomato Growers and Processors and Marketers of Nigeria NATPAN, Kano Sani Danladi Yakadawari said the severe weather conditions with excessive heat are not conducive for tomatoes to grow in an open field.

He said even farmers with greenhouses must be equipped with heat extractors to be able to grow tomatoes under the prevailing extreme weather conditions.

“Every year between April and July tomato production is low because of the heat. Tomatoes do not thrive in hot weather and excessive water.

“What is happening is that the dry season cultivated tomato is gradually ending and farmers are getting set for Wet season cultivation, so scarcity is manifesting because only areas with moisture continue to grow tomato though not in a large quantity.

“In essence it is the excessive heat that is responsible for the shortage and the surge in price. It’s not a question of improved variety. Tomatoes cannot grow where there is excessive heat nor does it like too much water,” Yadakwari explained.

[…]

“Instead of using fresh tomatoes to prepare sauce or stew, I mix dried tomatoes with fresh ones and then add tomato paste so that the taste will satisfy our customers. Every year we experience the same shortage and rising prices of tomato but people must eat with or without tomato,” Hamza noted.

Muhammad Suji, a civil servant, said he only buys Tomato paste with onions which he said is cheaper for his wife to prepare meals while noting that the current price isn’t affordable to people like him.

Another consumer Abu Ammar said currently his wife prepares Jollof rice and local soups with fresh Tomato worth N1000 mixed with tomato paste weekly pending when price reduces and supply increases.

Daily Trust

‘Monarchs’ in Osun are complaining about their allocations:

Traditional rulers, Baales, and elders in Ife North Local Government Area have appealed to the Osun State Government and relevant agencies to ensure proper administration of the statutory 5% local government allocation meant for traditional and chieftaincy institutions.

They added that some traditional functionaries reportedly receive as little as ₦1,000 monthly, a situation they said does not reflect the purpose of the allocation.

The call was made during a press conference convened by concerned custodians of cultural heritage in the council.

Speaking on behalf of the group, the Lodifi of Ipetumodu, Chief Orosanya Kehinde, said the briefing became necessary due to growing concerns over the transparency and disbursement of the funds under the local government autonomy framework.

The stakeholders cited the Supreme Court’s July 11, 2024 judgment in Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Abia State & 35 Others, which reaffirmed the financial autonomy of local governments and stressed accountability in the management of allocations.

They noted that traditional institutions play vital roles in peacebuilding, cultural preservation, security support, and community development at the grassroots.

The group expressed concern that the 5% allocation meant for traditional rulers, Baales, and chieftaincy affairs is not being fully and equitably administered within Ife North.

Tribune

Funny story from Delta state:

Peaceful protesters in Enhwe Community, Isoko South Local Government Area of Delta State, have said they are not in support of the blockade of Urri Road and the alleged illegal collection of levy from a businessman, Victor Wayles Egukhawhore, purportedly by the son of the traditional ruler of Enhwe Kingdom.

The protesters, including Enhwe community’s elders, women and youth, led by the Secretary of the Elders’ Council, Michael Akpakpa, entirely condemned the act by the monarch’s son and the denial that the arrest of the King.

Their protest placards read, “Prince Larry Eduvie Efekodha is not representing Enhwe,” “Enhwe does not belong to Efekodha family,” “Prince Larry Eduvie Efekodha you are too greedy,” “Efekodha Children should let Enhwe breath,” “High Chief Victor Wayles Egukhawhore has done well for us,” and “High Chief Victor Wayles Egukhawhore is our beloved son”.

The forceful collection of development fees (popularly called deve) is specifically prohibited under the Delta State Public and Private Properties Protection Law, 2018.

Under this law, it is a crime for community leaders, youth groups, or individuals to demand or forcefully collect any levy, fee, or rates (such as 10% land sales fees) from property owners and developers.”

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

Despite the current restrictions, Samuel Ugberaese has been able to obtain a visa to the US:

The FBI arrested Samuel Ugberaese after the US extradited him from Nigeria on charges relating to cross-border romance scams that targeted victims in the United States and elsewhere. A federal grand jury returned the indictment in the EDNC on January 22, 2021. United States Magistrate Judge Brian S. Myers ordered Ugberaese detained pending trial.

According to the indictment, Ugberaese and his co-conspirators used romance scheme techniques, including false stories and promises, to exploit and defraud victims into transferring money on their behalf. The indictment further alleges that Ugberaese conspired with a co-defendant Oluwadamilare Kolaogunbule, a naturalized U.S. citizen, to conduct financial transactions through his bank account network, including accounts registered to purported export companies, to conceal and disguise the nature, location, source, ownership, and control of the criminal proceeds.

Ugberaese is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. If convicted, he faces a statutory maximum penalty of 40 years in prison.

United States Attorney’s Office

Where does the zombie drug known as kush, that’s ravaging parts of West Africa, come from?

They come in blister packs of 10 like any normal painkiller, and you can buy them easily in roadside kiosks and street pharmacies across west Africa.

Millions of tapentadol tablets from India are helping drive a deadly opioid epidemic ravaging the region, with officials and researchers saying that they are also being added to the “zombie drug” kush.

The cheap pills are so strong that no regulatory authority in the world has approved them.

Yet an investigation found Indian pharmaceutical firms were flooding west Africa with the pills despite New Delhi vowing to crack down on the trade. Some shipments were even labeled “Harmless Medicines for Human Consumption.”

Customs records show millions of dollars’ worth of the high-strength synthetic opioid being shipped from India every month to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana, where even low doses of the drug are not permitted.

With opioids now heavily regulated in wealthier nations after being linked to 1 million deaths in the United States alone, some manufacturers in India — the world’s biggest producer of generic drugs — are pushing hard into Africa.

And in a frightening development, tapentadol is now being added to the “zombie drug” kush, health chiefs and researchers said.

Kush, infamous for the speed with which it hollows out its victims, has already been declared a national emergency in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Japan Times

News from Ireland:

Uruemu Adejinmi, Ireland’s first black female mayor and a Fianna Fail councillor in Longford, said constituents contacted her to express concern after Bertie Ahern’s comments about African migrants. Adejinmi, who was born in Nigeria, said Ahern’s remarks “were not good to hear” but she was pleased he had apologised and made clear that he was “against victimisation of migrants”.

She said the former taoiseach’s comments caused anger among people in her constituency and across the country but she hoped they would accept his apology.

“I have accepted it,” she said. “I hope others will accept it. The focus should return to addressing the issues in the community — housing, healthcare, infrastructure — and supporting everyone to live with dignity.”

“Constituents are commenting from all walks of life, migrants and natives alike,” she added. “I’ve heard from people who are upset by it and who called for an apology. People are entitled to react in whatever way they see fit.”

Ahern singled out people arriving from the Congo as a particular concern for him. He also said he was worried about “the next generation of Muslims” during a doorstep conversation with a voter while canvassing with John Stephens, Fianna Fail’s candidate in the Dublin Central by-election.

After his remarks, which were secretly recorded by the voter, became public, Ahern said he had been wrong to single out Africans, but defended his right to speak about immigration, even if his words had not been “careful or polished”.

Adejinmi said the comments did not reflect the man she had encountered in her dealings with him.

The Times

Clarissa generated a lot of buzz at Cannes this last week:

One of the most exciting movies playing during the Cannes Film Festival this year isn’t in the official lineup. Instead, “Clarissa” — a bold and wrenching adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” set entirely in Nigeria — is in Director’s Fortnight, the most prestigious of several smaller programs that run alongside the main event.

Independently run and housed in a theater several blocks from festival headquarters, this parallel event has a long history of showcasing new talent before the festival does. This is where the international film world first discovered Martin Scorsese, Chantal Akerman and Bong Joon Ho.

Since its premiere on Saturday, “Clarissa,” which stars Sophie Okonedo in the title role alongside David Oyelowo and Ayo Edebiri, has been rightly received with a chorus of wows. Directed by the filmmaking brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the movie counts as one of the few genuine discoveries in what has been a generally lackluster year.

[…]

If the American distributor Neon has its way, you will be hearing much more about Arie and Chuko — as they are billed in the film — who are 40-year-old fraternal twins. (Neon hasn’t set a date for the theatrical release, but “Clarissa” will be in rotation on the fall festival circuit.) Written by Chuko, this is the brothers’ second feature following “Eyimofe (This Is My Desire).” That critically lauded drama, about two Nigerians hoping to better their lives by emigrating to Europe, had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2020. It was there at a screening with a festival moderator, and shortly before the world started to shut down, that Arie first learned what he and his brother were going to direct for their follow-up project.

New York Times

Over in Sunderland:

Sunderland's Nigerian community is planning a peaceful protest as new councillors are inaugurated at City Hall this afternoon. The community is calling on Glenn Gibbins, who was elected to represent the Hylton Castle ward for Reform UK in local elections earlier this month, to resign after comments made on social media in 2024.

In the now-deleted post, Coun Gibbins complained about the "amount of Nigerians in the town", adding "should melt them all down and fill the potholes." He has been suspended by Reform UK, the party confirmed last Monday, and he is now standing as an independent councillor.

Sunderland Nigerian Community are planning to protest the inauguration of new councillors this afternoon. Chair Godwin Ejeh, who stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate in the Pennywell and South Hylton Ward but was unsuccessful, said that an apology issued to ChronicleLive by Coun Gibbins was "not remorseful" and that he "must resign".

Chronicle Live

Good feature on Nollywood past, present and future. Covers some of the themes we covered in our recent podcast recording with Chris Ihidero. Should be out in a couple of weeks:

Economic challenges and a low subscriber base saw the streaming giants pull funding for original content, a decision that left filmmakers pivoting and many observers asking: What’s next for Nollywood?

The answer lies in streamlining distribution. “We are encouraging regional sales,” says Ude. “If you are a filmmaker ready to work with sales agents and distributors to sell your films regionally, it’s more work, but you will make a lot more than you even made with the streamers coming on board. That way, when the streamers do come back, asking for your worldwide rights, it’s going to be a different story. We just have to take the hit now and work hard towards elevating ourselves.”

