This week on 1914 Reader, I wrote about my original research into the Nigerian national honours system and what I found looking into more than 2,000 awards going back to 1963. I also looked at the upcoming Dangote Refinery IPO’s prospectus (I’m still an accountant!) and shared my thoughts on it.

Enjoy the week’s selection of stories below

Nigerian Media

It seems that a guy in Kano was murdered over his social media posts:

A quick check on his social media handles shows that Dan Shagamu was fond of posting selfie-recorded videos of him commenting on various issues.

In his videos, he literally attacked everyone ranging from politicians, traditional rulers, opposing religious groups to his neighbours. This, according to analysts, could make each of the groups he attacked potential suspect in his killing.

A resident of the area who preferred not to be mentioned confided in Weekend Trust that beyond what is in the public, residents of the area suspect that he could have been be involved in something that made his neighbours uncomfortable.

The source said even the account that he shared in one of his videos in the past alleging threats to his life over an encounter with a small child wasn’t normal.

He said, “There is no way everyone in the area could turn against a person unless there is something underground. He had a good relationship with little children who are always after him, which made people suspect that the relationship wasn’t normal, hence the hostility.

“But nobody could substantiate the kind of relationship with them. He was also living alone in his house after his divorce. He asked his six children to leave the house for their grandparents’ after he alleged there were threats to his life, saying he should rather be killed alone than with the children. That was why when he was found killed in the house, he was alone,” the source added.

He also said late Dan Shagamu’s life represented a paradox: outspoken on social media, but reserved and with limited friends in reality.

Daily Trust

27 deaths from a drink elsewhere will be huge news but in Nigeria there is always so much going on that stuff like this usually passes below the radar. And why is the official focus here for it to “die down”:

The death toll from the incident involving residents of Odigbo Local Government Area of Ondo State has risen to 27, as the state government has commenced a crackdown on the sale of herbal drinks and other unapproved substances in the affected communities.

PUNCH Metro reports that residents of Araromi Obu and Odigbo town had reportedly fallen ill after consuming substances suspected to be herbal drinks, with 24 deaths initially recorded in the two communities.

The Chairman of Odigbo LGA, Taiwo Adegoroye, told our correspondent on Thursday that the number of deaths had increased to 27.

Adegoroye said eight people had earlier died in Araromi Obu, while 16 deaths were recorded in Odigbo town, adding that the situation had since subsided following the intervention of medical teams from the state and local governments.

He said, “The number of deaths is now 27, but if not for the proactiveness of the medical teams from the state government and the local government, the death toll would have risen further. But we thank God that the situation has subsided.

“Today, the task force has moved around the parks, markets and streets to enforce the ban on the sale of herbal drinks. As I’m talking to you, a number of them have been seized.

“The environmental and health teams of the state government are already in town, carrying out investigations. I’m sure very soon it will die down.”

Punch

Very bizarre story. 87 year old?

The Adamawa State Police Command has arraigned an 87-year-old man, Dahiru Garba, for allegedly attempting to murder an Area Court judge in Fufore Local Government Area of the state.

According to a statement issued on Tuesday by the command’s spokesman, SP Suleiman Nguroje, Garba allegedly cut the hand of the presiding judge, Hon. Dauda Hamman, with a cutlass.

The statement read, “On 31st August, 2026, there was mild drama at Mayo-Ine Area Court, Fufore Local Government Area of Adamawa State, after an 87-year-old man, Dahiru Garba of Korawa village, allegedly cut off the hand of the Presiding Judge, Hon. Dauda Hamman, with a cutlass.”

Nguroje said the incident occurred while the judge was presiding over a case involving the suspect and one Ismail Yusuf.

He said, “The suspect attacked the presiding Judge with a cutlass and severally cut his hand, causing him grievous injuries.”

Punch

For as long as humans have been moving around, water has always been the cheapest form of transportation so its important to be clear about what is driving this:

At the waterfront of the popular Ose-Okwodu market, Onitsha, located at the bank of the River Niger, boat and canoe transport business thrives. The Canoe park there is always busy with paddlers, and their loaders make brisk business.

They work daily and make money to sustain them and cushion the effects of economic downturn.
It may be assumed that the present economic downturn in the country, coupled with the high cost of both formal and informal education prompt many young men to embark on boat and canoe paddling business so as to make ends meet, despite the high risk associated with it.

But some of the young peddlers dismissed that, saying it is a choice they willingly made. They dismissed the issue of risks, insisting that water transport is much less risky business than road transport.

According to them, the issue of high risk is not really real, unless for those who failed to wear life jackets and who do not know how to swim, who are vulnerable to losing their lives by drowning in case of the canoe capsizing and in the absence of divers and a rescue team.

The canoe paddlers maintained that it is cheaper and safer for travelers to go by canoe or boat than to travel by road to their various destinations.

According to Friday Idakwo, a 20-year-old canoe paddler and an indigene of Kogi State, “we charge about N4,000 per passenger traveling from Onitsha in Anambra State to Kogi State and vice versa, but road transporters charge as high as N15,000 for the same journey by road”.

Idakwo, popularly known by his fellow paddlers as “Mammy Water Boy Friend” because of his efficiency in swimming, explained that there is little or no risk for a passenger to travel by water when compared with traveling by road.

He said that in water transportation, there is less delay, there is no police extortion, no task force harassment, no armed robbery attack, no kidnappers or criminal Fulani herdsmen to fear, and no auto crash on water as witnessed on highways.

Vanguard

News from Mapo Customary Court:

Grade A Customary Court, sitting in Mapo, Ibadan, Oyo State, has asked a couple, Kayode and Michelle, to go their different ways on account of irresponsibility, clubbing and excessive drinking.

Kayode stated that Michelle had proved to be irresponsible from the first day of their marriage, adding that she lacked all the virtues he expected to see in a woman.

The plaintiff explained that he and the defendant had been together in their marriage for five years, but that they had nothing to show for it.

According to Kayode, Michelle had been unable to conceive, despite various efforts and measures taken in an attempt to have a child.

He added that, to his chagrin, his wife, instead of being sad for not having a child, went clubbing.

The plaintiff added that the defendant went to club every day and always got drunk.

Kayode explained that the more he tried to make Michelle see reason, the worse she became.

The plaintiff stated that he could no longer bear the embarrassment caused by his wife’s behaviour.

He thus prayed that their union be dissolved.

Michelle refused to make an appearance in court despite been served court summonses.

Kayode, in his testimony, said, “My wife and I got married in April 2020 and I paid N25, 000 as her bride price.

Tribune

Truly an amazing story. And of course it was started on Tiktok, which is a completely different part of Nigeria:

The Federal High Court in Abuja has sentenced a fake spiritualist, Solomon Odigie Moses, to one year in prison after he defrauded an Indian woman of $1,100 and recorded her during a private spiritual bath.

Justice C.N. Nwabulu sentenced Moses on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, after he pleaded guilty to a one-count charge of cheating and impersonating a spiritualist.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, said Moses was arrested in Ekpoma, Edo State, after obtaining the money from the Indian woman, who had sought spiritual healing.

The commission said Moses used a fake TikTok account to pose as a spiritual leader and received the $1,100 through his Zelle payment platform, after which the naira equivalent was paid into his local bank account.

The EFCC said Moses later deceived the woman into taking a nude spiritual bath, which he recorded without her permission, before threatening to make the video public unless she paid him.

Daily Post

A story you’d typically read about America, not Nigeria:

A 13-year-old boy, Mubarak Mohammed has died after allegedly pulling the trigger of a loaded Dane gun in Udubo village,Gamawa Local Government Area of Bauchi State.

According to the Bauchi State Police Command, the tragic incident occurred on Saturday, September 5, 2026, at about 4:30pm, when the teenager reportedly entered the room of a 35-year-old hunter, Suleiman Hamza, after the latter returned from hunting.

According to the Bauchi State Police Command, Hamza had allegedly left the loaded Dane gun inside his room before going out.

The teenager was said to have picked up the firearm and pulled the trigger, causing it to discharge and inflict fatal injuries on him.

The incident was reported to the Police at about 8:45pm by a 50-year-old resident of Udubo village.

Following the report, detectives attached to the Gamawa Police Division immediately mobilised to the scene and evacuated the victim to the General Hospital, Gamawa, where a medical doctor on duty confirmed him dead.

Guardian

Non-Nigerian Media

Which one of you is earning £400/month from Nigeria?

Darya Simanovich could be described as “having it all”. The serial entrepreneur not only manages several businesses but also runs her own string of companies while juggling three children. But late-night working isn’t part of her routine.

Darya’s secret is not getting up at 5am or hiring a nanny. Instead, Darya has chosen to outsource less desirable aspects of her life, leaving her free to be a listening ear for her growing children while keeping up with her impressive career.

“When I was first pregnant in 2012, I was worried about fitting everything in after the baby was born,” says Darya, 38, who lives in Chelsea with her children aged 14, 11 and 9.

“Then a friend suggested that instead of hiring a nanny, I could get someone to do the tasks I’d rather not do, such as cooking and cleaning. That way I could spend quality time with my baby. It seemed like a great idea.”

Darya employs a virtual assistant based in Nigeria to help with personal admin, freeing her to focus on her job and entrepreneurial ventures, including running Chelsea Swim Spa and her property management company. This sets her back £100 a week for approximately 10 hours of support.

Telegraph

This piece about Chimamanda Adichie and the death of her son in Nigeria is truly harrowing to read:

Esege said the doctor had urged him not to call Adichie until the hospital could do a CT scan, but he replied that he couldn’t keep the information from her. He texted his wife and asked her to come back, and she returned around midnight. In the next few hours, Nkanu’s heart stopped at least two more times.

“So they basically are doing cardiac resuscitations on this poor boy for more than four hours, until 8 in the morning, when they decided to call it,” Egese said. “Nkanu, our son, was gone.”

It seemed that Esege’s theory about the timing of Nkanu’s death was not one he had shared with his wife. Adichie looked at him, incredulous, and asked, “So, sorry. We don’t actually know when our son died?”

She paused and then said again, in disbelief, “We don’t know when he died.”

Turning to me, Adichie said, “I’m actually hearing this for the first time. Some of it.” She then referred to Esege by his nickname. “I didn’t know about IV’s conversation with the doctor when I went home to try to get the payments for the ambulance. I think IV’s tried to protect me.”

New York Times

This story has broken containment:

A social media influencer allegedly wanted by Nigeria over drugs trafficking died after having penis enlargement at a clinic in Bangkok.

Igho Ubiribo, known as “Ego”, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, London, died in early March from a pulmonary embolism caused by a cosmetic injection into his penis.

An inquest confirmed “genital hyaluronic acid injection” as a medical cause of death.

Ubiribo, 43, who was born in Sapele, in the Delta State of southern Nigeria, had built up a reputation as a glamorous jet-setter on Instagram, where he had 186,000 followers under the name “Ego2222”.

He posted photographs of himself and his wife, Daniella Simba Allen, a Zimbabwean designer and socialite, in luxury hotels around the world, often posing in yachts, helicopters and supercars.

They were also accused by Nigerian authorities of recruiting teenage girls as drug traffickers.

An inquest at Westminster coroner’s court last month heard how Ubiribo had gone to the clinic in Bangkok for penis enlargement treatment on March 5. He received injections of hyaluronic acid, a filler commonly used in cosmetic procedures, and lidocaine, an anaesthetic.

Later that day, while having a massage at the Marriott Hotel, he complained of severe chest pain and collapsed.

He was still alert when taken by ambulance to Samitivej Hospital in central Bangkok, but lost consciousness before a CT scan could be performed. He was given CPR before being pronounced dead in the early hours of March 6. The post-mortem examination and toxicology tests determined the cause of death to be the hyaluronic acid injection.

The Times

Three London fashion designers and their mums talk to The Times. First up is Tolu Coker and her mum, Olapeju:

Even as a little girl Tolu had an eye for intricate styling. There was a time when she was small that a friend took her to a party and thought she’d lost her on the dancefloor. Of course, Tolu had just transformed her outfit — removing her jacket to reveal a sparkling disco top underneath.

Growing up in Nigeria gave me the privilege of having many of my clothes custom-made. I come from a creative family and creativity has always influenced the way I dress. I also enjoy making my own garments and designing jewellery to complement them. This allows me to choose quality fabrics and materials while creating pieces that genuinely reflect who I am. It brings me immense joy to think that this might have influenced Tolu.

The Times

A different way to get to the US it seems:

Six Nigerian nationals linked to an organized criminal network that allegedly swindled American women out of over $6 million through online romance scams will be extradited to the United States on Friday, South African police said.

The men, who were arrested in the South African city of Cape Town in 2021, are set to be handed over to officials from the FBI on Friday and transported to the U.S. to face wire fraud and money laundering charges.

They are accused of belonging to a criminal network known as the Black Axe, which Interpol describes as being part of criminal groups responsible for a significant share of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams.

According to South African police, the men are alleged to have targeted more than 100 women in the U.S., defrauding them of more than $6 million through online romance or love scams.

Among the alleged victims were pensioners and businesspeople who were reportedly targeted through sophisticated online relationships.

“Through the coordination of Interpol South Africa, the six will today be transported from a correctional facility in Cape Town to Cape Town International Airport, where they will be handed over to officials from the FBI and the United States Secret Service, who arrived in South Africa this morning,” said police spokesperson Katlego Mogale.

AP News

Le Monde feature on AbdulSamad Rabiu, one of Nigeria’s billionaire Instagram influencers:

His Instagram account reveals a life that is both deeply rooted and globalized. He is most often seen in a caftan and hula (a Hausa headpiece), receiving guests in his bright office with cream leather sofas, overlooking the lagoon in Lagos, the economic capital in the predominantly Catholic South. Or attending a flamboyant engagement ceremony, a favorite pastime of Nigeria's high society. Another day, he appears in a T-shirt, sneakers and cap, aboard his new Bombardier Global 8,000 jet – he was the first African to own one – or on his yacht, the Raniya, named after his youngest daughter. It is a life of opulence. On this account, he also describes himself as "Africa's biggest giver," highlighting the work of his foundation, the ASR Initiative, which allocates $100 million annually to education, health and development. "I don't think we are doing enough in terms of giving back," he told the Nigerian press a few years ago.

Le Monde

Uncle Chris Osagbaekhoe is now a graduate:

A 68-year-old grandfather from south-east London has graduated with a first-class degree in social work.

Chris Osagbaekhoe, from Thamesmead, gained his Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Goldsmiths, University of London at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, four years after starting his studies.

Chris, who was born and raised in Nigeria, had previously studied psychology and counselling between 2013 and 2015. He has four children and 12 grandchildren.

He said: “Part of the inspiration was to empower people to empower themselves, and part of the motivation was to be a voice to the voiceless – that was my inner drive.”

BBC

Do you care for some spag jollof? Joke Bakare has got you covered with a recipe:

There’s a long-standing tradition of pasta-making in northern Nigeria that’s sadly dying out as good-quality dried pasta becomes available. We’ve served a couple of pasta dishes in Chishuru, my restaurant – most recently gnocchi made with gram flour and flavoured with moringa, a nutrient-rich leaf, served with a caramelised yoghurt sauce.

For the 100th anniversary of legendary Soho restaurant Quo Vadis, my dear friend Nick Bramham of Quality Wines and I were asked to collaborate on a celebration dinner. Nick loves to cook Italian so we decided to do an irreverent Italy-meets-Nigeria dinner including spaghetti with jollof sauce. Jollof rice is one of the most famous dishes of West Africa – there’s a never-ending argument about whether Ghanaian or Nigerian jollof is better, I honestly don’t care. Anyway we took the sauce base of jollof and applied it to pasta. We didn’t invent this – it’s a popular late night snack dish in Nigeria – but it was Nick who christened it “spag jol”.

Observer

A truly unexpected twist to this story where Nigerian scammers helped to catch a paedophile in the UK:

A paedophile who was spotted by a passenger watching child abuse videos on a train to London also tried to buy a 13-year-old girl - and was paying for her in instalments.

David Johnson, 35, was caught viewing videos of young children being abused while on a train from Stafford to London on September 23, 2025.

Messages from a supplier read: ‘I got all videos. Don’t worry, sweetheart [I] supply all kinds of videos.[sic]’ The vile predator responded: ‘Just kids videos’.

But unbeknownst to him, a horrified passenger sitting behind him witnessed the disturbing exchange as well as the videos that followed.

After moving to another carriage, he alerted British Transport Police, who swooped in to arrest Johnson as soon as the train arrived at London Euston.

Officers seized his phone, which was found to have an indecent image of a child saved as the wallpaper, but the CPS said more evidence was required to charge him.

While in custody, brazen Johnson even asked officers for his phone back because he ‘needed to delete some stuff’.

Further analysis of 150 electronic items belonging to Johnson, where they uncovered nearly 200 indecent images, including 105 Category A pictures – the most serious.

In an episode of Channel 4’s 999: What Happened Next, it was also uncovered that Johnson was trying to buy who he believed was a 13-year-old girl named Lola.

[…]

Johnson had planned to meet the 13-year-old girl at her home on the day of his arrest and had condoms and a train ticket in his possession at the time.

Police went to an address in Wolverhampton where they believed Lola was living; however, people living there did not know anything about the child.

It was later uncovered that neither Lola nor Shanelle were real and were fake personas created by scammers in Nigeria to whom he was sending money.

Daily Mail

Alhamdullilah, we are pleased to have found that the Dangote Refinery IPO shares are currently Shariah-compliant - Professor AbdulRazaq AbdulMajeed Alaro, mni, FIFP, FCPA, M.IoD, MCIArb, CIAE, CSA

Nigeria has lately been overcome by what I can only describe as Dangote-mania. The upcoming public listing of Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals (DPRP, but I prefer to use “Dangote Refinery” as I will do throughout this piece) has been described as “The People’s IPO” and yet another example of Aliko Dangote selflessly doing something for Nigerians and Africans across the continent.

As with all things Dangote, his psychological hold on Nigerians (I often say that culturally, Nigerians view the richest man in the country as a kind of god-ordained office) is such that various institutions that you might expect to at least be neutral have openly taken positions in favour of this IPO. As an example, Nigeria’s pensions regulator, as far back as May, issued a directive waiving the applicable operating-history and profitability requirements it would normally demand of pension funds planning to make such an investment. It did this by invoking the refinery’s strategic importance to Nigeria and its “fundamentals” (no numbers had been published at the time.)

Research, Re-search

And then there are the investment banks who have been publishing their “research notes”. The quality of what they have put out in the name of this IPO has truly shocked me. I have managed to go through three such documents and want to highlight the most egregious findings in what Renaissance Capital (operating cost comparison), Chapel Hill Denham (peer average) and Cardinal Stone (dividend yield) have put out. It’s important to point out that all of these firms have commercial relationships with the Dangote Refinery. The IPO prospectus (more on this in detail) names all three of them as joint issuing houses.

The most striking (and hilarious) example of this comes from a disclosure on page 60 of Cardinal Stone’s document. The statement cannot be improved so I quote it in full here: “The content of this research report has been communicated with the Company, following which senior management or relevant executives at the company approved the report. However, no influence was exerted by the management team on the content or recommendations.”

The ‘Company’ here is of course Dangote Refinery and so Cardinal Stone are telling you that what you’re reading was approved for publication by Dangote Refinery, the subject of the research. They also disclose on the same page that the analyst(s) who wrote the report “holds personal positions (directly or indirectly) in a class of the common equity securities of the Company” and that “the analyst(s) responsible for this report, is a board member, officer, or director of the Company.” RenCap are also unusually explicit in their disclaimer. In a report they themselves titled “The People’s IPO”, they said this on page 30: “The Communication is not an advertisement of securities nor independent investment research and has not been prepared in accordance with legal requirements designed to promote the independence of investment research”. Wonders.

Chart 01 above shows how each of the issuing houses are valuing the refinery. The refinery’s own prospectus values it at $46 billion (before issuing new shares) but all the issuing houses are very confident that it is worth a lot more than that. Chapel Hill Denham goes the furthest by saying it thinks the refinery will be worth $113.4 billion by 2030 (perhaps it would have discovered how to refine water into wine by then). Amusingly, CardinalStone’s own comparable-company methods actually put the refinery substantially below the IPO valuation at $27 billion (EV/EBITDA method) but they more than doubled their headline valuation target, because of reasons.

To more substantive matters. On pages 4 and 46 of the Cardinal Stone report, the bank advertises a 39.6% “expected total return” broken down into 31.1% capital appreciation and an 8.5% dividend yield. Now when you go to page 41 of the same document you read this: “On these assumptions, we forecast a PAT margin of 12.9% in FY’26 (H1’26: 13.1%) and profit after tax of $3.8 billion, equivalent to EPS of $0.03 (N44.743)” Two pages down on page 43 it says: “In line with management guidance, we forecast a mean payout ratio of 30.0% between FY’26 and FY’28 as the expansion program progresses”. The reference purchase price is of course N525 per share.

Now taking all the numbers published by Cardinal Stone themselves in their report and doing some simple arithmetic with them, you get this:

This is an unequivocal error which overstates the cash yield by roughly six percentage points and more than triples the dividend yield supported by their own model.Their advertised dividend yield of 8.5% can only be possible if every single naira of earnings is distributed, even though the report forecasts distributing only 30%. All of these contradictions are contained in the report they themselves published.

Moving on to Chapel Hill Denham. On page 31 of their report, they published an emerging-market comparison with 15 available EV/EBITDA observations. Have a look at the column I highlighted below:

When you add up those numbers you get 96. Taking the mean (average, unless it now means something else) gives you 6.4. Somehow they have arrived at 9.5 as their own mean. The surrounding P/E and forward EV/EBITDA averages are calculated correctly so this is clearly an error. The problem with this error is that when you go back a couple of pages to page 29 they say: “On an adjusted peer average of 9.5x and 6.1x EV/EBITDA, we derive an average fair equity value of US$42.89bn…” meaning they are actually using that number in their calculations of the company’s valuation (they don’t explain anywhere what they mean by “adjusted” or anything they adjusted to take the 6.4x to 9.5x.)

Correcting that error alone (while keeping their two-year averaging and valuation weights) reduces its overall equity valuation by approximately $2.21 billion, from $62.53 billion to $60.32 billion. But what is $2 billion among friends?

Finally RenCap. On page 6 of their report, they show this very eyebrow raising chart:

Just before the chart on the same page they say this: “The cost discipline is evident in DPRP’s direct production cost structure translates into a clear competitive advantage when benchmarked against some US independent refiners. Figure 3 compares DPRP’s targeted controllable cash operating cost against the most recent disclosed figures for Marathon Petroleum, CVR Energy, Valero, HF Sinclair, Par Pacific, and Phillips 66, all measured on a consistent basis excluding depreciation and amortisation.”

I read that and was like woah, Dangote Refinery may have discovered the elixir of life here if their operating costs of $0.4 per barrel in 2025 are a tiny fraction of American refiners’. How did they arrive at this figure I wondered. RenCap’s report was published before the IPO prospectus was made available to the public but they clearly had an advanced read of it as one of the joint issuing houses. On page 2 of their report they have a throughput figure of 432,000 barrels per day for 2025. This implies 157.68 million barrels for the year (432,000 x 365). So what operating costs will you give $0.4 per barrel? You are looking for something like $65.5 million ($65.5 million divided by 157.68 million rounds to $0.4). Hmmm, where can we find this number I wonder? Oh look! On page 86 of the IPO prospectus I saw this:

Of all the operating expenses incurred by Dangote Refinery, RenCap decided that the only one that counts in their magic operating expenses number is admin expenses. To give you a sense of how ridiculous this is, I pulled out some operating costs from the IPO prospectus (page 83) in the table below:

If you apply that $1.35 billion to the 157.68 million barrels of throughput for the year you get $8.58 per barrel before adding admin expenses. This will put it above every US refiner on the RenCap chart. And this makes sense given the RFCC issues the company battled with all through 2025

These are by no means the only errors or ridiculousness in these reports. For example on page 1, RenCap says: “Phase 2 expansion will double capacity to 1,400kbpd and lifts polypropylene to 2.4mmtpa at a cost of USD 12.4bn which will be financed by the IPO proceeds”. How does an IPO that is raising $1.55 billion finance an expansion costing 8x more? On page 9 of Chapel Hill’s report where it discusses governance aligned with global institutional norms, it highlights Dangote Oil Refining Company’s approximately 66% holding, then notes that special resolutions require 75%. This gives the impression that DORC alone cannot carry special resolutions. A few pages later on page 12, it produced this chart:

Just DORC and Dangote Industries Limited alone add up to 80.73% ownership. What are we doing here? And you’re not going to believe who owns Greenview either.

Cardinal Stone use 112.981 billion shares throughout its valuation and forecast per-share figures. The footnote on page 48 of their report explicitly says these are the shares issued at June 2026. The problem is that in the prospectus, it says that the private placement increased issued shares to 120.129 billion. When you add the 4.1 billion new shares to come from the IPO, you get 124.229 billion shares, which is 10% larger than what Cardinal Stone used. Just changing that denominator alone reduces their total return target from ₦688.09 to ₦625.79. Their model already takes account of the new shareholder cash coming in from the IPO, so you cannot possibly include the benefit of such cash coming in and then leave out the very shares bringing them in from your denominator. Basic.

This piece is not really about the investment banks talking their books. I only included the above critique as a way of showing how everyone rallies around Aliko Dangote once he sets about something to the point of sloppiness. No questions will be asked and it can quickly become a suffocating atmosphere for anyone who expresses even mild skepticism. It played out exactly this way in 2013 when the entire banking sector in Nigeria mobilised to help fund the refinery’s construction.

Now let us get into the meat of this post which is the refinery IPO as presented in the 194 page prospectus. There are some useful things to welcome about the IPO. It gives Nigerians an opportunity to own part of an operating industrial business, with the same ordinary share rights as existing investors. The listing also brings the company’s finances and its dealings with other Dangote businesses into greater public view, allowing shareholders and others to examine how it is being run (I have to point out that page 31 incorporates full audited financial statements and their notes by reference but those notes are not all included in the prospectus.) A minimum subscription of ₦5,250 for ten shares makes participation possible for people who would otherwise have little opportunity to invest directly in an enterprise of this scale. These benefits deserve some recognition.

The refinery’s contribution to Nigeria and the merits of buying its shares at ₦525 remain entirely separate questions, however, and each question requires its own evidence.

The ownership calculations assume full subscription to the base offer and no other changes. The 3.30% is the new issue’s share of capital, not necessarily the total tradable free float.

Questions to answer

In this section, I want to try to answer 3 main questions:

1. What are the sustainable earnings that can justify the price at which shares of the Dangote Refnery are being offered?

2. How much of this valuation is based on the existing working refinery (650,000bpd) and how much depends on the planned expansion (1.4 million barrels per day)?

3. There has already been a private placement and refinancing. When you take all those into account, how does it change the picture of what investors are buying with this IPO?

The first big challenge is that the financial presentations need reconciling because different sections report materially different operating cash flow and capital expenditure figures. Secondly, the sustainability of the H1 2026 profit turnaround needs testing because even though the operating improvements are real, favourable product prices also contributed significantly on account of the Iran war. Thirdly, the expansion, debt servicing and dividends are all going to be competing for the same cash so they need to be assessed together.

Starting with the first, which figures should investors use? The reporting accountant’s extracts and the historical financial summaries provide different answers to questions about the refinery’s finances. For the first half of 2026, the extract on page 74 of the IPO prospectus reports $1.513 billion of cash generated from operations. The summary on page 78 reports $1.273 billion. Cash purchases of property, plant and equipment fall from $162.2 million in the first presentation to $33.4 million in the second. Both tables cover the same period and both amounts are expressed in dollars so it cannot be down to exchange rate differences.

One company, many profits

The profit-and-loss account have the same issues. H1 gross profit is $2.583 billion in the reporting accountant’s extract (page 70) and $2.495 billion in the summary (page 76.) Finance income changes from $498.5 million to $49.6 million (perhaps this is a $400m typo?), while finance costs change from $807.6 million to $308.8 million. These differences are offset elsewhere so that profit before tax agrees across both sources ($2.106 billion), but they leave the reader with different pictures of operating profitability and financing costs. The prospectus talks about offsetting “derivative contracts” with Dangote Industries (Note 4.1, page 88), which may explain part of the presentation but there is no schedule connecting these figures.

You can see that the operating profit in the historical summary is $49.905 million lower1, while its net finance costs are lower by exactly the same amount, allowing both set of accounts to arrive at the same $2.106 billion profit before tax. But the prospectus does not provide a complete explanation of why the same business, over the same six months, has these different allocations of income and expense.

Is this the new normal?

Be all that as it may, $2.1 billion of profits is a very large number and it is what much of this IPO is being sold on. Everyone knows that the Iran war has had a big impact on the fortunes of the Dangote Refinery so I would not belabour that point. The question for me - and I imagine any investor - is: does the prospectus provide any indication or evidence that the earnings level it presents can become normal for the completed refinery?

Stable and full-capacity operation of the refinery only began in March 2026. The operational improvement and the exceptional market conditions caused by the Iran war all arrived together, so the available results cannot cleanly separate the profit attributable to each. Begin with chart 06 below comparing H1 2025 to H1 2026:

The key thing to note from these numbers is that 98.4% of the improvement in pretax profit is accounted for by the increase in gross profit. Everything below gross profit contributed a net improvement of just $38 million. What I’m trying to get to is what exactly explains the move from a loss in H1 2025 to profit in H1 2026. Gross profit, by definition, is what remains from your sales after deducting production costs, including (for a refinery) crude oil, direct labour and depreciation of production assets.

Looking at it another way using the prospectus’ historical summary figures:

In H1 2025, the refinery generated just $145 million of gross profit, against a combined net burden of $427 million from everything below that line. That left it with a pretax loss of $282 million. A year later, the burden between gross profit and profit before tax had fallen by just 9%, to $389 million, but gross profit had risen to almost $2.5 billion. There was now enough gross profit to absorb those remaining costs and leave $2.1 billion before tax. That is where my earlier 98.4% comes from: the $2.350 billion increase in gross profit divided by the $2.388 billion improvement in pretax profit.

We are thus left with a very big question unanswered. The refinery sold a lot more product: petrol volumes almost doubled, while diesel volumes increased 62%. Selling prices also increased quite sharply - approximately 35% for petrol and 78% for diesel. The prospectus says the refinery was better able to absorb fixed costs this year but it does not provide any reconciliation that separates volume and operating efficiency from changes in product prices relative to cost of crude. In other words, while the figures demonstrate improvement, they do not tell us how much of these should be carried into a normal year (with no war.)

A simple way to think of this is that what happens above gross profit is largely out of the control of a refinery (its inputs and outputs are priced in a competitive and transparent international market) while what happens below it is largely within its control.

Speaking of the Iran war (I know I promised not to belabour the point, bear with me), how should we think about this in relation to the Dangote Refinery? A refinery makes money from the difference between what its products sell for and what its inputs cost. In that sense, a fall in crude oil prices can actually be good for a refinery’s profitability if petrol, diesel and jet fuel prices remain high. The IEA said something about this in early July when crude prices fell sharply as supplies recovered, but tight product markets still pushed refining margins to four-year highs. The reverse is, of course, also true.

Let’s quickly go back to RenCap’s analysis (I know I already mocked them but no hard feelings) to see why this is important:

Just a $5 reduction in the margin earned on each barrel removes more than $1.1 billion of annual EBITDA in their sensitivity analysis. What this means is that the refinery can continue to operate successfully while its earnings fall substantially. A very revealing detail is what the various optimistic forecasts by the issuing houses require. RenCap estimates that the refinery’s gross refining margin fell from $33.7 per barrel in Q1 2026 to approximately $18 in Q2 2026. But its full-year forecast somehow requires a recovery to approximately $29 - 30 in H2 2026, followed by $30.20 in 2027. The report explicitly identifies that rebound as one if its key assumptions. Chapel Hill Denham on their part assume $25 in 2027. These are materially different judgements about the earnings capacity of the same asset given what just a $5 swing can do. (Renaissance Capital, p.12; Chapel Hill Denham, p.8.)

Dear reader, I leave you with this question on this point - how much of that additional $2.35 billion in gross profit can the refinery earn again under more ordinary market conditions and what evidence supports the answer embedded in the IPO price? Whatever the answer is, it is not in the prospectus. It only says on page 80 that: “the Issuer estimates that it will be able to achieve a GRM [gross refining margin] of approximately US$24.2 per barrel in 2026” but immediately qualifies this by saying actual margins may vary with crude oil prices and market conditions.

Cash and Debt

When you look at H1 2026 numbers, you are presented with a very reassuring number in terms of how much debt the refinery is carrying.

But the key thing to note here is that this low-debt picture is a snapshot taken after the company received substantial fresh equity and before expansion spending ramps up. This is important because it has a big impact on how much cash shareholders can receive while the company is spending on doubling the refinery’s capacity to 1.4 million bpd.

The numbers in the prospectus are a bit confusing so I’m hoping chart 10 below will make it a bit clearer:

The summary of this table is that the refinery received $2.71 billion from share issues and deposits for shares before the IPO. This is equivalent to about 85% of the increase in its cash during H1 2026. From the prospectus, it is not clear which share transactions account for $468.7 million out of those receipts, but the cash-flow statement recorded that the money came in. This fundraising helped to boost the refinery’s cash balance to $4.27 billion by June. The refinery still owed $5.67 billion, but subtracting that cash is how they got to net debt of just $1.40 billion in chart 09. That low net-debt figure is therefore mostly down to cash supplied by investors. As that cash is spent on the planned expansion, it will of course no longer be available to reduce the net-debt figure unless operating cash flows or further equity funding replenish it.

This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate way for a company to strengthen its balance sheet. The question here is what happens when the money has been spent. Simply paying for construction cost will reduce cash and increase net debt as a result, even without taking out another loan. That is to say, that cash deducted when calculating net debt is also part of the money available to fund expansion. It cannot serve both purposes - debt reduction and construction - indefinitely.

What makes this even more important is the spending timetable disclosed in the prospectus. $4.8 billion of capital expenditure is budgeted for the remainder of 2026 (i.e. H2 2026), followed by $3.9 billion in 2027 and $3.1 billion in 2028. That adds up to $11.8 billion over the next two-and-a-half years. The IPO’s net proceeds translate to approximately $1.55 billion at the exchange rate used in the offer, which works out at about a third of the planned H2 2026 expenditure alone. (Prospectus, pp.34, 93 and 156.)

I don’t want to keep punching at the investment banks and their research reports (what am I saying, of course I want to) but this capital expenditure point is another part of their research that makes no sense.

By what logic have these guys all come up with a full year’s capital expenditure spending that is less than half of what the refinery itself says it will spend in just six months of the year? Someone who is good at spending please explain this to me in the comments.

Now to be perfectly clear, I’m not suggesting that the company is going to run out of cash or anything of the sort. The company does have other resources available to it. Alongside that $4.3 billion of cash it disclosed in June, a $750 million bond issue was completed in July alongside the $258 million private-placement tranche in chart 10. Adding those amounts to the expected net IPO proceeds of $1.55 billion brings us to approximately $6.82 billion (before bond issuance costs and other cash movements) after June. This is more than enough to cover the planned H2 capital expenditure, leaving about $2.02 billion before subsequent operating cash flows, debt service and other uses. The key point is that a big chunk of that cash has a planned use and by definition will not be available to pay shareholders. Am I communicating?

Control

I want to talk about something that has increasingly become normalised in Nigeria around the way “public” companies are owned and governed. Just because this absurdity has been going on for a long time (Dangote himself “pioneered” it with his cement listing in 2010) does not mean everyone should shrug and accept it as the mandate of heaven.

A fully subscribed base offer would leave Aliko Dangote with approximately 84.39%2 ownership of the refinery, assuming his existing shareholding remains unchanged. The new IPO shares would represent 3.30% of the enlarged company, with existing minority shareholders holding the balance. This large holding gives Dangote a financial interest in the refinery’s success but the public will actually be buying shares in one company that sits inside a larger group. If, for example, another Dangote company supplies gas or cement to the refinery, the price determines how much profit each company earns. A refinery’s shareholder will not have any claim on the supplier’s profit just because both businesses carry the Dangote name. These are among the supplies the prospectus lists under transactions with related parties, therefore the terms on which all the Dangote companies deal with each other has an impact on the value of the shares being offered (Prospectus p.158).

The financial relationships between the Dangote companies are much deeper than just buying supplies. The refinery repaid a $3.99 billion loan to Dangote Industries Limited (DIL) during H1 2026. DIL is also the counterparty to the arrangement under which losses on the refinery’s external commodity derivatives were offset by a gain on an intercompany derivative (if this sounds complicated, that is the point.) There was no net derivative loss for H1 2026 shown in the prospectus because of that offset. So in this particular case, we can see that the group arrangement helped to support the refinery’s reported profit. I have no idea on what the pricing and duration of these derivatives are, or the conditions under which it can be changed, and neither do you. But you have to factor it into any discussion of the sustainability of the refinery’s profits (pp.78, 88, 92–94 and 159).