For Ude, the shift is a positive development, but “My Mother Is a Witch” and “Colours of Fire” director Niyi Akinmolayan, whose Anthill Studios was among those to ink a deal with Prime Video, warns of potential hurdles. “I’m gonna shock you,” he says. “Even in West Africa, it’s hard to sell a Nigerian film to Ghana, or to the Republic of Benin. They don’t get some of our jokes or subtleties. It’s also difficult to sell our films in South Africa. We may all look alike to the typical American or European, but culturally, we are very different.” His answer? Producing stories that close the gap. “I’ve told Nollywood filmmakers that one way forward is to develop films where you have a lot of cross-culture influences. When you do that, people might be excited because they can see someone like them in the story.”

Increasing access to cinemas is another effort, with the number of screens growing from 218 to 369 between 2019 and 2025. The ratio of Hollywood to Nollywood productions on those screens has shifted from 62-38% to 47-53% over that same period — highlighting the demand for local stories. “We didn’t have a lot of cinemas then as compared to now,” says Victoria Ogar, the head of distribution at FilmOne Entertainment, West Africa’s largest distributor. “We had Hollywood dominating our space, but then over time, we noticed that people started to react to Nollywood films. They speak to the value of the people, the culture.”

Los Angeles Times

A leading Australian politician has found herself in a very interesting type of scandal:

Documents released under Freedom of Information laws also reveal Ms Allan’s office spent almost $128,000 in taxpayer funds boosting her social media posts on Facebook and Instagram over eight months, outpacing the digital advertising spend under her predecessor Daniel Andrews.

The internal documents shed light on a dramatic surge in followers in late February and early March, which inflated the Premier’s Instagram audience from about 34,500 to more than 100,000, with many suspected fake accounts still remaining.

“Analytics compiled by the Premier’s office show that following the surge, just 37.3 per cent of followers were based in Australia, with large cohorts in Bangladesh (18.6 per cent), Nigeria (7.3 per cent), Jordan (2.8 per cent) and Saudi Arabia (2.1 per cent), pointing to the likelihood of fake accounts.

Only 26.4 per cent of her followers were from Melbourne, compared with 4.7 per cent from Dhaka in Bangladesh, 4 per cent from Abuja in Nigeria, 2.8 per cent in Amman in Jordan and 2 per cent in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

There is no evidence in the material that Ms Allan or the Labor Party purchased followers, with a trail of emails instead revealing the extent of alarm inside the Premier’s office when the surge in followers began.

On the night of Saturday, February 28, a senior staffer in Ms Allan’s office emailed a Meta representative alerting him about the suspicious activity and seeking an urgent intervention.

“In the past hour, our followers have increased by more than 40,000 – and these accounts are all ‘new’ accounts,” he wrote. “Can this please be escalated for us? Conscious this activity could see our account suspended.”

The Australian

If you have not signed up to the Berklee in Nigeria: Tiwa Savage Intensive Music Program, what exactly are you waiting for?

Tiwa Savage wants to ensure the next generation of Nigerian artists are well-equipped for the music industry.

Savage is a 2007 alumna of Berklee College of Music in Boston. Starting out as a backup singer at 17 for George Michael and many others, Savage attended the University of Kent in England to pursue a career in business administration. From there she landed a job at Royal Bank of Scotland, according to information shared by Berklee. But music was calling her back, and she returned to her first love.

“When I came to Berklee and saw a lot of the younger students, their drive and their passion, it recharged my batteries,” Savage told the college at the time she was attending. “[They’re] not thinking, ‘I’m going to save about $10,000 before I move,’ no, ‘I’m just going to get my backpack and move.’ I needed that fresh air, that atmosphere. I kind of felt like a 19-year-old.”

Savage is now recognized as a superstar, forging her own lane in the afrobeats genre. While she is grateful for her success over the decades from countless performances and awards, she admits that success has a different meaning to her nowadays.

“It’s great to perform in front of hundreds and thousands of people to win awards, but at some point, the thing that’s really gonna fulfill you is what’s going to outlive you or outlive your career,” she told CNN. “It was literally about 20 years ago when I walked through the halls of Berklee College of Music, but when I got to Berklee, I didn’t see many African students, and it was at that moment I knew that I was either going to bring Berklee to Nigeria or find a way to get more African students to be able to have this opportunity.”

She is now partnering with the college to establish the Berklee in Nigeria: Tiwa Savage Intensive Music Program, a four-day, no-cost program in Lagos, Nigeria. From a pool of more than 2,000 applications, 120 emerging musicians were selected nationwide, according to TRT Afrika.

Afrotech

Edikan Adiakpan (see BTH 100) has pleaded guilty:

A 34-year-old Nigerian national living in Houston pleaded guilty Tuesday to operating an illegal money-transmitting business that funneled proceeds from a sophisticated international email scam.

Edikan Adiakpan admitted in federal court that he used a company he controlled, Akama Lifestyle, to move funds for fraudsters between 2020 and 2022 while keeping a percentage as a fee. Federal prosecutors stated the funds originated from “business email compromise” (BEC) schemes that targeted more than 10 victims across at least eight states.

Among those targeted was a California research group dedicated to developing treatments for U.S. veterans.

The fraud relied on “spoofed” emails designed to mimic legitimate suppliers and creditors. Victims were tricked into diverting payments to bank accounts controlled by the fraudsters rather than their actual business partners.

According to court documents, the scope of the operation became clear when one victim wired $927,080 to the fraudsters. A portion of those proceeds was then sent to Adiakpan, who redeemed a $60,000 cashier’s check for himself as a kickback for his role in the scheme. The laundering process involved conspirators moving money rapidly between multiple bank accounts they controlled before converting the funds into cashier’s checks to be cashed by Adiakpan.

FOX26

Update on John Fashanu:

The daughter of veteran Gladiators host and England footballer John Fashanu is set to marry a billionaire African businessman in a lavish wedding held over three days and spanning two continents.

Bride Amal Fashanu patched up a bitter feud with her famous father on the eve of her wedding that will see him walk her up the aisle when she marries Ghanaian tycoon Mohamad Odaymat.

Speaking publicly for the first time about the planned epic event, Ms Fashanu revealed how her wedding to an heir to one of Ghana’s most influential billionaire families will take place in both Africa and Europe assisted by private jets.

And thanks to her making up with her famous father, he is now set to play a prominent role in both legs - despite concerns about his declining health.

Amal, 37, told how she was moved to patch things up with the former England and Wimbledon striker when his health took a turn for the worse.

Amal revealed John, now 63, has been laid low by a mystery condition which she believes may be connected to him heading thousands of balls during his 17 years at the top of the professional game - as other former pro footballers have suffered.

Now she is hoping that John - who has been living in Nigeria for the past 13 years - will be fully recovered in time to be one of the guests of honour on the biggest day of her life.

Amal said more than 600 guests will be invited to their celebrations - exactly a year after their legal wedding - which will be held in Nigeria, where her father lives, and Spain - which is home to her mother, former model Marisol Acuna Duenas.

Daily Mail

A small note: The episode ends a bit abruptly – our apologies for the audio hiccup. But the conversation itself is packed with insight, and we hope you enjoy it.

There is a funny thing that happens whenever a famous or high-status Nigerian says something true but inelegantly. Everyone immediately starts debating tone. In this case, it was the CEO of Moniepoint, one of Nigeria's fast-growing unicorn fintech companies, complaining about the dearth of talent in Nigeria, so much so that he could not fill 500 open senior positions in the company. Was he rude? Was he being elitist? Was he looking down on Nigerians? Could he have said it better? Is this another example of Nigerian tech people speaking as if they are the only smart people in the room?

All fair questions, perhaps. But tone is often where serious conversations go to die. I think the comments have generated strong reactions because they touched a nerve. Nobody likes to hear that their country cannot produce enough highly skilled people for its own best companies. It sounds insulting. It sounds like the sort of thing people say after raising foreign capital and attending too many conferences where they are asked to explain "Africa".

But the uncomfortable question is not whether Nigeria has smart people. Of course it does. That question is boring. The better question is what kind of economy produces senior talent at scale? Not brilliant individuals. Nigeria has always had those. Not people who can pass exams. We have those too. Not people who can hustle, improvise, survive, learn three skills at once, and make something out of almost nothing. If anything, Nigeria produces too many of those because it gives people no choice.

The question is narrower and more important: what kind of economy produces large numbers of people who have learned how to solve complex problems inside complex organisations? That is the question behind the outrage. And once you ask it properly, the issue stops being about one CEO’s phrasing and becomes a much larger indictment of Nigeria's development model - if it can even be said that it has one. Talent is not born. It is not summoned by LinkedIn posts. It is not produced by vibes, youthfulness, intelligence, or "tech ecosystem" branding. Talent is a product of institutions, and we know that is one area in which Nigeria has consistently fallen short.

Human Capital is not a Certificate

We talk about human capital as if it were a thing people carry around with them. Like a CV. Or a university degree. Or an online course certificate from Coursera. This is one reason the debate becomes confused very quickly. Someone says Nigerian graduates are not ready for work. Someone else responds that Nigerian youths are brilliant and hardworking. Someone else blames ASUU. Someone blames bad parents, culture, "yahoo", and "hookup". Someone blames colonialism. Someone posts a thread about how they learned Python in six months and now earn in dollars. All of these things can be true and still miss the point.

Human capital is not simply schooling. It is not even simply skill. It is the accumulated capacity of a person to function productively in the world: health, language, numeracy, judgment, discipline, confidence, social competence, technical knowledge, emotional regulation, practical experience, and the ability to learn further. The last bit is very important. A good education is not just what you know. It is whether you have been formed into the kind of person who can keep learning.

A recent World Bank report1 on human capital shed more light on this point. Human capital is built in a collection of settings: homes, neighbourhoods, and workplaces. It is not restricted to schools and classrooms. This sounds obvious until you apply it to Nigeria. By the time a company is hiring a senior engineer, product manager, operations lead, compliance specialist, data scientist, or finance controller, it is not merely evaluating "the education system". It is evaluating the entire social history of the candidate. Was the person well-nourished as a child? Did they grow up in a household where language, curiosity, books, and adult attention were present? Did they attend a school where teachers showed up and knew what they were teaching? Did they live in a neighbourhood where safety, electricity, transport, sanitation, and peer effects supported learning rather than constantly interrupting it? Did their first job teach them anything? Did their second job have competent managers? Did anyone ever show them what excellence looks like? The talent conversation gets trivialised because people enter the debate at the point of hiring, when much of the story has already been written.