The refinery’s Finance and Investment Committee has the responsibility for reviewing these financing strategy decisions and overseeing treasury activities. The three members of the committee are:

Every member of the Finance and Investment Committee also has a role at DIL. The director described as “independent” at the refinery has a seat on DIL’s board while DIL’s vice-president chairs the refinery committee responsible for overseeing financial reporting and internal controls. These overlapping responsibilities make the arrangements for scrutinising any transactions the refinery has with DIL particularly important. What exactly does “independence” mean when the company on the other side of a transaction is one that that the committee members also hold senior roles in?

There is also a big difference between establishing committees and show how they work in practice. The prospectus says that the newly constituted board committees had not held any meetings as at the date the document was published. A separate Statutory Audit Committee is expected to be constituted after the listing, with shareholder representatives elected at the first annual general meeting. It also says governance policies are “being reviewed” and that any such policies still awaiting formal adoption will be submitted for board approval (without identifying which policies remain outstanding.) Investors are therefore being asked to assess safeguards whose operation is still to be demonstrated (Prospectus pp.130–132).

As I say, this is all very “normal” in Nigeria where owners of “listed” companies own almost all of its shares and control it via various opaque structures. But just because something has been normalised in Nigeria does not mean it should be accepted with a shrug.

Peer Review

We come to the final point I want to make about the prospectus and the refinery’s valuation. A standard practice is to compare a company like the Dangote Refinery to similar (in terms of operations, size etc) refineries from around the world to get a sense of what its value ought to be. None of this is an exact science but you can help yourself a great deal by the choice of peers you select.

The way that the three investment banks have gone about this part of their exercise has been quite problematic to say the least. RenCap did a 19-company peer group which included Japan’s SALA: a company whose businesses span gas supply and car sales, but no disclosed crude-oil refining operation. Removing SALA doesn’t really change the valuation benchmark but it makes me wonder who checked the list. There is an even bigger problem with HD Hyundai, whose refinery subsidiary includes shipbuilding and other businesses, and SK Innovation, which combines refining with batteries and other energy operations. These are a different collection of businesses from the one being offered by Dangote Refinery through this IPO. Valero, Marathon Petroleum and Phillips 66 account for almost 70% of the enterprise value in RenCap’s table. When you add the enterprise values and earnings you get a multiple of 7.74x compared with a median of 6.27x across the individual companies. It is not that this approach is wrong per se but the weighting affects the answer you arrive at and needs a justification (RenCap, p.10).

CardinalStone’s is better and names such as Tüpraş and Valero are worth retaining. But its unadjusted comparisons also include Marathon and Phillips 66 (for the reasons already stated above), and Bangchak, which has upstream and power businesses. More importantly, its table does not identify the earnings periods behind the peer multiples and yet it applies them to Dangote’s next twelve months of forecast earnings. The median is arithmetically fine, and its relatively low peer valuations are not the main reason for its highly optimistic conclusion, which comes from the much higher discounted-cash-flow valuation which carries 70% of the weight (CardinalStone, p.49).

Chapel Hill Denham has the more elementary obstacle that we already discussed in the opening section of this piece. It supplies “adjusted” peer averages of 9.5 times EBITDA for 2026 and 6.1 times for 2027 but it does not even name the companies in this peer group let alone explain the weights and adjustments. There may be a reasonable explanation behind those numbers but the research note does not give readers any information needed to test it (Chapel Hill Denham, p.29).

To get around these problems, I have come up with a shorter and, I hope, more useful peer group of four companies (you’re welcome.) Three are worth retaining from RenCap’s and CardinalStone’s lists while Mangalore is my own addition. I have included each one for a specific reason because the comparison should help us assess the specific business being offered to investors - in this case the Dangote Refinery - including the expansion it still has to finance. There is no need to include companies on the list just because they have “oil” in their name.

Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals (MRPL), India operates a single coastal refinery with a product mix very similar to Dangote’s. Petrol, diesel and jet fuel accounted for approximately 84% of its turnover in 2025–26 with polypropylene contributing another 4.4% (PDF, pp 109-110.) That is a pretty good match for Dangote Refinery whose current earnings depends almost entirely on producing transport fuels. MPRL’s less obvious attraction is its ownership structure. ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited, India’s state-controlled oil and gas producer) and HPCL (Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, a major Indian refiner and fuel retailer) together own 88.58% of MPRPL, leaving public investors with a small minority interest (are Nigerians and Indians blood relations?) MRPL therefore lets us compare Dangote Refinery to what investors pay for a refinery whose controlling shareholders remain firmly in charge. It’s also a cleaner comparison because, just like buying Dangote Refinery’s shares don’t entitle you to participate in DIL’s profits, buying MRPL shares only gives investors a claim on MRPL’s business, without participating in ONGC’s upstream oil operations. MRPL is smaller than Dangote Refinery and the state control aspect brings different policy risks, but those are differences we can identify and discuss.

S-Oil, South Korea has refining capacity of 669,000 barrels a day at its Onsan complex, close to Dangote’s rerated 650,000 (or the rerated 700,000.) This is the strongest physical comparison in the group which is again a large coastal complex combining refining with related chemical production. It gives us the concentration of a substantial business in one location. An important difference to acknowledge is that lubricants contributed approximately 29% of S-Oil’s H1 2026 operating profit (PDF, page 14), so its valuation is a bit more than just a pure fuel-refining multiple. Its Shaheen petrochemical expansion nevertheless makes it very useful. Commercial operations at the expansion are targeted to start in early 2027 (PDF, page 12), so, just like Dangote’s investors, S-Oil’s investors also have to value tomorrow’s production while today’s business finances the construction.

Tüpraş, Turkey is the most useful comparison for the pricing argument I will discuss in the concluding part of this piece. Its financial statements explain that selling prices follow Mediterranean petroleum-product prices and the dollar exchange rate (PDF, page 43). Here is an important domestic refiner whose local customers remain connected to international fuel markets. That gives us a very concrete (pun intended, I’m afraid) way to examine the value of a strong domestic position under international pricing and not just saying “emerging market”. Tüpraş operates four refineries, and its broader investments and Turkey’s hyper-inflation environment require us to be very careful when interpreting its multiple. But the commercial mechanism is directly relevant to Dangote and Nigeria.

Valero, United States provides an established benchmark in the international fuel markets into which Dangote sells some of its products. Its Gulf Coast and North Atlantic operations make the connection more useful than just choosing any large American refiner. Its business is also more focused on transport fuels than a diversified energy conglomerate (although renewable diesel and ethanol also contribute meaningfully). Another useful point is that it makes us consider how valuable geographical diversification really is. Dangote’s concentration in one enormous complex can produce economies of scale, but a network offers protection against an interruption at any one location (see earlier article on RFCC I linked above). Valero owns 14 petroleum refineries across the US, Canada and the UK. Low costs are very attractive but so is having another refinery working when another one breaks down.

Having done all that explaining, here is my own peer-group comparison:

The EV/annualised H1 EBITDA column shows how much each business in the peer-group costs (after adjusting for debt and cash) for every dollar of earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation. Dangote costs $8.94 against a peer median of $5.62, a 59% premium on its peers. The Equity/annualised H1 profit column looks at what shareholders pay to access the remaining profits after those charges. Here, Dangote’s 13.13 times compares with a peer median of 9.13 times, a 44% premium. Dangote is the most expensive company to buy in this group on the first measure but Mangalore is more expensive on the second. The result is that investors in this IPO are being asked to pay a lot more for each dollar of Dangote Refinery’s earnings.

To make these comparisons I have doubled their H1 2026 earnings which might be different from what a full year might look like (there might be some seasonal variation for instance.) If for example I removed S-Oil’s inventory gains and Mangalore’s exceptional repricing income, the operating-earnings premium would reduce from 59% to about 34%.

But the real implication of the numbers in chart 13 is this - If Dangote repeated its first-half performance for the rest of 2026, its annual earnings would be about $5.3 billion. At the valuation implied in this IPO, those annual earnings would need to rise to about $8.4 billion for investors to be paying the same amount for each dollar of earnings as they do for the typical company in this peer group. That means roughly 60% more earnings just to bring its valuation in line with its peers.

This is where the planned expansion to 1.4 million barrels a day enters the discussion. It is the reason you’re being asked to pay that price today and the premium suggests a lot of future success (the construction will go to plan, the RFCC issue will not repeat itself and so on) is already baked in. The prospectus puts the expansion programme’s cost at approximately $14.3 billion (prospectus page 34). That funding must come from the business’s cash generation or additional financing (since the IPO is only going to cover a small part of it as discussed). Again, cash committed to construction is unavailable for dividends and borrowed money carries its own financing bill. All of this is to say that the promised expanded refinery will have to arrive well before any return for shareholders. How much of that expansion represents extra upside for the buyer at ₦525, and how much is the business growing into the price already being charged?

I don’t know, you tell me.

Aliko Dangote (and cement)

I can’t close this piece without talking about Aliko Dangote himself as the promoter and larger than life person behind this IPO. I don’t think any other Nigerian could cause so many to lose themselves in excitement in the way this IPO has done (was it really necessary for RenCap to say on page 20 of its report that “DPRP processes more crude than the combined operational output of every other refinery on the African continent” when Algeria and Egypt alone processed approximately 1.17m barrels per day in 2024?)

As a very self-satisfied Dangote Detractor I will not be investing in this IPO. Anyone who knows me knows that development is my favourite topic. To me, Dangote is anti-development and as such I’m opposed to his businesses in principle and in practice. If this IPO is the one sure route for me to become rich (something I’d very much like to happen), then I’m going to have to remain poor. But you can have pity on me by taking out a paid subscription to 1914 Reader to help mitigate this risk of poverty.

Cement, as I will never get tired of saying, is a key to civilisation. There is no path to development that does not run through pouring lots and lots of concrete. Forget even housing, you need it to build drainage systems, power plants, roads, bridges and to overcome the harsh external environment in a way that makes it habitable for humans to flourish in it. It has taken me living outside of Nigeria for two decades to really appreciate just how difficult the physical Nigerian environment is. Cement is one of the biggest keys to getting out of that.

A World Bank study on cement usage in Mexico found this:

In this paper, we help to fill this gap by investigating the impact of a large scale effort by the Mexican Government to replace dirt floors with cement floors on child health and adult happiness. We find that replacing dirt floors with cement floors significantly improves the health of young children. Specifically, we find that a complete substitution of dirt floors by cement floors in a house leads to a 78 percent reduction in parasitic infestations, 49 percent reduction in diarrhea, 81 percent reduction in anemia and a 36 to 96 percent improvement in cognitive development. Additionally, we find that replacing dirt floors by cement floors significantly improves adult welfare, as measured by increased satisfaction with their housing and quality of life, as well as significantly lower rates of depression and perceived stress.

If Aliko Dangote’s stewardship of this critical civilisational tool has produced anything, it is unhappiness. His singular obsession has been to charge as much as possible for the product without any thought about its effect on Nigeria’s development, even though it is the country that has made his fortune possible. No amount of support he is given changes this - he will take it as his god-given right to bigger margins. And we can illustrate this with coal.

A cement plant uses a lot of energy to generate heat. It burns fuels such as coal or gas to heat limestone and other raw materials to around 1,450°C in a kiln, which turns them into clinker, which is then ground into cement. It is pretty much its biggest cost input. If I go back as far as the Dangote Cement 2013 results (PDF, page 5), I can see that Obajana - Africa’s largest cement plant by installed production capacity (it can turn out 325 million bags of 50kg cement a year) - used practically no coal at all at that point. Fast forward to 2020 (this is the latest disclosure for Obajana specifically I can find) and coal had become 50% of its fuel mix (PDF, page 50). The reason for this shift is that around 2015, after Dangote suffered some disruption to its gas supplies and cost of importing fuel increased (something other businesses in Nigeria also suffered), the Nigerian government stepped in to award him licences to a couple of very large coal mines with decent quality coal in them (PDF, page 29). I have not found any evidence that Dangote paid anything meaningful for these coal mines. For a sense of scale, those two mines alone (there have been others - link opens as an Excel spreadsheet) cover almost 90% of the size of Paris city.

The point I made earlier about dealings between Dangote entities is useful here. The arrangement is that a company called Dangote Coal Limited mines the coal and sells it to Dangote Cement at whatever price they determine between themselves. We have no idea what it costs Dangote Coal to produce the coal for sale since that company’s accounts are a black hole not visible to the public. But we can get an idea. On an earnings call last year, the CFO of Dangote Cement said: “We have started using local coal. Three, four years ago, we were importing expensive coal at about $80-$100 per tonne. As at today we are using local coal and buying for less than N30,000 N40,000 per tonne.” In other words, one Dangote company sells coal to another Dangote company for roughly $20 - 26 per tonne (using 2025 exchange rates). As of today, on the international market, coal sells for just under $150 per tonne. I stress again, this is the price that one Dangote company sells the coal to another Dangote company. Whatever the profit on the sale ends up with Dangote anyway. And the price is still a fraction of what it costs on the international market.

What have Nigerians benefitted from making it easier for Dangote to produce cement in Nigeria? As I have previously demonstrated, however you slice or dice it, Nigeria’s per capita cement consumption has gone down from where it was in 2013 to today, even though Nigerians barely consume half of the cement that Indonesians do. As for Aliko Dangote himself, in 2008 (the year he made his debut on the list), Forbes reported his net worth at $3.3 billion. As of today, the Forbes tracker lists his net worth at $31.2 billion. I’m here to tell you that it is possible for someone to get richer as people buy fewer of his products. To misquote the Bible - “He must increase, but I must decrease.” All of the government support, all of the tax breaks, all of the import bans - how has Aliko Dangote expressed his thanks to the country that has made him so fabulously wealthy? Revenue per tonne of cement in China works out at $34 per tonne (China Resources), in India $66 per tonne (Ultra Tech), in Indonesia $60 per tonne (SIG). And Dangote in Nigeria? $111 per tonne (₦167,186 in naira).

There is no mystery to this other than that Dangote sees the biggest possible margins obtainable from Nigeria and Nigerians as his singular obsession and god-given right. This is useful to bear in mind for the upcoming IPO for the reason I alluded to above in the discussion about Tüpraş. In the IPO prospectus, I counted four mentions of import parity:

It is very important for everyone to be clear about what this means given that Dangote has been very clear about it and given his antecedents. Nigeria may be reducing its dependence on imported fuel with this refinery but it will continue to import fuel-price shocks. Import-parity pricing uses the cost of obtaining an equivalent imported product as a benchmark. In general, that means the international price of fuel plus the costs of bringing it into the Nigerian market. It does not matter whether the local crude and delivery do not incur the same international shipping and insurance costs - that is the price he will charge Nigerians for it. No amount of support with naira for crude or operating out of a tax free zone will change this (on page 113 you can even see that the prospectus places import-parity pricing alongside the advantages of local logistics. It identifies efficiencies from producing locally, but does not specify how much of those savings will reach customers through lower prices. I can tell you for free that the answer is zero.)

Dangote has been clear on this, you - as a potential investor - also need to be clear. If some crazy guy in the Middle East flies a drone into a refinery in Saudi Arabia and oil prices spike, you as a Nigerian will feel that price shock. Dangote will give it to you, whether you want it or not. Just as with cement where he has priced the product at what you might get it for in China plus the cost of shipping it to Nigeria (which is very large due to the weight of cement), this limits any consumer-price protection Nigerians can expect from having a local refinery on their doorstep.

As I said before and will say again - I object to Aliko Dangote and his businesses in principle and in practice. If I were to be building something in Nigeria today, I will go out of my way (including paying more) to avoid using Dangote Cement.

The day before Tim Cook handed over to John Ternus as the new CEO of Apple, the Financial Times did a piece on his (Cook’s) legacy in numbers. It worked out that Apple’s shares had risen by more than 2,000% under his leadership and the company had returned well over $1 trillion in dividends and buybacks to shareholders. All of this happened as the company sold 3.1 billion iPhones under his guidance and went from 60,000 to 166,000 direct employees. Tim cooked and everyone ate.

Over the period he was CEO, he was a paid a total of $880 million in salary, stock awards and other cash incentives. As of today, he owns just 0.02% of Apple. For every $1,000 he added to Apple’s market value, he took home 20 cents for himself. Against the cash Apple returned to shareholders through dividends and buybacks, his compensation was less than 90 cents for every $1,000 distributed.

Dangote is the direct inverse of this. Any value he creates is captured at source by him. No technology boon will accrue to Nigeria from him. No one will leave any of his companies to set up a business elsewhere in the economy that boosts development (you will notice that the cement company only ever makes noise about rewarding “distributors”). Bear all of this in mind as you invest in the IPO (if you make money, you can share some with me out of the goodness of your heart.)

I can only properly express all of this in pidgin English to close: Dangote no dey chop remain for anybody.

Obasanjo was following a long line of rulers who have tried to direct their citizens’ ambitions through public recognition. In 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte, at the time France’s First Consul, established the Legion of Honour to reward individual merit in a country where a revolution had been waged against the privileges of birth. Military courage and civilian accomplishment would receive recognition within the same institution. Among those honoured was Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist who invented the electric battery, whom Napoleon made a knight of the Legion in 1805. He also decorated Benjamin Delessert for his factory’s success in producing sugar from beet, offering France a domestic alternative to imported cane sugar at a time when war had severely disrupted supplies. In doing so, scientists and industrialists could stand alongside generals, with identifiable achievements explaining their presence in such company. Napoleon also wanted to bind a country exhausted by revolution and war around a common idea of national honour.

So what has Nigeria decided is “worthy of every Nigerian’s pursuit”? To investigate, I assembled a database of 2,213 national honours awards1, covering nine award periods between 1963 and 2023. I drew on government gazettes and official citation booklets, supplemented by contemporary newspaper reports and some material supplied by the ministry responsible for national honours. Alongside the recipient’s name and the rank of the honour, I brought together evidence about their career and the contribution they were being recognised for. I also followed people who were honoured on two separate occasions to follow their progress through the hierarchy.

Counting the number of businessmen or academics on a list tells us something about who Nigeria recognises but examining the specific honours they receive tells us how highly their contributions are ranked. I therefore distinguished (or tried to) recipients’ broader career backgrounds from the jobs they held when honoured. For example, a retired general does not lose his military history because the citation at the time of his award describes him as a businessman. The largest cohort turned out to be 2022 (the late former President Buhari seemed to hand them out like party packs on his way out), with 489 awards - 436 supported by individual official citations which provide accounts of the recipients’ work and the government’s reasons for recognising them. This allows us to examine what the government has wanted Nigerians to admire over the years.

Limitations

The national honours have not operated as an annual exercise so any gaps in the data have more than one explanation. The promised combined ceremony for 2015 and 2016, for example, never took place. To deepen the confusion, the absence of a ceremony does not mean that nobody received an honour: former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo received his GCON in 2015, and Walter Onnoghen (former Chief Justice of Nigeria) received the same rank in 2017. So awards were certainly handed out in some years for which the database contains no recipient list. The ministry’s historical summary records 348 awards in 1964 and 142 in 1982, for example. I was not able to obtain some relevant documents while others have been identified as present in some archives but produced a dead-end when I tried to track them down.

All told, the best official benchmark I could find is the ministry’s 2022 retrospective, which reported 5,341 awards. But the database I managed to put together contains 2,213 records: 1,832 from post independence up to 2022, followed by another 381 in 2023. The earlier records amount to roughly a third of that official benchmark from 2022. This is not a precise completeness rate because the official sources themselves sometimes disagree (quelle surprise.) As an example, the retrospective records 241 awards for 2001 but the complete gazette I was able to obtain for that year contains only 235 entries.

Surprisingly (to me, at least), there are also differences between being selected for an honour and actually completing the process of receiving it. Of the 2,213 records, 514 remain provisional: 365 entries in the combined 2010/2011 list and the 149 names on the 2012 shortlist. They are evidence of selection but every individual’s completed appointment and acceptance has not been independently established. A separate 752-entry gazette from 1998 is preserved outside the main analysis because the exercise was subsequently reported to have lapsed, whatever that means. These distinctions are important particularly when counting completed awards or following somebody’s promotions through the system.

Does the missing material invalidate the exercise? Not really because what I really wanted to do was look for patterns. But that does not mean that the missing data is of no effect. The available cohorts were determined by the records I was able to recover rather than selected at random, and the main dataset currently only covers awards under civilian governments. The stronger reassurance comes from testing the patterns within the available years.

Knowing who somebody is presents another difficulty. I was able to assign a category to 1,858 records, while 355, or 16%, remain unresolved. A judge identified by judicial office is generally easier to classify than someone whose entry consists of initials and a surname, say. I have tried to keep the unknowns visible and to distinguish a person’s broader career from the position they held when the award was given. But even then, categories still require judgment. A person’s occupation alone cannot establish whether they got their award based on merit or favouritism.

The evidence about why people were honoured is much thinner than the evidence about their names and ranks. Many earlier records supply a job title without any individual citation. The 2022 booklet is much richer, but even there the short closing citation can omit achievements that are described elsewhere in the recipient’s profile. Furthermore, an official profile is often just the government presenting its case for the award, rather than an independent audit of everything claimed in it (I give an example of this below.)

The treatment of rank also needs some care. The ‘prestige points’ I have used in the database are just a convenient way of summarising an ordered hierarchy not that one decoration is worth twice another. The actual distribution of ranks remains the stronger evidence.

Finally, it is worth stating the obvious that the database contains recipients, rather than the wider population of nominees or deserving Nigerians who received nothing. Therefore, while it can show which groups account for larger shares of honours, it cannot calculate a scientist’s chances, say, of recognition relative to a politician’s. It also cannot establish whether the honours motivated anyone to invent something or choose a different career. The records simply let us examine the examples the government put before Nigerians.

Prestige Points

The raw count of the awards above treats a MON and a GCFR as one apiece even though they occupy very different positions in the hierarchy. To capture that difference, I assigned each award rank “prestige points”: ten for GCFR, and then falling one point at each successive rank down to one point for FRM II. This deliberately simple scale preserves the ranking and lets us compare a group’s share of awards with its share of prestige points. These are research weights, not government scores: ten points do not mean someone contributed ten times as much to Nigeria, of course.

The GCFR is normally given to presidents and heads of state although there have been a couple of exceptions such as MKO Abiola and Obafemi Awolowo, neither of whom ever held the highest office in the country. The 2022 retrospective counted 14 GCFR awards in the wild although I have only been able to find entries for nine people. It carries the maximum ten prestige points, but honouring someone for becoming president tells us very little about which achievements everyone else is being encouraged to emulate. I therefore calculate the results with and without awards identified as coming with the job, such as Bola Tinubu’s GCFR. Abiola’s award stays in both calculations, with its full ten points, because he was not being honoured for taking office.

Headline Findings

Across the 2,213 awards in the database, people whose careers lay in politics and public administration, military/security, law, or traditional and religious authority collected fully half, 50.7%, of the awards. When weighted by rank, their share rises to 54.9% of all Prestige Points. This preference becomes much more pronounced at Commander level and above: these groups received 371 of the 486 senior awards, or 76.3%.

Using names might better illustrate this point. In 1965, Ado Bayero, at a time he was already the Emir of Kano, received the CFR honour (eight Prestige Points) along with a whole host of other such Nigerians including the Minister of State for External Affairs (Senator Nuhu Bamali), the Etsu Nupe, the Tor Tiv and the Emir of Gwandu. More than half a century later, the 2022 awards included GCONs (nine points each) for Senate President Ahmad Lawan and Chief Justice Olukayode Ariwoola while General Lucky Irabor, the then Chief of Defence Staff, received the CFR honour. These men all arrived at their respective honours with considerable authority already attached to their names. Their institutions had already placed them in positions from which they could command attention and influence other people’s lives. The medals only supplied an additional distinction showing that the authority they exercised within those institutions now came with the country’s formal endorsement of them as exemplary Nigerians.

This suggests that institutional standing (people who are already inside the system) carries a particular premium in the upper reaches of the honours system. Nigeria does recognise contributions from across different parts of society, but the most prestigious honours tend to confirm people who already have a place within the established order. In other words, there is a potentially self-reinforcing process here: people acquire authority within important institutions, receive national recognition, and become the examples everyone else is encouraged to emulate. In this way, the state is adding prestige to people who already possess it.

Gani Fawehinmi’s GCON (the GOAT, by the way) is an obvious counterexample. It shows why a legal career does not automatically mean insider status. It is possible to acquire institutional standing by building something valuable outside of authority. An honour can reward that achievement and reinforce the existing hierarchy simultaneously.

Three Points for a Submarine Cable

Funke Opeke helped build the infrastructure that made it possible for other Nigerians to become entrepreneurs. During the global financial crisis, her company, Main One, raised $240 million to lay a submarine cable connecting West Africa to Europe which was operational by July 2010. MainOne helped bring down the cost of international connectivity, making better internet access available to businesses that badly needed it. A contemporary investor case study described both the difficulty of financing the project and its wider economic effects. The company subsequently helped bring fibre to Yaba’s emerging technology cluster. By the time the government honoured her in 2022, Main One’s cable had been delivering internet traffic to Nigeria for twelve years. The government’s own citation (PDF, page 252) credited her with delivering the project on time and within budget, alongside subsequent investment in data centres. It awarded her the Member of the Order of the Niger (MON), worth three Prestige Points. On a development test, a MON is a very weak signal to send about building the infrastructure of a digital economy.

She may yet climb the ranks: Jim Ovia progressed from the his earlier CON award to CFR in 2022, so the MON need not be the final word on her contribution. In the same list (page 182), Paystack’s Shola Akinlade and SecureID’s Kofo Akinkugbe received the OON, worth five points each.

But Opeke’s citation gives us a concrete example of the economic capability Nigeria says it values, and the prestige it attaches to someone who helped to create that capability. Is getting an infrastructure project finished on time and within budget something to be taken for granted? Apparently.

Opeke is just one example of a wider pattern. To look beyond individuals, I grouped together the awards associated with what you might call productive activity and knowledge: business and infrastructure, alongside science, education and health. This is a deliberately generous definition, taking in established bankers and working professionals as well as people creating something new. Across the database, this group account for 489 awards, or 22.1% of the total, and 21.5% of all Prestige Points. But if you narrow the view to Commander level and above (CON, CFR, GCON) their share falls to 15.1% of the Prestige Points available at those ranks. Productive and knowledge-based work does get recognised but it given considerably less room at the top.

The wording used in the official citations offers another clue. Across the original official texts available to me - overwhelmingly from the 2022 booklet - the most frequent words include “state”, “university”, “service”, “contribution” and “school”. “University” often tells us where someone studied, rather than what they discovered; “state” frequently tells us where they were born. Once plural forms are combined, “service” appears 441 times and “development” 264 times, against 18 mentions of “innovation” and just one of “patent”(“innovative” appears separately.) This contrast suggests that the language is much more suited to simply describing a career and praising service rather than spelling out a new capability that Nigerians might be encouraged to emulate.

Hierarchy in Tragedy

That Nigeria is a deeply hierarchical society is hardly news. But even knowing that, I found something in the database that amazed me. On 21 May 2021, a military aircraft crash killed the Chief of Army Staff Ibrahim Attahiru and ten others. Nine of those men went on to appear in the 2022 honours records. But even in this shared act of commemoration, the honours reproduced the hierarchy within the military exactly. In other words, even though the men all died on the same flight, the chain of command survived them in the awards.

I found this astonishing. You can die in the service of your country and still be honoured according to your rank?

Rapid Promotions

As mentioned earlier, the late President Buhari seemed to hand out national awards like party packs on his way out of office. Something even more interesting, however, is that at least seven people who were decorated in October 2022 appeared at higher ranks in May 2023. The interval was approximately seven and a half months with Habeeb Okunola making the biggest jump: three steps, from MON to OFR. The available 2023 sources do not supply individual explanations for these upgrades but the same presidency seems to have reassessed several recipients within months.

Honour Before Achievement

One final point on the standard of evidence used to hand out these honours. On 11 October 2022, Julius Dediare Rone, the head of UTM Offshore, received an OFR, worth six Prestige Points. His official citation (PDF, page 112) described his company as building a floating liquefied natural gas facility and claimed that his initiative would lift 600 million people out of energy poverty and provide clean cooking for 900 million across Africa. Having begun with these promised benefits, it then concluded by praising his “innovation which has led to the expansion of the gas market”.

On 18 November 2022, thirty-eight days after the ceremony, the Japanese engineering company JGC announced that its consortium had been awarded the contract for front-end engineering and design, the work needed to define the plant before construction. Earlier conceptual design work had begun in 2021, but this next stage was not scheduled for completion until December 2023. Construction would follow only if the project went ahead. There was a real business and a project under development in this case, but the citation had allowed its promised benefits to mingle freely with claims of achievement. In other words, the honour and medal were ready before the engineers had even finished designing the plant.

Conclusion

Nigeria is wasting an opportunity to encourage the capabilities it keeps saying it needs and that is a shame. An honours system gives the government a useful tool to identify people whose work deserves public admiration and explain why others should follow their example. But the pattern in this database suggests that the more prestigious the honour, the more its recipients already belong to the established institutions of Nigerian life.

There is a lovely example from Japan of how recognition can echo in unexpected ways beyond the person being recognised. In 1949, Hideki Yukawa became the country’s first Nobel laureate “for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces.” At that time, Ryoji Noyori was eleven years old. He later recalled that Yukawa’s prize had helped awaken his interest in science (PDF, page 81): “At age eleven, I was inspired by Professor Hideki Yukawa’s Nobel Prize - Japan’s first – and awakened to science.” In 2001, Noyori then won the chemistry Nobel himself, for developing the catalysts used in the industrial manufacture of medicines. Public recognition of one person’s work helped another person imagine their own life in science.

The Nigerian government already hands out honours and decides how much prestige to attach to different achievements. It could use those same tools to make building useful things a more visible route to national recognition. The disappointment here is that an instrument with that possibility has become so heavily occupied with recognising people whose importance was already well advertised.

Obasanjo’s phrase, “worthy of every Nigerian’s pursuit”, was an invitation to people who had not yet to made a contribution to Nigeria to have a go at doing so. Nigeria could use its honours system to give accomplished builders a prominence that makes their work familiar far beyond their own industries. It would also be useful if the explanation of how they earned it gave other Nigerians watching something to emulate. If you want more of something, you should go out of your way to reward and incentivise that thing.

That, too, is part of how countries develop themselves.

If September turns out quiet on 1914 Reader, it is because we are working on a project that involves a lot of research work. We hope to begin sharing it with you next month.

Enjoy the usual selection below

Non-Nigerian Media

This story about Nigerians buying buy-to-let property in the UK featured on past editions of BTH. The 2026 data is now out and the story has not changed much:

One in five new buy-to-let businesses in the UK are being set up by overseas landlords, with Nigerian, Indian and Irish buyers driving a surge.

Figures from the estate agency Hamptons show 27,200 buy-to-let companies were set up in the first six months of the year and 19.5 per cent had at least one non-UK director.

This is 56 per cent higher than same period in 2016 when the figure was 12.5 per cent.

Indian investors are the nationality with the highest proportion of directors, with Nigerians the second highest, and Irish third.

[…]

The biggest increase in arrivals to the UK was among Indians and Nigerians between 2019 and 2023, according to the Office for National Statistics, with 127,000 more Nigerians arriving in 2023 than in 2019 and 178,000 more Indians.

The Times

Marketing video from DJI on how their drones were used in the construction of the Coastal Road in Nigeria

$2m book deal pulled due to ‘suspicions’ of AI usage in drafting it. This will look extremely foolish in a couple of years but unfortunately his head has fallen on the chopping block when publishers are still utterly confused about how to respond to AI (it is likely going to end their industry as we know it). Hopefully he self publishes:

A high-profile publishing deal for a debut crime novel has collapsed after doubts emerged over whether artificial intelligence played a role in writing it.

The hotly anticipated manuscript Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, by Jerry Falade, was withdrawn from sale by its agent despite reportedly receiving an offer for more than $2m (£1.5m) from Minotaur, owned by Macmillan US, as part of a 14-way auction. The plan was to publish it in 2028.

An email sent to publishers by Falade’s agents and seen by the Guardian said: “Jerry Falade produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

It continued: “During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with Jerry for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilising AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process. We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

The US auction was run by the author’s agent Marc Gerald of Europa Content, according to the Bookseller. In the UK, Sandy Hodgman of Hodgman Literary is said to have secured several six-figure bids through a similarly competitive process. The Guardian has approached both agents for comment.

Gerald told the Bookseller he first read the book in June, and that it was “stunningly good, everyone fell in love with it. It’s a book that appeals to absolutely everyone.”

[…]

“We feel terrible for putting this into the universe and the firestorm it has caused,” Gerald added. “The book itself is genius – however it came to be drafted, it’s amazing.”

Guardian

Interpol released a report about AI and cybercrime in Africa. Most interesting is that it portrays Nigeria as both a major victim of serious cyberattacks and a significant hub in Africa’s wider cybercrime ecosystem:

West Africa is observed as the most active region for BEC detections.19 Ransomware detections in 2025 provided by TrendAI reached record levels in Cabo Verde, with 16,997 detections, the second highest in Africa, while Nigeria recorded 5,822, reflecting the country’s dual role as an origin and target of cybercrime. Côte d’Ivoire is in ransomware detections of other countries and ranks third in sextortion IP senders, with 64,111 detections provided by TrendAI. Mali recorded the highest sextortion detections in West Africa, with 3,494 incidents, suggesting a growing infrastructure for automated blackmail campaigns. DDoS attacks, which had been prevalent in 2024, declined in the first half of 2025, although Mali registered 4,145 attacks,20 indicating a strategic pivot toward more profitable, less detectable vectors like BEC and crypto scams.

Mobile money fraud and crypto-related scams, including Ponzi schemes and romance baiting, were widespread, often linked to scam centres operating under the guise of fintech startups. The region’s high volume of French-language scams and the presence of cross-border money laundering networks underscore its position as a nexus between African and global criminal ecosystems. The Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) website was compromised in 2025, highlighting the vulnerability of key national institutions to cyber intrusion.21 The attack disrupted economic data collection and fuelled disinformation campaigns, demonstrating the strategic value of targeting public data infrastructure.

INTERPOL

I missed the news that Alhaji Alhaji died in July. Telegraph has an obituary:

Alhaji Abubakar Alhaji, who has died aged 87, was one of Nigeria’s most influential and distinguished public servants, serving as Minister of Finance in the early 1990s, before appointment as Nigeria’s High Commissioner to the Court of St James’s from 1992 to 1996.

From 1990 Alhaji also held the traditional title of Sardaunan Sokoto, a title of the Sultanate of Sokoto (a formerly independent Sunni Muslim caliphate), previously held by Sir Ahmadu Bello, who served as the first premier of Northern Nigeria, which had fallen into abeyance after his assassination in 1966.

Universally known​ as “Triple​-A”, Alhaji was a formidable negotiator who combined unusual charm with unusual stubbornness. He was credited with an ability to persuade western bankers to see things his way, but was also one of the few people able to convey the views of western financial institutions to Nigeria’s military leaders – and the only one with the political clout to get his way. A former colleague recalled how, as guest speaker at the National Press Club in Washington in 1990, Alhaji won over his American audience by joking that, after all, Nigeria and America had one thing in common: “We were both part of the British Empire.”

Telegraph

Solar usage in Abuja. I find stories like this quite painful to read. But it is what it is:

Sandra Ogbebor hunches over her softly humming refrigerator and scours through bottles before finally yanking out an orange juice. She hands it to a customer who has been waiting in her food stall, one of many informal shops tucked in an open-air food market in the Nigerian capital. The customer gulps it down in a single stretch and drops it into a bin – visible proof of his relief, at least for this moment, from the sweltering heat.

Ms. Ogbebor runs her cold-drinks business mostly off a rickety, gas-powered generator, as Nigerians are unable to rely on the country’s dodgy electric grid.

Some 90 million of Nigeria’s 242 million people live with limited access to electricity, a problem that the World Bank estimates costs the economy $29 billion annually. Decades of corruption and mismanagement of the power sector have forced many businesses to use alternative sources, such as generators.

But with war in the Middle East also sending fuel prices soaring, small businesses in Nigeria are bearing the brunt. In Abuja, creativity is the name of the game.

At beauty shops, for example, frequent power outages don’t stop the flow of commerce. Workers do their clients’ eyelashes by that 21st-century form of candlelight – their cellphone flashlights.

Christian Science Monitor

Plenty of ink has already been expended on Uber leaving Nigeria but I found this detail remarkable:

Drivers for the San Francisco-based multinational ride-hailing app said they learned of the decision in real time, with little warning. Some passengers told local media outlets they were en route via Uber when they received notice.

Online, people took to calling the day’s events the “Uber rapture,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to those left earthbound and blindsided by a sudden moment of Christian salvation.

Washington Post

The Osun Osogbo festival collides with gold mining. There can only be one winner:

It is the final day of Nigeria’s annual Osun Osogbo festival in honour of the African deity, in a tradition that has existed for hundreds of years and draws people from across the diaspora.

Except this year the water was once again a discoloured brown. Until 2018, the river ran clear, but then mining several miles upstream began to pollute it, introducing heavy metals and sediment into the watercourse.

The river, named after the goddess, runs through the Osun-Osogbo sacred grove, a 75-hectare (185-acre) Unesco world heritage site since 2005. The water is believed to possess healing powers and women who have trouble conceiving, or people in search of promotion or prosperity, often come to pray at the riverbank; the water is drunk or used for bathing, depending on the “directions” of the goddess.

Yemi Elebuibon, a writer who is also the chief Ifá priest of Osogbo, is among those who have been campaigning against the mining and pollution.

“What we are telling them [those running the mining operations] is for them to turn the mining in another direction so it can stop polluting Osun. Osun is naturally pure; it should not be polluted,” he says.

Osun is a gold-rich state in Nigeria, where small-scale and artisanal miners often operate illegally due to lax enforcement. When they dig for gold along the 132-mile (213km) river, they let the runoff leach back into the water, polluting it.

Guardian

Another feature on A7, the Russian payments startup. I remain intrigued by the fact that Nigeria was its first overseas office:

Russia’s war effort in Ukraine might be faltering, but the Kremlin has a high-tech superweapon to neutralize Western sanctions.

It is called A7. The state-backed payment network moves money in and out of Russia, defying U.S. and European efforts to isolate Moscow from the global banking system. A7 helps Russia pay for everything from military-drone parts to luxury cars to imported fruit, using a mix of cryptocurrency transactions and more-traditional banking methods, researchers say.

Behind its rapid rise is a convicted money launderer. A7’s founder, Ilan Shor, is best known for his role in one of the biggest bank heists in history: a complex scheme to extract $1 billion from three banks in Moldova, one of Europe’s poorest countries, in 2014. A Moldovan court convicted him of fraud and money laundering for helping orchestrate the theft, but he fled the country while under house arrest.

Shor has denied the allegations and called them politically motivated. The fugitive businessman, who is married to a Russian pop singer, now lives near Moscow. A boyish-looking 39-year-old, Shor goes by “Travolta” in A7’s internal company chat, according to leaked messages circulated by hackers last year.

Representatives of A7 and Shor didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Founded less than two years ago, A7 says it handles nearly 20% of payments in Russian foreign trade, or more than $100 billion annually. President Vladimir Putin gave it his blessing last year, taking part by video link in the opening of an A7 branch office.

Now, A7 is planning to take its services global and fulfill Putin’s vision of an alternative financial system outside the control of Washington or Brussels. Having recently opened its first offices abroad, in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, A7 says it is eyeing expansion into Latin America and the Middle East. Executives don’t hide their desire to serve countries seen as pariahs in the West.

WSJ

I’m sorry I laughed at this:

Shenseea’s verse on Yung Miami‘s new international remix for “Spend Dat” is still turning some heads.

On the remix for the track, which arrived on Aug. 28 and also features Davido and Vybz Kartel, the Jamaican artist delivers the pre-chorus “Where my Nigerian scammers at? / Haitian mandem got that check / Got every currency in cash / Grown men and them YN’s.”

The lyric began circulating widely online immediately following release, drawing mixed responses from listeners.

Complex

This piece about Nikki Ogunnaike and Philippe Fonzin’s New York wedding comes with 82 photos. Please enjoy responsibly:

When Nikki Ogunnaike and Philippe Fonzin first met—in August 2014 at a birthday party in Manhattan—they had something in common: “Neither of us was actually invited by the host,” Nikki says. (They had been invited by another friend.) At the party, which was at the now-shuttered Hudson Hotel, Nikki saw Philippe sitting at a picnic table and introduced herself. They hit it off, and spent the rest of that summer and fall getting to know each other. “We’ve been together ever since,” Nikki says.

Within the first few months of their relationship, Nikki introduced Philippe to her sister, Lola, who “immediately put him to work building a crib for my soon-to-be-born nephew,” Nikki recalls. “While that may have been annoying to another man, it was one of the first moments when I knew that Philippe was a generous and genuinely wonderful man.” She adds: “My 12-year-old nephew still can’t believe that Philippe has known him literally his entire life.” In 2020, amid the pandemic, the couple moved in together in Brooklyn.

In September 2025, during New York Fashion Week, Philippe proposed to Nikki. He took the opportunity of her sister’s birthday party “to let her parents know his plan. After going to the Tibi show and lunch at the Odeon, she picked up balloons for the party. “Nikki was in the backyard struggling to untangle the balloons, so I was able to sneak in and brought her parents upstairs to let them know the plan. She had no clue I was even there,” Philippe says.

“Cut to the party a couple of hours later, and everyone was in the best mood ever,” Nikki says. “I thought it was just because we were throwing a great party, but as it turns out Philippe had told everyone that he’d be proposing the next day.”

Vogue

Some data from the UK on surrogate fathers:

Applications for babies born to non-UK surrogates have increased by 136 per cent, more than doubling in the past decade from 151 in 2015 to 357 last year.

In contrast, parental order applications for children born from surrogacy arrangements based in the UK have risen by 23 per cent, from 113 in 2015 to 139 last year.

In England, between 2018 and 2024, there were more than 1,500 applications to become the legal parents of babies born to surrogate mothers abroad out of a total of 2,437, according to the official records.

The largest number of applications, 642, related to babies born to surrogates in the US, followed by 258 to those in Ukraine and 144 in Georgia. Applications have also been made for babies born in Colombia, Ghana, India, Canada, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Nigeria, Uganda and Russia.

The Times

This will be the last chapter published for now, unless I find enough material to complete some of the profiles I have in draft form

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly (no paywall)

Chapter 4: ‘His Name Is Dore’

Chapter 5: The Old Mushroom

Chapter 6: Maina Turjiman

Chapter 7: The Carpenter (no paywall)

At eight o’clock on Monday morning, 16 December 1929, Arthur Whitman went to the bamboo fence around the District Office at Opobo with a pencil and a sheet of paper. More than a thousand women were waiting on the other side and six of them stood in front as representatives of Opobo Town, Bonny, Andoni, Kwa, Ogoni and Nkoro, standing close enough to watch his hand as he wrote on the paper. Whitman had agreed the previous afternoon to hear them because they wanted the government to categorically state that women were not going to be taxed. Palm leaves had been sent through the neighbouring communities to call women to the meeting, using an old method by which women in trouble asked other women to come to their aid. Soldiers had arrived during the night and were now posted inside the perimeter of the fence, while police guarded the trading factories along the river.

The first statement said that the government would not tax women but the second was more precise: “No personal property, such as boxes, is to be counted.” Known prostitutes were to be arrested and women were not to pay rent for the common. They also wanted Mark Pepple Jaja removed as Head Chief of Opobo and for the tax on men to be abolished as well.

Whitman gave them the notes he had written, but they wanted six typewritten copies, one for each of the communities they represented. The interpreter and the clerk were to sign as witnesses and the office stamp was to be placed on every copy. While the typist worked, the women complained that the trading companies had entered the retail trade and pushed out the women who once acted as middlemen between the firms and their customers, which had in turn forced down the price paid for produce. Whitman promised to arrange a meeting with the commercial agents if the crowd dispersed. The women then asked for envelopes bearing two-shilling stamps so the papers could be posted.

The meeting had been going on for nearly two and a half hours. New groups were still arriving and the women danced and shouted while soldiers moved up and down behind the fence telling them to keep quiet. Some carried sticks and many wore palm fronds. The women expressed confidence in the knowledge that soldiers would not shoot women. A call went up for Mark Pepple Jaja and Whitman began to suspect that the complaints about trade were intended to keep him at the office while other people moved on to loot the factories.

Eventually the typed copies came out and one woman took a copy away and returned after consulting someone who could read. She then disputed the second sentence as untrue. The promise that boxes would not be counted had been drafted in English and witnessed by an interpreter but somewhere after that, “No personal property, such as boxes, is to be counted” had become an assurance (in the mind of the literate person who explained it) that boxes would continue to be counted. Whitman viewed the consultation as suspicious. Many months later, the commissioners at the public inquiry concluded that the woman may have been confused by “the transposition of the negative away from its verb”. The sentence placed “No” at the beginning and left “is to be counted” much later, so an oral explanation could lose the negative and leave its listener with the words about boxes being counted. Perhaps “Personal property, such as boxes, is not to be counted” would have worked better as an interpretation. Whatever might have been, nobody recorded the words used by the person who read the paper to her.

Whitman declared that the meeting was over and the women appeared to be leaving when the fence gave way at both ends. The noise was so great that he could not make himself heard. Lieutenant Richard Hill made a sign asking whether he should fire. Whitman nodded and said yes.

Hill shot the first woman at the fence in the head.

Read more

Nine Dragons (the China-based manufacturer she founded in 1995 to turn America Chung Nam’s recovered paper into packaging board) began production in Dongguan in 1998 with a single paper machine capable of making 200,000 tonnes a year. By May 2002, its annual capacity had reached one million tonnes. Then the numbers became ridiculous: 3.3 million tonnes by 2005 and 5.35 million two years later. Its Dongguan complex, with thirteen giant paper machines running twenty hours a day, became the largest paper mill in the world, while Cheung employed more than 10,000 people across the company. Her fortune, estimated at $3.4 billion in 2006, rose above $10 billion a year later, briefly making her the richest self-made woman in the world. Cheung had entered the wastepaper trade long before Zhu Rongji became premier, so she cannot be called his creation. Her great fortune was to have built the right business just as Zhu’s reforms were consolidating the economy in which it would become an empire. China entered the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in December 2001, a culminating achievement of his premiership, and between 2004 and 2007 its exports grew by more than 30 per cent a year. All those goods had to be put in boxes.

He came to bury Caesar

Trained as an electrical engineer at Tsinghua University, Zhu Rongji spent much of his early career inside the State Planning Commission. During the Hundred Flowers campaign in 1957, colleagues asked him to speak at an internal meeting. In a three-minute speech, he criticised planning officials for drawing up plans and budgets without serious investigation, relying instead on reports and figures detached from reality - what he called “subjectivism”. When the political wind reversed, those same remarks were reclassified as “rightist”. In January 1958, Zhu was demoted and expelled from the Communist Party and he was not allowed back in until 1978. During the Cultural Revolution, in a separate punishment, he spent five years doing farm labour at a cadre school.

This broken relationship between plans and reality stayed with him until he took charge of China’s economic portfolio as vice-premier in 1993. The problem, as he saw it, was no longer that the old state-led economy was inefficient. To him, it had largely ceased to reveal anything useful about itself symbolised by what he called the “tumour” of fake accounts which could be found at the root of every problem in the economic order. His famous inscription of “make no false accounts”, delivered to the Shanghai National Accounting Institute, was of a piece with his disdain for irrational growth plans and subjectivism.

In the pre-reform days, a state-owned enterprise (SOE) might also be its workers’ landlord, hospital, and childcare service. This was the danwei, or work-unit, system, built around the “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed employment and a package of housing, medical care, education and pensions. The SOE was, in essence, a miniature welfare state. Banks lent to them because officials required them to, losses were rolled forward and workers remained on payrolls whether there was useful work for them to do or not. By 1997, the net profit of all China’s industrial SOEs (after the losses of failing firms were net against the earnings of profitable ones) had fallen to zero.

The policy under which he began to tackle this problem was known as “grasp the large, let go of the small”. During the brutal restructuring from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, roughly 35 million workers disappeared from SOE payrolls (employment fell from 77 million in 1995 to 42 million in 20032.) Some SOEs were sold, some leased to their managers, some folded into stronger companies and others were simply bankrupted. One of the most prominent examples was the Shenyang Smelter, founded in 1936 and once one of China’s 500 largest SOEs. It employed more than 10,000 people and had led the country in the production of several non-ferrous metals. But it also produced 42 per cent of Shenyang’s sulphur dioxide emissions, all while losing money. Its three great chimneys stopped smoking in the summer of 2000; on 8 August, a court formally declared it bankrupt.

Here Zhu becomes an awkward fit into the story that is now commonly told about China. These days “Chinese economic policy” brings to mind subsidies, national champions, technology funds and officials selecting industries in which the country intends to dominate. Yet Barry Naughton argues that3, on a narrow definition, targeted industrial policy reached its lowest point under Zhu. Industrial policy, in this sense, means a government identifying particular sectors and directing resources towards them in order to change the structure of production. It presupposes that a market already exists but while a command economy can be good at issuing commands, it is rarely able to will markets into being.

In that sense, Zhu spent much of his premiership dismantling the institutions that issued those commands. Most industrial ministries were abolished and formal responsibility for industrial policy was transferred out of the State Planning Commission. For a period of time, there was practically no government agency taking charge of industrial policy. He also decided against launching large state projects in semiconductor fabrication, nuclear power and large civilian aircraft, three industries that would later become central to China’s ambitions. Zhu saw his work (as The Undertaker of China’s old industrial order ) as making decisions about what industries and sectors should be allowed to die. Or to put it another way, it was the preparation of the soil into which industrial policy could later be planted: removing dead firms, allowing prices to do their work, forcing enterprises to keep accounts and building the institutions within which a market could function.

None of this made Zhu a “free-market liberal”. Naughton describes his economic view as resting on two beliefs namely, the need for markets and the need for a strong government. Markets were useful because they subjected bureaucrats to a discipline they could never be relied on to impose on themselves. Government, on the other hand, was necessary because Zhu was suspicious of entrepreneurs as well. He believed that left to their own devices, they would dodge taxes and help themselves to public property as cheaply as they could get away with. He was irritated by the corruption that accompanied local privatisations and never became a strong advocate of private-property rights for their own sake. His ideal was a state powerful enough to set rules that its own officials and enterprises dare not ignore. You might say that he shrank the perimeter of the state economy while hardening its centre.

The names of most enterprises that were let go are long forgotten, but those that took their place are impossible to miss today. In steel, Baoshan Iron and Steel absorbed Shanghai Metallurgical Holding and Meishan in 1998 to form Baosteel, the corporate ancestor of today’s China Baowu (now the world’s largest steelmaker, producing almost 125 million tonnes of crude steel in 2025, more than ArcelorMittal and Nippon Steel combined). In oil, a big exchange of assets in the same year turned CNPC and Sinopec into two vertically integrated national groups. PetroChina was then carved out of CNPC in 1999 and dual-listed in New York and Hong Kong the following April, raising $2.9 billion at a valuation of roughly $30 billion (its state-owned parent retained around 90 per cent). All these were attempts to place enormous state assets inside recognisable corporate forms thus exposing part of their capital to outside investors and making their managers answer for commercial results.

The old China Telecom monopoly was divided by business line, with its mobile operations spun out into China Mobile (now the world’s largest mobile operator by customer base, with over one billion mobile customers), while the fixed-line network initially remained with China Telecom. Near the end of Zhu’s premiership, the State Power Corporation was dismantled into two grid companies - including State Grid (now the world’s largest utility and, with annual revenues of $555.4 billion, the third-largest company in the 2026 Fortune Global 500) - and five competing electricity generators. Administrative monopolies were broken up, competition was introduced between state-controlled firms and public ownership was concentrated in a smaller number of much larger companies. Seen from outside China, it was easy to mistake Zhu for a free-market liberal.

There was an even more consequential reform that made a lot of what he achieved possible. By the early 1990s, Beijing had slowly lost control of the country’s revenues under an arrangement where local governments collected taxes via a patchwork of negotiated fiscal contracts. They were allowed to retain much of what they raised and could use some of the money to grant their favoured enterprises tax exemptions. The central government remained responsible for national policy but lacked the financial firepower to actually implement them. Zhu’s 1994 tax-sharing reform replaced much of this bargaining with rules. Taxes were divided into central, local and shared categories; the new value-added tax was split 75 per cent to Beijing and 25 per cent to local governments; and a national tax administration was built alongside local tax offices. Per one IMF measure, the centre’s share of total revenue rose from 34 per cent in 1993 to 56 per cent in 19944. More broadly, budgetary revenue recovered from 10.4 per cent of GDP at its low point in 1995 to about 16 per cent in 2001. Zhu was so proud of the reform that he said in 1996 he deserved a Nobel Prize in economics for it.

The tax reforms gave Beijing the funding to finance infrastructure and absorb some of the costs of SOE restructuring. But it also created a lasting imbalance (till today) by shifting revenues upwards while leaving local governments responsible for a significant chunk of spending. The pressure this placed on local authorities encouraged the proliferation of land sales and various other forms of off-budget finance. In the immediate term, though, it restored Beijing’s capacity to govern a large and complex economy.

Zhu applied the same logic to the financial system. In 1998, the government issued RMB270 billion5 (around $32.5 billion at the time) in special bonds to recapitalise the four large state banks. Bad loans were then moved into four state-owned asset-management companies, with nearly RMB1.4 trillion transferred by the end of 2000. The provincial branches of the People’s Bank of China were replaced by nine regional offices, a way to deliberately block the channels through which governors and local Party officials pressured banks to lend to their favoured enterprises. Sometimes he would deliberately make the same point in dramatic fashion. In October 1998, Beijing refused to rescue the Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corporation (GITIC), the principal foreign-fundraising arm of China’s richest province, and ordered it closed. GITIC was formally declared bankrupt the following January, owing about $4.3 billion. Foreign banks were taught a hard lesson that lending to a politically connected Chinese state company did not always come with a sovereign guarantee6.

What grew in the space Zhu cleared were private businesses and foreign-backed manufacturers who became large enough to challenge the old SOEs and absorb some of the workers they released. The surviving SOEs were reorganised as joint-stock corporations and mostly returned to profitability. Government money shifted away from dictating particular industrial outcomes towards broader investments in capacity like research grants, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Project 985 (the elite-university programme named after its announcement in May 1998) which concentrated resources on a small group of higher institutions to make them reach world-class research standards. Alongside this, higher education itself was expanded more broadly, raising the number of university graduates from around one million in 2001 to five million in 20077.

Next came the most consequential transfer of all. To allow SOEs die without taking their workers’ homes down with them, Zhu agreed to sell work-unit apartments to their occupants at heavily subsidised prices. In 1998 and 1999 alone, something like half of China’s urban housing stock changed hands, often for a fraction of its market value. Arthur Kroeber8 has described the privatisation of China’s urban housing as “one of the greatest wealth transfers in history”, worth an estimated $540 billion, or about one-third of China’s GDP in 2003. It was Right to Buy with Chinese characteristics, on a scale that would have made Margaret Thatcher blush. Millions of urban families acquired an appreciating asset almost overnight, transforming housing from a welfare benefit provided by an employer into the most valuable form of private property most of them would ever own. But it also helped turn property into the principal store of Chinese household wealth and laid the foundations for the extraordinary housing boom - and the dependence on ever-rising land and house prices - that followed. It ended up drawing a sharp dividing line between those who received subsidised apartments from the state and migrants and young people who later had to buy into the market at rapidly rising prices. As Evan Osnos put it, “the world’s largest accumulation of real estate wealth was under way.”9

Around the same time, rural workers were migrating to cities on an unprecedented scale. WTO membership opened Chinese producers to ferocious competition but it also gave them reliable access to the largest consumer markets in the world. Chinese suppliers upgraded their manufacturing methods and the country embedded itself in global production networks. The fear had been that WTO accession would destroy Chinese industry. Instead, growth remained above 10 per cent for five years from 2003. In that sense, Cheung Yan did not need a government policy to designate wastepaper as a strategic industry, neither did Zhu need to select her as a winner. In his consolidation of the Chinese economy, her observation about those empty return ships was tested until it became an industrial empire.

The Human Cost

All of these upheavals came with an immense human cost. In the cold light of history, the restructuring looks to have justified itself. The SOEs that were closed tended to be smaller and less productive, while the labour productivity of those that survived closed the gap with that of private firms. But restructuring happens to people individually, not economies in the aggregate. Many of the people the liquidated SOEs previously employed remained unemployed for years. Others eventually returned to work at lower wages (and lower status) or accepted early retirement and left the formal labour force altogether. Some recent research that followed workers that were displaced during the reforms found that the damage was persistent: earnings remained lower long after the initial job loss, with many workers re-employed in less-skilled occupations, under informal contracts and by employers the authors inferred were less profitable10. The subsidised transfer of work-unit apartments left many of those workers with a valuable asset, but owning the roof over your head was not the same as replacing the institution that had previously held almost your entire life together.

Zhu had the good fortune of arriving late to the reform scene which allowed him to get round some of these challenges. Between 1979 and 1983, long before he became premier and took control of economic policy, Chinese farmers had been given much greater freedom over what they produced. Food output rose rapidly and rural households found that they could spare labour for other types of economic activities. Township and village enterprises spread through the countryside, followed by an explosion of privately owned shops, restaurants and small manufacturers in the cities. Come the late 1990s, these parallel businesses had acquired enough scale to absorb some of those workers released by collapsing state enterprises. This was not Zhu’s achievement so much as his inheritance: he smashed the iron rice bowl when China was no longer short of rice.

To be clear, the countryside was not quite the soft landing this makes it sound. As noted earlier, the same 1994 tax-sharing reform that restored Beijing’s ability to collect revenue had darker consequences further down the system, increasing the pressure on local authorities to find alternative sources of funding. In predominantly agricultural provinces, officials tried to close the gap with taxes and so-called village reserves imposed on rural households. In March 2000, Li Changping, a 37-year-old township Party secretary in Hubei, wrote directly to Zhu telling him that peasants were suffering and agriculture was in danger. He described elderly villagers who wished for an early death, children unable to go to school and a local bureaucracy in which refusing to invent figures made an honest official’s job almost impossible. Zhu, to his credit, did not ignore the warning and ordered an investigation.11

For many rural households, the only answer was to leave. But the hukou system placed rural migrants outside of the housing and schooling available to urban residents. Cities trying to find jobs for laid-off SOE employees sometimes dismissed migrants or restricted the occupations open to them. Cheung Yan’s factories offered work to thousands of people but Nine Dragons Paper also illustrated the new discipline that replaced the old security. In 2008, a labour-rights organisation accused the company of a long pattern of industrial accidents, inadequate safety equipment and discrimination against workers (link in Mandarin, requires browser translator). It published extracts from an employee handbook under which workers could be fined 300 yuan just for jumping the queue in the cafeteria, 500 yuan for napping or bringing in an outsider to see the factory, and 1,000 yuan and dismissal for organising a strike or spreading rumours detrimental to the company’s image. Asking a colleague how much they earned could be grounds for dismissal.

Cheung rejected the claim that Nine Dragons had become wealthy by treating its workers harshly. She argued that the company paid out more in bonuses than it collected in penalties and had ended the practice of fining employees for spurious reasons. A more careful executive might have stopped there but Cheung instead explained that she still considered fines legitimate in the right circumstances because without them, workers might carelessly injure themselves and then return to demand compensation.

Where the old system had protected urbanites while wasting capital, the new system used capital more efficiently while shifting more of the risk to workers who were no longer permanently tied to a work unit. That mobility made it possible for labour and investment to move towards more productive businesses and at the same time introduced dismissal, demotion and insecurity as ordinary features of economic life.

Suffering for Something

In countries where government often appears incapable of acting at all, it is often very tempting to conclude that China’s advantage was simply a leader willing to bang the table. Zhu himself encouraged that image when at his final annual press conference in 2002, a reporter asked him about a Hong Kong newspaper’s description of him as a short-tempered man who banged on tables and benches and stared down opponents. “It’s true I’ve banged on tables; it’s true I’ve stared at people,” Zhu replied. He denied banging benches because that would have hurt, and asked what use a leader was if he could not stare - he might as well be a vegetable. He insisted that he had never tried to intimidate ordinary people, only greedy and corrupt officials. The exchange is quintessential Zhu but it can lead down the wrong road. A leader can bang a table in any country in the world but whether that banging can get the levers of government to move is another thing entirely.

China’s reforms are often cast as one long march away from Maoism, but their sequencing was important. To recap: agriculture was reformed and made more productive first. Township and village enterprises then expanded through the countryside. Small private businesses created a market for urban services and retail. Only after this alternative economy had acquired substantial mass did the leadership take on the hard core of large state industry and, of course, the WTO accession which came later. Zhu’s attack on the old industrial order was just about survivable because this other economy was already growing beside it.

The sequence was far from painless or perfectly designed, but the destructive steps were connected to opportunities that could make use of what they had let go. Copying China is difficult enough but the most dangerous way to learn from China is to copy it in the present tense because what is visible today are giant state firms, technology funds, infrastructure networks and grand national plans.

Taken together, China’s emergence as an economic and technological power was the result of the policy package pursued between 1978 and the middle of the 2000s: marketisation, openness and investment in physical and human capital. The enormous programme of targeted industrial policy now associated with China came later and surely cannot retrospectively explain the growth that preceded it. The China that developing countries now encounter is therefore not quite the China that got rich.

The country’s massive internal market, its reservoir of underemployed but literate rural labour, its state-owned financial system and the political dominance of the Communist Party have not been incidental details in its incredible story. They shaped which reforms were possible and how quickly decisions could be carried through. Naughton’s conclusion is that the distinctiveness of China’s institutions (particularly the CCP) makes the successful parts unusually difficult to transfer anywhere else. The useful lessons are thus more literal than functional. A developing country should should ask what economic function a particular institution performed in Chinese economic development. What market will buy any additional production? What stops temporary protection for a new industry from becoming permanent support for a politically connected failure? And what institution will be independent (and brave) enough to tell the government that its chosen policy is not working?

In Nigerian public debate - and in versions of the same argument elsewhere across Africa - economic suffering is often presented as a down payment on eventual prosperity. The elite version says that macroeconomic adjustment takes time and that citizens must be patient. The popular version says that every developed country passed through hardship on its way to wealth. Both contain elements of truth: structural change creates losers, and correcting years of accumulated distortions is never painless. But pain is not some sort of promissory note that the future is obliged to honour. Suffering earns no economic return just because it has been endured. The distinction ought to be between necessary reform and productive reform. A government can remove a subsidy, devalue a currency or raise taxes, with each action correcting a genuine distortion. But the correction does not by itself create a new source of production.

Nigeria’s experience over the past three years offers a useful illustration. Since 2023, the government has removed petrol subsidies, liberalised the exchange rate and tightened monetary policy. The IMF’s conclusion is that these measures have strengthened macroeconomic stability and rebuilt resilience. It also says that economic conditions remain extremely difficult as poverty has risen, food insecurity remains severe and electricity, security and cumbersome trade procedures continue to constrain productive growth.

Against that background, one Nigerian exporter recently lamented being unable to quote competitively for an overseas order. That is to say, a cheaper currency has not automatically turned into an export strategy. One recent assessment calculated that Nigeria’s manufactured exports fell by 5 per cent, from $1.8 billion in 2022 to $1.7 billion in 2025, despite a roughly 70 per cent devaluation of the naira. Manufacturers still relied on inputs priced in dollars (or tracking dollar costs) while contending with expensive logistics and an onerous trade regime. If a reform only makes imports more expensive without making exports more competitive then it has completed only the destructive half of the job.

This does not mean that governments should avoid reforms until every complementary institution is ready. China itself did not reform according to some perfectly designed master plan. Its leaders often proceeded experimentally (“crossing the river by feeling the stones” as Deng famously put it), solving one problem while creating another. But there must be some intelligible mechanism connecting present losses to future production. If citizens are asked to suffer, the government should be able to explain what the suffering is laying the ground for and how success will be measured. Otherwise, people are merely suffering during reforms and will have nothing to show for it at the end.

Qingguan

Zhu’s own record also demonstrates that state capacity by itself is not enough. An authoritative government can execute the wrong policy with the same efficiency as the right one. One of the best examples of this is illustrated by the story of Huang Tongwen12, a county Party secretary in Anhui during a terrible drought. Local officials typically protected their careers by minimising bad news or inventing a triumphant recovery. Huang did the opposite by refusing to enforce an impossible grain quota. He divided the affected villages according to the severity of the drought and ordered that the worst-hit peasants should not be squeezed for grain they needed to survive (Naughton describes Zhu’s grain procurement policy as the single worst policy of his government). He then reported the true extent of the disaster to his superiors. Provincial officials investigated and then sent relief after confirming his account to be true. But the episode caused Huang’s county to be officially classified as an area of extreme poverty, an embarrassment for leaders who preferred attractive figures and his (Huang’s) career stalled as a result. A darkly comic and popular saying at the time among bureaucrats was “no lies, nothing accomplished”, an ironic contrast with Zhu’s famous instruction to China’s accountants.

That contradiction comes close to summarising Zhu as a public official. Naughton thought the best key to understanding him was the traditional Chinese ideal of the qingguan, the upright official who was intolerant of corruption and convinced that public office carried a moral obligation to intervene13. The same certainty that allowed him to confront insolvent banks, failing enterprises and resistant provincial officials also made him arrogant, rough on subordinates and unwilling to entertain criticism when he believed he was right. His successes and his failures often came from the same place.

In the final analysis, his biggest economic legacy was changing what the Chinese state did. He reduced its role in the micromanagement of thousands of enterprises while making it more capable of enforcing rules across the country. Markets would discipline bureaucrats while a stronger government would discipline markets, le pouvoir arrête le pouvoir. In place of the special deals, exemptions and negotiated arrangements of the early reform period, he sought general rules backed by a more powerful centre.

Still, for a man who dominated economic policy so completely, Zhu’s final act was restrained. He promoted a generation of younger technocrats, gave Wen Jiabao increasing responsibility and left office when his term ended. For all the complaints about him having an overbearing manner, Zhu was not threatened by rising talent. After spending a decade deciding which parts of China’s old order had reached their end, he also accepted the end of his own authority.

Asked in 2000 how he hoped to be remembered after leaving office, Zhu said “I only hope that after I step down, the people of the whole country can say that I was an honest official, not a corrupt one.” If they were generous enough to say that he “did do some practical things”, he added, he would thank God14.

Her award-winning book, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria, is a labour of love and the culmination of years spent thinking about, documenting and trying to understand Nigerian food—both as a Nigerian and as a scientist.

We explored all this and more in our conversation. And, with Ozoz’s kind permission, we have reproduced below her Chicken Curry recipe from Chop Chop.

Chicken Curry

Serves 4 to 6

This vibrant and delicious dish connects Nigeria, Japan and Korea by way of British colonialism and “curry powder” from India. You can swap the chicken for beef, mushrooms or your favourite vegetables. Whatever you do, don’t skip the green bell peppers—they add flavour and fragrance to the sauce.

Serve with white rice or spaghetti.

Ingredients

• 1 pound (450 g) boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1- to 2-inch (2.5 to 5 cm) chunks

• 1½ teaspoons fine sea salt, plus more as needed

• 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

• 1 teaspoon minced garlic

• ¼ cup (60 ml) peanut oil or other neutral oil

• 3 medium red onions, cut into 1-inch (2.5 cm) chunks

• 2 dried bay leaves

• 1 teaspoon Curry Powder (page 25)

• 1 teaspoon dried thyme

• 2 medium starchy potatoes, such as Yukon Gold or russets, peeled and cut into 1-inch (2.5 cm) chunks

• 2 carrots, cut into 1-inch (2.5 cm) chunks

• 1 small red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch (2.5 cm) chunks

• 1 small green bell pepper, cut into small dice

• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

• ½ teaspoon ground turmeric

• 1 cup (240 ml) Curry Stock (page 333) or water

• 2 tablespoons sifted all-purpose flour

Method

In a medium bowl, combine the chicken, 1 teaspoon of the salt, the ginger and the garlic. Rub the seasonings into the chicken, then cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

In a large sauté pan, heat the groundnut oil over medium heat until it shimmers. Add half the onions, the bay leaves and the remaining ½ teaspoon of salt. Cook until the onions soften and brown, about 8 minutes.

Stir in the curry powder and thyme. Cook until aromatic, 1 to 2 minutes, then add the chicken, potatoes and carrots. Cook, stirring well every now and again, until the chicken loses its raw appearance and releases its juices, and the liquid begins to boil—about 10 minutes.

Add the remaining onions, the red bell pepper, half the green bell pepper, the black pepper, turmeric, curry stock and 1 cup (240 ml) water, then stir. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook until the chicken is tender, about 15 minutes.

In a small bowl, whisk together the flour and 1 cup (240 ml) water to form a smooth slurry. Add the slurry to the pan and stir to incorporate, then cook until the sauce begins to thicken, about 5 minutes.

Add the remaining green bell pepper and cook for another 5 minutes, until it brightens in colour and softens slightly. Taste and add more salt if needed. Discard the bay leaves before serving.

Unless something changes (I have a few half-finished profiles where I have run into dead-ends trying to get more material), this is the penultimate chapter of the book (somewhere around 70,000 words so far!)

This chapter is free to read

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly (no paywall)

Chapter 4: ‘His Name Is Dore’

Chapter 5: The Old Mushroom

Chapter 6: Maina Turjiman

At Okwo Nebo market, fifteen miles out from Abakaliki, the day’s trading was over and the crowd had reduced as it was evening. In one corner of the emptying square a group of eight or ten men had let an argument spiral out of control, and so out came the machetes. The man who saw it happen was standing beside a half-built shed, where he had been putting up a machine house for a cotton gin. He watched for a while, taking its measure, and then decided to go in.

He picked up his shotgun, got onto his push bicycle with the gun held in his right hand, and rode straight into the fight, shouting for his two Afikpo labourers to come behind him. He threw the bicycle down when he reached them, waded into the middle of the men, slapping faces, and pulled three machetes out of three pairs of hands and arrested four of the men. Three others were already on the ground with their bellies opened and their intestines showing. He wrote a hurried note detailing what had happened and sent one labourer off on the bicycle to hand it to the District Commissioner at Abakaliki while he tied up the four prisoners at the shed.

That night, after dark, an old man came to the shed with a group of men and four hundred rods - ten pounds - because one of the tied men was his son. This was Chief Adagba, a warrant chief of Amasaka, and the son was called Eleh. Adagba asked that the money be taken and the men let go. It was refused. The old chief was told that if he were not so old he would himself be reported for offering it. In the morning three policemen and a lance-corporal came out and marched the four men to the station, where they were tried and given nine months imprisonment each. Their people carried the three wounded men away. The man later learned that a local practitioner had managed to save them.

The man with the shotgun and the bicycle held no rank in the police. He had no warrant to arrest anyone and none to turn away a chief’s money. On the establishment of the government of Southern Nigeria, against his name, stood two words. He was the District Carpenter.

I

There is no paper record anywhere that says when he was born. The date came from his father - Thursday, the 29th of July, 1887 - and there is no way to check, because that particular day in that particular year fell on a Friday. He was born at Elmina, on the Gold Coast, in the old town under the shadow of the Portuguese castle the Dutch had taken and the British had bought, and in the Fante custom he was given the name of the day: Ekow, a boy born on Thursday. His father, Cudjoe Adjaye, worked as a trained carpenter. He died while the boy was still small, still at the Wesley School the Methodists ran in the town, and already given over as an apprentice to another carpenter, a man named Kwesi Assampah.

Assampah did not keep still, and so neither did the boy. The two of them went west along the coast into French territory - to Grand Bassam on the Ivory Coast, then down through San Pedro, Droway and Sassandra on the Kroo coast, where the great canoemen of West Africa came from, and back again. At Grand Bassam the master was posted inland and left the boy behind in the keeping of a cousin, and the cousin, “for the love of money,” put him into a French government blacksmith’s shop, and then aboard a government boat called the Maddigow as an engine-boy. The engineer over him was a Senegalese named Momadu, a Muslim, whom Cudjoe remembered half a century later as “a very kind man.” The engine-room job brought him five French dollars each month.

Momadu wanted to keep him and teach him engineering as a trade. Assampah, coming back from the interior, wanted him home, and would not yield, for if he returned to Elmina without the boy, the grandmother would take it that the boy had died. The old master won. The epidemic that then broke out at Grand Bassam, and held the two of them there for two months before they were let go, was in all likelihood yellow fever. The town was a byword for that one disease above all others; the fever emanated from the lagoon and its swamps so regularly, and killed so many, that the French had already begun abandoning Grand Bassam as their colonial capital and were shifting the seat of government inland to get away from it. When at last they reached Elmina it was “only to experience the hardships of life.” Assampah, who had seemed hale on the whole journey home, died two days after they landed. The boy was on his own again, and comforted himself with the flattest proverb he could find: “what cannot be cured must be endured.”

This was the season of the last British war in Asante, and the war is the reason the roads out of Cape Coast were suddenly full of paid work. The Asante kept a Golden Stool that held the soul of their nation, and no one, not even the Asantehene, sat on it. In the spring of 1900 the governor of the Gold Coast came up to Kumasi, demanded a heavy yearly tribute in gold, told the assembled chiefs that their exiled king would never be restored, and asked them to bring out the Golden Stool so that he might sit upon it. They gave him no answer and left. They kept the governor and his wife and a few hundred defenders inside the Kumasi fort; the siege ran for months, through famine and disease, until the governor’s party cut its way out through a stockade and a relief column fought up the muddy roads in the height of the rains to break in. When it was counted afterwards, The War of the Golden Stool had cost over a thousand lives, most of them African. At the end of it Asante was annexed outright.