As the World Bank report makes painfully clear, skill gaps appear very early. In some countries, children whose mothers have less education already show large vocabulary and mathematics deficits by age five, before school has had enough time to do much. These gaps then persist through childhood and adolescence. It means that by the time a child enters primary school, society has already made large investments in some children and large non-investments in others. The school then receives both groups and pretends it is starting from zero. Policymakers and other stakeholders in Nigeria always speak as if human capital can be repaired at the end of the pipeline.

We wait until university, then complain about graduates. We wait until NYSC, then complain that young people lack discipline. We wait until recruitment, then complain that candidates cannot write properly. We wait until a startup needs managers, then complain that there are no senior people. But that person being interviewed by Moniepoint at the age of 28 already began that journey when they were two years old. This is not to downplay personal responsibility. It is a pushback against magical thinking. Human capital is accumulated. The deficits compound, just like advantages.

Firms Don't Just Buy Talent

A firm that says it cannot find enough senior talent may be telling the truth. But if many firms say the same thing, the question is no longer simply: "What is wrong with schools?" It is also: "Where are people supposed to become senior?" Senior talent is produced by junior talent being placed inside organisations that know how to teach, challenge, discipline, reward, promote, and retain people over time. A school can teach you accounting. A firm teaches you how accounting works when invoices are late, when regulators have questions, when customers are angry, when software breaks, when the CFO wants numbers by 7 a.m., and someone somewhere is trying to steal from the company. A school can teach you software engineering. A firm teaches you how to maintain systems that cannot go down, work with legacy code, review other people’s work, communicate trade-offs, respond to incidents, and build products under constraints. A school can teach you management theory. A firm teaches you that human beings are complicated, incentives matter, information is always incomplete, and the organogram is usually lying.

This kind of knowledge is not appreciated enough. It is not "soft skills". It is not secondary. It is the core of productive competence. The great economist Kenneth Arrow made this fundamental observation in his famous idea (and paper) on "learning by doing"2. Production itself is a learning process. People and organisations become more productive by repeatedly making, coordinating, correcting, and improving. Knowledge is not only invented in laboratories or taught in classrooms. It is acquired in the act of doing.

Learning by doing happens inside firms through routines and process improvement; across firms through labour mobility, imitation, suppliers, and clusters; and at the national level when institutions learn from experience and embed those lessons into policy and production3. This is why the firm is such an important site of human capital formation. A good firm does not merely consume talent. It upgrades it. It takes a person with potential and gives them harder problems. It surrounds them with people better than them. It creates routines. It documents processes. It punishes sloppy work. It rewards competence. It lets people see how decisions are made. It exposes them to customers, regulators, technologies, logistics, capital, risk, and failure. After five years in such a place, the person is no longer the same way they joined. They become better.

In Nigeria, too many people spend their working lives in organisations that do not teach very much. They work in microfirms that are permanently close to death. They work for bosses who are themselves improvising. They work in businesses where there is no training budget, no management system, no documentation, no internal labour market, no serious mentorship, no process discipline, and no patient capital. They work in survival mode. You can learn many things in survival mode. But it rarely produces deep organisational capability.

The World Bank report says this directly. Workplaces are not only places where skills are used; they are places where human capital is built. But many workers in low- and middle-income countries are concentrated in jobs with little opportunity for learning: small-scale agriculture, low-quality self-employment, and microfirms. The report notes that returns to experience are lower among the self-employed than among wage workers, and lower in small firms than in medium and large firms. One person spends five years in a structured organisation with competent managers, demanding customers, audited systems, performance reviews, and exposure to increasingly complex tasks. Another person spends five years doing repetitive work in a small business where nothing scales and every month is a cash-flow emergency. Both have "five years experience." But they have not accumulated the same human capital.

This is one reason the Nigerian labour market is so strange. Employers ask for young people with ten years of experience because they want maturity without having paid for formation. Young workers want senior salaries because they know firms will discard them if they do not bargain aggressively. Firms underinvest in training because workers may leave. Workers leave because firms do not train, promote, or pay them enough. Everyone’s behaviour is individually understandable. The collective result is a low-capability equilibrium.

The Economy is the Curriculum

There is an even deeper layer to the problem. Human capital is not produced only by homes, schools, and firms. It is produced by the structure of the economy itself. A country’s real knowledge is not measured by how many people have degrees. It is revealed by what the country can do. Can it manufacture medical devices? Can it build reliable logistics systems? Can it run large hospitals? Can it design and maintain industrial machinery? Can it produce pharmaceuticals to standard? Can it manage ports efficiently? Can it regulate complex financial markets? Can it build software at scale? Can it export services competitively? Can it coordinate thousands of suppliers to deliver a high-quality product on time?

The economic complexity literature, associated with César Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann, argues that development is fundamentally about accumulating productive capabilities. These capabilities include skills, infrastructure, institutions, supplier networks, technical standards, managerial routines, and know-how. They are complementary. They work in combinations. Having one without the others is often useless. This is why development is so hard. It is not enough to say: "train more engineers.". Engineers for what? To work in which industries? With which suppliers? Under which standards? Using which machines? Serving which customers? Financed by which capital? Protected by which contracts? Regulated by which institutions? Learning from which senior people?

Capabilities are not isolated Lego blocks lying around waiting to be assembled. They are more like ecosystems. One capability makes another more useful. A country that already has many capabilities finds it easier to acquire new ones. A country with few capabilities struggles because each missing capability reduces the value of the others. Poor countries do not automatically catch up just because they are poor. They converge only when they accumulate the right combinations of capabilities that allow them to enter more complex activities. Otherwise, they remain stuck in low-productivity traps4.

I believe this should change how we talk about talent. A low-complexity economy can produce educated people. It can produce brilliant people. It can even produce globally successful individuals. But it will struggle to produce deep pools of experienced people in complex fields because the economy does not generate enough complex tasks. If the economy is dominated by trading, importing, arbitrage, political access, informal services, subsistence production, rent extraction, and small firms that never scale, then that is what most people will learn. They will learn how to survive, bargain, improvise, evade, endure, and move quickly. These are real skills. In Nigeria, they are often necessary skills.

But they are not the same as the skills produced by an economy full of export manufacturers, research labs, engineering firms, large hospitals, advanced logistics companies, competitive banks, deep suppliers, well-regulated utilities, and technology companies operating at the frontier. Moniepoint itself became a unicorn by making it easier to collect cash, not by fundamentally reshaping how Nigerians pay for things.

A Nigerian developer who has never worked inside a serious engineering culture is not stupid. A Nigerian nurse who has never worked in a properly run hospital is not lazy. A Nigerian technician who has never had access to modern tools is not inferior. A Nigerian manager who has only managed chaos is not genetically incapable of order. But talent develops through the kind of problems it solves. When the economy offers mostly low-complexity problems, it produces mostly low-complexity experience. The few people who acquire high-complexity experience often do so by leaving the country, working remotely for foreign firms, or joining the tiny number of local organisations that operate near global standards. So when executives complain about a shallow talent pool in Nigeria, perhaps it is because the pool is being filled from a very narrow river.

Moniepoint, which calls itself Africa’s leading payments infrastructure, raised $200 million last October, bringing its total funding to $320 million; by any measure it is a juggernaut in Nigeria’s and Africa’s tech scene. Eniolorunda’s remarks have since ignited a firestorm in the rarefied corner of the Nigerian internet where the country’s young elite talk among themselves. The comments start around 16:45 in the video below:

If I may be so presumptuous, much of the ensuing debate has been pitched, I think, at the wrong altitude. Some heard an insult to Nigerians; others heard a blunt truth about talent scarcity. Eniolorunda has since tried to clarify his remarks on X, explaining that his real complaint is the scarcity of senior technical talent still resident in Nigeria, the thinness of the feeder industries that supply them, and the way emigration - japa - continually drains an already shallow pool.

First, I want to articulate something that has been turning in my mind for a long time - something I am still learning how to express fully. In Nigeria today, the idea of government and the language of state responsibility have raced far ahead of the actual capacity of the state. Furthermore, the very existence of this idea of government has become an alibi for elite inaction. Because Nigeria nominally possesses a government charged with everything from education to security, the elite have learned to think differently about their own role - to see it as diminished, or even irrelevant.

Consider it another way: imagine Nigeria as a frontier country still in the process of being built and populated, where the government has only a faint footprint or is altogether absent. In such a place, whose responsibility would education and security be? The revealed preference of the Nigerian elite shows that, on some fundamental level, they already understand the answer. They never leave their own education or security to chance - which is to say, they never leave it to a government with almost no capacity to deliver either at scale.

Hunger Games

I like to describe Nigerian education as a sort of Hunger Games style tournament. The best way to illustrate this is by doing some data triangulation (there is no single data source for this, which itself buttresses the point I’m going to make).

Depending on definition and age range, Nigeria has roughly 18 million primary-to-secondary-age children outside of the formal schooling system. UNICEF reports that 12.4 million children have never attended school at all. These are children who are screened out of the tournament even before it begins.

Now of those who manage to beat this first hurdle of getting into school at all, staying in school gets harder the further they go. The MICS report [PDF, lots of data] defines dropout as the share of children who attended a given grade in one school year but were no longer attending the following year. For the last grade of a level, “dropout” means non-transition to the next level between the previous and current school year. MICS reports that dropout rates in primary are 3–6% in the lower grades but rise to 12% in Grade 6. In its dropout table, the primary-level dropout headcount is 1,353,300. I hope you’re keeping score - the tournament is heating up.

What if you make it past primary school? The next major hurdle point in the tournament is Junior Secondary year 3 (JSS3). MICS reports that junior-secondary dropout rises from 2% in Grade 7 (JSS1) to 8% in Grade 9 (JSS3). Its dropout table gives the junior-secondary dropout headcount as 504,800. The pathway analysis looks something like this - out of every 100 Nigerian kids aged 15-17, 72% made it into secondary school, 52% completed JSS3, and 51% transitioned to senior secondary school. The main issue after JSS is not only formal dropout but delay, over-age progression, and failure to reach senior secondary on time. MICS says 18% of 15–17-year-olds are still attending lower secondary when they should already be in upper secondary. That’s a topic for another day so let’s stay with the tournament.