The relief of Kumasi had depended on carriers as much as on soldiers: the roads were deeply muddy in the rains, food could not be obtained locally, and a column could only go as far and as fast as the men on its supply line could haul its goods. Carriers by the thousand were recruited for it, and a great many did not come back - of the campaign’s dead, far more were carriers and African soldiers than Europeans, though there was no exact count. Into this Chief Coker of Cape Coast was recruiting for the government, and Ekow, an orphan leaning on an old grandmother, went and enlisted. He carried military material up to Prasu, five days to and fro, for half a crown in ration money and ten shillings on his return; then a longer haul, ten days to Kumasi itself, the Asante capital, for twenty shillings. Thirty shillings in total. His grandmother, Amah Abokumah, added a few pounds to it, and with the sum he bought a set of carpentry tools. He carried the tools to Sekondi, found a European building contractor who would take him on at three shillings a day, and worked for three months.

Then he heard that at Elmina carpenters were being drafted for a place called Nigeria.

II

News reached Sekondi that recruiters at Elmina were assembling a party of carpenters for Nigeria. Twelve tradesmen, supervised by a headman, sailed from Cape Coast and reached Old Calabar a week later, on 29 October 1902. They started in the yard of the Public Works Department and moved from there onto a set of new barracks going up on the waterfront - the buildings that would become the headquarters of the Nigeria Regiment. The government’s own report on the year notes that “the construction of new barracks at Old Calabar was begun.”

They had come into a country the British had only just finished taking by force. The year before, a field force had gone up against the Aro, the trading and oracle power whose reach ran across the whole of the south-east, and had burned their way to the shrine at Arochukwu. Trade, which had reduced at the rumour of the expedition, was reviving as the carpenters landed. The barracks they were building at Calabar were the barracks of the expedition army. When they were sent inland in 1903 - by boat through Akassa, Brass, Opobo and Equanga, where they were stopped and made to work for some months before being allowed to go on - they were travelling into territory that had been fought over in the previous eighteen months, to build the houses from which it would now be governed.

At Akwete they were met by the District Commissioner, a man named Sproston, whom Cudjoe would meet twice more down the years - each time both of them a rank higher, the Gold Coast carpenter rising alongside the imperial officer. Sproston found them carriers, and they went overland to Aba, then “thick bush,” held by a single company of the Regiment. On a patch of cleared ground, in palm-leaf shelters run up to house them, they built the first District Commissioner’s bungalow at Aba. The house was still standing when Cudjoe wrote his account fifty years later.

From Aba the party went to Owerri to build another bungalow, and Cudjoe and a fellow named Ashun were sent ahead to Owerrinta to build a pontoon ferry across the Imo River - a day’s journey up-river by boat from Akwete, then transferred to a paddled canoe, then two months building the pontoon, then across and along the trace of a new road being cut to Owerri station. The District Commissioner waiting for them at Owerri was H. M. Douglas, “Handsome Douglas,” or as he was later known: “Black Douglas.” He was “a hard man”. He could afford to; he was a stranger passing through with a trade, not one of the governed.

His superiors praised his performance during the Aro expedition, and in May 1902 he was rewarded with the new District Commissionership at Owerri. What that meant on the ground was road-building by forced labour, courthouses and rest houses thrown up under compulsion, chiefs and elders seized and held as hostages to guarantee the good behaviour of their people, and whole towns burned when a district would not bend. In one campaign after a British medical officer was killed in a mistake for Douglas himself, villages were wiped out and, by the accounts that survive among the people there, some of the dead were buried alive. Even other Europeans in the service found him hard to stomach.

In September 2025, Chisom Ojukwu, the member for Nkwerre constituency, asked the Imo State House of Assembly to remove Douglas’s name from Owerri’s principal road. He listed the accusations against him - compulsory labour, collective punishment and the destruction associated with Eziama, Norie and Ahiara - and argued that the state’s major landmarks should commemorate its own people rather than its colonial officials. The House approved the motion and instructed the relevant agencies to alter the signs and public records. Its chosen replacement was not one of Douglas’s victims but the incumbent governor: the road became Governor Hope Uzodimma Road. Supporters described the change as recognition of Uzodimma’s performance while he was still alive. Douglas House, a short distance away, kept its name.

When the Owerri house was finished, Douglas called the chiefs and the people in to see what the strangers had built in their country. They came in their numbers, men and women, and were sent up to walk through the whole house. The women danced round the verandah and sang, and Cudjoe wrote the song down, in Igbo and in his own English underneath:

Greetings you good people, Ah! Ah!! Brothers, men of Accra, greetings to you.

He worked next at Uyo, Ikotobong, Afikpo and Ikom, as the bungalows of those stations went up one after another; a commanding officer of the Regiment came through Owerri to inspect the troops and the new house while it was still drying; a marine officer who met the pontoon party at Owerrinta would end his career as Director of Marine at Lagos. Everywhere Cudjoe went, the fabric of a government was being nailed together out of imported timber and imported skill.

The wage the coastal carpenters and clerks earned did not stay in the country where they earned it. The government record for 1903 noted a rise in the money-order business at Old Calabar and put it down to “the native clerks and artisans taking greater advantage of the money order system to remit money to their families on the West African Coast.” The men who built the stations were strangers passing through, their families a week’s sail away at Elmina or Cape Coast or Freetown, and the wages they were paid travelled back down the coast by postal order to grandmothers and wives who would never see the houses their sons and husbands had built.

He went back at last to Old Calabar, and was then sent inland once more, further than before. He reached Abakaliki as District Carpenter on the 15th of May, 1909.

III

The station he came to was in the middle of a slow, ugly change of state - from a place held down by soldiers into a place run from an office - and the change was not gentle. The government’s account of that year, surveying the Southern Provinces, complained that its workshops could turn out engine-drivers and fitters and joiners and carpenters but could not find enough trained men to teach the trades. There were not enough like him. The same account records police detachments sharply increased at Abakaliki and Ikom to take the place of military garrisons that had been pulled out for good; the telegraph pushed up through Afikpo towards the station and government jurisdiction spreading wide across Abakaliki, Ogoja and Ikom.

A few months after he arrived, during a visit by the High Provincial Commissioner, Cudjoe was granted a shotgun licence for five shillings, valid for five years. Four years after that he shot his first bush-cow - not with the shotgun but with a rifle a Regiment captain had given to his brother Afan, who would die at Ogoja in 1924. He had become a carpenter with a gun, a bicycle, direct access to the officers, and two labourers of his own to send where he liked. He was no longer, in any working sense, only a carpenter.

IV

And so we return to the market at Nebo: the gin-shed, the four men tied up beside it, the old chief arriving out of the dark with his people behind him. It happened in those first years at Abakaliki, while he was still District Carpenter. A push bicycle, which in that country was like a private motorcar. Two labourers who would follow him into a fight. The ability to write a note that a District Commissioner would read and act on within hours. And enough working knowledge of police and court routine to be sure that four tied men at a shed would produce three constables and a lance-corporal by daybreak. Chief Adagba read the situation and came with four hundred rods to a man he had understood to be a gate to the attention of the government. A warrant chief of the district judged the District Carpenter to be worth ten pounds of his own money and the risk of asking.

The note had already gone down the road by the time he reached the shed, and the four men would be tried at the station and given nine months apiece on the strength of what one man had seen and written down. There was no other account of that evening that the government was ever going to receive: no officer had been there, and nothing that happened at Nebo would reach Abakaliki except through him. Adagba came with four hundred rods to the holder of the only version.

V

In August 1914, still carrying the title of District Carpenter, Cudjoe was sent a telegraph by a Colonel Muir and told to come to Ikom, where the headquarters of the Cross River Expeditionary Force then were. The war that had broken out in Europe that month had an African front along the Cameroons border, a few days’ march to the east, and the Force was one of three British columns pushing into German territory - one attacking from Maiduguri in the north, one up the Benue from Yola, and this one from Ikom on the Cross River. It was a large undertaking for a colony that had just been stripped to feed it: forces stronger than a thousand African soldiers and their officers had gone to the Cameroons, and alongside them close to a hundred civilians pulled out of government departments and the trading firms and attached to the columns for whatever they could do - railway work, political work, and the ordinary business of building and mending that any army in the bush cannot do without. That was how a District Carpenter came to be standing on the German frontier with an expeditionary force. He was attached to it as a useful pair of hands, and was still at Ikom when things went wrong.

On 6 September, a much larger German force overwhelmed the British position at Nsanakang after the defenders exhausted their ammunition. Roughly half the British contingent was lost, including eight of its eleven officers, and the survivors retreated across the border. The defeat briefly allowed German troops enter into Nigeria and gave substance to rumours that British authority was collapsing. Cudjoe narrates the same events from the deck of a boat. “Judging from the bodies floating down-stream, it was a terrible disaster.” A week after the fight, going down towards Abakaliki by way of Obubra on a boat called the Bansara, he counted them himself as they came down on the current: “about 15 or more.”

Nigeria had been stripped almost bare of soldiers for the war, its administrative staff thinned out by the officers who had gone off as volunteers, and the government relied heavily on the men who were left “to maintain order and dispel false rumours.” The rumour running everywhere along the Cross River that autumn was that the British had been beaten and would soon be gone, and the Germans would take the country. The District Officer at Abakaliki, F. H. Ingles, who would later become Resident of Owerri Province, recalled Cudjoe from the Cross River Expeditionary Force. Back at the station, Cudjoe took up a probationary appointment as District Interpreter on 1 October 1914; the change of department became permanent at the beginning of 1915.

VI

Describing the Native Courts of the Southern Provinces, the 1914 colonial report admitted that they had fallen largely under the control of two men each: the Native Court clerk - “an alien to the district on a low salary” - and the interpreter. It was written as a lament about a hybrid institution but it is a plain description of where the power in a Native Court really sat. The court belonged, on paper, to the warrant chiefs the British had appointed. In practice it belonged to the literate stranger and the man who understood more than one language.

That was an arrangement built for abuse, and it was abused. The warrant-chief system rested on a misunderstanding the British never quite cleared up: in much of the south-east there had been no chiefs to speak of before they arrived, no kings and few standing rulers, and so they made some, handing warrants to men they found convenient and calling them chiefs. Native Courts became notorious for turning official authority into abuse of power and position. Arbitrary penalties generated income; office could be used to coerce marriages; and compulsory labour was diverted to the farms of chiefs and court officials.

As we have seen multiple times in this book, translating speech was the least of what the interpreter actually did. He explained a law the people had never heard of, and reported the rumours the officer’s ear could not hear. He read a drumbeat, or a silence, or a sudden movement in a crowd, and told the officer what it meant. He made the written record that everything afterwards would rest on. And - this was the part that divided a good interpreter from a dangerous one - he knew when to say that he did not know. It was an office of knowledge that fell on people as arrests and sentences. A man who wanted to could sell a verdict from that office. Cudjoe, on the evidence he left, did not; but the office and the power in it was real.

In 1915 Cudjoe accompanied R. H. J. Sasse, the District Officer assigned to the police patrol sent out after Chief Endor of Negarabi Igbo Ekureka was killed. The operation ended with the capture of the head chief, Ogbuenyi Kama. In the proceedings that followed, Adoki was sentenced to death, while Kama and several others received sentences of penal servitude. That is his entire record of the case - he gives the outcome and not his own part in reaching it. The interpreter through whom the arrest and the evidence and the sentence had all been carried does not appear anywhere in his account of them.

VII

In February 1916 Cudjoe went out again, with a political officer named Dann, on a patrol against the Ezza, commanded by an assistant commissioner of police named Cavendish. The patrol expelled the Ezza settlements from the Oshiri bank and forced their inhabitants back across the Western Aboine River. Here, in the middle of an account that has been all dates and marches and postings, Cudjoe gives us his own verdict:

In my personal experience I should say this was an awful injustice on the part of the Government against the Ezza tribes.

His reason is not that fighting is wrong, or that the strong should not beat up the weak. The Ezza “had conquered and established themselves on the land before the white man ever opened up the Cross River.” They had built compounds across the field near Onicha towards Uburu before the patrol pushed them back over the river; some had gone through Uburu and settled beyond it, near Nkerefi under Agbani and at Ihenu. On the grounds of established occupation, standing compounds, a settlement older than the government that was now undoing it, he judged the British to be the trespassers, and said so decades later.

Cudjoe’s appeal to prior conquest made sense within an Ezza political culture in which possession had to be made visible and defended. Land acquired by war, labour or military service became permanent through settlement and covenant. The Ogbu Ezekuna fig tree marked some of those agreements and an attack on it challenged the settlement itself. Military preparation was embedded in male initiation and the age-grade system, while farming supplied both the reason for expansion and the means of recovering from its costs. Every Ezza boy, once he had been circumcised, was handed two things: a gun and a hoe.

This type of life came with costs, and the Ezza paid it. Their own accounts remember them living warily even on ground they had won, braced for the reprisal from the people they had conquered. The land Cudjoe watched them driven off was land of exactly that kind - taken, held, farmed, and never quite safe. The particular quarrel he walked into on the Oshiri frontier had been running, on and off, for the better part of a generation before any British officer arrived to have an opinion about it: a long fight over a stretch of ground along the river that the Ezza had set their hearts on and, in the end, largely taken. When the patrol pushed them back across the Aboine, it was reversing, with a machine gun, the last move in a war the Ezza had been winning.

The government record for 1915 lists the Ezza patrol among the only three in the Southern Provinces that year “of any importance or considerable duration” - the other two were against Okigwi and Okwoga - and reports that all three were “brought to a satisfactory conclusion.” The record for 1916 establishes a police patrol in the Ezza country that produced “70 casualties amongst those people” and “a fine of £750,” imposed and paid. Between “satisfactory conclusion” and “awful injustice” lies a distance between the officer writing up the report for London and the interpreter who had stood in the field and watched it done.

The Ezza, for their part, wanted the government gone from Abakaliki, and told the interpreter so more than once. Their feeling was expressed in a saying he recorded: “since the white man have [sic] come out, men have become women, and women the men.” Without the white man in the way, they reckoned, they could have finished driving the Izzi across the Ezekwe River into Ogoja and taken the last of the land they wanted. Chief Okanu Opehu of Umu Ohara asked Cudjoe outright, on several occasions, whether he could find some way to help remove the government from the station. His answer each time was the same: “Impossible, the white man has come to stay as long as men lived.” Meanwhile he rounded off his portrait of the Ezza thus: “very good people, very slow to pick a quarrel, but if you do fall out with them - woe betide you.”

VIII

From 1913, attacks repeatedly disrupted the route between Abakaliki and Obubra, forcing the administration to escort its mail and carriers. Cudjoe also alleged that Ikwo fighters mutilated some of the bodies carried downriver after Nsanakang, prompting officials downstream to organise their recovery and burial. Wartime rumours intensified the hostility and it was an interpreter’s job, as much as a soldier’s, to know how far it had spread and what it was making people do.

Nearly four years into the war in Europe, Cudjoe left Abakaliki on 21 January 1918 with a Nigeria Regiment column bound for Ikwo. The machine around him was substantial: nine patrols and sixteen escorts across the Provinces employing thirty-six officers, fifteen British non-commissioned officers, and 1,381 African infantry, with a detachment of artillery - and “the Ekwi patrol in the Abakaliki district” among the most important of them. This large, expensive, well-gunned operation rested, at its sharpest moments, on one man’s reading of noise coming out of the bush.

The Resident of the province, Copland Crawford - the “Old Man,” who had come along “to see for himself what the Ikwos would do” - sent three friendly chiefs, and eight young Ikwo men who had been picked up near the station, to carry word to the clan that the troops meant no harm and wished only to talk. The emissaries returned the next day without an agreement. The Ikwo, they reported, denied any wish to fight but would neither attend the proposed meeting nor enter into discussion. Crawford and his officers read the answer as defiance. The column had camped a couple of miles from a police post set up on the Ezza border to keep the mail moving safely to and from the station, and every few days an escort had to go down and collect it. Three days after the refusal came back, the platoon sent for the mail was ambushed as it passed through a village called Ohanku; the troops fired volleys into the bush to frighten its owners, brought the mail in, and fell back to camp. A week or so later a Major Lawrence came up with three more companies of soldiers, at which point the column moved on Igboji, the centre of the Ikwo country.

It was on a march out from the camp, half an hour in, that what others thought of the interpreter began to reveal itself. The signal drum began sounding up and down a long belt of bush across an open field. Major Lawrence asked Cudjoe what all the noise meant. He answered that it was calling the people to assemble, “but whether for attack I could not tell.” A woman was brought in, strongly built, about forty, arrested with a man who had dropped his gun and run. The Major put the same question to her. She was not helpful in the direction he wanted; she told them, in effect, that the Ikwo were waiting in the bush opposite and the soldiers should come across and meet them. The Major sent back a message that he would give the clan up to four days to come to him at Igboji, and told her to carry it or go. She went. Minutes later, men burst from the bush to cries of “Ikwo hayi, Ikwo hayi.” They advanced until, at roughly 150 yards, gunfire began on both sides. Cudjoe remembered the effect of the troops’ volleys in a phrase as brutal as the scene: “the Ikwos dropping down like flies.”

That evening Eze, an Amuda Ezza man serving as one of the patrol’s guides, warned Cudjoe that the camp would be attacked after dark. Cudjoe was sceptical. The Ikwo had suffered heavily that morning, and another assault did not make sense to him. Eze insisted that the losses would not deter them: because the troops had not taken the heads of the dead, the fighters would return to avenge them by killing a white officer - or an interpreter. Cudjoe carried the warning first to Dann and then to Lawrence. Asked for his own judgment, he admitted that this was his first journey into Ikwo country and that he could not know what its people would do. The officers discounted the warning but kept the camp alert.

After nightfall, rain and darkness closed over the camp before gunfire, drums, trumpets and shouting broke out on every side. Captain Collins came to Cudjoe’s hut with a lamp, calling, “Interpreter, Interpreter.” Cudjoe was awake on his cot but feigned sleep until Collins touched the bed. The officer wanted to know whether the music announced an imminent charge. Cudjoe refused to turn the sounds they were hearing into any kind of certainty. He said only that the drumming and singing were keeping the fighters from retreating and showed that “they meant business.” Collins instructed him to report any change in the drum pattern and left. Cudjoe returned to bed: “The night was too dark, and to go out during the rapid firing was inviting trouble.”

Two quiet days followed. On the third morning the Ikwo attacked in daylight, advancing beneath cut branches and firing from around 150 yards. Cudjoe called the exchange “a fine show but a waste of precious lives.” During the fighting, Wilton’s men worked around an ambush beside a dried stream and struck it from behind; Cudjoe later understood that many of the Ikwo war leaders had died there. That night, soldiers and officers from the colonial column returned to the site. Cudjoe says they gathered the Ikwo dead, cut off their heads and raised separate mounds over the bodies and the heads.

About a week later three light guns joined the expedition. Organised resistance then collapsed, and the operation became a pursuit across the surrounding country. Cudjoe’s language fractures at this point. He had called the fighting a waste of life and lamented the scale of the Ikwo losses, yet described the men resisting the column as “foolish brutes” and “senseless brutes.” The pity and contempt sit beside each other because his safety lay with the armed column, even while he could see what that column was doing.

At Nsobor, delegates from across Ikwo agreed to peace terms. These included a collective fine of £3,000, due within twenty-one days, and the original company remained behind to oversee its collection. Payment was nearly complete when Lugard reduced the penalty to £1,500. Dann’s reply was written down by Cudjoe: “Reduction reduces me to tears. Dann, Abakaliki.” Any amount collected above the revised figure was returned. Cudjoe closed the episode with a reckoning: it was “a pity” that the Ikwo had sacrificed so many of their young people without inflicting a single casualty on the troops.

IX

One night in 1918, lightning ignited the barracks at Abakaliki. A soldier’s wife and her young daughter died in the blaze. The next morning Chief Okanu Opehu - the same Ezza chief who had asked Cudjoe about removing the government - came to the station, took Cudjoe’s hand, and, still holding it, said: “Urubot” - Robert - “things are moving well.” Cudjoe, confused, asked what the matter was. “Ezeke Una, the Founder of the Ezzas, is not asleep.” Cudjoe laughed, and the chief hushed him: there was no joke about it, the white man was about to go, could he not see that the white man had begun to burn down his own houses? Cudjoe explained the lightning. The chief would have none of the explanation, because it ran against what his diviners had told him. Two accounts of one fire - a discharge of electricity in a storm, and the founder of the Ezza stirring in his anger against the government - and the interpreter standing between them, able to translate every word from the one into the other and unable to make either man’s idea of cause fit inside the other’s head.

The first sitting at Achiagu in 1919 quickly exposed the distance between the procedure Dawson had taught and the court the community made from it. He formally opened the institution, demonstrated one case and returned to the station. Three days later, its messengers delivered roughly eighty convicted people to Abakaliki. Dawson, badly annoyed, sent them straight back and went out himself to review the cases, taking his seat without so much as greeting the sitting members and rebuking them to their faces: the court had not been set up so that the Ezza could send all their undesirables down for the government to feed. Then he opened the record book, found three men charged with stealing a cow, and decided to save them, telling them there was no evidence and asking whether they had really been caught with the animal. Their entire defence was this: “Do you want us to tell lies? We did steal the cow and we have sold it.” He condemned them and had them taken out. He called a second case - five men, another stolen cow - and warned them the last three had been fools. He urged the next set of defendants not to repeat the first group’s mistake. The reward for his trouble was: “We have sold the stolen cow to a stranger whom we cannot trace.” At which the whole court burst out laughing, and Dawson got up and walked out and ordered the lot sent to Abakaliki.

The government’s own report of 1914 had said the courts belonged to the clerks and the interpreters; this is what that admission looked like in practice - an institution that ran only because someone could stand in the middle of two incompatible ideas. Cudjoe stood in that middle for the length of his career. The Ezza in the dock, he noted, would insist on their guilt even against weak evidence, and go smiling to their deaths rather than lie about whether they had done the thing they had been accused of; a stranger, he says, might take them for fools. “Fools, eh?”

X

Cudjoe reached his new posting at Afikpo on 13 December 1929, just as the disturbances had begun in the area. He was following an instruction left for him to join an assistant district officer on tour, and reached the Afikpo Road just as the disturbance did. This was the movement that ran through the whole south-east that winter - thousands of Igbo and Ibibio and Efik women, convinced that the government meant next to tax them as it taxed their men, rising against the warrant chiefs and their courts and, before it was put down, pulling the whole apparatus of native administration off its foundations across the region (more on this to come in the next chapter). It was the largest thing of its kind the colony had seen, and it is why the warrant-chief system that Cudjoe had worked inside for fifteen years did not outlive the decade.

The Ishiagu women joined with women from Okigwi and neighbouring divisions; troops came down from Enugu; arrests were made. Many Ishiagu women were taken, tried, and given six months apiece, with twelve months for two named as ringleaders. By his account, the unrest within Afikpo Division was confined to Ishiagu and Okposi.

The Riots from my personal experience were an unfortunate game played by the men of the affected villages and clans who thought they could incite the women with all sorts of false stories so as to get tax stopped altogether in the country.

Cudjoe believed that men had exploited an assumption that troops would hesitate to use lethal force against female demonstrators, turning the protests into an indirect campaign against taxation. It is also the limit of what his position allowed him to see. The women who had come out across five provinces to bring down the courts do not appear in his page as people with a politics of their own; they appear as an “unfortunate game” that other men were playing.

On tour at Okposi with a District Officer named Chapman, at about nine at night, a middle-aged man walked out of the dark towards the rest house crying “Ogbu’m, Ogbu’m - I am killed, I am killed” - with a wound laid open across his stomach and his intestines showing. The steward and the boys came out with a lamp, got close enough to see the state of him, shouted, and ran. Chapman came fast to the court where Cudjoe was staying, calling “Robert! Robert!” and the two of them worked over the man together with the District Officer’s own blanket and towel and brandy and tinned milk - Chapman saying “we must try all we can to save the man’s life,” unsure whether to push the intestines back in or leave. Chapman admitted that his abandoned medical training had not prepared him for a wound of this severity. They got the man into a hammock and sent him off under escort towards a mission hospital five miles away, and word came back later that he had died near the hospital compound. The killer turned out to be a madman, later found hanged on a tree.

Chapman later thanked Cudjoe in writing. Cudjoe’s response is more revealing: because he was African, he believed the gratitude should have travelled in the opposite direction. Real grief for the wounded stranger, real regard for the officer, and underpinning both of them the trained reflex of someone who has learned where he stands, and who presents his own gratitude the right way before anyone has to correct him. He could call the Ezza patrol an awful injustice and, in the same career, miss the women of Ishiagu entirely. He could grieve a stranger through the night and, at the end of it, apologise for being thanked.

XI

On a Sunday in April 1945, Cudjoe borrowed a rifle and ten rounds from the District Officer, Cardale, having run out of ammunition for his own. He joked that success would oblige the administration to lend him a vehicle large enough to recover the carcass. Before dawn he sent a driver and a hunter ahead and followed on a push bicycle, crossed the Cross River by canoe, and spent the day tracking bush-cow through mud two feet deep, and killed two of them. Villagers came in scores to drag the animals down to the water and float them to the beach; the officers rode down in their cars to see; the truck came behind to carry the beasts up. By evening, people from both the station and the neighbouring villages had crowded around his house. A borrowed rifle, other men’s vehicles, a crowd at the door of an African’s house: the reputation he had built up was very real.

His right to own the rifle at all had come ten years before. When he applied for the licence, the Lieutenant-Governor minuted his approval - “after his 21 years of good service, I shall approve provided the bore of the rifle is other than .303.” The .303 was the calibre of the army’s rifle. A senior African servant of the government might, after twenty-one years, be trusted with a rifle but he might not be trusted with the government’s own rifle. Cudjoe ordered one of a different bore and said nothing.

Then the records. The King George V Jubilee Medal, May 1935. A Certificate of Honour, July 1944. Senior Interpreter, Grade I, from the 1st of October 1947, on the £405–450 salary scale. Retirement on the 10th of March, 1951, at sixty-four, after forty-eight years in the service of the Nigerian government - a span that had begun on a steamer out of Cape Coast when Nigeria was not yet a single country and the man was not yet called Robert.

He admitted that he got a lot of dates wrong in his memoirs and he said why. His house at Abakaliki had burned at eleven o’clock one night in 1922, and his papers with it. “But for the unfortunate destruction of my house, I would have been able to state different months and dates for all I have written.” Retirement carried him back to Elmina, where his career closed where it had opened.

After he had retired to Elmina, Cudjoe sent a former officer, P. F. Grant, a large envelope with his reminiscences inside it. Grant and his wife remembered stories he had told them at Afikpo that were not in the manuscript, and Grant wrote to ask him to write those out as well, and then put them “in the appropriate places.” At Cudjoe’s own suggestion, Grant “slightly amended his draft where the sense was not quite clear” - while insisting that “the phrases, expressions and words used are his own, as will be immediately apparent.”

So the text that survives is neither an untouched African voice nor a British invention, but something made by the two of them across a distance. Cudjoe chose what to tell, narrated it, wrote it down. Grant arranged what came, inserted it where he judged it belonged, and smoothed the places he found unclear. The fire of 1922 had already moved the whole account off paper and onto memory; Grant moved it back onto paper again, in an order of his own choosing. For forty-eight years Cudjoe had stood between British officers and other people’s speech, deciding what an officer needed to hear. In retirement his own speech was gathered up, prompted, arranged and lightly corrected by a former officer, and set in type.

The last act of interpretation in his life was performed on the interpreter.

The First Lady of Nigeria, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, has drawn criticism for some of her recent remarks regarding poverty and how to empower people. The underlying theme of her remarks was that the government she represents is doing its best to address poverty in Nigeria with grants to start microbusinesses like selling Akara. The comments have spawned many viral Akara-themed videos, with the satirical implications that the wife of the president has no better dreams for Nigerians than being a roadside trader.

The attempts to defend the First Lady’s comments by appeals to the dignity of small traders severely miss the point. There is nothing petty or undignifying about selling Akara, or running any microbusiness. Some of the criticisms were also wrong on substance. The truth is that it would not have mattered if the First Lady had referenced POS machines, mobile phones, or computers instead of Akara. What critics are right about is the ambition. The fundamental question at the heart of the issue is about what works for poverty reduction. And while that question might still be unsettled, what is clear is these kinds of interventions have not proven to work in reducing poverty.

The Pritchett Test

In a recent Voxdev Talks podcast episode, the development economist fiercely criticised the $1 a day measure of poverty that The World Bank has been using since 1990. His main critique boils down to this quote:

This poverty line is crazy, it's just crazy too low. Yes, everyone below this line is poor, but billions of people with higher incomes than this line are also poor by perfectly legitimate and reasonable ways.

He argued for a higher measure of poverty that excludes people who cannot be considered poor by any “reasonable standard”. But in typical Pritchett fashion, there was something he said, almost like a throwaway line, that struck a deep nerve with me. He described the way development institutions currently measure and conceive poverty as “inclusion in consumption, rather than inclusion in productivity”.

Inclusion in consumption means helping people acquire enough income to meet immediate needs, through cash transfers, food assistance, subsidies or small grants. These interventions can genuinely reduce suffering. A woman who receives working capital and earns a little more from selling akara may be better off than she was before.

Inclusion in productivity asks a different question — whether people are being incorporated into activities capable of generating sustained increases in output per worker, earnings and living standards — which depends on access to better capital, technology, infrastructure, skills and larger markets.

The distinction matters because an intervention can be presented as “enterprise development” while functioning mainly as consumption support. Giving someone a small amount of capital to enter a low-productivity occupation may simply let her earn a small daily income close to subsistence, rather than put her on a path to an expanding business. That is my main concern with the akara model of empowerment.

Microbusinesses Everywhere

Akara sellers, roasted-corn vendors, vegetable traders and producers of similar household goods are not missing from the Nigerian economy. They are ubiquitous, which should make us question whether financing more people to enter these sectors creates meaningful new economic activity.

These occupations are widespread because they require little capital, use commonly available techniques and have low barriers to entry. But low barriers to entry have a consequence. When many sellers offer nearly identical products to customers with limited purchasing power, competition pushes returns down. When one trader appears to earn more, new sellers enter, until the expected return falls to what workers could earn in their next-best occupation, which in an economy with scarce alternative employment may itself be close to a survival wage.

The trader may end each day with a cash surplus after paying for beans, oil and fuel. But that surplus still has to compensate her for her own labour, long hours, capital and risk. What looks like business profit may be little more than a precarious self-paid wage.

There is also a fallacy of composition at work in many microenterprise programmes. It may be true that one woman can improve her income by entering a particular market. It does not follow that thousands of women can improve their incomes when they are all financed to enter similar markets.

A programme evaluation that studies only the recipient may find that she earns more than before and call the intervention a success, missing the real question of whether total output increased, or an existing pool of demand was simply divided among more sellers. When thousands of people are directed towards the same saturated activities, empowerment may amount to redistributing poverty within the informal economy.

Activity is not productivity

Some have defended this idea by arguing that Nigerians should be engaged in some form of enterprise rather than remain idle. That sentiment is understandable, but it confuses economic activity with productivity, and productivity is what drives economic development. A person can work twelve hours a day and still produce very little value - statistically employed, but severely underemployed.

This is one of the oldest insights in development economics. Earlier economists called it disguised unemployment, or surplus labour, describing people who are working, but where adding another worker or trader to a saturated activity produces only a small increase in total output.

Financing another person to enter petty trade may therefore change the visible form of unemployment without solving the underlying problem. She moves from having no recognised occupation to operating a microenterprise, but her productivity and income remain extremely low.

Structural transformation works differently

The classic account of development traces how labour moves from low-productivity activities into more productive ones. Firms that expand combine workers with better capital, technology and organisation, produce at sufficient scale to invest and specialise, and pay higher wages. This is not limited to manufacturing. Commercial agriculture, food processing, logistics, construction and modern retail all exhibit this pattern. The essential feature is sustained growth in output per worker.

A policy that finances more entrants into already crowded petty-trading sectors moves in the opposite direction, accommodating people within the low-productivity economy and financing additional entry into precisely the kind of work too many Nigerians are already trapped in.

None of this is a commentary on the intelligence, dignity or industriousness of women who fry akara or sell vegetables. Their low earnings are not evidence of a personal failure to work hard. Productivity is not principally a measure of individual virtue. It depends on the economic system within which people work: access to electricity, transport, storage, credit, secure property rights and customers with sufficient purchasing power.

Providing a person with a small amount of working capital while these conditions remain absent will typically produce only a limited increase in output. A food vendor without refrigeration cannot reduce spoilage or expand production, no matter how much capital she receives. Productive capacity is systemic, and development cannot be reduced to distributing small sums to isolated individuals.

The irony is that roadside traders are often encouraged by one arm of government and harassed by another, receiving grants for activities the state has never provided secure space or infrastructure for. Government finances informal survival while failing to build the institutional environment that would let entrepreneurs create something more productive.

Social assistance is not the same as development

There is nevertheless a case for supporting poor households. A ₦50,000 grant may help a woman replenish her stock, avoid an expensive informal loan or maintain household consumption during a severe cost-of-living crisis, and that assistance should not be dismissed.

But the programme should be described honestly. If its main effect is to help recipients survive or consume slightly more, it is a social-protection intervention, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem begins when limited livelihood support is presented as economic transformation.

Calling every grant “empowerment” obscures the difference between making poverty more bearable and enabling people to escape it. It lets the state claim developmental success because a recipient has crossed a very low income threshold, even though she remains in insecure work with no clear path to much higher productivity. A person can move from extreme destitution into precarious self-employment and still remain poor in every meaningful sense.

The appropriate standard is whether policy is building an economy in which ordinary Nigerians can participate in productive systems capable of supporting secure and substantially higher living standards.

What inclusion in productivity would require

A serious productive inclusion agenda would look very different. It would begin with reliable electricity, transport, water and secure commercial spaces, improve access to machinery and supply chains, and support firms capable of expanding and adopting better technologies.

It would also distinguish between subsistence enterprises and businesses with genuine potential for productivity growth, since not every microenterprise is destined to remain small. Some have specialised skills, differentiated products and access to growing markets, but supporting them means addressing real constraints to expansion, not distributing identical sums to politically visible beneficiaries and calling the result entrepreneurship.

For many subsistence traders, a better long-term intervention would be access to wage employment, vocational training, affordable transport, childcare or social insurance, rather than another grant to remain in petty trade. The goal should be an economy where people have a range of productive opportunities, including stable jobs in firms that can grow.

The danger of lowering ambition

Small empowerment grants are politically attractive. They are visible, easily announced and divisible among thousands of named beneficiaries, producing ceremonies and photographs. Building productive capacity is harder. It requires patient work on electricity, infrastructure, education, macroeconomic stability and firm capabilities, results that cannot always be displayed in a ceremony. The political danger is that governments substitute the first type of activity for the second.

As society gradually lowers its expectations, surviving through roadside trade becomes “empowerment.” A tiny grant becomes “capital.” A precarious daily income becomes “entrepreneurship,” and the absence of productive employment gets reinterpreted as evidence that citizens simply need to be more enterprising. The survival strategies generated by economic failure are then presented as the solution to economic failure.

Nigeria should certainly respect and support those who earn honest livelihoods from akara, kuli-kuli, roasted corn and petty trading. But respect for their work does not require pretending that mass entry into low-margin informal activities constitutes a development strategy.

The real test of economic inclusion is whether people are incorporated into productive systems that can continually raise what their labour produces and what their households can afford. Poverty reduction becomes development only when citizens end up producing much more. Consuming a larger share of what the economy already makes is not enough.

Go back as far as you can in Nigerian commercial history and you see trading everywhere. Farming was obviously the dominant occupation across most of the territory that became Nigeria, so it would be wrong to say that most Nigerians were literally traders. But trade has long been one of the dominant routes into business, wealth and social mobility. It cuts across society, from ordinary citizens to the elite. A census of Lagos in 1911 recorded more than 21,000 people - about 46% of the “occupied” population, roughly those recorded as working - as traders or otherwise involved in trade.

Today, the pattern remains hard to miss. In the first quarter of 2026, the NBS category called Trade accounted for 17.9% of real GDP, narrowly making it the largest single economic activity in that quarter. The NBS’s 2023 labour survey found that the same broad category - wholesale and retail trade together with motor vehicle and motorcycle sales and repairs - employed 23.1 million people, or 27.5% of all employed Nigerians, second only to agriculture. And yes, this includes the market woman, the roadside hawker and the one-person shop, not just supermarkets and large distributors. As recently discussed, the Nigerian first lady believes this number to not be enough and so has been encouraging more people to go into trading.

In its darkest form, of course, trade meant people where for centuries, people made a profession out of trading their fellow human beings. Even after the Atlantic trade was outlawed and gradually suppressed, slave dealing and domestic slavery did not disappear on command. In Northern Nigeria, for example, the 1901 proclamation banned slave-raiding and removed the legal status of slavery but did not prohibit slaveholding itself; formal abolition did not come until 1936. I am not suggesting a straight line from that history to the woman selling tomatoes by the roadside. The point is simply that buying, selling and acting as the middleman have very deep roots in the economic history of the country.

Trade by itself is of course not a problem. People have been known to begin life as traders before moving on to other endeavours such as manufacturing. Nor is that transition entirely foreign to Nigerian history. Peter Thomas, one of the great Lagos merchants of the early twentieth century, used his trading fortune to build a tannery and a corn-flour mill, acquire a printing press and establish a farm. He wanted West African products to be partly or wholly manufactured in West Africa rather than simply exported raw. What failed to emerge was a broad and durable process through which merchant capital became industrial capital.

The Gujarati merchant communities of India are a more successful example. They spread across the world through trade, but trade became a platform rather than their ceiling. They used the profits, networks and discipline of trade to climb the value chain. Gujarat now accounts for roughly a quarter of India’s merchandise exports and is adding semiconductor and aerospace capability to its established industrial base. In June 2026, the first C-295 military transport aircraft assembled in India completed its maiden flight from Vadodara, Gujarat. It came from the Tata–Airbus plant, where more than 85% of the structural and final assembly of the 40-aircraft programme will be done in India, alongside the manufacture of about 13,000 detail parts. This is plainly a long way from merely buying and selling. It is capability being accumulated.

The problem is when trading becomes so sticky that people - ordinary citizens and the elite - do not or cannot move into a higher gear. These are not morally equivalent cases. The woman hawking tomatoes because she cannot find better work and the conglomerate lobbying for an import ban are not doing the same thing. One is survival; the other is strategy. But they are not as far apart as they might look inside the same economy in which buying and selling is much easier and safer to enter.

So much so that even when it looks as though people have moved up into manufacturing, look closer and you often find a sophisticated form of trading: import most of the inputs, perform the minimum local processing needed to qualify as a producer, attach a Nigerian label and sell into a protected market. In the extreme version of this phenomenon, the government gets involved to reduce choice. Tariffs, bans, quotas, licences and preferential access create a captive market. The beneficiary groks that controlling access to the product is easier and more profitable than acquiring the capability to make it competitively. The trader dressed as a manufacturer can end up far more profitable than the actual producer of the thing being sold. This was the F.O.O.D thesis in summary.

When the Trading Mentality has gone this deep, it becomes a kind of doom loop. Trading often offers quicker turnover, lower fixed costs and enough profit that there is almost no incentive to pursue the riskier work of building productive capability. Once government policy adds artificial scarcity and privileged access to the mix, remaining a trader may be the most rational commercial choice. And so the day of development (not growth) is forever postponed.

Where did this Trading Mentality come from and why is it so persistent? I have no idea. For several months now, I have been exploring this question and I cannot say I am much closer to an answer than when I started. But I increasingly suspect that “mentality” may describe the outcome more than the cause. William Baumol’s old point was that entrepreneurial energy can be productive, unproductive or destructive depending on the relative rewards created by the rules of the game. If the rules consistently make arbitrage safer and more profitable than production, Nigerians who choose to trade may simply be reading the incentives correctly.

A declaration of war

Social media is one of the better vantage points on contemporary Nigeria, and lately something has caught my eye: alongside the flood of Chinese electric vehicles into the country, the Chinese themselves are quietly muscling in on one of Nigerians’ favourite trades - car dealing. Dealers have been part of the social fabric in Nigeria for as long as I can remember, from Tunde Debasco to today’s Sarkin Mota. They turn up in praise songs and are upstanding members of society, at least until they aren’t.

Recently I came across the video below on Instagram, breaking down what it costs to buy a car in China and ship it to Nigeria (it is one of those Nigerian absurdities where, almost uniquely in the world, people import their own cars):

In the video, Xuanshiauto walks through the cost of getting a car from China into Nigeria. The car itself costs ₦15 million (roughly $10,700); by the time every charge and tax has been added, it costs ₦26 million. Transparency of this kind is already a hostile act. Information asymmetry and confusion are not incidental to the Nigerian car trade - they are the very business model. The Chinese gentleman in the video presents his calculator as a public service: leave a comment, he says, and he will send you a copy, free. He never explains why he is being so generous, but by the end you don’t need telling. Xuanshi Auto is not an educational charity. It is a vehicle-export business based in Ningbo which sources cars, inspects them, arranges payment and shipping, prepares export documents and connects foreign buyers to Chinese wholesale supply.

He then shows the same car advertised in Nigeria for ₦45 million. If his landed-cost calculation is accurate, and if the asking price is achieved, the difference is more than ₦19 million: a markup of roughly 74% on the landed cost, or a gross margin of about 43% on the selling price.

Anecdotally, I have heard many versions of this story of the Chinese squeezing out the middleman and taking over the trade for themselves. A couple of years ago a friend told me about a nice business he had going, sourcing materials in eastern Nigeria and delivering them, at a very healthy markup, to Chinese buyers in Lagos who shipped them home. It lasted about six months. Then he travelled east one day and found his customers already in the market, negotiating for the goods directly. It was fun while it lasted; he moved on to something else.

The factory comes for the trader

Let’s zoom out for an overview of the Chinese economy today. One of the more astonishing facts of the last few years that I have to read multiple times is that, between 2008 and 2017, China’s banking system added roughly $29 trillion in assets - equivalent to about one-third of annual global GDP. Bank assets are not the same thing as government spending, and not every dollar represented a conventional loan, but the figure gives a sense of the credit machine Beijing put into overdrive after the global financial crisis.

The stimulant worked. It financed houses, roads, railways, local-government projects and an enormous expansion of productive capacity. For years, it supported both growth and domestic demand and helped to build much of modern China. The problem is the hangover. A banking system cannot continue expanding at that speed indefinitely without accumulating bad investments, heavily indebted borrowers and projects that remain viable. Nor can property continue carrying an economy forever.

China’s property market began its prolonged correction in 2021. This extends well beyond construction because housing accounted for 47% of Chinese household assets in 2022. Falling house prices have therefore weakened not only property developers but household balance sheets and confidence. Local governments have also suffered because many depended heavily on land sales and property development for revenue.

Beijing still has plenty of tools and is not remotely powerless. But the old trick of opening the credit taps and getting another surge of property and infrastructure investment is not so easily repeated. This leaves China with a peculiar imbalance. It is exceptionally good at financing production and less good at giving households the security and confidence to consume. It manufactures much of the world’s wigs and widgets and a growing share of its cars, batteries, solar panels, industrial machinery and electronics. Estimates are that China produced 29% of global manufacturing value added in 2023.

Chinese firms possess real and formidable advantages: scale, engineering capability, dense supplier networks, modern infrastructure, efficient ports and an increasingly sophisticated technological base. Their products are often both cheaper and better than they were even ten years ago. But weak demand at home makes the export option more urgent, while ferocious domestic competition makes foreign margins more attractive. China now has a word for the destructive version of this competition: “involution” - firms work harder, add capacity and cut prices, but profits keep shrinking. Beijing has even launched an “anti-involution” campaign to restrain excessive investment and price wars in some industries.

The country ended 2025 with a record goods-trade surplus of $1.189 trillion. Its exports to Africa rose by 25.8% during the year, even as its exports to the United States fell sharply. The Chinese car exporter turning up on Nigerian Instagram is not an isolated hustle. He is one tiny part of a much larger movement towards markets where Chinese firms can sell more goods, escape brutal competition at home and earn better margins.

The Economist recently supplied an almost perfect example:

The Chinese firms are eager to export partly because pickings at home are slim. In China they have been able to scale up their projects and bring down the unit cost of pricey hardware. Taxi companies have also been able to collect real-time data to make cabs run smoothly. But the economics still do not work, mainly because a glut of cab drivers is keeping fares low. Newly jobless workers often become cabbies, adding to supply. Baidu, which in 2025 said its robotaxis in the central city of Wuhan had broken even, has not bragged about them since. Pony.ai, a rival, claims it has broken even in Chinese cities.

Foreign markets look far more appealing, especially if developers can deploy their low-cost technology and data from China in places where they can charge more. A ten-kilometre taxi ride in Wuhan costs around 23 yuan ($3.40), whereas the fare in St Gallen, a canton in eastern Switzerland, is a juicy SFr44 ($54). Such arbitrage probably explains why Chinese companies are now more focused on expanding abroad than on operations at home. Baidu no longer releases updates on its Chinese fleets and provides information only on its foreign ventures.

Countries like Nigeria are almost powerless to resist this unstoppable force coming out of China.

An affront to a producer

Now zoom back in to better understand what is going on in that video. What the Nigerian market has trained everyone to regard as perfectly normal - applying a large markup to something you had no hand in producing, without adding anything like commensurate value - must look almost like an affront to a Chinese entrepreneur accustomed to extremely brutal competition at home. My extremely good friend, Aliko Dangote, is the perfect encapsulation of this Nigerian normality - he has not invented or innovated anything and yet is far more profitable than any cement maker in China (it’s not even close) where he buys his technology from.

To the Chinese seller, the ₦19 million spread is a blockage in the pipe. If the price of the vehicle in the Xuanshi Auto video fell by, say, ₦5 million, it would come within reach of some people who are currently priced out. Drop it by another ₦5 million and the pool of potential buyers widens again. In other words, from the point of view of the Chinese seller, the margins being enjoyed by Nigerian dealers stand in the way of the thing he wants most: selling more cars. Every naira absorbed by an avoidable layer of intermediation raises the final price and reduces the number of vehicles the Chinese supply chain can move. Given the pressure on Chinese firms to find demand outside their increasingly unforgiving domestic market, that margin starts to look less like somebody else’s legitimate reward and more like the next cost to be eliminated.

There is an important irony here in that Xuanshi Auto is also a trader. But it is a trader sitting almost on top of the productive system, with access to factory inventories, wholesale prices, shipping lines and export documentation. Its business model is to shorten the distance between the factory and the final customer whereas the Nigerian dealer’s business model depends on keeping that distance as wide as possible.

A ₦19 million spread would of course be nice. But the Chinese exporter does not need to capture the whole thing. He can take a much smaller slice, pass part of the saving to the Nigerian buyer and still come out ahead if the lower price allows him to sell more cars. His relevant choice is between a thinner margin on more cars abroad and an even thinner margin - or an unsold car - at home and so he optimises for throughput.

Unstoppable force, meet immovable object

All the actors in this drama are new to the particular game they are now playing. China has never been this powerful or this productive. It has also rarely had so much industrial capacity searching for buyers at a time when its property market is weak and domestic demand is not doing enough of the work. Nigeria, meanwhile, has never been as economically intertwined with China as it is now. In the first quarter of 2024, China supplied 23.2 per cent of Nigeria’s merchandise imports. Two years later, in the first quarter of 2026, its share had risen to 37.4 per cent - almost two out of every five naira Nigeria spent on imported goods.

For all that China is the world’s second-largest economy, it is still a country of 1.41 billion people with nominal GDP per capita of just under $14,000. It is rich enough in aggregate to possess a superpower’s industrial machinery, but still close enough to middle-income reality that small margins and difficult markets are not beneath its entrepreneurs.

For much of Nigeria’s modern history, dealing with foreign business meant dealing with firms from countries vastly richer than Nigeria. Their cost structures, salaries and ambitions created an unofficial floor below which they often did not descend. They took the oil rigs, and the large construction contracts while beneath them, Nigerians retained a large protected space as agents, distributors, importers and middlemen. The pattern is old enough to be grim. During the Atlantic slave trade, European buyers generally remained at the coast and relied on African merchants and political authorities to bring captives to them. The foreign buyer controlled one end of the chain, but the African middleman controlled the distance between him and the product.

China offers no such floor or guarantee. The same economic system that can build a railway with advanced technology can also send a man with a spreadsheet onto Nigerian Instagram to explain customs duty to individual buyers. There is no part of the commercial chain whose smallness automatically protects it. There is therefore no shortage of Chinese entrepreneurs willing to dive into the lower reaches of the Nigerian economy that local traders have long maintained as their fiefdom. Distance used to protect the Nigerian middleman. So did language, confusion, paperwork and the buyer’s ignorance. The smartphone steadily strips away all of those.

I do not pretend to know what will happen when this unstoppable force meets the immovable object. For one thing, the object is not really immovable. Nigerian traders are famously adaptable, especially when the alternative is extinction. They know the customer and the customs officer. Those are not trivial advantages and no foreign entrant can easily. Some dealers will cut their margins. Some will formally become agents for Chinese brands that impose strict limits on dealer markups. Some may even move upstream into assembly and components, while others will make themselves indispensable to the Chinese firms now trying to bypass them. Others will, inevitably, ask the government to protect them from the competition (for a long time I had a #CabalAlert hashtag going on twitter documenting the often comical ways in which Nigerians organised themselves to be noticed by the government). And some will simply be swept away.

A spreadsheet is not a gunboat, but…

Nor would this be the first time that a change in the terms of trade transformed Nigerian commercial society. The Niger Delta went through its own version of this in the nineteenth century. As the Atlantic slave trade declined, industrial Europe developed a huge appetite for palm oil, which was used to make soap and candles and to lubricate machinery. Bonny, New Calabar and later Opobo grew rich by standing between producers in the hinterland and European ships on the coast. The British called it “legitimate commerce”, but the central arrangement was that the foreign buyer waited at one end while African merchant houses controlled the route inland. The transition disrupted trading practices that had developed over centuries, created new social groups and destabilised the politics of the Delta.

Trade remade the Niger Delta by forcing the canoe houses to combine their commerce, political authority and military power. Through them, outsiders and enslaved people could sometimes rise, none more spectacularly than Jaja, who arrived in Bonny as an enslaved Igbo boy, became head of one of its most powerful houses and then founded Opobo. By the 1870s, he had become the dominant trader in the region. But the same trade that made Jaja powerful also made him vulnerable. British merchants increasingly regarded the Delta middlemen as expensive obstructions and demanded direct access to the producers in the hinterland. Jaja refused. He defended Opobo’s control of the inland markets and at times tried to bypass the British middlemen by shipping oil directly to Liverpool himself. In 1887, the British removed and exiled him.

Now before anyone comes for my head, I’ll be the first to say that the analogy should not be pushed too far. China is not Victorian Britain, Xuanshi Auto is not the Royal Navy and a spreadsheet calculator is not a gunboat. Nigeria is a sovereign state with its own political agency. But there is some rhyme to all of it. Once again, a foreign commercial system looks at a Nigerian intermediary and sees a tollgate. Once again, technology makes it possible to get round him. And once again, what begins as an argument about the price of a product may end by changing who organises the market.

We may therefore be standing at a profound moment in Nigerian culture without realising it. After all, few things have changed people as thoroughly as trade has over the centuries. It changes language, taste and status. It changes which skills are rewarded, what counts as a respectable profit and who is permitted to become powerful. Eventually, it changes the organisation of society itself. And the first signs of cultural change are often banal: a new price, a new route, a new word, or a customer discovering for the first time what something really costs.

Perhaps the most consequential thing China is now exporting to Nigeria is not the electric car itself or any other cheap product. It may be a different idea of what a trader is for which is not merely to defend the largest possible margin on every sale, but to lower the price, enlarge the market and keep the goods moving. The Chinese trader may simply want to capture the margin for himself but the Nigerian middleman may disappear without anything resembling Nigerian productive capacity emerging in his place.

Either way, that old bargain is now under threat. The Nigerian trader has long been protected by the fact that the factory was far away.

Maybe no more.

This week, Tobi wrote a piece on the theme of extraction in Nigeria and how it applies to regulation in general.

Enjoy the week’s selection below and see you soon.

Nigerian Media

Following the recent high profile killing of a popular NURTW boss, Punch has a list of NURTW bosses killed in Lagos in recent times:

The killing of the Organising Secretary of the Lagos State chapter of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, Toba Ajiboye, popularly known as Toba Ijaya, has again drawn attention to the recurring cycle of violence that has claimed the lives of several influential transport union figures in Lagos over the years.

Ajiboye died after succumbing to gunshot injuries sustained when unidentified gunmen attacked his vehicle in the Fadeyi area of Lagos on Sunday. His burial on Tuesday attracted family members, political associates, transport workers and sympathisers.

His death adds to a growing list of high-profile killings involving leaders and members of the transport union, many of which were linked to political rivalry, leadership tussles, motor park supremacy battles and gang violence.

[…]

In April 2015, Oshodi transport union leader Olayemi Eniola, popularly known as Esi Oluwo or Baba Esi, died after sustaining fatal injuries during a violent clash linked to political activities in Oshodi.

According to The Guardian Nigeria, supporters alleged he was attacked by rival transport union members after an All Progressives Congress campaign rally, although no court established responsibility for his death.

His killing sparked widespread tension in Oshodi and renewed concerns over violence associated with transport union politics.

Punch

Female vigilantes in Plateau:

Worried by the persistent insecurity bedevilling communities like Bible Faith, Rafinfa and Laranto, some women joined the fight against criminal activities and social vices across Jos, the Plateau State capital. These fighters are known as the female vigilantes of Plateau State.

The group, comprising both Christians and Muslims, came together to contribute its quota to peace building in the community, saying the initiative became necessary to tackle violence, theft, drug abuse, prostitution and other crimes threatening peace and security in their neighbourhoods. They also noted that early intervention was key to preventing disputes from escalating.

Some of the female vigilantes, who said they were only equipped with canes and sticks, and without pay, patrol the community to ensure peace and harmony, as well as uphold moral standards among residents and visitors. They narrated their experiences to Weekend Trust.

One of the vigilantes, Hamma Usman, an indigene of Rafinfa said, “During operations, some people call us names, insisting that what we do is not a job for women. But for us, it is about maintaining peace in the communities.”

Hamma said she had witnessed every major crisis that happened in Jos and didn’t wish that anyone would experience the situation.

“At my age, I have witnessed all the crises that have occurred in Jos and realised that no one has benefitted from them. That’s why Christian and Muslim women came together to form this group to fight social vices. We are working together as one.

“No one has gained from the crises. Our children are growing and seeing all these. We cannot continue to face these challenges without doing anything. That’s why we created this group to unite Christian and Muslim communities and fight the crimes bedevilling our areas,” she said.

Narrating how they operate, she said they would patrol with men during the day but return home at night because they have children to care for, striking a balance between housework and security service.

Daily Trust

Fake university and ponzi scheme rolled into one, the worst combination possible:

The Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Lagos State Command, has rescued 125 victims and arrested 18 suspects during a series of intelligence-led operations targeting a fake university, Ponzi scheme operators, human traffickers, school vandals and cross-border crime syndicates in Badagry.

The operations, carried out between July 14 and July 20, followed credible intelligence gathered through community engagement with stakeholders in the Badagry axis, leading to coordinated raids in Imeke, Itoga and Ibereko communities.

According to the command, the victims comprised 107 Nigerians and 18 foreign nationals, while those arrested are being investigated for offences ranging from operating an illegal tertiary institution and investment fraud to human trafficking, illegal migration and vandalism of public infrastructure.

One of the major breakthroughs came on Monday, July 20, when NSCDC operatives raided a fake university in Imeke, Olorunda Local Council Development Area, suspected of offering illegal admissions and unaccredited programmes, including nursing.

Six male suspects, aged between 24 and 31, were arrested during the operation.

Investigators discovered that 107 unsuspecting Nigerians who enrolled in the institution were allegedly lured into a Ponzi scheme after gaining admission.

Guardian

Many years ago, in the first iteration of this newsletter, I made a habit of trolling Kubwa almost everyday. I see that despite my ceasefire to allow them get their act together, things have yet to improve there:

An Upper Area Court in Kubwa, Abuja, Federal Capital Territory (FCT), has dissolved a 10-year-old marriage between a woman, Rukaya Shuaibu and her husband, Shehu Zubair for lack of love.

The judge, Mohammed Wakili dissolved their marriage according to Islamic Law, following Rukaya’s prayer for divorce on the ground that their marriage lacked love.

Wakili ordered Rukaya to observe “Iddah,” which is a three-month waiting period before contracting another marriage.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Rukaya had earlier told the court that she got married to the respondent under the Islamic Law, and that she was yet to have a child for him.

She said that their marriage had broken down irretrievably, saying, “I pray the court to grant my request for divorce due to lack of love.”

“The respondent owes me N100,000, which I want him to pay back,” she said.

Responding, Zubair asked the court to grant Rukayat’s request, saying, “I once divorced her in June, 2023. I consent to her request before the court.”

“I borrowed the money she mentioned on behalf of a friend for his business, which unfortunately went bankrupt.

“She is aware that I have been pestering my friend to pay back,” he said.

Tribune

Snake bites are such remain a deadly problem in Nigeria and the bottlenecks to producing anti-venom are a big part of the problem:

Two residents of Lissam Sambo (Pangtso) community in Ussa local government council of Taraba State have died from snakebites within 24 hours, raising fresh concerns over the lack of access to life saving medical treatment in the remote border settlement.
One of the victims, Elder Bako Awanki, reportedly died on the evening of July 23, 2026, after sustaining a snakebite. A second resident, who was bitten in a separate incident at a different location, also died later that night.

Lissam Sambo (Pangtso), a remote community bordering the Republic of Cameroon, has no nearby healthcare facility equipped with anti-snake venom.

As a result, both victims reportedly relied on traditional treatment because appropriate medical care was not immediately available.

The delay in accessing effective treatment was believed to have contributed to their untimely deaths.

Reacting to the incidents, the Chairman of the Lissam Sambo (Pangtso) Community Development Association, Danladi Bewa, described the deaths as heartbreaking and lamented the recurring loss of lives to snakebites in the community.

“Several residents have died under similar circumstances because anti snake venom is unavailable in the area, while the nearest health facilities capable of managing snakebite emergencies are located far from the community,” Bewa said.

He appealed to the council chairman, Mr. Abershi Musa, to urgently provide anti-snake venom to the community to prevent further avoidable deaths.

Bewa also called on the Taraba State Commissioner for Health to intervene by ensuring that life-saving anti-snake venom is made available in Lissam Sambo (Pangtso).

Daily Post

Fake doctor selling fake jobs. But when are we going to have a conversation about people who pay for these jobs and only report the matter when they get scammed? Not today? Oh ok:

A 39-year-old man, Udeme Emmanuel Ekpeme, has been arrested by the Cross River State Police Command for allegedly posing as a medical doctor and swindling a woman of Five Hundred Thousand Naira with a promise of securing hospital jobs for her children.

The suspect was picked up by operatives attached to the Uwanse Division in Calabar South LGA following a petition by Mrs. Edemawan Samuel, 45, who accused him of parading himself as a doctor and taking the money from her under the pretext of helping her children gain employment at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital (UCTH).

Police say preliminary findings show the suspect exploited his false identity to gain the complainant’s trust before defrauding her.

Exhibits linked to the case have since been recovered, and he remains in custody as investigations continue.

Confirming the arrest, the Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Sunday Eitokpah , said the Commissioner of Polucee had ordered a full-scale investigation into the matter.

“The Commissioner of Police has directed that this case be thoroughly investigated to establish the true circumstances surrounding it and to determine whether there are other victims,

“The suspect will be charged to court as soon as sufficient evidence is established,” Eitokpah said.

He added that detectives were widening the probe to unravel the suspect’s full activities.

Vanguard

Non-Nigerian Media

Chidimma Adetshina is back in the news in South Africa:

Now, the 25-year-old is facing deportation from her country of birth over accusations that she entered it illegally from Mozambique earlier this year. Adetshina, who was arrested last month in Cape Town, is contesting the legal process for her detention and deportation.

She is also expected to file an affidavit detailing steps she has taken to try to resolve her immigration status. In a social media post this week, she vowed to keep fighting the case.

“Exhausted — yes, burnt out — yes, depressed — yes, will I give up, no!” she wrote on Instagram, adding “see you next month”, in reference to her next court date.

Having entered the Miss South Africa pageant in 2024, Adetshina had her passport and national ID revoked after failing to respond in time to government requests to justify her documents. Her Mozambican mother was accused of committing identity fraud and assuming the name of an “innocent South African mother” around the time of her birth.

Later that year she obtained a Nigerian passport, having inherited citizenship through her father.

Adetshina has been in court as South Africa is gripped by xenophobic violence and anti-immigrant sentiment. A “deadline” of June 30 given by protest groups for all illegal migrants to leave the country has resulted in tens of thousands of Nigerians, Malawians and other Africans being deported, supposedly voluntarily but often fleeing violent mob threats.

Since the deadline has passed, those groups have committed to weekly demonstrations until local elections in November to put pressure on the government to remove illegal migrants and secure the border.

The Times

And staying with South Africa, a feature on the woman who is leading the anti-immigrant crusade:

On a clear morning last October, Nozie Khoza and her brigade of self-proclaimed patriots stood at the entrance of a public health clinic in Johannesburg on a quest to shape South Africa in their image.

When the gate opened at 7:30, the group demanded to see IDs from everyone seeking to enter, saying that only South Africans would be allowed inside.

“You belong to Nigeria, sweetheart,” Bongi Nomnganga, one of Ms. Khoza’s allies, told a young woman, turning her away because, even though she had a South African ID, her last name was Nigerian.

“It smells like fraud,” another one of Ms. Khoza’s associates said of a young woman’s South African ID, after the woman told them her parents were from Mozambique.

Ms. Khoza, a 39-year-old mother of two, had no authority to determine who could enter the public clinic.

Rather, she is a foot soldier in a highly organized network of activists going to extreme lengths to harass immigrants in South Africa, most of whom come from other African nations in search of opportunity in the continent’s largest economy.

New York Times

Who can afford to go to the beach in Lagos these days?

Weekends for Mukthar Oladunmade since he was a child have typically featured a visit to the beach. In the ceaselessly bustling city of Lagos, he prefers to unwind on the breezy Atlantic shoreline that nearly surrounds the city.

But these days, going to the beach in Nigeria’s commercial hub has become expensive. It now involves a virtual spreadsheet of expenses, including fees for entry, chairs, food, drinks and activities as the local government hands over more of the shore to private developers.

“It costs a lot of money for the average Nigerian to come here,” Oladunmade, a 27-year-old writer, said at Takwa Bay, one of the few islands that are not privately owned.

He travels regularly across West Africa for work, and his favorite evening pastime is relaxing at the beach, whether in Accra, Cotonou, Dakar or elsewhere in the region. He says it’s only in Lagos where that has become nearly impossible.

“On average, I spend 25,000 naira ($18) whenever I think of coming to the beach,” he said.

That´s beyond many residents of Lagos, where the majority of people work in the informal sector. Nigeria´s minimum wage is 77,000 naira ($56) per month.

The beach is one of the few public spaces in the city of over 20 million residents to escape the crowds and Lagos´ often sweltering heat. The city is near the equator, with humidity averaging 80% year round.

But most of the city’s 180-kilometer-long coastline is being privatized by the government or by families with ancestral claim to the land. The Lagos state government also has reclaimed land for exclusive residences and developments including a causeway and deep sea port.

What used to be free public spaces are mostly now ticketed ones, with entry fees ranging from 2,000 ($1.50) to 60,000 naira ($44), as the state government has licensed them to individuals or businesses.

A surging economy has grown around the beaches, where items are priced steeply under private owners.

“They are only making money half of the year, having put a lot of money in it,” said Doyin Ogunye, who runs drinks and food businesses at beaches. “So the entry to the beach, the food and drinks will be more expensive.”

Daily Mail

The sextortion case that led to a teen killing himself is still making its way through the courts:

A Nigerian man who helped launder money in the twisted online extortion of a Montgomery County college student — a plot that led the 20-year-old to kill himself by walking in front of a train — was sentenced Friday to five years in federal prison.

Afeez Olatunji Adewale, 27, was one of two men who helped collect money and mask its source while a third man orchestrated the tormenting of Abington native Jack Sullivan, prosecutors said.

The scheme took place on social media in 2023, when one of the co-defendants, Imoleayo Samuel Aina, began communicating with Sullivan using fake social media accounts under the moniker “Alice Dave.” Aina, posing as the woman, convinced Sullivan, a student at Kutztown University, to share intimate photos of himself, and then demanded money to keep the images private.

Sullivan ultimately turned over more than $3,000, prosecutors said, and Adewale helped try to hide the source of those funds, including by having money sent to what they called “compromised American banking accounts” as well as accounts in Nigerian banks.

But on Jan. 4, 2023, only about 18 hours after Aina had begun messaging Sullivan, the harassment reached a tragic end.

Aina reached out to Sullivan to demand more money, prosecutors said, but Sullivan sent a message back saying: “I don’t think I have enough for it.”

Three minutes later, prosecutors said, he walked onto the tracks near the Jenkintown SEPTA station, where he was struck and killed by a passing train.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Tolu Arokodare has invented a new method of forcing a club to sell you to who you want:

Wolves striker Tolu Arokodare forced the cancellation of a training session after he refused to leave the pitch.

Wolves have rejected a bid from Fiorentina for the forward, having accepted an offer from Turkish club Trabzonspor.

While Arokodare has denied that he refused to train, sources have said that he allegedly inserted himself into a training session which he was not due to be involved in.

The striker was not involved in Wednesday’s friendly at Maidenhead United as Wolves continued their pre-season plans.

On social media on Wednesday evening, Arokodare wrote: “Throughout my career, I have always taken great pride in conducting myself professionally and maintaining the highest training standards.

“My commitment has always been to prepare myself as well as possible so that I can contribute to my team-mates and the club whenever I am called upon.

“I remain under contract with Wolves, and my only intention is to fulfil my responsibilities professionally by training, doing my job, and contributing to the team in accordance with that contract.”

The latest incident is another flashpoint in the forward’s career at Molineux after he was disciplined in April following a confrontation with young forward Mateus Mane.

Arokodare signed for £24m from Genk last summer but scored just three league goals as Wolves finished bottom of the Premier League and were relegated.

BBC

New elephant just dropped:

A new elephant calf has joined a closely watched family, marking a major milestone for Arden, one of the elephants tracked through Fahlo animal-tracking bracelets: her daughter has given birth to a female calf, making Arden a first-time grandmother.

The conservation update also came with a regal new name. Arden’s daughter, a first-time mother, has been named Haidzatu after Hajiya Haidzatu Ahmed, Queen of Kumbwada in Nigeria, who is known for championing women’s education and opposing domestic violence.

The Cool Down

Nice feature on Nigeria’s burgeoning animation industry:

From the mid-1990s to late-2010s, Nigerian animation was in its pioneering years. While the competitive commercial ecosystem did not fully exist, a small number of studios working across advertising and broadcasting created animations for educational programmes, children’s shows, news introductions and product adverts aired by the Nigeria Television Authority. For children like myself who grew up during that era, these animations became part of our visual and sonic memory. They arrived with melodic intro soundtracks, often recited in moments of solitude or while playing with our friends. TV programmes such as Unicef’s 1996 animated film Sara’s Choice, alongside the animated opening sequence of NTA’s A.M. Express, which began airing in 2002, became defining moments of this period.

There were also animated adverts in the early 2000s, many of which leaned more heavily on stop-motion techniques and early digital graphics. Among the era’s most memorable campaigns were the Shaky Shaky Daddy advert, the Baba Blue throat drop commercials and the hauntingly beautiful Fumman fruit juice ads, in which anthropomorphic oranges sang melancholic tunes about being picked.

The next wave arrived in the 2010s, when internet culture and platforms like YouTube and Facebook brought animation to a wider audience. Unlike broadcasting, this generation was more driven by independent creators, with comedy becoming one of its core forms. Leading this movement was House of Ajebo.

Erem Emeka Nehemiah started House of Ajebo while in his sophomore year in university, driven by a desire to create something unique that didn’t exist in the Nigerian entertainment industry. Before animation, he was a comedian who had spent years building his craft – something he credits fully to the support of his parents, who encouraged him to express himself from a young age. The characters he built were those that Nigerians could instantly relate to. His breakout character, Tegwolo, embodied the humour, chaos and confidence of the everyday Nigerian child, particularly the mischievous schoolboy archetype familiar across many African homes. Today, the characters he created have amassed more than a billion views across digital platforms, while House of Ajebo has grown into one of Africa’s most recognisable animation studios, with nearly four million followers and subscribers.

Its Nice That

Is there any scenario in which this Maduka Okoye story ends well?

Maduka Okoye‘s baby mama just went scorched earth on the Nigerian soccer star in a brutal Instagram rant.

Dutch model Jelicia Westhoff made explosive allegations about the goalie ... accusing him of abuse -- and neglecting their young child because he’s too busy getting laid with women and men!

Westhoff went off on Maduka around the time he was snapped hanging with Cardi B in Italy ... they were also seen hanging out during Paris Fashion Week.

It’s not clear if the Cardi snaps triggered Westhoff ... but she had daggers for Maduka, saying ... “I made you! No one knew who you was. And instead of loving us, you beat me, cheated on me with men and women. You’re a f****** demon who tried to destroy my life.”

Westhoff added there’s nothing wrong with being bi ... she’s more upset that he’s allegedly been MIA in their child’s life while he’s out partying.

TMZ

News from Pennsylvania:

The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Okeoghene Patrick Udugba, age 45, of Frisco, Texas, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of Money Laundering and Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud and Mail Fraud.

According to United States Attorney Brian D. Miller, the indictment alleges that Udugba and others orchestrated overlapping romance and business email compromise schemes. As part of the scheme, Udugba and others utilized social media and dating websites to meet and establish purported romantic relationships with persons in multiple states. Those persons were groomed and ultimately used by Udugba and others as money mules to receive and cash fraudulently obtained checks.

To obtain the checks, members of the conspiracy sent emails from “spoofed” addresses in Nigeria, claiming to be representatives of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The spoofed emails directed that FWS grant funds be used to pay fabricated invoices, which falsely represented that the money mules were contractors and consultants of FWS who had performed work on grant-eligible projects. As a result of the fraudulent emails and invoices, FWS’s grant administrator issued payments in excess of $300,000.

United States Attorney’s Office

The always excellent Adia Sowho writes

There’s a version of history that goes like this: colonialism ended, and then the work of nation building began.

We tend to remember who left. We pay less attention to what they left behind.

When political power transferred, the institutions through which power moved often transferred with it — intact, operational, and optimized for the purposes they had always served. The checkpoint that required papers to move goods across a region did not disappear because the flag above it changed. The licensing system that created dependency on official approval did not dismantle itself because the officials were now local. The bureaucratic structure that generated revenue through control did not lose its appetite for control when a new administration arrived.

What changed, in many cases, was personnel. What remained, however, was the logic.

Systems do not transform automatically when leadership changes. They transform when their underlying incentives change, when their design is deliberately altered, when the people who benefit from their current form lose the power to preserve it. Those conditions require more than a transfer of formal authority. They require a reckoning with what the authority is actually built on.

The colonial checkpoint was not just a physical location. It was an arrangement — who had to stop, who didn’t, what it cost to pass, who collected that cost. Replacing the people at the checkpoint without redesigning the arrangement preserved the arrangement. In some places, it still runs today. Renamed. Reformatted. Recognizable.

What has been renamed, but not redesigned, in your operating environment?

Adia describes something I have been thinking about for years: Nigeria’s regulatory environment defaults to extraction. Since I am terribly bad at naming things, and the ever-prolific Feyi (who gave us many gems) has refused to help me, I will call it Toll Gate Niger. A useful comparison is India's infamous License Raj. Toll Gate Niger works this way: government regulators find wherever new value or a new market is being created, and attach a legal right to extract rent from it, usually through a permit or a ban.

It is worth asking why extraction became Nigeria’s default regulatory instinct. There are two common and plausible explanations. The first is inherited history: the British built Nigeria’s institutions to extract, and after independence, the state that took over kept running the same machine, just under new management. The second is the political economy of oil: Nigeria’s oil sector grew into an enclave, largely separate from the rest of the domestic economy, and successive governments found this arrangement comfortable so long as the rent kept flowing to the centre. Over decades, governments got used to that arrangement, and they carried the same instinct into how the whole economy is administered.

There is a third speculative reason I have been thinking about: a theory of what government is for. Governance in Nigeria runs on what might be called an “overseer” theory of government. Under this view, government is not an active participant in the economy, and it is not expected to produce anything on its own. Its role is only to oversee, mediate disputes between producers and citizens, and punish those who break the rules. This view has real roots in market failure theory. But developing economies are full of market failures that block coordination and prevent private investors from forming credible expectations about the future. In that setting, a government that acts only as a detached overseer is not enough. Sometimes solving a market failure requires the government to become an active participant while seeding a market that would not otherwise exist. A government committed to the overseer theory cannot do this. It is only prepared to deploy brute and blunt instruments of governance like legal coercion and Pigouvian taxation. When those tools fail to fix the underlying problem, which they often do, they morph into extortion.