The next major transition point is what happens after you leave secondary school. The MICS report says the senior-secondary dropout rate ranges from 3% in Grade 10 (SS1) to 84% in Grade 12 (SS3), but it also warns that Grade 12 dropout means the student had not yet transitioned to a higher level between the previous and current school year. So this is not the same as saying 84% will never enter university. Some may transition later; some may go to polytechnics, colleges of education, foreign institutions, vocational tracks or non-university tertiary routes.

We are now approaching the business end of the tournament. For the university end of the pipeline, NUC’s 2019 Statistical Digest records 2,159,461 [PDF, page 150 of this ridiculous report] students enrolled in Nigerian universities at all undergraduate and postgraduate levels, full-time and part-time. It also records 785,259 undergraduate new entrants in 2019 [page 183]. In that same year, the full-time undergraduate output was 197,873, and part-time undergraduate output was 15,842. Total graduate output across all programmes and modes, including postgraduate degrees, was 267,229 [page 280]. The 785k students are obviously not the same people as the 267k but it gives us a sense of what might be going on i.e. a significant number who enter university do not complete their studies.

Bringing it all together, UNESCO’s 2025 country profile puts Nigeria’s school-age population at about 37.3 million primary-age children, with 5.96 million in the last grade of primary age band. Against that sort of annual cohort size, roughly 300,000 undergraduate finishers is a very narrow far end of the pipeline.

Now let us award the tournament prizes. The federal government’s direct budget for tertiary education (Universities + polytechnics + colleges of education + a bunch of alphabet soup tertiary agencies like NUC and NBTE etc) came to ₦1.5 trillion ($1.1 billion) in 2025. The enrolment number for 2025 was certainly a lot higher than the 785k in 2019 above. Whatever the number is, this is what gets spent on them. We can add the new student loan scheme under NELFUND to this, because frankly, we all know those loans are never getting repaid in any meaningful way. NELFUND has so far disbursed about ₦242 billion ($177 million), in student loans, of which roughly ₦158 billion has gone to institutions and ₦85 billion to students as upkeep allowances. There’s also TETFUND, an earmarked tertiary-education intervention funded through the education tax system. Their currently published beneficiary list - 96 universities, 75 colleges of education, and 75 polytechnics - those per-institution figures imply an indicative total of about ₦537 billion ($392 million).

There’s more. The hunger games finish when you complete higher education in Nigeria and become part of that 300,000 figure or whatever the 2026 equivalent number is. At that point, you qualify for the National Youth Service Scheme (NYSC) where you pretend to work for the country for a year and the government keeps up that pretence by paying you a salary for 12 months. This NYSC alone is about 47% of the direct federal university budget, and about 33% of the broader direct federal tertiary budget in size. There is ₦486 billion appropriated to it in the 2026 budget.

Nigeria spends heavily at the narrow end of the pipeline - universities, NYSC, student loans - while millions are lost before they ever get close to that point. If your survive the hunger games, the government will open the funding taps to award your prizes.

How much, by comparison, is spent on primary education? Because primary education is the responsibility of Nigeria’s states, an estimate can only be reached through triangulation. According to the Nigerian Governors Forum, states spent or budgeted ₦1 trillion on education in 2022, ₦1.6 trillion in 2023, ₦2.4 trillion in 2024, and ₦3.6 trillion in 2025 - though in 2024 they actually utilised only 67% of the education budget, leaving an ₦800 billion shortfall. Those figures cover all levels of education. To isolate primary spending, we can draw a range from two states: a CSEA basic-education financing paper [PDF, page 19] shows that Kaduna allocated about 57% of its education budget to primary education, while Lagos allocated around 37%. That spread is useful: Kaduna reflects the public-school-heavy northern model, whereas Lagos has a much larger private-school sector. Taken together, the best estimate is that the 36 states and their local-government arms spend roughly ₦1.0 trillion to ₦1.2 trillion a year on public primary education - less than $1 billion at current budget exchange-rate assumptions.

What is spent on primary education - supposedly the foundation on which the entire system rests - amounts to a tiny fraction of what goes to tertiary education, by which point it is already too late to make much difference. The reason is not hard to decipher: the Nigerian government has no way of seeing its citizens. To extract anything for yourself, you must first make yourself visible through violence, hostage-taking, or sheer noise. University students and their lecturers are virtuosos of that particular skillset. Primary school children are not.

Pipeline Problems

It’s not hard to see why Eniolorunda and Moniepoint are struggling to fill 500 roles. There’s no great mystery in a country of 200 million people with high employment somehow struggling to fill 500 skilled positions: everyone is waiting at the end of the same tournament to grab the same 500 winners. As he put it in his clarification on X:

But we must tell ourselves the truth. Nigeria currently doesn’t have enough highly skilled technical talent resident in Nigeria to build companies that can scale globally.

Interestingly, I have also read a lot of employers double down and agree with my current diagnosis around our country’s technical talent pipeline gap and confirmed it is true. Former Minister, Kemi Adeosun also referenced Africa’s richest man, Alhaji Aliko Dangote comments around finding the right quality and quantity of talents for his refinery project.

Let me ask a hard question - can we say that Nigeria has enough highly skilled technical talent still resident in Nigeria? That's a huge conundrum that any organization that wants to maintain market leadership must solve for.

It is definitely true. If you and everyone else are trying to hire from the same shrunken pool of tournament winners, scarcity is inevitable. And that is even before you consider what children are learning in school - if they’re learning anything at all. The country can keep pretending the problem isn’t there, but it remains a handbrake on whatever development ambitions Nigeria might hold.

Here we come to a fundamental question and why I’m writing this piece. I am here to tell you that the job of increasing the size of that pipeline belongs to Eniolorunda as much as anyone else. It is his responsibility.

I like to use the United States as my go-to development template (I know, I am almost alone in this but I shall continue this good fight on your behalf). Even by 1930, the US government was spending only about 3.6% of GDP - this was all government spending, meaning education would have been some small percentage of that. This gives a sense of how small Washington still was before the fully matured twentieth-century state. But Congress had already used post roads and subsidised newspaper circulation to build national communications infrastructure, and the Morrill Act used federal land grants to create colleges for agriculture and the mechanic arts. But here is the thing - just because a state is thin does not mean that the burden of building up human capital is somehow removed. It is redistributed.

The entrepreneur’s burden - especially in a country like Nigeria - is not just to wait for the conclusion of the tournament to hire skilled people. It is to help build the institutions through which ordinary people become skilled. I don’t make the rules. If you have been successful in Nigeria, the responsibility to do things that might seem like the job of the state automatically falls on you. Since there are a tonne of things the Nigerian state does very badly, the avenues for intervention are endless. Since upgrading human capital provides by far the best returns, I prefer to focus on that.

Rosenwald

Julius Rosenwald was an American businessman and philanthropist, born in Springfield, Illinois, in 1862, to German-Jewish immigrant parents. He grew up close to Abraham Lincoln’s world - literally: he lived in Springfield and as a boy even sold pamphlets at the 1874 dedication of Lincoln’s tomb, where Ulysses S. Grant spoke. He attended public school, then left high school as a teenager to work in the clothing trade in New York.

He then moved into the wholesale clothing business, eventually entering the orbit of Sears, Roebuck & Company, the great mail-order retail firm that served rural America. In 1895, Rosenwald and his brother-in-law Aaron Nusbaum each invested $37,500 in Sears. Rosenwald rose rapidly: he became vice president in 1896 and president in 1908, later serving as chairman until his death in 1932.

He didnt just use his wealth to donate to schools however. He forced a coalition between Black communities, local government, and philanthropy to build educational infrastructure where the state had failed. His business genius was organisational. Sears was a mail-order company selling to a vast, scattered rural population. That required catalogues, logistics, inventory control, customer trust, fulfilment systems, and a national commercial imagination. Rosenwald identified and implemented management and business strategies that drove Sears’s growth in dry goods, consumer durables, hardware, furniture, farm equipment and other goods across the United States through catalogue marketing.

That background shaped his philanthropy. He thought like a systems man. The Rosenwald school programme he came up with was not “charity” in the normal sense. It was logistics, standards, incentives, co-financing, accountability, replication, and scale.

He was not a revolutionary in the modern ideological sense. He worked within the constraints of Jim Crow America. He did not launch a direct frontal attack on segregation but he did something that was, in practice, deeply disruptive: he helped Black rural communities secure real buildings, better teachers, longer school terms, books, and a stronger claim on public funds. Rosenwald later described his own philanthropy as an attempt to “cure the things that seem wrong.” He also did not like simply handing money over. He preferred to use matching grants, co-investment, and local commitment. He was described as an “unorthodox philanthropist” who opposed perpetual endowments. In his 1929 Atlantic essay, he argued that permanent endowments could make institutions “endowment poor”, that is, wealthy on paper but unable to seize urgent opportunities.

His own Rosenwald Fund was deliberately time-limited. It was created in 1917 and closed in 1948, after spending itself down. This was intentional: Rosenwald believed each generation should take responsibility for the problems of its own time. That is to say - do not build monuments to your own virtue; build mechanisms that solve live problems (one reason Rosenwald is less famous than Carnegie or Rockefeller is that he resisted turning philanthropy into self-advertisement. He did not want his name plastered everywhere.)

The decisive personal connection that motivated him to invest in black education was Booker T. Washington. Rosenwald read Washington’s Up from Slavery, met him in 1911, and became convinced that Black education in the South was a major moral and national problem. In 1912, he gave Washington $25,000 for Black colleges and preparatory academies; Washington then proposed using a portion of it to help Black communities near Tuskegee build rural elementary schools, on condition that the communities raised matching funds. The context was grim. Southern public education was underfunded generally, but Black education was far worse. Around the turn of the twentieth century, former slave states spent about $4.92 per white child versus $2.21 per Black child. There is a real parallel here with Nigeria: the state existed, school boards existed, taxation existed - but Black children were still being denied serious educational infrastructure. The state can exist formally while leaving millions outside the machinery of human capital formation.

Designing a school programme

It’s worth outlining how Rosenwald’s school programme worked in some detail.

The first phase worked through the Tuskegee Institute. Rosenwald gave Washington funds and Washington used part of the money to support rural school construction near Tuskegee. By Washington’s death in 1915, Rosenwald had supported grants for around 80 Black schools in three states.