Lagos State’s recent attempt to manage plastic pollution illustrates this point. The state banned single-use plastic bags, and for a few weeks, stores stopped giving them out and told shoppers to bring their own. Formal grocery stores complied, since government sanctions carry real weight for a business with a fixed address and a license to lose. The informal market, which is enormous in Lagos, ignored the ban, and there was never a real way to enforce it there. The policy is a predictable and ongoing failure, as the streets of Lagos are no cleaner than before. But the state never lifted its sanctions on the stores that had complied; rather, the ban evolved into a form of penalty on plastic bags. Grocery stores responded by selling the bags to shoppers outright. The city is still as polluted as ever, and shoppers now pay a tax on plastic bags that funds nothing but another channel for extraction.

The deeper implication of the overseer theory is that nobody expects the government to deliver anything. A government that sees its job as boundary policing does not measure itself by clean air or working infrastructure. It measures itself, whether officials say so or not, by how much it can block. Lagos could have taken a different approach to plastic pollution: seed a functioning recycling market first, and reach for a ban only at the edges, once that market existed to absorb the waste. But the government does not see itself as a participant with an output focus in the quest for a clean city. It merely exists to oversee whatever solutions people can come up with, and it gets some free revenue along with that.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Anambra’s war on native doctors continues apace:

An Anambra State High Court sitting in Awka has sentenced popular native doctor, Onyebuchi Okocha, popularly known as “Onyeze Jesus,” to six years’ imprisonment and imposed a ₦20 million fine after finding him guilty under the Anambra Homeland Security Law.

Justice Jude Obiora delivered the judgment on Friday, convicting Okocha on one of the three charges brought against him following his arrest during a security crackdown on suspected native doctors in February 2025.

The defendant was accused of promoting wealth through supernatural means on social media, preparing charms for criminals, engaging in “Oke-Ite” rituals and practising money-doubling schemes.

The court, however, found him guilty only of misleading the public by claiming to possess supernatural powers capable of making people wealthy through unlawful spiritual practices.

Justice Obiora held that Okocha admitted being the person featured in the viral videos circulated on social media and acknowledged ownership of the accounts used to promote the claims.

The judge ruled that the defendant propagated the idea that wealth could be acquired through supernatural means rather than lawful work.

He, however, discharged Okocha on the remaining two counts after the prosecution failed to prove allegations relating to ritual killings and money-doubling practices.

According to the judge, there was no evidence or witness to establish that anyone benefited from the alleged rituals.

Delivering the judgment, Justice Obiora said, “Individuals who claim supernatural powers capable of making people wealthy through prohibited practices or preparing charms outlawed by the Anambra Homeland Security Law are liable to imprisonment and financial penalties.”

Before sentencing, Okocha broke down in tears, pleading with the court for leniency.

“My Lord please tamper justice with mercy because this is my first offence and this is the first time that I am having a court case.

Punch

What a crazy story:

A Federal Capital Territory High Court has sentenced Ekang Bassey to life imprisonment for the death of his friend, Emeka Nnonifu, following a disagreement at a birthday celebration in the Kubwa area of the FCT.

This was disclosed in a statement released yesterday by the Police Public Relations Officer, FCT Police Command, Josephine Adeh.

Adeh said the conviction followed a thorough investigation by the command into the incident which occurred on January 6, 2024.

The statement said Bassey was initially charged with culpable homicide punishable with death, contrary to Section 220(a) and (b) of the Penal Code Law and punishable under Section 221 of the same law.

According to the police, evidence before the court showed that the defendant and the deceased were friends, and that the deceased had organised the birthday celebration which the defendant attended.

“A disagreement between both men subsequently escalated into a physical confrontation, culminating in the fatal incident,” the statement said.

The police said the prosecution led evidence during trial establishing that the defendant assaulted the deceased by slapping and pushing him, causing him to fall and strike his head on a concrete surface, leading to fatal injuries.

Daily Trust

Much to ponder in the words of this popular streamer. Nigeria is a place you are trapped in? Hmmm:

Nigerian streamer and content creator, Carter Efe, has voiced his frustration after revealing that his application for a United States visa was denied, saying he feels “trapped” in Nigeria because of the difficulty of travelling abroad.

The social media personality made the remarks during a recent livestream, where he expressed disappointment over his inability to secure the visa despite efforts made on his behalf.

Speaking candidly to his audience, Carter Efe said, “Chat, I won’t lie to you. We’re trapped in this country. Yes, in case you don’t know, we’re trapped. We can’t go anywhere we want. We can’t go anywhere we want, bro. We’re finished. We’re doomed. I swear to God.”

The content creator suggested that the rejection left him feeling helpless, arguing that travelling freely has become increasingly difficult.

His comments came after popular American livestreamer Kai Cenat disclosed that he had attempted to assist Carter Efe in obtaining a U.S. visa. According to Kai Cenat, the effort was unsuccessful, leaving the

Nigerian entertainer unable to travel to the United States.

The revelation has since sparked conversations on social media, with many Nigerians reacting to Carter Efe’s remarks and sharing their own experiences with visa application challenges.

Vanguard

You hear the craziest things in Nigerian customary courts:

A clergyman, Enoch, has sought the dissolution of his three-year-old union with his wife, Omolabake, whom he stated was getting on his nerves.

Enoch explained that Omolabake was as gentle as a dove when they met, but that she suddenly changed a few years into their marriage.

Enoch said that Omolabake had no respect for him.

He stated that she was rude, often shouted at him, and also insulted him.

The plaintiff said that the defendant had made him a source of ridicule in their compound and neighbourhood.

He added that their marriage was not blessed with a child because his wife is infertile.

Enoch begged the court to end their relationship.

He again requested an order restraining her wife from threatening and encroaching on his privacy.

Omolabake refused to make an appearance in court, although she was served court summonses.

Enoch, in his testimony, said, “I am a pastor.

“I met my wife in 2019.

“We courted and later got married.

“We had a traditional wedding, and I paid N5, 000 as her bride price.

“We initially got on well in our marriage; our relationship was smooth, and our home was peaceful.

“My wife was as gentle as a dove and pleasant to be with.

“All these came to a stop in 2022 when she suddenly changed.

Tribune

Now and again you get reminders like this of the scale of modernisation and development (NOT growth) that is needed to course through Nigeria and Nigerians:

The National Coalition Against Mass Killings, Extra-Judicial Killings, Mob Actions and Impunity (NCAMKI) has condemned the alleged flogging, assault, public humiliation and degrading of Mr Godspower Okedi in Emevor Community of Isoko North Local Council of Delta State.

The coalition stated that disturbing videos on social media, supported by eyewitness accounts, showed Okedi being forced to lie face down while he was repeatedly whipped with canes, sticks and pieces of wood by individuals allegedly acting on the orders of community officials.

According to NCAMKI, Okedi was alleged to have questioned why a Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) road project was abandoned, and further demanded accountability for the public infrastructure meant to serve the community.

In a statement by Babatunde Agunbiade on behalf of the group, the coalition described the assault as a violation of human dignity, freedom of expression and a direct breach of Sections 34 and 39 of the Constitution.

“No citizen in a democratic society should be tortured, beaten, or subjected to mob punishment for demanding accountability over abandoned public projects,” the statement partly read.

“The era of feudal impunity, where citizens are whipped into silence for speaking truth to power, has no place in a constitutional democracy.”

Guardian

Secondary school:

The Taraba State police command has arrested an 18 year old student suspected to be involved in cult-related activities and recovered an illegal firearm in Jalingo, the state capital.
The arrest, according to the police, followed a report received by the GRA Division of the command on July 14, 2026, at about 11:00 p.m., from the management of Sheikh Abdullahi Bala Lau Institute for Koranic Memorization, Jalingo.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Victor Mshelizah, said the report was linked to a misunderstanding between two students of the institution.

According to the police, preliminary investigations revealed that during an altercation involving the school’s Senior Prefect, Usman A. Usman, an 18-year-old student from Sansani, Gassol local government area, was allegedly found in possession of a mini revolver pistol without ammunition.

The command said the suspect allegedly had the firearm with the intention of using it to intimidate another student involved in the dispute.

Daily Post

How old is President Obasanjo? His daughter surely must know:

Iyabo Obasanjo, daughter of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, has made clarifications surrounding her father’s actual age, saying the elder statesman could be older than his official records indicate.

Speaking during an interview on The Morayo Show, Iyabo said her father is expected to celebrate his 90th birthday next year but noted that he believes he may, in fact, be about 92 years old.

According to her, the discrepancy stems from the way birth records were handled in rural communities at the time.

“My dad would have his 90th birthday next year. He was born in a small village in Ifo Local Government called Ibogun,” she said.

She explained that there was no primary school in Ibogun during her father’s childhood, forcing children to trek to an an hamlet in neighbouring Ibogun Olaogun to attend school.

“When he started school, what they did in the village was that they just looked at other kids. That if the other kids were probably two years, he was actually quite older, looking at some of his village contemporaries,” she said.

Iyabo added that the age recorded for her father when he was enrolled in school became his official age and has remained unchanged over the years.

“He says he would be 90 years next year officially, but he could be 92 years. But you know, once that age is stamped, it follows you for the rest of your life,” she added.

Tribune

Non-Nigerian Media

The FT does a feature on the scions of billionaires around the world who are trying to make their own way in the world. One section is on Dangote’s daughters:

In 1977, Aliko Dangote borrowed money from his uncle and launched a small commodities trading business. Today, he is Africa’s richest person, with an estimated fortune of $35.1bn. He remains active in the Dangote Group but now, aged 69, he has started handing over chunks of his sprawling industrial empire to his daughters within a deeply patriarchal society.

As is common for children of Nigeria’s moneyed elite, all three women were educated in Britain. Halima, 42, has run the Dangote Family Office in Dubai since 2023, helping her father gain a foothold in the Gulf’s financial hub. She sits on the board of Dangote Cement — crown jewel of the empire — alongside her sister Mariya, 47, who leads the commercial operations for the company’s cement and food businesses. But Fatima, 40, appears to have the biggest remit as commercial leader across the group’s energy portfolio.

Fatima said it was difficult for her and her siblings to prove themselves at the company because their father is an “extremely hardworking” person. “He was a bit hard,” she told CNN in a rare interview in 2024. “I think he expects so much more from us compared to other people . . . Nothing but perfection is acceptable.”

Financial Times

Anthony and Kevin are going to prison for a while:

A gang who impersonated police officers to defraud eight victims of more than £4 million worth of cryptocurrency, have been jailed following an investigation by the Met Police.

The three men called their victims claiming to be police officers, told them their cryptocurrency was at risk and persuaded them to either provide account details or transfer the funds to what the victims believed were secure police accounts.

In fact, the highly organised gang had designed convincing looking police websites, and the victim’s cryptocurrency was immediately stolen and laundered through a complex financial network.

Detectives established during the investigation that the three men were living lavish lifestyles with the funds they had stolen – buying cars, designer clothes and Rolexes as well as going on numerous luxury holidays despite one of the men having a recorded income of £444 a year.

This was uncovered after victims came forward in January 2025 to report the fraud. An investigation was immediately launched with officers using a data-driven approach to gather multiple sources of information to establish the circumstances. That included blockchain transactions, communications, financial records, cryptocurrency exchange records, and internet service provider data.

[…]

The group were sentenced at Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, 16 July as follows:

A] Anthony Ikenwe, 29 (06.07.97), of Bata Mews, East Tilbury was sentenced to six years for conspiracy to commit fraud and five years for money laundering to run concurrently.

B] Hamza Bashir, 23 (15.01.03), of Beverley Way, Wimbledon was sentenced to three years nine months for conspiracy to commit fraud and three years for money laundering to run concurrently.

C] Kevin Nwamma, 25 (21.08.00), of Clarendon Road, Watford was sentenced to six years for conspiracy to commit fraud and five years for money laundering to run concurrently.

Metropolitan Police

I randomly started following her on Instagram a couple of years ago after she featured in one of this Vox pop videos. So I can say I’ve witnessed this journey unfold:

Nigerian-American content creator and ISIPCA-certified perfumery expert Funmi Monet captures those cultural memories in a bottle—or rather, four bottles—with her new fragrance brand, Influxious. With almost 1 million followers across Instagram and TikTok, Monet is a trusted voice in fragrance. She’s also a licensed therapist with a deep understanding of how everyday experiences, like spraying your favorite perfume, can help you connect with your emotions and identity. “What fascinates me the most about fragrance in general is how much it’s tied to our self-care and how we show up for ourselves,” Monet says.

[…]

Monet’s intention is for her fragrance line to represent movement, transformation, and presence. “Life can be soft and delicate, and life can also be bold and dynamic,” Monet says. “Life can be molten and sensual, but life can also be juicy, fruity, and celebratory. And it was about figuring out how to capture the balance of those things, and how they are represented within the materials that we use in our fragrance, and how our fragrance is packaged.”

The Influxious founder also aims for her brand to underscore A-beauty’s luxuriousness. “Let’s make this brand a living testament of my cultural experiences, my black womanhood, my you know pride in my Nigerian culture, and also the decentering of French and European perfumery, and bring that to the mainstream,” Monet says. “I want Influxious and African fragrance brands to be given the same reverence that people naturally give European brands.”

Byrdie

Plogging in Nigeria:

At just past 8 a.m. on a Saturday, several dozen young people in athletic wear are moving briskly through a crowded outdoor bus terminal in Lagos, Nigeria. They stop every so often to peer around and pick up what the city has forgotten: A discarded shoe. Plastic bottles. So many crushed pouches of drinking water lying among weeds or wedged inside concrete gutters.

An hour and a half later, the young people – volunteers with the environmental group Plogging Nigeria – gather at a central point to get their trash bags weighed one by one on an orange hanging scale. In addition to collecting trash from the bus terminal, the volunteers, toting 12 black bags, had picked up all the garbage along the surrounding streets. A few more bags, including a tall mesh sack of plastic bottles, came in from locals who received cash in return. That brings today’s haul to nearly 153 kilograms (337 pounds).

A local recycling company later took away 56 kilograms of recyclables – plastic, paper, and nylon – the volunteers had sorted out. The remaining waste went to a municipal dump.

Plogging – picking up litter while jogging – started in Sweden but has flourished in Nigeria since 2018, when Mayokun Iyaomolere created an informal network there of volunteers known as Ploggas.

“When [Plogging Nigeria] started, we were just picking plastics, but we understood that we could not leave any waste behind,” says Mr. Iyaomolere, who now runs the nationwide volunteer network from his home base in Ibadan in southwestern Oyo state.

His ultimate ambition is for the Ploggas to become redundant. He wants Nigeria to be so clean that there is no waste left to pick up. “If we’re still plogging,” he says, “it should only be for the fitness part.”

Christian Science Monitor

Is juju real? The eternal question:

She thought she was leaving Nigeria to work at a mobile phone shop in Mali to save money for university.

Instead Blessing was forced into prostitution at 16 before escaping with four other women three months later.

“They said, ‘There is no boutique or phone plaza, it’s ashawo,’” she said, using the local Pidgin term for sex work.

AFP met Blessing at a Lagos bus depot on her way back to reunite with her family in Cross River state in the southeast of the country.

The teenager is just one victim of a huge flow of trafficked women tricked or forced into prostitution by poverty along west African migrant routes that go all the way to Europe.

Many are trapped by dubious “debts” imposed by brothels -- while others feel chained by “juju” curses put on them by pimps.

Even those who get away often face resentment from their own families because they are no longer sending money home.

It was on Valentine’s Day that a man promised Blessing work at the phone store in Mali. It took a week for her and the other women travelling with her to realise they had been lied to, when they were already close to the Mali-Guinea border.

“We cried that night. We said that we can’t do the work.”

Blessing was told by the madame who ran the brothel -- herself a Nigerian who went by the name “Mommy Love” -- that the price of her freedom would be 1.5 million CFA (about $2,600).

When Blessing refused to sell her body she was punished -- deprived of food and water for three days until she gave in.

She was soon servicing clients, some for less than $4.

[…]

Patience, who comes from Benin City in Edo state, was forced into prostitution in Burkina Faso at the age of 13, sent there by her mother to help support her family.

Thousands are out of work in the industrial city in southwest Nigeria leaving them easy prey to well-established trafficking networks that also take advantage of local tradition and beliefs.

Men seduce women with dreams of comfortable European lives, and keep them in bondage under the threat of oaths sworn before traditional priests.

The priests take snips of their pubic hair and make the women vow silence lest “juju” spells be used against them.

“If you run away from that place, your period will not stop,” one victim who returned to Benin City told AFP.

AFP

News from London:

An “out of control” illegal migrant who mugged City workers outside a London Underground station has been jailed for five years.

Wasiu Smith stole items from random passers-by in a frenzied series of robberies outside Farringdon tube station in November, physically assaulting one of the men.

When police tracked Smith down on a London bus, he was in possession of a stolen ring worth £600, several phones and a wrap of crack cocaine, Adrian Yalland, prosecuting, told Snaresbrook Crown Court.

Smith claimed he had come to Farringdon to see the Christmas lights but they had not yet been turned on.

The 26-year-old, who was born in Nigeria but has a Dutch passport, set upon Alex Belsham-Harris as he was leaving the gym.

He punched Mr Belsham-Harris in the face, knocking him to the ground, and hit him in the head a further five times before stripping him of his rucksack containing his laptop.

Dizzy and barely able to stand, Mr Belsham-Harris, who is head of energy consumer markets at Citizens Advice, sought refuge in a branch of Tesco, Mr Yalland told the court.

Smith, who came to the UK in 2019 and was living in Canary Wharf at the time of the attacks, had already targeted three other men.

Telegraph

And from Pennsylvania:

A former Department of Defense employee from Oreland pleaded guilty Monday to helping Nigerian scammers launder millions of dollars they collected during phishing or extortion operations.

Samuel D. Marcus, 33, was arrested earlier this year and charged with crimes including conspiracy and money laundering. Prosecutors said he served as a “money mule” for fraudsters who used aliases to target victims in schemes including cyber or tax fraud, romance fraud, or attacks on business email addresses.

The FBI said those types of crimes cost Americans more than $20 billion last year, with scammers targeting vulnerable people using a variety of tactics designed to exploit or steal peoples’ personal information and money. The Pew Research Center said nearly three-quarters of American adults have been subjected to some form of online fraud, such as credit card fraud, ransomware, or unwittingly giving away personal information.

Marcus knew that the fraudsters he was interacting with — who used the names “Rachel Jude” and “Ned McMurray” — were committing sophisticated digital crimes, prosecutors said, in part because he was first targeted by those same fraudsters in an online romance scam.

Still, Marcus went on to help the scammers collect and transfer millions of dollars through bank accounts he created and into overseas accounts or cryptocurrency exchanges between 2023 and 2025.

Prosecutors did not say how much Marcus was able to keep for himself, but said in court documents that he was able to collect small amounts from each transaction. At the time, prosecutors said, he was also working as a logistics specialist for the Department of Defense.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Over in Gambia:

Police in West Coast Region on Monday arrested Audu Williams, a 35-year-old Nigerian, in connection with the death of Esther Tango, believed to be his girlfriend whose body was discovered on July 7, 2026, in a bush between Kitty and Siffoe villages in the West Coast Region.

In a statement, the police communication unit said the victim who was initially unidentified as “Jessica,” was later positively identified as Esther Tango, a 41-year-old Nigerian national, following intensive investigations by detectives of the Suba Ward CID Unit, supported by the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Team.

Her identity was confirmed after investigators recovered her Nigerian passport during a search of her residence in Brikama.

“Through witness interviews, crime scene examination, and the analysis of telecommunications records, investigators identified the suspect as a person of interest and subsequently invited him for questioning,” the released said

According to the release, during the course of the investigation, the suspect confessed to the offence. Preliminary findings indicate that he allegedly lured the deceased to Kitty on the night of July 6th where the fatal incident occurred before abandoning her body at the scene.

The Standard

The best reminder of this is Thai street food in Bangkok. Almost nothing about Thai food is left to chance or Anyhowness. Pad Thai, perhaps Thailand’s most famous culinary export, came out of a deliberate government cultural project:

The year was 1938. Six years earlier, Phibunsongkhram, better known as Phibun in Western historical accounts, had played a prominent role as a military officer in a coup that stripped Thailand’s monarchy of its absolute powers. A year later, he became the equivalent of the Minister of Defense after crushing a rebellion launched by royalists, and in 1938, he became prime minister.

Yet Phibun worried as he assumed power. Thailand, which was then known as Siam, had never been colonized, but it was surrounded by French and British colonies. Siam was also an ethnically diverse country with strong regional identities, and Phibun had wrested power from the monarchy, the institution that had long held it all together.

Worried about his country’s independence, disintegration, and, most of all, support for his rule, Phibun decided to transform the country’s culture and identity. The European-educated Phibun saw his country as provincial and backward; he aimed to make Siam a strong, nationalistic, and modern country.

Like a drill sergeant breaking in new recruits, Phibun passed 12 Cultural Mandates that exhorted the Siamese people to be productive, well-mannered, and proud of their country.

Some of Phibun’s mandates—like his desire for everyone to wear hats in public—are now footnotes in history. Other edicts—like his decision to change the name of the country to Thailand—stood the test of time. And one changed culinary history, even if few people know it.

As part of his campaign, Phibun ordered the creation of a new national dish: pad Thai.

How to eat in Bangkok

In Bangkok, food carts are everywhere offering “street food”. The hit rate is so high that you can sample any one of them and eat something very tasty (trust me on this - have I ever lied to you?). But no cart is legally free to appear just anywhere. The system is best understood as managed informality, that is, the default rule is restrictive, but local authorities have latitude to designate, tolerate, or cancel vending areas.

The law regulates the cart in two ways: occupation of public space, and food and public-health safety. Under Thailand’s cleanliness and orderliness law, “road” covers the carriageway and pavements, alleys, lanes, bridges and similar public ways. Section 20 then bars cooking, selling goods, or selling from a wheeled vehicle on a road or public place, unless the activity is on a private road, or in an area and at a time announced by local officials with traffic-police approval. Violating section 20 carries a fine of up to 2,000 baht (about $60).

The public-health aspect is separate. The Public Health Act requires a licence to sell goods in public places or public ways, and gives local authorities power to set rules on hygiene, preparation, storage, utensils, water, food handling, vending times and related conditions.

For Bangkok today, the rules are fairly specific. The local authority’s criteria require enough pavement left over once a stall is placed: generally at least 2 metres on wider roads with three or more traffic lanes, and 1.5 metres on smaller ones. Trading areas must be reviewed every one or two years depending on road type, and they need traffic approval and local consultation. The physical stall is controlled too and is limited to about 3 square metres, must normally be arranged on one side only, must leave a buffer from the traffic surface, and must provide emergency gaps. Stalls are barred from bus stops, entrances to transit infrastructure, pedestrian bridges, crosswalks, intersections, busy building entrances, public toilets, fire hydrants, public phones and post boxes.

The vendor or street trader is regulated as closely as the cart. Under that same framework, sidewalk-vending eligibility is aimed at Thai nationals in specified welfare or low-income categories; one route is income not exceeding 300,000 baht (about $9,000) a year after deductible business expenses. Vendors must register, generally cannot hold multiple stalls, and the permission is personal rather than a tradable asset. Operational rules include annual tax filing, public-health permission, identification cards or QR display, one weekly non-trading day, food-sanitation training for food vendors, safe use of gas and electrical equipment, and bans on things like alcohol and tobacco sales and dumping food waste, oil or wastewater into public drains.

The First Lady and Akara

I am sorry to have revived Akara Discourse just as it was fading from public consciousness. But it annoyed me, and I finally think I know why. Her comments about akara - and the subsequent doubling down - represent an Intensification of Anyhowness. That is to say: if you take the First Lady at her word, and all that follows is an increase in every manifestation of disorder, chaos and the other things we have come to associate with Anyhowness.

For the sake of non-Nigerians who read this Substack, a quick recap. Last month Nigeria’s first lady sparked outrage when she said they - presumably she and her husband - were “doing their best” by “empowering” Nigerian women to start small-scale businesses selling akara (fried bean cakes), roasted corn and kuli-kuli (a crunchy snack made from roasted peanuts). The ways of the internet are beyond my understanding, but suffice to say that of the three, it was akara that caught the public imagination:

Speaking on the activities of the Renewed Hope Initiative, the First Lady said the programme had been providing grants, rather than loans, to vulnerable Nigerians to help them start businesses and improve their livelihoods.

“We’re trying to give hope, and to start Akara business doesn’t take a lot of money. To start roasting corn, or somebody even said kuli kuli doesn’t take much. We didn’t give them a loan; we gave it to them as a grant.

“So we’ve encouraged Nigerians as best as we could. What is within our hands, I have given, and I keep giving,” she said.

The comments were about as close to a modern-day "let them eat cake" as you are likely to get. An obviously privileged person telling The Poors that their lot is to try their luck with akara. Staring down her critics, she later clarified that it was not just akara: her "empowerment" efforts extended to tomato sellers, boli (roasted plantain), pepper and vegetables. Never has Nigerian economic discourse reached the heights the first lady has now opened up to us. We are so blessed.

As should be obvious to anyone who has managed to spend five minutes in Nigeria, no more is required to start an akara business than a busy road corner and the will to start frying. Lagos is no Bangkok, to state the blindingly obvious. There is no designated area, no prescribed pan size, no rule about the kind of fire you may use or how often the same oil is used. And as the akara seller runs the gauntlet of periodic raids by some state "task force" or other, so you, the customer, run a gauntlet of your own: food bought from the roadside whose provenance you know nothing of. You just have to trust that the frying oil is hot enough to make life uncomfortable for any germs, so that none survive the journey into your system.

Akara is Anyhow. There is no structure behind it, and no attempt at any. So when the first lady says that she and her husband are "empowering" people by shunting them into this kind of disorganised space, ask what that looks like in practice. What would Lagos look like with another 50,000 akara and tomato sellers "empowered"? Every street corner would have one, and Anyhowness would be intensified.

When Anyhowness Intersects

Newspapers in Nigeria report on the intersection of akara with the wider Nigerian Anyhowness now and again, often in tragicomic ways. The result is an intensification:

A few years ago, Channels Television reported that a petrol tanker overturned at Upper Iweka Junction in Onitsha. A NEMA official blamed the explosion that followed on the fire a woman was using to fry akara beside the road. It spread to nearby shops and homes. Last year, Leadership reported that a Toyota Corolla left the road at Nnung Oku Junction in Ibesikpo Asutan LGA and struck bystanders and roadside traders. Among those killed was a popular bean-cake seller known locally as “Mma Akara”, who usually sold late into the night. The paper reported seven deaths. This past January, when a diesel tanker toppled on Liverpool Bridge in Apapa, the Nigerian Tribune reported that a motor-park official immediately chased away the women selling akara, roasted plantain and roasted corn, and ordered them to put out their fires. Last year, The Guardian reported that two women were killed by a bread-delivery van on the Alao-Akala Memorial Highway in Ogbomoso. One of them was identified as a local vendor who sold ekuru, a steamed bean dish. They were reportedly attempting to cross the highway when they were struck, and the driver allegedly fled. And in April, Punch reported that a roadside hawker in Lagos was killed in a collision with a Lexus SUV.

There are other non-traffic risks. A December 2025 Guardian report followed an akara seller in Yenagoa who cooked with firewood because gas cost too much against her working capital. Smoke irritated her eyes as she worked. The health burden of polluting fuels, the report noted, falls hardest on the women doing the cooking. A February 2026 Punch investigation found akara, roasted plantain and fish being sold in Lagos beside heavy traffic, open drains, refuse and dust, with doctors warning of contamination from flies, unsafe water, vehicle emissions and roadside debris. A Nigerian Institute of Medical Research study, reported by the Nigerian Tribune in April 2025, found dangerous contamination in sampled street foods, including akara.

When a country's leaders offer this disorder as the "best" they can do, and do nothing about what it costs, we are through the looking glass.

Renewed Hope giveth, Renewed Hope taketh away

In Abuja, where the first lady and her husband live, roasted corn-sellers are treated as a security problem and the corn they sell as an urban menace. In August 2023 Nyesom Wike - one of the most powerful ministers in the government - prohibited street trading in the capital, singling out corn-sellers and hawkers, whose presence he said contributed to insecurity and criminal activity.

The First Lady has been on this for a while. In August 2024 she launched ₦50,000 grants for 37,000 women petty traders, a thousand of them in the FCT. The FCT Minister of State, Mariya Mahmoud, praised the programme for helping women traders expand their businesses and improve their livelihoods. Eleven months later, Wike’s office launched Operation Sweep to remove street traders from the FCT. Then on 6 June 2026 the First Lady distributed grants and equipment to another thousand traders and small-business operators in the FCT, where Mahmoud described the intervention as a demonstration of President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda and its commitment to empowerment and self-reliance. The junior minister hands out the grants and praises them; the senior minister sends in the task force.

Nor is this an Abuja peculiarity. This month in Anambra, the OCHA Brigade ran a major enforcement operation against roadside trading, demolishing shanties, confiscating goods and targeting traders who displayed them on roads, walkways and unauthorised public spaces. You can find dozens of stories like this across the country.

On 24 June 2026, the Lagos State Task Force gave the street traders along the Alaba Rago section of the Mile 2–Badagry Expressway 72 hours to leave. The government said it was enforcing the ban in the Lagos State Environmental Management and Protection Law 2017, and would clear trading from highways, walkways, road medians and setbacks. Two days later, the first lady told Nigerian women that selling akara and roasted corn did not require much capital and urged them to go for it.

One arm of the government will give you ₦50,000 to fry akara. Another will evacuate you from the road you fry them on. Take her advice at your own risk.

As with all things Nigeria, it’s a mixed bag of the good and the not so good.

We close out the discussion the broader opportunities for intra-African trade and what to expect in another year from Nigeria and the continent

Follow us on X/Instagram - @1914reader

Please like and subscribe to our YouTube channel (is that the correct way to say it?) where we also post all podcast episodes.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Is cocoa dying in Ondo?

For decades, cocoa was the backbone of Nigeria’s economy and the pride of Ondo State, the country’s leading cocoa-producing state. The crop financed major infrastructure projects, including the iconic Cocoa House in Ibadan, once the tallest building in Nigeria.

Today, however, stakeholders in the cocoa value chain are expressing concern over a steady decline in production, driven by ageing farmers, old cocoa plantations, insecurity, rising production costs, and the growing disinterest of young people in agriculture.

Findings by Daily Trust revealed that many cocoa farmers in Ondo State are now elderly, while several cocoa plantations are decades old and producing far below their potential. As the older generation gradually exits farming, concerns are mounting over whether there are enough youths willing to take their place.

The national president of the Cocoa and Plantain Farmers Association of Nigeria (CPFAN), Ayodele Ojo, said cocoa production had been on a downward trend for decades.

“It is not only Ondo State that is affected. More than 13 states in Nigeria produce cocoa today. Since 1978, cocoa production has been moving backward rather than forward,” he said.

Daily Trust

What goes through the brain of someone who decides to smoke on a plane? I wonder:

The Airport Police Command, Lagos, has said it will arraign two passengers for allegedly smoking and engaging in unruly conduct aboard an Air Peace flight from South Africa to Lagos, an incident that reportedly triggered the aircraft’s emergency smoke alarm and caused panic among passengers.

The command disclosed this in a statement on Friday signed by its Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Mohammed Adeola, and identified the suspects as Enaruna Prince Aghama, 51, and Tony Ajayi, 43.

According to the statement, the suspects were handed over to the International Airport Police Division by Aviation Security personnel after the aircraft landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Ikeja, for further investigation.

The police said preliminary findings showed that the incident occurred at about 7:44 p.m. on Thursday while the aircraft was en route to Lagos.

“Preliminary investigation revealed that at about 1944hrs on 9th July, 2026, while aboard an Air Peace flight from South Africa to Lagos, the suspects lit and smoked cigarettes inside the aircraft, an action which activated the aircraft’s smoke detection and emergency alarm system, causing panic and anxiety among passengers and cabin crew,” the statement read.

The command added that investigations also revealed that the suspects were in possession of an alcoholic beverage and became uncooperative when cabin crew members attempted to enforce safety procedures.

Punch

This is almost certainly yet another case of an aphrodisiac going wrong:

The Bayelsa State Police Command has launched an investigation after a 40-year-old phone repairer, identified simply as Felix, was found dead in a guest house in Yenagoa, while the woman who reportedly checked in with him disappeared before his body was discovered.

PUNCH Metro gathered that the deceased, said to be from Cross River State, had checked into Diko Guest House along Azikoro Road in the Ekeki area of Yenagoa with an unidentified woman on Wednesday night.

His naked body was, however, discovered in the room on Thursday morning after a cleaner reportedly raised the alarm.

Our correspondent learnt from sources in the hotel who craved anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the incident that the woman was said to have disappeared before the discovery.

PUNCH Metro learnt that the incident attracted traders and residents to the nearby Seriake Dickson Shopping Complex, where the deceased operated a phone repair shop.

Eyewitnesses told our correspondent that sachets of alcoholic drinks were found on a bedside table in the room, while police officers later evacuated the body.

Punch

We talk a lot about technological innovation here so here is a story for you. Posted without comment:

In the bustling heart of Nigerian cities and towns, the deafening roar of small gasoline generators, popularly called ‘I better pass my neighbour’, is the soundtrack of survival for hundreds of small business owners.

However, a quiet, homemade engineering trend is spreading through local workshops. Economy&Lifestyle discovered that Nigerian artisans, hit hard by the high cost of petrol, are bypassing their generators’ built-in steel tanks.

Instead, they are using discarded polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles, to act as makeshift, gravity-fed fuel compartments.

This viral hack is saving them thousands of Naira daily.

The concept is incredibly simple but highly effective.

Artisans remove or close off the large, traditional top-mounted metal fuel tank of a standard 950-watt or larger generator. They then suspend a clean, 1-litre or 2-litre plastic soda bottle, upside down, from the generator’s outer metal frame.

A slim rubber hose is inserted through a small hole drilled into the bottle cap.

This hose feeds petrol directly into the carburetor fuel intake.

Mr. Dirisu Jayjay, a local mechanic, explained that this set-up drastically reduces fuel waste.

“Many older generator tanks suffer from microscopic leaks, rust accumulation, or evaporation loss, due to intense tropical heat.

“Furthermore, standard carburetors can over-consume fuel when under a heavy tank load.

“But the small PET bottle relies on a gentle, gravity-fed system. This delivers only the exact amount of fuel the engine needs to keep running under a steady load.

Vanguard

Nigeria and Ponzi Schemes are twins separated at birth. No matter how badly one goes, another one is sure to rise in its place:

Social media users have reacted with frustration after another online investment platform, National Reading Culture (NRC), reportedly crashed, leaving many Nigerians stranded and unable to access their funds.

NRC operated as a task-based earning platform that required users to pay money to carry out simple daily tasks, with the promise of receiving heavily inflated and guaranteed returns.

A check by Tribune Online on Tuesday night showed that the scheme’s website, nrc.cc, was no longer accessible as of the time of filing this report.

The platform was founded in 2023 and claimed to have its headquarters in the United States.

Reacting to the development in a post on X on Tuesday, a user, @Oma22k, whose associate was a victim, wrote, “So, NRC has crashed.

“The funny thing is, someone had been seriously persuading me to join. She wanted me to register, but I refused. She explained everything, but I still wasn’t convinced.

“She even went ahead and registered me with her own money, expecting me to pay her back later. I simply told her, ‘Take the account and manage it yourself. I’m not interested.’

“From that day, she stopped talking to me.

“I just heard that the platform has crashed, and people have lost their money. The painful part is that people hardly ever learn. Give it some time, another platform will come with a different name, make the same promises, and many people will still rush into it.’”

Tribune

When even government buildings are collapsing like this, you should know the handshake has gone way beyond the elbow:

The Gombe State Government has ordered an immediate investigation into the collapse of a section of the entrance canopy at the ongoing construction site of the new Gombe State House of Assembly Complex.

The incident, which occurred on Friday, claimed one life and left seven construction workers injured.

In a statement issued by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Works, Housing and Transportation, Danladi Adamu, the government said the collapse involved a section of the cantilevered entrance canopy that was under construction. It added that five of the injured workers are receiving treatment at the Gombe State Specialist Hospital, while two others are being treated at the Federal Teaching Hospital (FTH), Gombe.

The government also directed that all injured workers be given comprehensive medical treatment at the government’s expense. It further directed the Ministry of Works, Housing and Transportation, alongside relevant emergency, regulatory and technical agencies, to immediately commence safety and accountability procedures to determine the cause of the incident.

As part of the investigation, the contractor handling the project and the supervising consultant have been directed to submit a formal incident report within 24 hours.

They are also expected to provide a preliminary investigation report, followed by a comprehensive technical report containing findings and recommendations.