As the programme grew, it became too large for Tuskegee to administer informally. Rosenwald created the Rosenwald Fund in 1917. In 1920, the programme moved its headquarters to Nashville, where staff set clearer standards and administered grants at scale.

Communities had to raise money, contribute labour, donate land or materials, and secure public support. The Fund required matching funds from the Black community and the white school district. This was both powerful and morally complicated. It was powerful because it forced local governments to contribute. It was morally complicated because Black communities were already taxpayers and were often being made to pay again for schools that public authorities should have funded properly in the first place. Still, as a mechanism, it worked. The Fund contributed $4.3 million, Black communities contributed $4.7 million, and local governments were compelled to spend $18.1 million.

The schools were not meant to remain private charitable schools. They were to become part of the public school system. Black communities often bought land and built schools that were then turned over to local school authorities. In other words, Rosenwald wasn’t so much substituting for the state as dragging it into its responsibility.

The Fund issued school plans and insisted on standards. Early designs came from Tuskegee’s architectural programme; later, after the move to Nashville, architect Fletcher Dresslar revised the plans. The schools were designed for light, air, comfort, and health, with careful attention to windows, ventilation, paint colours, site orientation, and classroom layout. Rosenwald was funding quality, not just buildings. Many rural Black children had previously studied in churches, barns, fields, or improvised rooms. A Rosenwald school was meant to embody order, dignity, light, seriousness, and modernity. The Rosenwald Fund refused to make final payments on buildings that failed to meet its exterior or interior standards.

The Fund also supported teacher homes, known as teacherages, because teachers often came from outside rural communities and needed somewhere to live. It also funded shop buildings for practical training in carpentry, metalwork, agriculture, and related skills.

By the end of the fund in 1932, the numbers looked something like this - 4,977 schools funded, 217 teachers’ homes, 163 shop buildings, 16 states covered, and 663,625 students served.

A small ray of hope

I’ve long been drawn to the Rosenwald story - there was a documentary about him a decade or so ago, well worth finding if you can - because it illustrates how a privileged elite can take up the obligation of nation-building as a distributed effort in places where government simply cannot meet its responsibilities. Consider the 1,681 public library buildings funded by Andrew Carnegie’s foundation, with communities themselves committing public money to maintain them; or the more than 100,000 demonstration farms that John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board created in partnership with the USDA, guided by the logic that higher agricultural productivity would lift incomes, and higher incomes would in turn widen the tax base for public schools; or Peter Cooper’s Cooper Union, created on the proposition that education served not just prosperity but civic virtue. Cooper made it free for the working classes, opened it to women as well as men, imposed no colour bar, and stocked a public reading room with newspapers and periodicals. These endeavours are all of a piece - the same tradition of a shared burden willingly shouldered by the elite to build a society.

Nor did they take the easy way- merely writing cheques for a university or covering lecturers’ salaries. Instead, they brought the experience they had earned in business to bear on philanthropic nation-building, targeting the problem directly and in a structured, sustainable way. That is why I consider the current class of Nigerian billionaires more or less a lost cause. Having made their money through no great feat of innovation, they have little from their own business lives to bring to bear on the nation’s myriad problems.

This is why today’s Nigerian founders and entrepreneurs matter. Unlike many of the billionaires before them, some have actually built operating companies inside Nigerian conditions - solving for trust, payments, logistics, distribution, regulation, fraud, infrastructure, and talent. They have made things work where they were not supposed to work. That experience is not nothing.

So when a Nigerian entrepreneur says he cannot find 500 people to hire, my response is not “How dare you?” It is: “Congratulations. You have discovered the country you live in.” And having discovered it, the question becomes what you intend to do about it. If you have somehow made serious money in Nigeria as it currently exists, then the responsibility of improving Nigeria’s human capital has become yours as well. This may be annoying. But that is how success works in a poor country: you do not merely acquire wealth, you acquire homework. (I have cleverly protected myself from such expectations by not being a billionaire.)

The talent shortage is not an inconvenient externality but part of the same society from which your business draws customers, workers, legitimacy, and profit. The broken school system, the weak reading culture, the complete lack of investment by the elite in knowledge production, the absence of serious vocational formation - these are now upstream of your balance sheet and it is enlightened self-interest to want to fix them. A country that cannot produce enough educated people will eventually grow hostile even to those who found a way to prosper inside it. You can build a great company in such a country, but you cannot build an indefinitely successful business on top of a permanently undereducated society.

The next frontier is not another app. It is the Nigerian mind.

We take a hard look at the past six years and discuss whether market-creating innovations are truly enough to counter macro shocks, fragile states, and a global poverty reduction rate that has slowed to a standstill.

The podcast closes with his reflections on Clayton Christensen and what it was like to work with him for so long.

Hope you enjoy the episode

We have been able to get a few more tickets made available for Frontiers Matters Live in Lagos with Funsho Doherty on May 11th. Tickets cost N50,000 each but you get a N25,000 food voucher from the venue included in that. Get your tickets HERE.

The regular podcast should return with a guest next week.

This newsletter may or may not get to your inboxes for the next 2 weeks.

Enjoy the week’s selection below and see you in a few weeks, maybe.

Nigerian Media

If you have cash to spare, invest in Vigilante services. It is a booming business. Don’t say this newsletter does not give you business tips:

For residents of Tungan -Maje, Pegi, Abattoir extension, which cuts across Abaji, Kuje and Gwagwalada Area Councils of the territory who have suffered various kinds of crimes, especially kidnapping in the past, making local internal security arrangements remained the alternative means of safeguarding their homes and property.

In the same vein, residents of Unguwar Idris, Unguwar Toka, Ungwan Sarki and New site in Tungan -Maje community in Gwagwalada Area Council of the territory said they pay heavily to engage the services of vigilante groups to provide security in their areas.

Mrs Patience Malachy, a resident of Unguwar Toka, in Tungan -Maje, said that due to rising insecurity in the area, they were forced to organise a meeting and resolved to contribute N2, 000 monthly per tenant in order to engage vigilantes to safeguard their houses.

She noted that prior to coming up with the local security arrangement, some miscreants usually invaded homes to steal valuables when people have left for work.

She said when the trend continued unabated residents of the area decided to come up with the idea of contributing money to engage the services of local vigilantes.

Malachy, said while it wasn’t easy for them to make such a contribution, the initiative had helped in reducing the rate of insecurity in the area.

She said for over two years, there has been no case of kidnapping around the area because of the vigilantes’ effort who are always on ground day and night.

A resident of an estate in Pegi community in Kuje area council of the FCT, Kolawale Benjamin, lamented how hoodlums always invaded the estate, especially after tenants have left for work, a development which forced them to engage services of local vigilantes.

He said each tenant pays N1,500 monthly for vigilante service in the area.

“Before now, there’s a provision shop where my wife sold things in front of the estate. Any time she closes, hoodlums come overnight to burgle the place. Until when we decided to come up with the initiative of engaging the services of the vigilantes before they stopped”, she said.

Daily Trust

Are we going to blame hunger for this one?

Consequently, the Archbishop directed that the Blessed Sacrament must never be left unattended during exposition.

The letter partly read, “It is with great sadness that we inform you of the desecration of the Chapel of Adoration of St Mulumba Parish, Wetheral Road, Owerri.

“As reported by the Parish Priest, Rev. Fr Raymond Madu, unknown persons opened parts of the roof, gained access through the ceiling, and made away with the monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament.

“It is alleged that this incident occurred during rainfall in the early hours of Wednesday, April 29, 2026. Following this act of irreverence, the Archbishop, His Grace, Most Rev. Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji, hereby directs all parishioners of St Mulumba Parish, Owerri, to observe a one-week prayer of reparation from Friday, May 1 to Friday, May 8, 2026, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. daily.

“All priests in the Owerri Archdiocese are reminded to strictly adhere to the norms and directives regarding the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and adoration to avoid any recurrence.

“We emphasise that exposition is to take place only when a fitting attendance of the faithful is assured (cf. Can. 942). The Blessed Sacrament must never be left unattended during exposition.”

Punch

How Rabiu Shuaibu went from Almajiri to entrepreneur:

He was born into a modest family in Kebbi State, the second of six children: three boys and three girls.

In a household where Western education was neither a priority nor a shared dream, Rabiu stood

alone, nursing a quiet but stubborn desire to go to school.

His parents did not believe in that ambition. For them, the path was clear: the Almajiri system.

At a tender age, he was sent far from home to Minna for Islamic education. It was meant to shape his future.

But Rabiu, even as a boy, knew he wanted more: Western education! There was no financial support, no encouragement, no safety net but there was resolve. He refused to be broken by neglect.

Instead, he chose defiance,not loud or con frontational, but steady, deliberate, and deeply personal. Out of sheer determination,

Rabiu wangled his way into acquiring elementary education in Minna. It was a fragile start, but it lit a fire he would not allow to die.

Not satisfied, he proceeded to a secondary school in Minna, but like many dreams built on thin air, his ambition soon hit a wall.

At the Junior Secondary School level, the journey came to an abrupt halt: no money, no support, no way forward.

Where many would have surrendered, Rabiu pivoted. He turned to the streets, not to beg, but to learn. He became a cobbler.

Today, with just one machine, his hands produce sandals of various sizes, elegant hand bags, and purses that rival imported goods, each piece a proof of resilience shaped by hardship.

Vanguard

Interesting data point on cow valuations here. I did not know things had gone this far?

Operatives of SWAT, Ogun State Police Command, on Thursday arrested two suspects for theft and recovered a stolen cow valued at N1.7 million.

The suspects, Muhammed Monsur and Olaseinde Olatunji, who are part of a four-man gang, allegedly invaded a dairy farm located at Omitoro, via Coker in the Ifo/Ibogun axis of the state at about 2:30 a.m and rustled the cow.

According to a statement made available to DAILY POST by the police spokesperson, DSP Oluseyi Babaseyi, the arrest was made following a distress call.

Babaseyi stated that upon receiving the call, operatives of SWAT acted swiftly and mobilised to the scene where the suspects were nabbed while attempting to flee the farm in a mini bus popularly known as ‘Korope’.

He noted that the cow, a knife and their operational vehicle used in the commission of the crime was also recovered.

Daily Post

Oba Fabiyi is on self-imposed exile from his community:

Olowa of Owa Onire, in Ifelodun Local Government Area of Kwara State, Oba AbdulRahman Fabiyi, currently hibernates in the outskirt of Ilorin, Kwara State capital.

One is likely to miss Oba Fabiyi’s royalty based on where he currently resides, which is about four hours journey from his kingdom. In fact, none of the passers-by who greeted us recognised him.

Interviewing him was also tedious and stressful because the interview was conducted with both of us sitting on a pavement under the scorching sun, in the downside of a bad road.

The monarch was already sitted on the pavement while giving directions to Vanguard correspondent.

When I arrived, he asked me to sit down beside him under the sun. It was obvious he didn’t want me to know where exactly he resides among the surrounding old bungalows.

The Olowa of Owa-Onire in Ifelodun local government area of Kwara state, Oba AbdulRahman Fabiyi, in this interview said, among others, that he won’t return to the palace until government provide security in his community.

Speaking with Vanguard correspondent, the monarch said he abandoned the palace since January 1, 2026, day after terrorists attacked him in his palace.

According to the monarch, “Eight terrorists broke the gates and doors of my palace on December 31, 2025. They collected my phone and that of my Olori and some money I had with me at gunpoint. But they didn’t order me to follow them. Though they later went away with two of my palace aides.

“Though I remember they kidnapped me about a year earlier when they took my Jeep away. I spent about seven days with them until I was released after my community paid them N5 million.

“I guess that was why they didn’t ask me to follow them at gunpoint on December 31, 2025. But they eventually went away with two of my palace aides.”

Vanguard

Not to rain on Opay’s IPO parade (see below) or anything:

Jennifer Ogbodo, the owner of ‘Ody-Best Point Collections N More’, a Point-Of-Sale (POS) business, mistakenly sent N150,000 to Olamilekan Abdulkareem, an OPay customer, on April 17. Immediately after she noticed, she called Abdulkareem to resend the money, and he promised to do so.

Ogbodo told FIJ that since then, Olamilekan has only returned N80,000 and has blocked everyone who has contacted him to return the balance.

FIJ

Apologies if this story lowers the tone of what is a very serious newsletter, but we try to cover all important stories without discrimination or snobbishness:

Popular social media personality and herbal products vendor, Eniola Fagbemi, popularly known as Sisi Alagbo, has apologised following a viral video involving herself, her husband Adesola Hakeem, and another woman.

The intimte video, which surfaced online on Monday, has sparked widespread reactions on social media, with many expressing disappointment while others questioned the circumstances surrounding it.

In a post shared via her verified Facebook page on Wednesday, Fagbemi expressed remorse and opened up about the emotional toll the controversy has taken on her.

“I own my mistakes, and I apologise with all sincerity for the video circulating online. I am deeply sorry to everyone who felt disappointed in me.

“This is a great phase for me, and I pray for God’s forgiveness and my fans’ forgiveness. Please let’s move on past this because this media is where I get little support to feed, pls don’t condemn me or castigate me am already passing through a lot,

‘I can’t eat or sleep for days, even sleeping meds aren’t working for me anymore, I am deeply sorry, everyone. Please forgive me, I don’t want to injure myself, it’s only the little strength I have.”

Fagbemi, who rose to prominence for promoting herbal remedies and her grandmother’s business locally and internationally, including in China and Qatar, has built a significant online following of nearly 400,000 followers on Facebook.

Tribune

Non-Nigerian Media

One of the “biggest” ones we have covered in this newsletter. Hopefully the key to where they are locked up goes missing:

After a four-day trial, a federal jury found two men and a woman guilty of involvement with an international email hacking scheme that defrauded more than 1,000 victims out of approximately $215 million. The scheme spanned 47 states and 19 countries.

On April 24, 2026, a jury in Toledo, Ohio, convicted Oluwafemi Michael Awoyemi, 40, of Romeoville, Illinois, Aruan Drake, 37, of Atlanta, Georgia, and Peter Reed, 35, of Oak Forest, Illinois, of Wire Fraud Conspiracy. Additionally, Awoyemi and Drake were convicted of a Money Laundering Conspiracy. U.S. District Judge James R. Knepp II presided over the trial.

In total, 25 defendants have been convicted for their roles in this fraud and money laundering scheme, commonly referred to as a “business email compromise.”

According to court documents and evidence presented in court, individuals, businesses, and other organizations in the United States, were targeted and hacked by Nigerian-linked fraud organizations. Their objective was to gain access to e-mail accounts held by individual users. The co-conspirators would then monitor the communications, and other activities of the individual email users to learn about their business practices and contacts. After gaining sufficient intelligence about the nature of a hacking victim’s activities, the co-conspirators would send a fraudulent e-mail to either the hacking victim, or to someone communicating with the hacking victim, requesting payment. Because the co-conspirators were familiar with the victims’ activities, the fraudulent e-mails were crafted in a way to convince recipients that the request for payment was for legitimate business activities. Once members of the conspiracy obtained payment from victims, conspiracy members used a web of fraudulently created bank accounts and cash transfer systems to launder and distribute the funds.

United States Attorney’s Office

Nigerians in limbo caught by the partial US travel ban:

Loss of opportunity is a common theme. M, who lives in Virginia and is from Nigeria, first came to the U.S. in 2011 for her undergraduate and master’s degrees. She then pursued her medical degree and last month got into, or matched, with a surgery residency program in Oregon. But because of the hold, her visas and work permit processing are frozen. That means she may not be able to start her residency at all.

“I cried so much the day after my match, because I was overwhelmed with the fact that I worked so hard to get to this point. And I look around me and all my classmates are celebrating because they are celebrating with certainty,” M said. She said her work permit had been pending for a month by the time matches for residency were announced.

“I had so much anxiety and uncertainty around me that, yes, I did take the pictures and I was very happy to match,” she said. “But just because of my place of birth and my citizenship — that’s taking it away from me.”

Some immigrants said they paid up to $3,000 for what the USCIS calls premium processing, meaning their renewals and transfers should be decided in a matter of weeks, not months. No matter the payment, everyone from the list of travel ban countries have been left waiting.

“I really cannot move on with my life. And I really cannot contribute to the United States because I am from Nigeria,” said P, who lives in Texas. He came to the U.S. in 2023 and graduated with an engineering masters degree in December. He said he had to turn down multiple job offers because his work permit cannot be processed. “I barely can feed [myself]. I barely can pay bills. It is overwhelming and sad.”

NPR

Meanwhile over in Switzerland:

Suspected members of the Nigerian-linked Black Axe crime gang have ​been arrested in Switzerland accused of ‌involvement in romance scams and cyberfraud, Europol said on Tuesday.

Black Axe grew out of ​a student fraternity in the late ​1970s called the Neo Black Movement ⁠of Africa, and it has since ​evolved into a structured, violent criminal organisation ​often dealing in financial cybercrime.

“The suspects are accused of numerous crimes. This includes romance scams ​and other cyberfraud offences causing millions ​of Swiss francs in damages, as well as ‌money ⁠laundering,” said Europol, which is headquartered in The Hague, in a statement.

The pan-European police body said 10 people - most ​of whom ​are of ⁠Nigerian origin - had been arrested in the operation that ​also involved German police.

Reuters

OPay goes to the stock market:

Opay Digital Services Ltd. is working with Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. as the Nigeria-focused payments platform prepares for an initial public offering, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The SoftBank Group Corp.-backed company is planning to list in the US and is seeking a valuation of about $4 billion, said the people, who asked to not to be identified as the information is still private. The company may sell the shares later this year, they said.

Bloomberg

Foreign media coverage of the never ending war on fake drugs in Nigeria:

Across Nigeria, flames are consuming towering piles of seized drugs – but not cannabis or heroin.

Hidden in warehouses are millions of doses of counterfeit and substandard medicines, now being burned in highly visible operations that have become the hallmark of an intensifying government crackdown.

In one of the largest raids, officials in Lagos seized 10 million doses of fake and banned drugs in February.

“What we seized from that warehouse alone could kill three million Nigerians if it reached the markets,” said Martins Iluyomade, director of investigations at Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control.

Such raids – and the resulting bonfires – are being repeated nationwide as authorities target a trade blamed for thousands of deaths.

The approach, experts say, could offer a blueprint for other developing countries grappling with the global crisis of falsified and substandard medicines.

“Nigeria is regarded as a model for the global south,” said Dr Harparkash Kaur, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s bioanalytical facility and lead investigator into the university’s drug quality project. “Their regulator has been doing a brilliant job… they’ve gone from strength to strength.”

In the last year alone, NAFDAC has conducted six large-scale raids of open-air markets, seizing millions of doses.

Telegraph

Janice Okoh’s debut novel is getting good reviews:

Fans of atmospheric thrillers won’t want to miss Janice Okoh’s debut novel.

Girl Number 8 promises “Tana French–level atmosphere meets the cultural resonance of Black Cake and The Girl with the Louding Voice,” according to an press release shared with PEOPLE.

“It means so much to me to share this book with you,” Okoh tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement. “I began writing it when I was partway through my 10-year infertility journey and found it cathartic to explore my feelings around motherhood and to discuss it in all its forms through a story about a missing girl.”

Set in Nigeria, where Okoh’s family is from, the book “pairs a propulsive investigation with rich cultural insight and emotional depth,” per the press release.

The novel follows fictional Detective Sola Adeyemi of Nigeria’s real-life Department of Ritualistic Murders and Human Sacrifice as she investigates the disappearance of a 4-year-old girl, who vanished from the home of a powerful politician.

“I love writing about older female characters and can’t wait for you to meet 50-year-old cop Sola Adeyemi,” Okoh says of her lead character. “She’s the badass I’d love to be and she’s menopausal, too!”

People

The Guardian review Iyabo Ojo’s new movie, The Return of Arinzo. 3 stars out of 5:

This Nigerian thriller unfolds mostly in the bustling city of Lagos but it makes excursions to Ghana and Tanzania and casts actors from all three countries, making for a diverse, textured tale that is thoroughly entertaining. That said, there are still plenty of imperfections, especially in the editing, and the acting ranges from professional and polished to amateur and awkward, so it’s a bit of a bumpy ride. Still, it is yet more evidence that the increasingly well-financed Nollywood industry can hold its own internationally, and grow audiences beyond Africa.