Daily Post

Nigeria is almost certainly the only country I know of where ordinary people purchase cars by importing it themselves. This absurdity has been going on for as long as I can remember and everyone now thinks it is normal:

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Enugu Zonal Directorate, has arraigned one Chukwuebuka Ogbonna before Justice Vincent C. Ezeugwu of the Enugu State High Court.

Ogbonna was arraigned on a four-count charge bordering on stealing by conversion to the tune of N15, 400, 000.

The court said that the offence is contrary to Section 342 of the Criminal Code Law, Cap 30, Enugu State and punishable under Section 353 (1) of the same Law.

[…]

The defendant was arrested, following claims of a petitioner that he paid him N15.4m, sometime in October 2023, to assist him in importing three cars.

On receipt of the money, the defendant promised to deliver the cars on or before December 25, 2023, but failed to do so.

He neither delivered the cars nor returned the money to the petitioner.

Daily Post

Climate change comes with employment and money making opportunities:

At major flood flashpoints, groups of young men gathered with wheelbarrows, wooden planks and ropes, offering rescue services to stranded motorists and earning a living.

“We started early because we knew that cars would get stuck. We charged between N5,000 and N20,000, depending on the size of the vehicle,” one of the vehicle pushers said with a grin.

“Desperate motorists who were unable to restart their vehicles willingly paid to have them pushed to dry ground. We were not cheating anyone.

“We were providing service. Without us, many cars would still be stranded,” Ibrahim, a cart pusher insisted.

At the Trade Fair area of Ojo, many teenagers carried traders across the flooded Mile 2-Badagry expressway on their backs, ensuring they reached dry land without soaking their clothes.

“Some paid N500, others N1,000. It may not be much but it helped us feed to ourselves,” one of the teenagers rendering service said.

Commercial tricycle and motorcycle operators also enjoyed brisk business as transport fares surged on routes still accessible despite the flooding.

Roadside food vendors, sachet water sellers, umbrella hawkers and raincoat merchants equally recorded increased patronage from commuters trapped in an endless traffic.

Also, vehicle mechanics worked almost without rest. “Our workshop is full. Many drivers ignored the warnings and entered deep water. Some engines will require complete replacement,” a mechanic in Oshodi said while inspecting another flood-damaged engine.

Tow truck operators also reported one of their busiest days in months, moving stalled vehicles from flooded roads to repair workshops across the city.

Daily Trust

Non-Nigerian Media

Feature on Tolami Benson, Bukayo Saka’s fiancée:

While her husband-to-be trains from England’s base in Kansas City, Benson has work to do. Shoots and events are becoming routine — she recently created a collection for River Island, which she modelled alongside her teacup poodle, Bailey, “a chill babe” (at home there’s also a cockapoo, Tucker). She attended the British Fashion Awards in December and was at the Richard Quinn show at London Fashion Week last September in a dramatic V-neck white gown. “Fashion week is fun but it’s so back to back.”

Benson grew up in Hertfordshire, in a “big” family. She is (politely) cagey about her parents and siblings — in case “people start looking for them on the internet” — but her “born and raised country girl” upbringing involved plenty of dog-walking. After Bishop’s Hatfield Girls’ School, she studied public relations and media at Birmingham City University, then worked in several London-based PR and advertising agencies. She serves as a governor at her old secondary school. “It’s not what people think I do, but when you’re young you should do things like that. Because that’s when you can change things.”

The Times

Aliko Dangote has been one of the biggest winners from the Iran War:

There is a surprise winner from the Iran war: Africa’s richest man.

Nigerian industrialist Aliko Dangote went “through hell” building a $20 billion oil refinery that was plagued by a decade of delays and cost overruns that doubled the tab for the project.

Now, the commodities tycoon is reaping the benefits. The huge refinery reached full capacity in February—just in time to supply the world with diesel, jet fuel and gasoline that doesn’t need to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Surging demand for refined petroleum products has boosted Dangote’s wealth by some $4.86 billion since the start of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, bringing his net worth to about $34.8 billion. Dangote’s repeated bets on the rise of Africa’s middle class, from cement to sugar to salt, have helped the 69-year-old become the world’s 65th-wealthiest person.

The refinery’s output of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel have all risen more than 70% so far this year.

WSJ

Boko Haram are big fans of AI:

When a gang of motorcycle-riding members of Boko Haram attacked a military base in eastern Nigeria a couple of years ago, they were stymied by a defensive trench surrounding the complex.

The extremists regrouped. Before launching another assault, they asked A.I. for help.

“We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges,” a former Boko Haram commander told Antonia Juelich, a terrorism and technology researcher at Cambridge University. “We used A.I. to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on, and it gave us steps on what we have to do.”

Using tips from chatbots, mechanics modified the motorcycles to allow for faster acceleration and top speed. The riders dug their own holes, filled them with broken glass and fire, and practiced jumps — sometimes with fatal outcomes — until they achieved enough aerial liftoff to mount a successful attack, defectors said.

The episode, recounted in a research paper by Dr. Juelich shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication on Friday, highlights how generative artificial intelligence tools are increasingly aiding terrorist groups directly on the battlefield, experts say, despite efforts by their makers to safeguard them from misuse.

[…]

Dr. Juelich conducted nearly 60 interviews with 27 former members of Boko Haram in Nigeria over the past year. Her field research found that terrorists were using chatbots to design explosives, fix or upgrade other weapons, and brainstorm ideas on how to attack their enemies.

New York Times

Who put a grandmother up to this?

A British-Nigerian grandmother was arrested in Lagos while attempting to smuggle cocaine on to a London-bound flight by disguising the drugs inside plantain peels, according to Nigerian authorities.

Mary Yetunde Barek was detained with some 13kg of cocaine in her luggage as she tried to board a Virgin Atlantic flight to Heathrow on June 28, Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) said.

Barek, 67, from Ondo state, “admitted full ownership of the recovered cocaine”, after she was apprehended in the departure hall of Murtala Muhammed airport in Ikeja, the NDLEA said.

Barek, who works as a carer in the UK, had a scheme to conceal the drugs “in peels of plantain which appeared as real plantains and [were] packed among other food items”, the NDLEA said.

A video posted on social media by the drug enforcement agency showed authorities searching two large suitcases to find brightly patterned bags filled with newspaper-wrapped foodstuffs.

Inside, the wrapping looked at first glance to be elastic-banded bundles of ripe plantains — a staple of the Nigerian diet — but officers sliced into the peels to find packaged powder that set off a drug detector.

The Times

The message from some Nigerians to President Trump: why introduce me to a lifestyle you won’t sustain?

It was not just the holiday that had Luka Binniyat overjoyed on December 25. President Trump announced strikes on Islamist militants in Nigeria’s northwest, positioning himself as a defender of Christians.

“It was the best Christmas gift we could have ever had,” Binniyat, 60, said.

The bombings came after months of building rhetoric from the US president over a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, which has a narrow Muslim majority. Shortly after the strikes, the US sent military supplies to Abuja and deployed 200 troops.

Binniyat, from Kaduna State, spent decades as a journalist monitoring attacks on Christian communities, often arriving at the scenes of massacres.

Less than six months after the first US soldiers arrived, Binniyat is among the many people in Nigeria’s northcentral “Middle Belt” — home to most of the Christians in the north — who are confused and angry over their withdrawal.

“We don’t know the reason for them coming, because it was not helpful to us,” said Binniyat, who is the spokesman for the Middle Belt Forum, a civil society group of predominantly Christian ethnic minorities.

US activity continued to build until a strike targeted a swampy Islamic State hideout in the northeast’s Lake Chad Basin on May 16. Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, one of the most senior Islamic State leaders globally, was killed alongside some 200 other jihadists, US officials said. During the attack, the US seized the largest trove of terrorist electronic intelligence since 9/11.

The Times

What a terrible story:

A 26-year-old man has admitted attempting to murder his ex-partner in a “sustained” attack on an Edinburgh street last year as she took their daughter to a doctor’s appointment.

Osarenkhoe Atutie, 26, left Victory Atutie with 12 separate injuries after repeatedly stabbing her in the assault on Duke Street, Leith, on November 11 last year.

He admitted the attempted murder during a hearing at the High Court in Edinburgh on Tuesday and is due to be sentenced next month.

During the hearing, the court was told the couple had got married in Nigeria before coming the UK, where they had a daughter.

They initially lived in London but, following a “breakdown” in the relationship, Ms Atutie moved to Edinburgh with their child.

On November 11 2025, Ms Atutie had been taking her daughter for a doctor’s appointment when the 26-year-old approached them.

The court heard the child had seen him first and shouted “daddy, daddy”, and that initially Ms Atutie did not believe her as she thought he was in London.

However, when she caught sight of him she “immediately panicked”.

The court heard Atutie came up to them and lifted the cover of the buggy before giving his daughter a hug.

He then told Ms Atutie: “I brought a knife, I will show you.”

Daily Mail

One of the most embarrassing stories ever out of Nigeria has broken containment:

A fictitious federal entity that was allocated 1.3bn naira (£700,000) in Nigeria’s 2026 budget has precipitated a political storm in Africa’s largest democracy in the run-up to a general election set for January.

The fake agency came to light last October when Femi Gbajabiamila, the president’s chief of staff, wrote to the police alleging that his signature, along with official seals and reference numbers, had been forged by Adeniyi Adeyemi Matthew, who was claiming to have been appointed by the presidency to head the presidential foreign intervention promotion council (PFIPC).

The case is due to be heard in a court in the capital, Abuja, on 27 July, more than six months after the police filed an eight-count charge including criminal forgery, impersonation and obtaining by false pretence against Adeyemi and two others.

In a 1 July statement, the Nigerian presidency also claimed Adeyemi had met ambassadors without the knowledge of the foreign affairs ministry and misled the country’s accountant-general’s office into opening accounts for PFIPC with the central bank and 33 commercial banks.

The actual Nigerian investment promotion council had also reportedly raised an alarm about the similarities with the PFIPC.

Apart from being included in the budget, the PFIPC was also allocated office space in the federal secretariat in Abuja, a huge complex housing the headquarters of Nigeria’s civil service and many government ministries and agencies.

Guardian

Amusing story from Jamaica. Not really a Nigerian involved but:

For 38 days, South Africa was an adventure for 24-year-old Jamaican digital nomad Kadeem Leslie. In the final week, it became a country he could not wait to leave.

Leslie, a Kingston-born author and entrepreneur who has been travelling the world full-time, arrived in South Africa on May 17, eager to explore a country he had long admired for its history, beauty, and cultural power.

By June 30, however, the young Jamaican had abandoned plans to spend his final night in Johannesburg and instead sought refuge inside the airport, nearly a day before his scheduled departure.

His reason was simple. People had started telling him he looked Nigerian.

“You can’t tell that I’m Jamaican by looking at me, because I look West African,” Leslie told The Sunday Gleaner. “But whenever somebody finds out that I am Jamaican, it’s different. It’s a smile.”

The irony was not lost on him.

Across the world, he said, Jamaicans are often embraced with excitement, their nationality immediately linked to Bob Marley, Usain Bolt, reggae, dancehall and an outsized global cultural identity. But in South Africa, during a tense final week marked by anti-immigrant protests and fear among foreign African nationals, Leslie said his appearance suddenly seemed to matter more than his passport.

“I heard it so many times: ‘Hey bro, you look Nigerian’,” he recalled. “And it wasn’t until that last week that I started realising why people were saying it.”

Jamaica Gleaner

Armin Rosen spent a lot of time reporting this story on Massad Boulos. It’s a very long read and a lot of it covers Nigeria:

On April 10, 2025, a private, still-mysterious meeting took place in Paris between one of the Trump administration’s top diplomats and the leader of the most populous country in Africa. Bola Tinubu, the president of Nigeria, was in the French capital on a secretive 19-day work retreat in which he did not appear to participate in any official public events or meet with any leading French officials. One person he did meet with was Massad Boulos, a senior adviser on Arab and African affairs at the State Department.

Boulos arranged the sit-down with Tinubu without informing his colleagues at State, “[catching] the U.S. embassies in both France and Nigeria off guard,” sources briefed on the meeting told Politico. (Other officials disputed this account to the publication.) The following day, the U.S. Embassy in Abuja published a brief X post about the meeting, saying the two men had talked about “working together with partners to build a durable peace in eastern DRC”—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that doesn’t even border Nigeria—as well as “expanding opportunities for economic cooperation throughout Africa.” The Nigerians released a more detailed readout: “The U.S.,” Tinubu’s office announced after the sit-down, “wanted to work closely with President Tinubu to expand American investment in Nigeria and Africa.”

Boulos’ son, Michael Boulos, married Tiffany Trump in 2022. Massad Boulos is a citizen of Lebanon, France, and most recently the United States, where he became a citizen in 1990 (Boulos’ Washington-based spokesman said his client does not hold Nigerian citizenship). He spent nearly 30 years in Lagos, Nigeria, where he ran a small company, part of his wealthy father-in-law’s business empire, that imported and rented large trucks and other construction equipment. One of its clients is the Chagoury Group, the Tinubu government’s favored contractor for state-funded construction projects. The Lebanese Nigerian Chagoury family, whose chief visionary Gilbert also holds French citizenship, is so close to the heights of national power in Nigeria that Tinubu’s son—who knows Michael Boulos from their overlapping social circles in upper-class Lagos—had served on the board of one of their companies and was revealed to be the co-owner of an offshore Caribbean entity with a prominent Chagoury in 2024. Two weeks before the Paris meeting, Nigerian media reported that Tinubu’s government had approved a hastily negotiated $700 million contract for much-needed upgrades to the Lagos port with the Chagoury Group. Boulos flew to Paris to discuss a hazy set of investment opportunities with the chief patron of his longtime business partners in a meeting reportedly arranged outside of State Department channels for which no media were present.

Tablet Magazine

News from Tokyo:

Tokyo police have arrested a 53-year-old Nigerian on suspicion of persistent touting for an establishment in Tokyo’s Kabukicho nightlife district.

Nwadiukwu Sylvester Ikenna grasped a passer-by by the left hand on the street in the district in Thursday’s small hours, the Metropolitan Police Department said. The suspect was saying things like “Why don’t you?” and “Don’t be scared. I love you,” the police said.

The suspect admitted to the act of solicitation and said he had received part of the money solicited customers paid at an eating establishment, according to the police.

In the first half of the year, the police received 91 consultations about cases around the district in which people were forced to pay extremely high sums at establishments that they were taken to by African-looking touts. The number already exceeds 77 consultations for the whole of 2025.

Nippon

Who is responsible for England stars hairstyles at the world cup?

“The stadium went wild. The cameras panned to get a close-up of Rashy and suddenly my work was on the big screen.” May Jike is remembering England’s first World Cup match last month when Marcus Rashford scored the final goal; Rashford was sporting a geometric design she’d braided a few hours before. And if he was the man of the moment, Jike was the stylist.

Thrust on to the world stage, things kicked off pretty fast. “I gained 20,000 followers overnight, and even now my phone is still going crazy,” she says. For the same match she crowned fellow England player Noni Madueke with a head of two-strand twists. “When you look good you feel good and perform your best,” she says, speaking from a hotel in Los Angeles. “Plus, footballers are gaining a greater awareness of their grooming and brand image.”

Jike’s client list reads like a scroll of the world’s biggest sporting stars. This week alone the Londoner has flown to Milan Men’s Fashion Week to dress the hair of the NBA star Jarred Vanderbilt, and then gone straight to Tennessee to do Sheila Ebana, mother of the Spanish footballer Lamine Yamal, before boarding the red-eye to LA to remain on call for the World Cup football teams (though the airline has lost a bag of her finest tools).

[…]

“I don’t drink, and I’m committed to my craft — coming in and doing an excellent job. Speed is important too,” she adds. Braids have a reputation for being a time-intensive, laborious style, but one of Jike’s USPs is working quickly. “I did Rashford’s cornrows in 45 minutes.” She is paid a base rate of £5,000 for such jobs.

[…]

Then, in 2019, as a qualified financial services project manager on the cusp of a very well-compensated promotion, she shocked her colleagues by deciding to leave. Somewhere in the quiet and recalibration of lockdown, she returned to her passion for hair, and Jayèma was born. The moniker (an amalgam of her own name, May, those of her brother, James, and her mother, Yemisi) is the one she now goes by professionally as her bookings take her across the globe. “Working with male athletes happened naturally,” she says. “As I built relationships within sport, players began recommending me to teammates and other athletes.”

Jike’s big breakthrough was the Paris Olympics of 2024. “I worked with WNBA star A’ja Wilson [of the US gold medal-winning women’s basketball team] — that experience and God’s grace opened the door and showed me just how important image and confidence are for elite performers.” Since then, word of mouth has been one of the “big drivers” of her career, she says.

She is also quick to credit her family’s encouragement for her strong belief that she could be anything she set her mind to, even though growing up there was little representation of black women doing the kind of career she dreamt of.

“I grew up in the UK, but when I was 11 my mum took me to live in Nigeria.” The experience was a total culture shock. “For the first time I wasn’t the only one in my class or neighbourhood — there were black people everywhere I went. I remember seeing billboards in Nigeria and adverts on TV in which black models made up the entire cast and being stunned. I’d never seen anything like that in England, and it made me determined to be a part of that world.”

The Times

Hope you have had a good week. Enjoy the usual selection below.

Nigerian Media

Egg selling is now a thing?

Weekend Trust gathered that fertility clinics have quietly become a destination for young women, especially students. Some who spoke to our correspondent claimed they sold their eggs to pay tuition fees, just as they are others who embarked on it to buy wigs, clothes among others. There are also among them single mothers who said they sell their eggs to feed their children.

What was once viewed primarily as an act of reproductive altruism is, for many, becoming an economic lifeline. Behind the promise of payments ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of naira lies a little-discussed industry where financial desperation, medical intervention and ethical questions increasingly intersect.

The practice, popularly known as “egg selling,” involves stimulating a woman’s ovaries with fertility drugs before retrieving multiple eggs for use in assisted reproduction. Fertility specialists maintain that the procedure is generally safe when carried out under proper medical supervision. However, like any medical intervention, it carries recognised risks, including ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), bleeding and infection, making thorough counselling, informed consent and post-procedure monitoring essential.

Yet interviews conducted by Weekend Trust with egg sellers, women considering the procedure, fertility specialists, legal practitioners, psychologists and gender advocates suggest that many young women embark on the enterprise with little understanding of the potential complications. While some described the experience as a worthwhile means of earning income and helping families struggling with infertility, others recounted severe physical complications, emotional distress and unanswered questions about the information they received before agreeing to participate.

The issue first came to this newspaper’s attention during a conversation at a salon in Abuja, where discussions about egg selling and surrogacy had become surprisingly commonplace. Salon owner Hussaina Yusuf said economic hardship has made both options increasingly attractive to young women.

Daily Trust

Meanwhile Nigerian fertiliser producers are making a killing right now. Why? Because Nigeria was dropped on its head as a child. (See more here):

Farmers in Taraba State are increasingly turning to melon (egusi) husks (chaff) as organic manure as the rising cost of fertiliser has become beyond the reach of many.

The sharp increase in fertiliser prices has forced many farmers to seek cheaper alternatives to improve crop yields.

Daily Trust gathered that the high cost of fertiliser has driven the growing adoption of melon husks as manure in communities where the crop is produced in commercial quantities.

In Sabon Gida, one of the state’s major melon-producing areas, farmers no longer burn melon husks after processing the seeds. Instead, they collect and apply the husks on their farms as organic manure.

Mukhtari Ajuji, a resident of Sabon Gida, told Daily Trust that farmers had found melon husks to be highly beneficial for crop production.

According to him, only a few farmers initially experimented with applying melon husks on their farms and recorded improved yields. Their success encouraged many others in the community to adopt the practice.

Another resident, Sani Haruna, said that a few years ago melon husks were regarded as waste, with many people burning them after processing the seeds.

“However, farmers later discovered that the husks serve as effective organic manure, which is why they are now collected and applied on farms,” he said.

Daily Trust

Why did an Ifa priest set himself on fire? Because he was suffering from something a lot of Nigerians are in denial about:

Shock and confusion gripped residents of Adebiopon Village in the Obafemi Owode Local Government Area of Ogun State on Wednesday after a 50-year-old traditional priest, Muritala Shodiya, allegedly set himself ablaze.

PUNCH Metro gathered from multiple sources in the community on Thursday that the incident occurred on Wednesday evening when Shodiya reportedly doused himself with petrol inside an uncompleted building before setting himself ablaze.

The residents, PUNCH Metro gathered, quickly extinguished the fire and rushed him to the General Hospital, Ijaye, Abeokuta, where doctors pronounced him dead on Thursday morning.

Before the incident, Shodiya, popularly known as “Ifa,” was widely known for fortune-telling and Ifa worship.

He had reportedly practised in Ijaye for several years before relocating to Adebiopon village.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the incident, a community source alleged that Shodiya had set himself on fire after showing signs of depression.

“We learnt that he set himself on fire. He had not been himself since his wife left him for another man. He had been showing signs of depression,” the source said.

Punch

Not even judges are safe from this menace:

The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mr. Ola Olukayode, has decried the activities of internet scammers popularly known as Yahoo Boys, revealing how over N7.2 million was wiped from the account of a serving judge at midnight.

Speaking during the public presentation of two books authored by a retired high court judge, Justice Alaba Omolaye-Ajileye, the EFCC Chairman said he was woken from sleep around 1am by a distress call from a judge in one of the South-South states who had fallen victim to scammers.

“What was the problem? She had just been scammed of the money she had been putting together for six years to send her child to school.

“She said it was alerts that woke her up. She received debits at that time of the day. Was it that the bank was at work, or what could be going on?

“Before she knew it, she had been scammed of about N7.2 million. So she put a call through to me that I had to do something.

“Incidentally, it was the state where they got an order against the EFCC from investigating certain crimes. And she said, ‘My lord, I have an order, an injunction not to investigate financial crimes in that state.’

“She said, ‘No, no, no! This is an exception. You must do something immediately!’

Vanguard

In case you think being a kidnapper is easy work:

Some persons, who were kidnapped at their farms in Estako West Local Government Area of Edo State, said they escaped after their kidnappers slept off.

They narrated their ordeal at a briefing in Benin on Friday. According to the kidnap victims, their abductors were tired after making them to walk all night.

One of the victims, Destiny Braimah, who spoke on behalf of the victims, said he was returning from the farm when he ran into six men armed with guns and cutlasses.

Braimah said the kidnappers abducted 10 other persons and took them into the forest. He said they heard police shooting, while being marched into the forest.

According to him, “I was coming from the farm when I met six of them armed with guns and matchet. They also captured others, making us 11 victims.

“They took us from one bush to another. It was around 6 p.m. that we heard police shooting. They made us walked throughout the night.

“We got to a place, and they told us to hide. They were very tired. So they slept off.

“That was how we helped ourselves and ran away. We ran to the police station, and went to meet the police. The kidnappers beat us and maltreated us.”

Vanguard

I do not even know what to say to this. I am completely speechless:

The Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, has conferred a chieftaincy title on Nollywood actor Olanrewaju Omiyinka, popularly known as Baba Ijesha, and also presented him with a brand new car.

Baba Ijesha disclosed the development in a Facebook post late Thursday, where he expressed appreciation to the monarch for the honour, warm reception and gifts extended to him and his wife, Afolashade Omiyinka, popularly known as Luminee.

He also revealed that he was bestowed with the chieftaincy title of Baba Awada Konge Oduwa.

The latest development comes weeks after the actor and his celebrity stylist partner, Luminee, welcomed a baby boy named King Kagar Omiyinka.

Baba Ijesha announced the birth of their son in an Instagram post where he thanked God for the child and described the newborn as a blessing to his family.

Tribune Online recalls that Baba Ijesha was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment in July 2022 after he was convicted for sexually assaulting a minor.

He was, however, released in November 2025 after spending more than three years in prison.

Tribune

One of those only in Nigeria stories where if you try too hard to understand what is going on, you may land in hospital:

A man, identified as ‘Kano thug’ has issued a stern warning to bandit kingpin, Kachalla Maha, and sponsors of terrorism to steer clear of Kano State.

In a viral video on X sighted by DAILY POST, the visibly angry man cautioned that anyone nursing the idea of taking banditry to Kano state should have a rethink and stay away.

According to him, Kano is not like other places, noting that they do not tolerate bandits and terrorists in the state.

“Any fool planning to bring harm to Kano, starting with the notorious terrorist, Kachalla Maha, should think again and stay far away.

“Kano is not like Katsina, Zamfara, or Sokoto. We don’t tolerate bandits or terrorists here.

“Our people rose up, fought Boko Haram, Mai-Tatsine and crushed them completely in this state. Any terrorist who tries to enter Kano will find his final destination right here.

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

The backlash to African governments borrowing with derivatives has begun:

A backlash against governments using derivatives to borrow against their debt is gathering strength, after the IMF cracked down on a multibillion-dollar loan to Nigeria as risky and opaque.

The $5bn credit line, arranged through a “total return swap” between Nigeria and First Abu Dhabi Bank, has raised concerns at the fund and among rating agencies and investors about developing countries using these opaque mechanisms to take on new forms of debt. They say the deals leave borrowers exposed to risks that are hidden from other lenders and conceal the true extent of their debt obligations.

The Nigerian deal has become a lightning rod for such warnings after years of effort to make emerging market sovereign borrowing more transparent. “The use of opaque borrowing has grown to a point where it presents a significant risk to that advancement, and the industry will respond,” said Samy Muaddi, debt portfolio manager at T Rowe Price. “To the extent these structures proliferate, there will be a Darwinian adaptation to respond to them.”

Financial Times

Impersonating a Dubai Prince is crazy work:

Maria believed she was romancing a prince from Dubai, captivated by his flirtatious smile and declarations of affection he showered on her during live video calls. But the suitor was an AI deepfake, making her yet another victim of an online romance scam.

The case illustrates how fraudsters posing as the real-life crown prince of Dubai ensnare victims by cultivating online relationships before swindling them out of money, with researchers tracing some of the scams to crime syndicates in Nigeria.

Maria met the scammer impersonating Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed, also known by his pen name Fazza, on a dating site before the conversation moved to a messaging app where he bombarded her with romantic messages.

“He kept on messaging me even when I was sleeping,” the Filipino domestic worker told AFP, requesting that her real name and age be withheld.

“It felt like there was a love spell that connected our minds.”

In one recording of a WhatsApp video call seen by AFP, the scammer, appearing lifelike as the prince, flickered on the screen. His words matched his lip movements, but not the prince’s voice.

“Hello beloved,” the voice told Maria. “I really appreciate your love and support.”

Maria, who was initially too lovelorn to suspect fraud, lost a year’s worth of savings.

The scammer manipulated her into paying 100,000 pesos ($1,625) for what he claimed were a marriage certificate and a “royal membership card,” which he said would help her secure a job in Dubai.

Her suspicion arose when he proposed meeting her at a hotel and demanded another 60,000 pesos ($974) for the booking. When she scrutinized his Facebook page, which has since been taken down, she noticed the account was based in Nigeria.

She cut off communication, sending one final message: “Go to hell, scammer.”

Daily Mail

Meanwhile over in Florida:

A Florida woman had her driveway ripped up and taken away as part of an alleged scam carried out by someone in Nigeria, according to a report.

Luz Lenzi returned to her home in Sanford, about 30 miles north of Orlando, in February to find a mountain of rubble where her driveway once was.

“I didn’t hire them, I didn’t need to have my driveway redone,” Lenzi told News 6.

Police say someone claiming to be from a real estate company hired a contractor to update the driveway. However, the contractor abruptly stopped working on the driveway when a $15,000 check provided to pay for the job bounced.

The check was written by New Mexico-listed company “SOIL Realty LLC,” which investigators later tracked back to Nigeria.

Authorities said the contractor did not meet with the client and did not file a permit to do the work on the driveway.

However, police uncovered the true origin of the scam by tracing bank transactions and Google records tied to an email address used in the deal, leading them to internet addresses in Nigeria.

“I said, Nigeria, like in Africa? And he said, yes,” Lenzi recalled. “I said, how? I was shocked.”

Independent

Viewing centres as social spaces:

Benson Eze has owned the same viewing center at the White House Bus Stop in Lagos for 11 years. He can tell you, without checking a notebook, how many plastic chairs he has (94), what he charges on a regular match night (200 naira). What he cannot tell you is how many will walk through the door on any given day.

“With World Cup,” he says, glancing toward the entrance as the first spectators claim their chairs, “You stop predicting. You just prepare.”

Across Nigeria, preparation is well underway. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, is deep into its group stage, and viewing centers in Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, and Benin City are running at full capacity. These low-cost, communally organized spaces are where the vast majority of Nigerian football fans actually watch international football. During a World Cup, they become something harder to define: part sports venue, part open-air cinema, part informal town square.

The Lagos State Sports Commission estimates there are more than 3,000 registered viewing centers in Lagos State alone, with thousands more operating informally across the country.

Eze’s ₦200 ($0.15) entry fee is calibrated to exclude almost no one. Revenue comes from volume. On a full house during a popular group-stage fixture, he clears between 15,000 and ₦25,000 ($18) at the gate before generator fuel, cable subscriptions, and maintenance costs take their share.

Okayafrica

News about AI from Australia:

Elii Emeghebo is suing a company he modeled for after an AI-generated image appeared to closely resemble him.

ABC News Breakfast reports that the Nigerian-Australian spotted an image while walking past the window of Peter Jackson’s Pitt Street shop in Sydney. He had modeled for the brand in the past, yet recognized himself not in the original campaign images but in an image he described as his “white twin.” He claims it was an AI-generated image of his likeness.

“My nose was reshaped, my skin tone and my eye colour was significantly lightened, and there’s some reshaping around my eyebrows and my eye shape to be more Eurocentric and a lot less black,” Emeghebo told ABC News Breakfast. “It’s not a good thing when you go from a shoot, something you’re really proud of … and you walk past the shop and see basically you, but without your identity there. It was really confronting and really unfair.”

Emeghebo has filed a lawsuit against Peter Jackson Australia at the Australian Human Rights Commission, alleging it whitewashed his image, which he said was proof of racial discrimination, per the outlet. Additionally he said that the company failed to compensate him for the use of the images. He claims that the images were intended only to promote the brand on its digital channels.

Afrotech

ICE arrested a Nigerian nun in Texas:

The arrest of a Catholic nun from Nigeria by federal immigration officers in southern Texas on Sunday made for an unlikely alliance on Capitol Hill as lawmakers from both parties demanded her release and asked the question: Why aren’t border officials focused on real threats to public safety?

Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, 56, was walking the block between her home and the Catholic Church where she attends Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas, when she was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The agents arrested her, taking her rosary, and brought her to a nearby detention facility.

As reports of Ugboaja’s arrest spread, demands for her release from members of southern Texas’ congressional delegation flooded social media.

“My team and I are working with DHS to gather details regarding the detainment of Sister Letty Ugboaja of Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy,” Rep. Monica De La Cruz, a Republican who is running to defend the Texas border district she won in 2022, wrote in a post on X. “I have elevated this to the highest levels and will provide additional information as it becomes available.”

MS Now

More Benin Bronzes returning to Nigeria. I wonder if anyone is keeping score and what the count is now:

Benin Bronzes from collections at the Museum of Ethnography Geneva, the University of Zurich Ethnographic Museum, and Museum Reitberg were returned to Nigeria this week. (Benin Bronzes are linked to a British raid on Benin City in 1897, and in the aftermath, the looted treasures made their way into museum collections around the world.) In addition, Switzerland also returned five other objects to Nigeria, including a bronze bracelet, that had been seized during criminal proceedings.

Per a joint release from museums, “The restitution follows several years of collaborative provenance research carried out under the Benin Initiative Switzerland, which showed that the objects were most likely looted from the Kingdom of Benin during the British attack in 1897. They would then have entered the art market and found their way into museums around the world. The ceremony also included the restitution of a bronze bracelet and four archaeological monoliths from Nigeria’s Niger Delta region seized in Switzerland as part of criminal proceedings and subsequently transferred to the state. Switzerland has now fulfilled its legal obligation to return them to their country of origin, the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

Town & Country

The technology that was supposed to ‘leapfrog’ the need for wires in the ground is itself now being ‘leapfrogged’ by Elon Musk’s constellation of satellites in space. Unhappy is the land that finds itself constantly in need of ‘leapfrogging’:

Ekiti, a state in south-western Nigeria, is named after the Yoruba word for hill. In the 19th century, its rocky terrain was useful for self-defence. It is less ideal for 21st-century commerce, as Akin Oyebode has found. The state commissioner wants to boost the economy of Ekiti. But that goal is being hampered by terrible network connections. Connecting mobile towers or getting fibre cables up the hills from the landing point 250km away in Lagos, the commercial capital, is expensive, and he has struggled to persuade internet providers to bring more of their infrastructure closer. But recently the government’s connection, at least, has improved—thanks to Starlink, the satellite-internet service provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Mr Oyebode is not alone. Maddened by poor connections, more governments and rich Africans are turning to satellite terminals. For now, it is an expensive stop-gap. But in the coming years it could boost connectivity, both by providing internet to more Africans and by spurring broadband providers to improve.

Africa’s internet infrastructure is not fit for purpose. During a communications boom in the early 2000s, the continent eschewed fixed-line internet for cheaper mobile broadband; today more than 400m Africans, the bulk of the continent’s users, gain access to the internet this way.

But the technology has not kept pace with the rapid increase in data demand from streaming and AI-powered applications. Even in big cities like Lagos and Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, WhatsApp video calls can be glitchy. And things will get worse. Traffic is expected to at least triple by 2030. Cabled fibre internet, which has much higher capacity, is used by less than 1% of Africans and is being expanded too slowly. Nigeria alone “has a shortage of 90,000 kilometres of fibre-optic network”, says Bosun Tijani, the digital-economy minister. Africa as a whole is probably short by hundreds of thousands.

All this made the continent fertile ground for Starlink when SpaceX started the service there in 2023. Starlink relies on satellites, not cables or mobile-phone towers. It is useful for programmers trying to supplement the patchy network in a co-working space in a city and for aid workers in far-flung areas with no cables. Starlink is most active in Nigeria, where it first launched, and Zimbabwe. But it offers its services in 27 African countries and it is likely to have 1m customers on the continent by early next year, says TMF Associates, a satellite-industry analysis firm (today some 12m people subscribe globally, according to SpaceX).

Economist

This story about Christopher Harborne, Reform UK’s biggest donor, carries an interesting angle and graphic on Nigeria. Sadly the graphic is too long to share:

AML is a fuel broker, meaning that it buys fuel at airports to supply to flight operators at airports across the globe. It is a major supplier of fuel to the US military and has signed live contracts worth up to $108 million (£82 million) between 2023 and 2026, at more than 30 airports across Africa, Asia and the Pacific.

US transparency records show that AML has eight active contracts with the US Defence Logistics Agency, responsible for securing fuel supplies for military operations, covering refuelling services for US military and government aircraft.

According to 2024 US court documents, the company had received $39 million in contracts from the US Department of Defence since 2018.

One of these contracts was for the supply of fuel at Nnamdi Azikiwe international airport, which serves Abuja, Nigeria.

US transparency procedures mean that the contracts must identify the refuelling companies working with AML Global to provide the fuel, along with the refineries that supply it.

The contract for Nnamdi Azikiwe international airport shows that fuel provided by AML under its terms would be supplied by Reliance Industries’ Jamnagar refinery in Gujarat, India.

The Times

Over in India:

The Anti-Narcotic Wing (ANW) of CCB has arrested four people, including three Nigerian nationals, in two cases of drug peddling in the city. Sleuths of ANW seized 10.27 kg of MDMA crystals and 2.044 kg of hydroponic ganja, worth around Rs 23 crore from the accused. Acting on a tip-off, the sleuths raided a house in Madanayakanahalli police limits and arrested Ambemo Jela Victor, 37, Chime Ndubunsi Moses, 36, and Karikari Ames, 33, from Nigeria. The sleuths seized 10.27 kg of MDMA crystals valued at Rs 21 crore from their possession.

The accused had come to India on medical and tourist visas. Preliminary investigations revealed that the accused procured drugs from another Nigerian national based in Delhi. In another operation, the police arrested Mohammed Marel Fecoge (25), a native of Kerala and a private firm employee in the Banaswadi police station limits for allegedly possessing and selling hydroponic ganja.

They seized 2.044 kg of hydroponic ganja valued at Rs 2 crore from him. He came to the city four months ago and allegedly procured drugs from a person in Kerala, who in turn sourced the drugs from Thailand.

The New Indian Express

Based on feedback I got on the Audu chapter, I have included a map to give a better visual representation of the territory this story covers.