Even if a male character’s run for president is a major engine of the story, this is very much a female-centric film, encompassing women across several generations in an assortment of configurations, often far from harmonious. That comes across very clearly in an early scene in which we see bossy matriarch Aisha Williams (Mercy Aigbe), wife of aspiring politician Marcus Williams (William Benson), having a screaming match with her sister-in-law as members of the household look on aghast. A complicated character to say the least, Aisha can turn on the charm when she needs to, for example when her son, aspiring actor Mandla (Enioluwa Adeoluwa), brings home his fiancee Simisola (Prisca Lyimo) to meet the family. But as soon as Aisha meets Simisola’s aunt Bridget (Bimbo Akintola), a devout preacher, the hospitality spigot is abruptly turned off. By degrees, we learn that there’s a long history between the two older women who are connected through familiarity with Simisola’s birth mother Arinzo (played by director Iyabo Ojo) who everyone thought had died years ago.

While the storytelling is jittery and slapdash in places, the cinematography is stylish and crisp, full of umbral shadows and backlighting that add to the noir feel. And while the story is about particular families who hate each other, there is a strong sense of the wider social context through the many crowd scenes in the streets and in church, complete with drone shots that bolster the sense of place.

Guardian

What’s in store for Uar Bernard and how do the Eagles plan to use him?

The Philadelphia Eagles are giving Uar Bernard a chance.

The supreme athlete from Nigeria is part of the NFL’s International Pathway Program, and the Eagles made him a seventh-round pick in the 2026 NFL Draft.

Bernard has never actually played football, only learning the game through the pre-draft process.

But he’s so athletically impressive that Philly believes he can become a contributing NFL player.

“It’s a dream come true for me because I’ve worked hard for this,” Bernard said after being selected. “I’ve not played football, but I’ve gone through some drills that made me believe that I’m going to get better every day. I thank God for everything. I thank God for life. I thank God for the opportunities given to me to be drafted by the Eagles.”

The reality is that it could be a long journey for Bernard, but it starts at rookie minicamp.

That’ll be his first chance to get real coaching from the Eagles’ staff, and he’ll have to grow even in simple areas of the game that lifelong football players have known for a long time.

The Eagles will be patient if they have to be, and Bernard will surely stick around through training camp and the preseason.

From there, it’s very possible he ends up on the practice squad, but as long as he keeps working, he’ll eventually get a chance to break through.

Sporting News

Police are looking for Ifedapo Adeyeye:

A British-Nigerian man who abducted his five-year-old son from his mother was mistakenly released from prison last month and remains at large.

Ifedayo Adedapo Kolawoe Adeyeye was released from HMP Pentonville in London on April 21, with prison staff not realising until April 23 that he was due to serve an additional 12-month sentence and be extradited to France upon its completion.

Last June, Mr Justice Hayden ruled that Adeyeye, a dual British-Nigerian national, had abducted his son, Laurys N’Djosse Adeyeye, from his mother in France in July 2024 and took him to Nigeria, saying the abduction was ‘in the most serious class of cases’.

Adeyeye, an engineer, was arrested upon his return to the UK and was jailed for six months in January for contempt of court after failing to return Laurys to his mother, Claire N’Djosse, who has not seen her son since he was abducted.

On April 20, the day before he was due to be released, Adeyeye was jailed for a further 12 months for further contempt of court offences, but the High Court heard on Friday that he was mistakenly released from HMP Pentonville the following day.

Lawyers for Ms N’Djosse said there was then a ‘two-day gap’ between Adeyeye’s release and an alert being issued to prevent him from leaving the UK.

Barrister Tori Adams, for Ms N’Djosse, asked the court in written submissions to allow reporting of Adeyeye and Laurys’ identities in a bid to locate them, adding that the case was of ‘the utmost seriousness’ and that Adeyeye’s whereabouts ‘remain unknown’.

Mr Justice Hayden allowed the reporting and said ‘the state has failed’, adding that there was an ‘alarming lack of urgency’ from prison staff and that he was ‘not even sure if the police have any impression of the seriousness’ of the case.

Daily Mail

News from Korea:

Rising Afrobeats artist Para (PARA) meets global listeners with his first mini album.

At 6 p.m. on the 7th, Para’s mini album ‘Ola (Ola)’ will be released on various online music sites.

Ola, which means wave in Spanish, is the album title that conveys the idea that music, which starts with one person, spreads to the world like a small ripple growing as it crosses the sea.

The title track of the album, also called “Ola,” is a song that expresses the thrill of falling in love over rhythmic drums and a smooth melody. Para’s distinctive vocals blend with a relaxed groove to create a sophisticated Afro-fusion sound.

The mini album also includes a total of five songs, from “Better,” which captures a global Afrobeats sensibility, to the cheerful and distinctive “Chihuahua (feat. Emarshal),” “Change (feat. Kriss killz),” which adds hip-hop sensibility to Afrobeats rhythms, and the addictive-hooked “Loco (feat. Insane chips).”

Collaborations with Nigerian artists are another notable point. From Emarshal to Kriss killz and Insane chips, local artists working in Afrobeats, hip-hop and other genres participate as featured artists, raising expectations that they will show unique synergy with Para.

Para, who performs Afrobeats, a modern African popular music, plans to announce his new beginning through his first mini album. He aims to present a single wave that connects different rhythms and emotions of Korea and Africa through music and deliver resonance to listeners around the world.

Chosun

Police in Thailand raided an unlicensed school and arrested 10 members of staff:

Authorities have raided an unlicensed international school in Prawet district of Bangkok, arresting 10 foreign teachers and staff found working without permits.

Investigators from the Immigration Bureau joined officers from the Prawet police station and officials from the Department of Employment to inspect the premises on Wednesday following reports of suspected irregularities.

The team found the school had been operating without a legally required licence for more than a year, offering kindergarten and primary-level classes to over 100 students.

Investigators said they found 10 foreign nationals from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria who were working as teachers and staff without valid work permits.

Bangkok Post

However, that stability has always rested on shaky foundations. Electoral competition has remained tense, frequently accompanied by allegations of fraud, manipulation, and episodes of violence. More importantly, successive civilian governments have struggled to alter the underlying structure of the state and economy. Public authority remains marked by weak institutional and bureaucratic capacity, persistent corruption, and an inability to deliver basic public goods. At the same time, the economy has not been placed on a sustained path of productive transformation capable of reducing poverty for the majority. These features are not new. They have defined much of Nigeria’s democratic experience since 1999 and, taken on their own, might simply be expected to persist.

What gives the present moment greater significance is a shift in the material conditions that have underpinned this political order. Oil revenues, long central to the functioning of the state and its surrounding networks of patronage, are no longer sufficient in the way they once were. Fiscal pressures have intensified, while efforts to diversify the economy into more productive sectors have yielded limited results. The consequence is a tightening environment in which the resources available for distribution are more constrained, even as dependence on access to the state remains high.

This combination alters the stakes of political competition. As the fiscal space narrows, the value of controlling the state increases, while the costs of exclusion become more severe. Under such conditions, electoral defeat becomes harder to bear, and political victory more consequential. The risk is not simply of continued underperformance, but of a gradual erosion of the conditions that have allowed democratic competition to persist.

Recent events have made this harder to dismiss as an abstract concern. After months of speculation and selective revelations, the government finally publicly charged the perpetrators of an alleged coup plot in court. The plot involved a prominent former governor and immediate former oil minister, persons across the security services, with plans that, if carried through, would have involved the seizure of key state institutions and the detention, and possibly assassination, of senior political leaders. Even allowing for the uncertainty that surrounds such allegations, their very plausibility is revealing. They point to the continued presence of actors willing to consider extra-constitutional routes to power, and to the existence of networks through which such plans can be organised.

The reaction to the alleged plot has also exposed deeper ambiguities. Official accounts have been partial and, at times, inconsistent, and public information has emerged slowly and unevenly. This has fed both scepticism and unease. As Chris Ogunmodede notes:

There are good reasons to demand that claims made by military and government authorities regarding such a serious allegation meet the highest standard of proof, given that previous Nigerian governments have used alleged coup plots as a pretext to suppress dissent. Those of us who recall the dark years of military rule in Nigeria recognize that few things are more destabilizing and terrifying than rumored coup plots, whether real or fictitious, given that a guilty verdict by a military tribunal could mean execution by firing squad.

While it is reassuring that the government wants to pursue a civil trial and that we have hopefully moved past the days of death by firing squads, the episode draws attention to a fact that is only acknowledged but never fully confronted. The transition to civil rule in 1999 and 25 years of civilian governance have not brought stability, nor have we crossed some magical rubicon to democratic inevitability.

These developments bring into focus a more general question about democratic stability. It is not enough to observe that elections continue to be held or that civilian rule has endured for over two decades. The more relevant issue is whether the underlying political and economic conditions make it reasonable for major actors to accept the outcomes of electoral competition. Where power remains highly valuable and loss highly consequential, democratic continuity rests on a narrow foundation.

Democratic stability is often treated as a matter of institutional design or civic commitment, but this obscures a more basic point. Democracies do not endure because political actors are inherently attached to rules. They endure when those rules align with the interests of the actors who must abide by them. The persistence of electoral competition depends less on formal procedures than on whether the outcomes those procedures produce are bearable to those who lose.

I drew this insight from a 2005 paper by Adam Przeworski1. Democracy, in his account, survives when it becomes a self-enforcing arrangement among competing actors. Winners accept limits on their power, and losers accept electoral outcomes, because both judge continued competition to be safer than confrontation or domination. Conflict does not disappear, but it is channelled into a form that all sides find preferable to the alternatives. Democracy endures, in other words, when political defeat is tolerable.

The conditions under which this becomes possible vary across societies. In richer and industrial democracies, economic life is less dependent on direct control of the state, and the range of outcomes political actors can tolerate tends to be wider. Losing office does not necessarily imply exclusion from security, opportunity, or status. By contrast, where wealth, protection, and advancement are tightly linked to political access, the consequences of defeat become more severe. In such settings, compliance with electoral outcomes becomes harder to sustain because the costs of losing are higher and the guarantees offered by the system are weaker.

Nigeria fits more closely into this latter pattern. Electoral competition takes place in a setting where access to the state remains central to material security, political relevance, and group standing. Political defeat is therefore not experienced as a routine outcome within an ongoing process. It carries consequences that extend beyond the temporary loss of office.

Part of the explanation lies in the structure of the state itself. Public office continues to provide access to contracts, appointments, and other forms of advantage that are not easily available outside it. This reflects corruption in a direct sense, but also a broader pattern in which the state remains a primary mechanism for the allocation of economic opportunity. Where that is the case, elections become contests over access to resources that are both scarce and unevenly distributed.

For a time, the scale of oil rents allowed for a broader sharing arrangement in which even those outside formal control of the state could maintain an adjacent relationship to its benefits. This helped reduce the immediate costs of exclusion and sustained a workable, if limited, equilibrium. As fiscal space has narrowed, this arrangement has become harder to maintain. The difference between winning and losing has grown wider, and the incentives that once encouraged restraint have weakened.

This Time is Different

One immediate response to these pressures is to maintain wider access to power. On this note, the immediate past government of Muhammadu Buhari set a bad precedent. Accusations of biased appointments and exclusion were met with an arrogant shrug. The current Tinubu government is running its own version of that dangerous experiment, with the aggressive tactics of suppressing opposition parties and consolidating power. While some may argue that this is simply the pattern of ruling parties since 1999, the point I have been making is that the times are different and things may actually tip over. Some form of distributed power sharing has always been the underlying logic of political power in Nigeria, from cabinet appointments to civil service recruitments. There is much to criticise about this arrangement, but its strategic importance to maintaining our current democratic equilibrium should not be underestimated.

Democracy for What?

Reducing conflict in the short run, however, is not the same as securing democratic endurance in the long run. A democracy stabilised primarily through inclusive rent-seeking and distribution remains vulnerable as long as the broader conditions that make political power the main source of enrichment remain intact. What ultimately alters those conditions is a deeper transformation of the economy and politics.

In the long run, democracy becomes more secure when it leads to development. As economic life becomes more productive and diversified, livelihoods, investment, and status depend less exclusively on state control. This reduces the material consequences of political defeat. At the same time, a more capable state extends the reach of rules and reduces reliance on discretion, making the outcomes of political competition more predictable and credible. Structural transformation, through industrialisation, job creation, and overall technological capability, will create broader access to opportunity, which creates a wider range of actors with a stake in continuity and stability. Together, these changes expand the range of outcomes that political actors can tolerate.

Under such conditions, democratic competition does not cease to be fiercely contested, but it also becomes less likely to be experienced as a zero-sum struggle for survival. Governments can be judged more on performance than on their control of distributive networks, and the loss of political access will not come as a huge loss. Nigeria has not made that transition, but the current juncture is a critical one, and should be treated as an opportunity to choose the right path to proceed.

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly

In October 2025, as Warri once again descended into one of its familiar moods of suspicion, Ebikeme Amafini - Secretary of the Ijaw National Congress of the Americas - reached for a name from the colonial past. The immediate quarrel was that Nigeria’s Supreme Court had ordered a fresh electoral ward delineation of Warri Federal Constituency, and the resulting field report showed the Ijaw as the more numerous people in two of the three local government areas. The Itsekiri were displeased. The Urhobo had their own complaints. The governor, Sheriff Oborevwori, had told the feuding parties to “fight after 2031” and asked, with a candour that was both refreshing and appalling, “You want me to speak and lose votes?” Then Amafini issued his advice. The Itsekiri, he said, should “dispense with structures/privileges skewed in their favour during Colonial Agent Dore Numa’s era, which cannot define independent Nigeria.”

There it was. A man dead since 1932, summoned as explanation - shorthand for why the architecture of power in Warri still tilted towards one group at the expense of its neighbours. In the language of present-day grievance, his name still meant structure and privilege. Plenty of dead chiefs are remembered. Far fewer are still politically useful. Fewer still are invoked as shorthand for why the living still do not trust one another.

Who was this man, that a century later his name could still function in this way?

Dore Numa - Dogho in the Itsekiri form, and more fully Omadoghogbone - was born probably in the early 1860s into one of the right families, but not in quite the right way. His father, Numa, was the son of Princess Uwala, a daughter of Olu Erejuwa I; his mother, Ejuonenowo, was the daughter of a man called Ogie, himself the son of an Ologbotsere - the great chiefly line that served as the Olu of Warri’s prime minister. On both sides Dore was well connected. But the connections ran through the female line, which in strict Itsekiri custom weakened or blocked any easy hereditary claim to the higher offices of state. That explains everything that followed. Dore would not come to power by the old road. He would have to find a new one.

Not a great deal is known about his early days. The historical record is largely silent on his childhood, which means you do not have the neat comforts of the modern biographer: no reliable school register, no clear missionary teacher, no clean story of education and advancement. But one detail has survived that is worth more than most. Dore was “brought up and trained” by his aunt, Princess Iye - a woman of the royal side of the Itsekiri order, one of the surviving centres of authority in the long interregnum that had gripped Itsekiri politics since the death of Olu Akengbuwa in 1848. So Dore’s childhood, so far as it can be reconstructed, was not spent at the edge of power. He was also, by all accounts, one of the “elite of society” in his youth, a contemporary of other stylish young Itsekiri men.

The interregnum into which he was born deserves some explanation, because it was the crack in the Itsekiri order through which men like Dore would eventually climb. When Olu Akengbuwa died in 1848, his two sons and heirs died within months of him. The princes and slaves of the dead king seized the capital, Ode-Itsekiri, and for a time prevented anyone else from being installed. None of those who qualified for the throne appeared strong, wealthy and acceptable enough to command popular acclaim. The interregnum that resulted would last until 1936 - nearly ninety years without a crowned Olu. In that vacuum, power migrated and flowed towards trade, force, and whoever could accumulate enough of both to fill the space the monarchy had left behind.

Two great camps formed. On one side stood the royal family group: Princess Iye, Oritsemone, Tsanomi, Numa and later Dore himself. On the other stood the Ologbotsere faction: Idiare, Dudu, Olomu and eventually his son, Nana. This division was a fracture inside the Itsekiri political order itself - an unfinished succession struggle fought out through trade, war and the strategic befriending of foreigners.

Before Dore’s rise, there was Nana Olomu. More than just the man Dore helped to destroy, he was another Itsekiri broker of power, another product of the same violent commercial age, another man formed in the overlap of trade, force and foreign contact.

Nana came from a formidable inheritance. His father, Olomu, had become one of the richest and most feared traders on the Benin River in the turbulent decades when the slave trade had to give way to palm oil, and when commercial rivalry regularly turned into armed conflict. Olomu built the fortress-town of Ebrohimi, amassed war canoes, arms and slaves, and eventually rose to become Governor of the River - the highest functioning office available in the Itsekiri interregnum. In that sense, both the Olomu line and the Numa line were living through the same constitutional fact: the old order was still there, but it no longer distributed power by blood alone. Trade had entered the bloodstream of politics.

The Itsekiri kingdom occupied the north-western extremity of the Niger Delta, a small territory of waterlogged settlements strung along the rivers Benin and Warri. Most of it lay in the mangrove swamp belt. There was very little firm land. The people were traders and fishermen who had dealt first in slaves and then, as the nineteenth century turned, in the palm oil that lubricated the machines of industrial Britain. Their geographical position made them the natural brokers between the Urhobo hinterland, which produced the oil, and the European ships, which bought it. Itsekiri’s possession of firearms - acquired through long contact with European traders - enabled them to dominate the rivers and the trade that ran along them. Competition came from the Ijaw who were equally at home on the water. But even the Ijaw could not displace the Itsekiri from the greater part of the Urhobo trade.

Olomu’s victory over both Oritsemone and Tsanomi in the interregnum wars disturbed an already fragile balance. Numa, Dore’s father, inherited the resulting feud. Dore would carry it forward into a bitter vendetta against Nana, Olomu’s son. They were not men who simply happened to dislike one another but heirs to opposed houses in a long interregnum, standing at the live edge of an unfinished struggle.

Nana himself grew into that inheritance early. By 1876, he was already playing the leading role in his father’s affairs. He defended Olomu before the British consul in a murder case involving Abraka prisoners, and the consul described him that year as “a very intelligent young man and well acquainted with the English language.” The difference - and it would prove decisive - was that Nana used language as part of an existing authority. Dore would turn the act of interpreting itself into a ladder as he came into the 1890s as the younger man of the hostile camp, looking for an opening. The British, in effect, would supply it.

An episode from Dore’s early life that reveals the world he grew up in vividly is worth a quick aside. His younger brother, Atunu Numa, was killed during the Otuekin juju play at Orugbo. Passing by Ogbe-Sobo by canoe on his way up-river to witness the occasion, Atunu unknowingly entered a day of ritual prohibition: the Ogbe-Sobo were sacrificing to their war medicine and would allow no canoe to pass. Warned to turn back, he ignored the order. Some of the men pursued him. Atunu, armed with a rifle, fired and killed two of them. The rest captured him, chained him, and one of the dead men’s relatives killed him with a hatchet while he was still in bonds. News of the murder caused uproar in Warri and at Batere, and preparations for war against Ogbe-Sobo began at once.

In 1891, Dore made the small, decisive move that would reshape his life. The British vice-consul, Henry Gallwey, was travelling through the creeks to Lagos and needed transport. Nana, the established big man, supplied a large gig canoe - but no crew. His reason was practical: once his slaves reached Lagos, where slavery had been abolished, they might run away. Dore stepped into that opening at once. He supplied the men - some thirty “boys” - and earned Gallwey’s gratitude. It was a tiny episode in the grand scheme of Niger Delta politics. But it was the hinge on which Dore’s future turned. Nana, the seated power, protected the logic of his old river household. Dore, the rising rival, seized the chance to be useful to the new power. From that point on, Gallwey did not forget him.

Then came the second turn. Numa died in February 1891, and Dore succeeded as head of the family and leader of the left-bank faction opposed to Nana’s dominance. Gallwey’s judgment on the succession is one of the most revealing single documents in Dore’s career. Numa, he wrote, had been “a particularly weak minded and incapable chief, but his son, who succeeded him, is a very superior man altogether, and in time is likely to improve very materially on his father’s rule and further, he is not afraid of Nana. In addition to all this, he is a very loyal supporter of Her Majesty’s Government - His name is Dore.”

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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.