Introduction: The Parrot’s Work

Chapter 1: Man Like Pascoe

Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote

Chapter 3: Audu With The Big Belly (no paywall)

Chapter 4: ‘His Name Is Dore’

Chapter 5: The Old Mushroom

I

Sometime in 1910, a young Scotswoman named Olive MacLeod interrupted her journey at Lokoja and went to call on the old chief whose house stood near the market. She was on her way up to Lake Chad to find the grave of her fiancé, an explorer killed earlier that year in the country beyond it. She had come up the Niger by steamer, past the floating villages and the distant ranges, and at the quay the resident magistrate had met her and put her up in a government house. The old chief lived among the people. She found him courtly, unhurried, and entirely at ease with her: a man who spoke fluent English and liked to rank the countries he had seen by the richness of their produce, the way another man might rank them by their armies.

He had been to Europe. He told her about it. There had been a dinner for two hundred guests at the Kaiser’s palace, which had impressed him greatly. There had been an audience with Queen Victoria, who had given him forty pounds. And there had been a receiving line of English ladies, each of whom, on shaking his hand, had pressed two shillings and sixpence or five shillings into his palm - so that the African visitor came away from the introductions a little richer with each one. He had seen Europe, in other words, several decades before most Europeans had seen the Margi hills he came from.

The old chief had travelled, as a young man, with two German explorers, and he had been at the side of one of them when he died near the lake. He had buried the man himself - buried him, he said, “deep-deep,” so that the body would lie beyond the reach of digging animals. Then he had gone on with the surviving German, west to Timbuktu and north across the desert, and eventually all the way to those palaces in Europe.

His name was Abbega, or close enough; Abbega, Abbiga, Abiga, Abigeh, and, for one stretch of his life, Frederick Fowell Buxton, after an English philanthropist he never met. He was a Margi from the borderland southeast of Bornu, and he had arrived at that house by the market by a route too incredible for any novelist to submit to an editor: captured as a child, sold, freed by an explorer, carried to Germany and England, baptised, turned to preaching the Gospel, returned to Islam, employed in by a Scottish consul, a French trading house, and an English chartered company, and finally made a chief. By the time MacLeod met him he had outlived almost everyone who could contradict any version of his story.

What she had no way of knowing was that the old man’s compound held a grandson. The boy had been born at Jega and raised on the river, in the same trades of language and usefulness. The Kanuri of Bornu would give him a name that later turned into a title - Maina Turjiman, the prince of interpreters - and he would spend his twenties walking into walled cities under false colours, talking emirs out of their guns, and kneeling among the dead to identify the bodies of fallen sultans. One of the smaller errands that fell to him along the way would be to ride out into the country east of the lake, find an old woman who remembered a grave, and dig up the bones of the very German his grandfather had put into the ground half a century before.

II

The particulars of Abbega’s capture into slavery are lost but the direction ran toward Kukawa, the Bornu capital, the great clearing-house at the western edge of Lake Chad where captured children changed hands. His companion in everything that followed, the Hausa boy Dorugu, left a fuller record of the same system: snatched in a raid as a child of eleven or twelve, carried off to Zinder, sold to a Kanuri merchant, taken down to Kukawa to work as a houseboy, and then resold to an Arab in the city to settle one of the merchant’s debts.

What rescued both boys from that circuit was an accident of geography. In 1851 two German explorers, Heinrich Barth - in his day the foremost European explorer of the Sahara and the central Sudan - and Adolf Overweg, were living at Kukawa, the survivors of a desert crossing that had already killed the leader of their expedition. Dorugu was hired out to Overweg as a camel boy on a journey north of the lake, and he wrote down his first sight of the explorer like a frightened child: “His face and hands were all white like paper, he had a red fez on his head, a long beard.” Overweg bought the boy out of slavery for fifteen Maria Theresa dollars - about twenty-five dollars - and had a redemption certificate written out by a mallam. Abbega, three or four years older, was freed by Overweg in the same fashion. Then, in October 1852, Overweg died of fever near the lake, and the boys passed to Barth. The surviving explorer took both boys west to Timbuktu and back, and then north across the Sahara, and he talked to them the whole way in Hausa - “even mostly,” he wrote, “with the Marghi lad Abbega.”

In 1855 Barth carried the two of them back to Europe, where they were, in all likelihood, the first northern Nigerians ever to set foot in England or Germany. A relative of Barth’s looked them over and recorded that Dorugu was a small, light-skinned, “highly intelligent” Hausa of fourteen; Abbega was “a coal-black muscular Marghi pagan, 18 years old but less gifted than the other.” That verdict did not age well as the “less gifted” of the two boys would go on to learn five African languages besides Arabic and English, to cross between two religions and three European commercial systems, and to die a chief.

Barth meant to keep the boys for two years, have them taught English “and if possible some handicraft,” and then return them home as Christian lay missionaries who would carry the Gospel back in a familiar accent. The boys did not cooperate with the plan. Within months they were homesick, and the British Foreign Secretary (George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon) himself was drawn into arranging their passage - a surviving instruction to the consul at Tripoli directs that the two freed Africans be given an Arabic passport “such as liberated slaves generally receive,” placed under the protection of a trustworthy man bound for Kano, and furnished with a camel.

While the passage was being arranged, the boys were lent to a missionary linguist, the Reverend James Frederick Schön, who had been up the Niger on a calamitous expedition in 1841 and was now assembling the Hausa grammars and dictionaries on which the next half-century of evangelism and administration would lean. The secretary of the Church Missionary Society met the two of them and found them “as home-sick as any Swiss”; to every inducement to remain in England, he wrote, their only answer was “Africa! Africa!” And then, on the eve of departure, they changed their minds. Dorugu announced that if Abbega were willing he would rather stay and be educated than go home in ignorance, and Abbega was willing. Barth refused. He had had a great deal of trouble arranging their passage; he had also been publicly accused by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society of importing two slaves into England. He spoke to the boys sharply in Kanuri and they went down to Southampton subdued, telling the missionary they would rather sail than be a cause of bad feeling between the two men.

Schön followed them to the ship, he said, only to see them off. When they caught sight of him at the quay they asked whether they might still leave the vessel and go with him. He put the question to the captain, who wished to know only one thing - whether it was the boys’ own free choice - and, satisfied that it was, let them disembark. They ran to gather up their few belongings and came away “in great joy.” Had the missionary arrived a few hours later, the ship would have sailed. The point he made afterward, when Barth accused him of taking the boys by “artifice and violence,” was a simple one: they were free men in free England, and had done nothing but what free men were entitled to do.

In Schön’s house at Chatham they settled down to be his pupils. He taught them to read their own tongues from a little primer; he also worked on them for his scholarship, and was candid about the division of labour. Abbega, he found, “spoke Hausa like a foreigner, being a Margi by birth,” though communicative enough to yield a vocabulary and a few stories in Margi itself. Dorugu was the prize - a real Hausa who would dictate to him “for hours together and even till late in the night.” What came out of the boy was the story of his own short life: his Hausa childhood, his capture and sale, the journey down to Kukawa and out across the desert, all the way to England. Around it he wound the rest of what he carried in his head - folktales, riddles, the narratives of how things were done at home - until the missionary had “a Hausa literature of several hundred pages” in front of him, the first connected prose ever written in the language, narrated by a boy of sixteen or seventeen who could not yet speak a word of English. That literature would be printed under the missionary’s name. Its substance had come out of the mouth of a teenager who had been a slave three years before.

In May 1857 the two boys were baptised at the mission house. Dorugu took the names James Henry, after the missionary and the explorer; Abbega was christened Frederick Fowell Buxton, after the missionary and after the great abolitionist who had been called “the friend of the African race.” Then their paths forked. Abbega sailed for Africa that same year; Dorugu stayed on in England for another seven, reading and studying, before going home in 1864.

The two of them met once more, at Lokoja, and then their lives ran apart for good. Abbega went up in the world. Dorugu did not. He drifted, by one account, through “an unsettled life in and around Kano,” surfacing at the turn of the century as a schoolmaster to the new Northern Nigeria Regiment and a Hausa tutor to British officials, ending his days teaching Hausa at a government school for the sons of emirs. When he died in a Kano suburb in 1912 - of a leprosy discovered only at the end, his body “a skeleton with brown parchment stretched over it,” his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, his English still without the trace of an accent - they found in his house the residue of a lifetime spent close to power: boxes of biscuits and cocoa and jam, all unopened, a dozen pairs of spectacles, two 250 pounds in little rolls of gold and silver, and a wardrobe of European clothes from which you could read off, by the initials stitched into them, the names of every white man he had ever served. There was a last turn to it. By law, his Hausa widow stood to inherit the whole of his small estate if she declared herself a Christian, as her husband had been, and only a fraction of it otherwise; the matter was carefully put to her; and she answered, without hesitating, that she was a Muslim, and then gave away as alms the little that came to her. The faith that had been the making of Dorugu’s career did not outlast him by a day in his own house.

Read more

This week on main, Tobi argued that Africa’s development depends on building competitive, capability-growing firms within a political economy that rewards productive risk-taking over rent-seeking. I wrote a response to the FT piece celebrating Aliko Dangote as an industrialist pointing out what has so far been missing from the story. And in keeping with the same theme, a new Chinese cement giant has arrived in Nigeria. I trace their journey from technology acquisition to mastery and why it is a test for Nigeria.

Enjoy the week’s selection below

Nigerian Media

Sachetisation eventually comes for everything in a poor country. It is the turn of powerbanks:

With electricity shortages and limited charging points frustrating residents in some areas of Kano State, and the country in general, a group of youths in Kwanar Ungogo have innovatively devised a new way to ease the burden on residents while earning a living. Backed by Mopo Company, a team of young agents under the supervision of Area Manager Zainab Shuaib now operates a power bank rental service in the community. At the outlet visited by our reporter, three agents manage the day-to-day rental operations, each equipped with more than 70 power banks, while a dedicated charging station located within the neighbourhood ensures that returned devices are recharged and made ready for the next customer.

For just N300, customers can rent a power bank for 24 hours long enough to charge a mobile phone four or five times. What initially appeared to many residents as an unfamiliar innovation has quickly gained acceptance, attracting customers not only from Kwanar Ungogo but also neighbouring communities such as Dawanau and Rijiyar Lemo.

A visit to the outlet by Weekend Trust showed a steady stream of customers tropping to the place. Some came to return power banks borrowed the previous day, while others waited patiently to rent a fully charged power bank. Before handing over a device, one of the agents verifies the customers’ details and activates the power bank through a mobile application. Without that activation, the device can’t be used. Returned units were later taken to the company’s charging station, where they were recharged before being returned to circulation.

Daily Trust

I’m guessing he posted the video online to make some Elon money?

The Anambra State Police Command has said that the man behind the viral security claims circulated on social media, alleging that a military helicopter dropped unknown items in a bush between Nimo and Adazi-Nnukwu communities in Anaocha Local Government Area of the state, has been arrested.

Recall that the claims, which spread rapidly on Thursday, raised concerns among residents and triggered public anxiety over possible security threats in the area.

In response, the police dismissed the report, describing it as a “false alarm” capable of causing unnecessary panic and undermining public confidence in the state’s security network.

However, in a statement issued on Friday, the command’s spokesperson, SP Tochukwu Ikenga, said the suspect behind the claims was arrested by residents of the affected communities, led by the President-General, on Thursday.

Ikenga said the suspect is currently in custody, adding that investigations revealed he recorded the video from a house.

He said, “The individual who recorded and circulated the video has been arrested and interrogated. He is currently being held in custody.

“Investigations revealed that he recorded the video from a house near CKP and was nowhere near the location he claimed in the video.

“During interrogation, he admitted that he never saw any helicopter land and that he fabricated the story based on hearsay.

Punch

Buildings collapsing are now so frequent that the only place you will find the stories below the headlines. And note the highlighted part below for added effect:

Tragedy struck in Lagos when a three-storey building located in the Alakija axis, Amuwo-Odofin Local Government Area, collapsed, which has thrown the entire area into panic mode.

As of press time, the number of casualties could not be ascertained, as there are victims said to be trapped under the rubble.

According to reports, the incident occurred unexpectedly and sent shockwaves through the community, as residents and passers-by rushed to the scene in fear of possible casualties and further structural failure.

An eyewitness account stated that the building suddenly collapsed at about 11:40 a.m. on Thursday. The incident disrupted normal activities in the neighbourhood, with people fleeing surrounding buildings for safety.

Vanguard

How much do pistols cost in Okrika?

The Rivers State Police Command has thwarted an alleged attempt to transport an illegal firearm in Port Harcourt, arresting a suspect after officers discovered a Browning pistol concealed inside a loaf of bread during a routine stop-and-search operation.

The unusual recovery, described by the police as evidence of the increasingly sophisticated tactics employed by criminal elements, occurred along Azikiwe Road near the Red Cross Junction in Port Harcourt.

According to a statement issued on Friday by the Police Public Relations Officer, ASP Agabe Blessing Kaborlo, the operation was carried out by operatives of the command acting on the directives of the Commissioner of Police, CP Olugbenga Adepoju.

The statement explained that officers intercepted a vehicle during a routine security check and conducted a thorough search of the occupants.

During the search, a Browning pistol was allegedly found ingeniously concealed inside a loaf of bread belonging to one Braya Nanas, a male resident of New Road, Borikiri, who was travelling as a passenger in the vehicle.

Police said preliminary investigations revealed that the firearm had no visible serial number, a development that has raised concerns over its origin and possible intended use.

The suspect was said to have admitted ownership of the weapon during interrogation, allegedly telling investigators that he purchased the pistol in Okrika for the sum of N800,000.

Guardian

This is the problem with podcasts (yes, I’m aware I’m also a podcaster). Once people see a Shure microphone and are given a comfortable chair to sit on, they start saying all sorts. I propose that podcasts should be recorded standing as a way of curbing this menace:

Nigerian lawyer and businessman Olufemi (Femi) Afolabi-Brown, has explained why he believes a man who intends to practise polygamy should wait about 25 years before marrying a second wife.

Afolabi-Brown, who is married to media personality Morayo Afolabi-Brown, shared his views during an episode of The Brown Couch Podcast, where he argued that a significant age gap between wives could help reduce rivalry and conflict in polygamous homes.

According to him, a man who marries his first wife at 25 should ideally wait until about age 50 before taking a second wife.

He said such a gap would ensure that the children from both marriages belong to different generations, making it easier for them to coexist peacefully.

“Your first wife ought to be a lot older than your second wife. You can marry your second partner at age 50 if you first marry one at age 25.

“So the first child’s children become like the older brothers, uncles and aunts to the younger ones. They are not of the same generation, so there will never be rivalry between them,” he said.

Afolabi-Brown argued that marrying a second wife only a few years after the first often creates unnecessary tension within the family.

Tribune

Stuff like this shouldn’t be funny so why then am I laughing?

A United Kingdom-based Nigerian, Emmanuel Opeyemi Makinde, has a Federal Capital Territory, FCT, High Court that his travel agent, Mr Waliyu Aderibigbe Shitta, fraudulently added an unknown woman to his visa application in 2022 as his wife.

Opeyemi, while testifying in his evidence-in-chief before the court presided by Justice Ademuyiwa Oyeyipo, stated that the travel agent added one Miss Dolapo Afusat Yusuf, as his legally married wife without his knowledge.

He disclosed that the agent was introduced to him by his pastor, Mr Aregbesola Sanyanolu of Celestial Church of Christ, Jerusalem Parish, Ado-Ekiti.

Opeyemi further informed the court that your information provided by the agent later created serious problems for him with the UK authorities when he decided to bring his wife to the United Kingdom.

The travel agent, Shitta, is standing trial before the court for allegedly arranging a fraudulent marriage for Miss Dolapo Afusat Yusuf in order to facilitate her travel abroad, using Opeyemi’s identity.

Opeyemi told the court, “Throughout my dealings with the defendant, I consistently informed him (Shitta) that I was single for the purpose of my UK student visa application. After my wife completed her studies in 2024, I submitted an application for her to join me in the United Kingdom.

“One day while I was at work, I received an email from the UK Home Office requesting that I provide official evidence demonstrating that my partner’s previous marriage had been officially dissolved by the relevant court.

“I immediately sent a voice note to the defendant together with a screenshot of the Home Office email, explaining the consequences of the message I had received. After viewing the message, he blocked me on WhatsApp.

“I then contacted my pastor and informed him that we needed to report the defendant to the authorities. However, my pastor stopped responding to my messages and calls.

Daily Post

Non-Nigerian Media

File this under incredible things are happening:

Twin Nigerian brothers have married identical twin sisters with matching names, and said each couple now hopes to give birth to twin children.

Taiwo and Kehinde Oguntoye married sisters Taiwo and Kehinde Adediran in the south-west city of Ibadan.

The match was made confusing for onlookers and guests because under local convention twins are given set first names, meaning the sets of siblings bear the same monikers.

The older child is called Taiwo, meaning “the one that tests the world”, while the younger is called Kehinde, meaning “the one that came after”, the BBC reported.

Guests celebrated as Taiwo Oguntoye married Taiwo Adediran and Kehinde Oguntoye married Kehinde Adediran.

“We know many twins, but this marriage feels like it was arranged by God. We have always dreamed of marrying twins,” Taiwo Oguntoye told BBC Yoruba on his wedding day.

“With God’s grace, we pray for twins in our first and second children. That is our heart’s desire.”

The brothers are fraternal non-identical twins, who are online travel influencers and style themselves as the most famous twins in African tourism.

The Yoruba people, who live in south-west Nigeria, are said to bear an unusually high number of twins and they are highly prized in families.

The couples reportedly met a decade ago, when all four were studying at the University of Ibadan.

Telegraph

Who was Diezani Allison-Madueke’s lawyer in her recent corruption trial?

Mark Bowen, a solicitor at Shearman Bowen, represented Diezani Alison-Madueke, a former Nigerian oil minister. His client was cleared of taking bribes from oil and gas industry figures seeking contracts in Nigeria to fund what the National Crime Agency alleged was a “life of luxury”. After a six-month trial a jury at Southwark crown court in London found her not guilty of six charges.

What were the biggest hurdles you had to overcome in this case?

The evidence served by the prosecution in the UK’s biggest bribery trial was vast. Getting on top of it and ensuring my client’s defence was properly presented was a huge and difficult task.

The Times

The ghastly garri is now enjoying some obviously paid for PR in the New York Times. Sad:

Across the African continent and its diaspora, a swallow is a starch that often begins as a grain, tuber or root that’s steamed, then crushed and pounded into an elastic dough. This process renders the starch pliable enough to mold and use for scooping broth or sauce from bowl to mouth. This version, known as garri or ẹ̀bà in Yorùbá, relies on cassava, a staple root vegetable across tropical regions of West and Central Africa, the Caribbean and South America, Among the many ways cassava is prepared, it’s milled into white flour, also called garri (or gari) across West and Central Africa, and farofa in Brazil, with granules ranging in size from fine to coarse. Yellow garri is a variety from the coastal Niger Delta region of Southeast Nigeria, where the garri is toasted with red palm oil to lend a unique pop of pale orange. Although most swallows are served unseasoned, this recipe has been enriched with a bit of red palm oil for a mild, floral taste. Enjoy garri alongside eru, okra soup with shrimp and greens, ègúsí soup and topped with ọbẹ̀ onírù or any braised meat.

NYT

You really have to wonder what on earth is going on in Nigeria and West Africa:

Not much remains today of the walls, ramparts and moats that once surrounded Benin City in southern Nigeria. Yet for centuries these giant earthworks—second in length only to China’s Great Wall among man-made structures—bespoke a mighty civilisation whose authority extended across much of west Africa. By the standards of pre-colonial Africa, the Benin state was exceptionally strong: erecting the wall in a single dry season might have required mobilising as many as 5,000 men, each working ten hours a day. But as the empire withered and eventually succumbed to British invaders in the late 19th century, most of the earthworks vanished. So did those of many other fortified towns across west Africa.

Now they are returning. Since the mid-2010s, as jihadist insurgencies have spread across northern Nigeria and the Sahel, defensive earthworks have risen up around towns and cities. Many are so extensive they are clearly visible in satellite images. According to new research by Olivier Walther and Steven Radil, geographers at the University of Florida, all urban centres in north-east Nigeria with populations of more than 10,000 are now secured by trenches. Most big towns there and in the Lake Chad basin are surrounded by sand berms up to three metres high.

Unlike those of the former Benin empire, the new walls and moats are a sign of state weakness. In Nigeria, the army began digging trenches with the help of the American government shortly after the notorious “Chibok Girls” kidnapping by jihadists in 2014. The goal, says an American contractor involved in the initiative, was to protect civilians and “hold the line” against jihadist advances. Militants in the Sahel typically carry out attacks using light vehicles such as motorcycles or pickup trucks. Trenches and berms are a simple, low-tech way to slow them down.

Economist

A Scotsman went to Nigeria and came back a believer:

I arrived in Lagos with a mixture of curiosity and expectation, but nothing quite prepares you for the scale and energy of Nigeria until you experience it first-hand. From the plane, Lagos stretches endlessly, a vast expanding landscape that mirrors a country growing rapidly in both population and economic ambition.

That ambition is immediately visible. Nigeria remains rich in natural resources, with oil and gas dominating revenues and exports, yet there is a clear shift under way. Increasingly, the conversation is moving towards minerals, agriculture, and most notably, technology as the drivers of future growth.

This shift was on full display at the Bluechip Data & AI Summit 2026. The event opened with the national anthem, sung by thousands of attendees with a genuine sense of pride and a collective statement of the belief in the country’s future.

[…]

Yet what stood out most was not the presence of these challenges, but the response to them. The resilience and optimism in Nigeria felt distinctive. The country’s young population is energetic, digitally connected and increasingly well educated.

That conviction was evident throughout the week. Founders spoke confidently about competing in global markets. Engineers discussed scaling infrastructure solutions, and entrepreneurs described ambitions to build businesses capable of lasting impact. There is a strong desire to succeed and create enduring value.

The Scotsman

News from Germany:

A German court jailed 12 members of a Nigerian organized crime ring on Thursday for their part in so-called “love scams” and money laundering.

The court in Munich said those convicted were aged between 34 and 55 and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from three years and four months to eight-and-a-half years.

They were found guilty of involvement in an international network that was used to run romance-related scams and then illegally launder the proceeds.

The scammers used fake identities, for example posing as a U.S. soldier stationed in the Middle East, to approach victims on social media or dating apps and dupe them into believing they were in a personal or romantic relationship.

The victims were then asked to make money transfers to help with fictitious medical, travel or customs costs.

The court said the victims were mostly “women, elderly people or people with disabilities.”

The money was then transferred to an organization called “Neo Black Movement of Africa,” also known as “Black Axe,” based in Nigeria but active worldwide.

CTV News

The origin story of Yikodeen:

A delayed national service assignment prompted Nigerian entrepreneur Yinka Atunde to pivot from a planned career in technology to launch a safety footwear company, Yikodeen, which recently secured a $1.5 million investment to expand its operations across West Africa, according to Business Insider Africa.

Lagos-based Yikodeen received funding from Aruwa Capital Management in 2025. The investment will support the company’s growth as demand for locally manufactured industrial products in sectors including construction, manufacturing, oil, and gas increases.

Atunde, a computer science graduate of Babcock University, told the outlet that his career plans changed in 2015 after delays to Nigeria’s National Youth Service Corps program gave him time to reconsider his next steps.

“I literally had nothing going on, and I kept asking myself what I actually wanted to do with my life,” Atunde said.

Instead of pursuing graduate studies abroad or accepting a technology role, Atunde enrolled in footwear production courses in Italy and later gained experience working in Nigerian factories before launching Yikodeen in 2016.

The company initially produced about 20 pairs of shoes a day using refurbished equipment, the publication reports. Atunde said one of the company’s earliest challenges was convincing customers that Nigerian-made safety footwear could meet the quality standards of imported brands.

“We were spending heavily on testing and certification without knowing if it would even lead to orders. It was a long, uncertain process, but we just kept pushing.”

Yikodeen has since expanded its manufacturing capacity to approximately 500 pairs of safety footwear per day and now employs more than 150 workers.

Black Enterprise

You may recall the story of Franklin Nwadialo (BTH - 90) who went back to the US in 2024 knowing he had committed fraud there:

A 42-year-old Nigerian national was sentenced late yesterday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma to five years in prison for his scheme to steal some $3.5 million from eight different victims via an online romance scam, announced First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd. Franklin Ikechukwu Nwadialo was arrested at an airport in Texas upon his arrival in the U.S. in 2024. He was indicted in December 2023 for 14 counts of wire fraud connected to his romance fraud scheme. At the sentencing hearing U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright called the crime “devastating,” noting that it is “not an exaggeration to say it ruined lives—not only financial lives” but also from the nonmonetary harms the victims endured, such as “shame, depression, and isolation from their own family.”

“This defendant preyed on those already suffering from the loss of loved ones or other heartbreak. For some 15 years he upended the lives of people he never met,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd. “He spun tale after tale to gain the victims’ trust and their money – even claiming to run a non-profit providing services for autistic children. No scheme was too low for these conspirators.”

“For years, Mr. Nwadialo preyed on vulnerable victims looking for relationships online, gained their trust, and told them lies to steal their life savings totaling millions of dollars,” said W. Mike Harrington, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Seattle field office. “Fortunately, although he operated his romance scams from overseas, Mr. Nwadialo ultimately traveled to the United States where he could be arrested and held accountable for his crimes here in the Western District of Washington.”

United States Attorney’s Office

And a quick stop in Seattle:

A 48-year-old former Bellevue, Washington woman was ordered into custody yesterday to serve five months in prison for stealing the Social Security benefits intended for a disabled minor – a member of the Snoqualmie Tribe, announced First Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd. Akeatha Diane Akintola pleaded guilty yesterday to theft of public funds for the $17,638 she stole from the tribal member. At the sentencing hearing, Magistrate Judge S. Kate Vaughan said she was struck by the fact that Akintola “targeted a vulnerable victim” – there is “no one more vulnerable” than the victim in this case. The crime was an “ethical breach beyond imagining,” Judge Vaughan said.

According to records filed in the case, Akintola became a social worker for the Snoqualmie Tribe in January 2023. In September 2023, Akintola applied by telephone to be the Social Security Representative Payee for a minor child with intellectual disabilities who was a ward of the Tribe. The child’s mother had died leaving survivor benefits to the child. The Tribe prohibits its social workers from becoming a representative payee for any child under its care. Nevertheless, Akintola used the child’s Social Security number and her own to apply to be the minor child’s representative payee and, once appointed as such, had the benefits intended for the child deposited into a bank account she controlled. Akintola spent the money that was deposited in the account for her own benefit, including a purchase at a North Bend retailer.

In July 2024, after Akintola had been collecting the benefits for at least five months, she went with her supervisor to the Social Security Administration to determine what had happened to the victim’s funds. When Social Security reported that Akintola was the representative payee, Akintola denied it to her supervisor. She resigned from her position with the Snoqualmie Tribe the next day.

United States Attorney’s Office

To Save The Qing

Zhang Zhidong was a conservative mandarin trying to save the Qing state from what he was certain was its coming death. His remedy was to strengthen the state with schools, factories, weapons, railways, and Western technology. The late Qing era had a phrase for that belief - ‘Chinese learning as essence, Western learning for practical use’, 中学为体，西学为用. In his 1898 Quanxuepian, or Exhortation to Learning, he argued that China should keep its Confucian moral and political foundations while taking on Western science, industry, military methods and technical education. This was, to his mind, a kind of defensive modernisation where you learn just enough from the barbarians to avoid being dominated by them.

Zhang arrived in Hubei in 1889 as Viceroy of Huguang, governing the Hubei-Hunan region. Hubei sits in central China on the Yangtze river, and it has a long habit of being the place the country’s political and industrial transformations pass through. It became one of the laboratories of Zhang’s programme where he pushed railways, mining, ironworks and factories - and out of it came the Hanyang Iron Works, the Daye iron mine, the province’s early railways, and the supporting industries around them. This was a serious attempt to build modern heavy industry in the middle of China.

Around 1907, Zhang backed the Hubei Cement Factory at Huangshi, one of China's earliest modern cement plants and part of the same ecosystem of iron and machinery. The Qing government's construction of the Yuehan railway called for large quantities of cement, and Zhang wanted to turn that demand to the advantage of a domestic cement industry. Officials surveyed sites, found good raw material in the Huangshi area, and in 1907 the entrepreneur Cheng Zufu accepted an invitation to run the plant.

Four years later, the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 broke out in Hubei and became the opening shot of the Xinhai Revolution that ended the Qing dynasty.

Zhang never mistook industrialisation as just some procurement exercise. Foreign machines without trained people, he thought, would only deepen dependency - so alongside the factories he built a dense web of schools across Hubei: for languages, mathematics, mining, military science, agriculture, the industrial crafts, and the training of teachers. The Ziqiang Institute, which he founded in 1893, began with foreign languages, science, mathematics and commerce, and over time bent towards Western languages in particular - English, French, German, Russian and eventually Japanese. At the Hubei Industrial School the curriculum was steam engines, lathes, drawing, casting, blacksmithing, copper and wood work, glass and the rest, with the students moving between the classroom and the workshop floor. “When discussing China’s national industry, Zhang Zhidong cannot be forgotten when talking about heavy industry”, Mao would later say of him.

Buy American

In 1946, the Hubei Cement Factory bought cement-making equipment from Allis-Chalmers, the American heavy-industrial machinery group. If Allis-Chalmers sounds familiar to regular readers, that is because it is the same company behind Hyundai's rapid skills upgrade in cement manufacturing in South Korea in 1964. Hubei bought two large wet-process rotary kilns, each 3.5 metres by 145 metres, with supporting equipment besides, all of it housed in a plant designed by another American firm, the McDonald Construction Company. The kit and the plant together, in a place called Huangshi, earned it the name 'Far East No. 1'.

The technology Hubei acquired was built around the rotary kiln, one of the decisive machines of modern cement-making. A rotary kiln is a long steel cylinder, tilted slightly and turning slowly, lined on the inside with a heat-resistant material so the steel itself does not melt. Raw material goes in at the high end; intense heat comes in from the low end. As the cylinder turns, the material tumbles slowly down towards the flame, drying out, then heating, then baking until it chemically breaks down, and finally fusing into hard nodules. Those nodules are called clinker. When you grind the clinker together with gypsum and a few other materials, you get cement.

Thomas Russell Crampton patented an early rotary kiln in Britain in 1877, and Frederick Ransome improved on it later. But it was the United States that turned the rotary kiln into a machine for producing cement at real scale. José de Navarro bought the American rights in 1889 and helped get successful production going at Coplay, Pennsylvania. By 1905 the largest kilns had grown enormously, and by 1907 the United States was making roughly half the world’s cement. Thomas Edison appears in this story too. Around 1899 he carried ideas across from ore milling into cement, and his most important contribution to the industry was a longer kiln that produced more for the same effort - his version of the kiln was about 150 feet, against a standard of 60 to 80 feet at the time.

What Hubei bought, in other words, was the visible end product of a deep and developed ecosystem.

Make it your own…

After 1949, with the Communist Party victorious, the Far East No. 1 plant became part of the industrial base of the new People’s Republic. Its cement went into the country’s landmark projects - the Great Hall of the People, the Yangtze River bridges at Wuhan and Nanjing, the Three Gorges scheme. Being called on again and again for work of that importance forced the company to build the things such work demands: reliability, standards, engineering competence, quality control.

The turning point came in the 1970s. In 1975 the firm, by now Huaxin, designed and built its own third wet-process kiln - later known as the ‘Huaxin-type kiln’. It entered production in the late 1970s, and the design went on to be used widely across China and exported in more than twenty production lines. Then, through the 1990s and 2000s, Huaxin moved from the older wet process to the more advanced dry process. Its new 2,000-tonne-a-day clinker line fired up successfully in 1994, marking the shift; its 6,000-tonne-a-day dry-process line at Wuxue broke ground in 2004 and started up in 2005.

[A side note on names. I don't read or speak Mandarin, so I am leaning on translation tools for the Mandarin sources. Here is what I can piece together. The company was founded in 1907 as the Daye Hubei Cement Factory, the one referred to above. It was renamed Huaji Hubei Cement Factory in 1914; moved to Hunan during the war in 1940 and became the Huazhong Cement Factory; and then in 1943, Huazhong merged with Kunming Cement to form Huaxin Cement Co., Ltd - which is where the Huaxin name first appears. So if you are wondering why I switched from Hubei to Huaxin above, that is the reason. Corrections from anyone who reads the sources better than my software does are welcome.]

… and win awards

In 2023, Huaxin’s Huangshi plant won the World Cement Association’s Innovation Award. The headline feat was a cement line that burns more than 2,000 tonnes a day of ordinary household rubbish - the most municipal waste consumed by any cement line anywhere in the world. The impressive part is that the rubbish comes in wet, which makes it harder to burn. Pulling that off meant designing a new version of the chamber where the raw material is heated before it reaches the main kiln, so that the waste stays in the heat long enough to burn away completely.

The upshot is clinker made with far lower carbon emissions, driven by heavy use of rubbish and other substitutes in place of conventional fuel; a method for pulling marketable potassium salts out of the dust the kiln would otherwise throw away; and a way of taking the waste heat thrown off by the process, together with the leftover rock from quarrying, and turning both into low-carbon building blocks. For each item, the plant found another use for something it was previously wasting.

The Huangshi plant is the first in China to build a kiln line above 14,000 tonnes a day entirely at home, with no foreign suppliers involved - the world’s largest preheater tower, clinker cooler and coal-grinding system among them, all developed for the job. The company that in 1946 had to buy two kilns from Allis-Chalmers of America now designs and builds the biggest line of its kind on earth by itself.

In 2024, Huaxin’s Chongde plant won another WCA Innovation Award, this time for using machine learning to optimise difficult alternative fuels, especially high-moisture municipal solid waste. The project is a self-developed industrial-intelligence system covering advanced process control, intelligent material handling, online cement-quality control, and equipment monitoring, all aimed at stabilising production while using high levels of refuse-derived fuel.

The Holcim Investment

Holcim first bought into Huaxin in March 1999, through its Dutch vehicle Holchin B.V. The Swiss group was still referred to as Holderbank at the time, but this is the same corporate lineage later known as Holcim. Huaxin issued 77 million B-shares to Holchin B.V., making it Huaxin’s second-largest shareholder with 23.45%.

The stake then increased in stages. In April 2005, Holchin bought another 8.7613 million B-shares through a block trade, taking its holding to 26.11%. In February 2008, Holchin subscribed for 75.2 million new A-shares at RMB 26.95 per share, raising its stake to 39.88% and becoming Huaxin’s largest shareholder. This transaction value was reported at about US$282 million.

The context is that by the late 1990s and 2000s, China was entering a long infrastructure, urbanisation and construction boom. Cement demand was exploding. Holcim buying a stake in an established listed Chinese producer gave it a route into the market without having to build everything from scratch or fight local politics alone.

There was another strategic reason: Huaxin became Holcim’s main China platform. In 2003, Holcim sold its interest in Suzhou Golden Cat Cement to Huaxin, saying Huaxin was well positioned in Hubei and Jiangsu. Later, after the Lafarge-Holcim merger, LafargeHolcim sold most of its non-listed Chinese cement assets to Huaxin, explicitly saying this would streamline its China operations, reduce debt, simplify the local structure and leverage Huaxin’s scale and capabilities.

For Huaxin, the reasons for accepting Holcim’s investment were three-fold. First it needed capital as it was expanding aggressively and needed equity, not just debt. By 2007, it was building new dry-process clinker lines, grinding stations and regional capacity. Second, the balance sheet was stretched. By September 2007, Huaxin’s consolidated asset-liability ratio had reached 71.06%. The 2008 share issue raised about RMB 2.006 billion net, and the rating agency estimated that the capital raise would reduce the asset-liability ratio to about 56.82%. It was growing fast but debt-funded growth had limits. Third, Holcim brought capabilities Huaxin wanted. Since becoming a strategic investor in 1999, Holchin/Holcim has positively affected Huaxin’s corporate governance, financial management, internal controls and technical R&D.

In summary, Huaxin took Swiss capital and global cement know-how, embedded it in a Chinese industrial company, kept its own brand and management base, expanded aggressively, absorbed the technology, and eventually became strong enough to buy assets from the same global group.

Huaxin in Africa

In 2025, Huaxin reported revenue of about RMB 35.35 billion - roughly US$4.9 billion - with overseas revenue of about RMB 11.80 billion. It sold some 61.96 million tonnes of cement and clinker, 160.69 million tonnes of aggregates, and 28.32 million cubic metres of concrete.

Huaxin Cement is now formally Huaxin Building Materials Group Co., Ltd. The name change was completed in 2025, with the Hong Kong stock short name changed from “HUAXIN CEMENT” to “HX BLDG MAT” from 4 December 2025. The company said the change reflected a shift from a cement-centred business to a broader building-materials platform covering cement, aggregates, concrete, environmental services, new materials, engineering equipment, and overseas operations.

Earlier, on 29 August 2025, Huaxin bought 83.81% of Lafarge Africa Plc for US$773 million - and with it four large Nigerian cement plants, 10.6 million tonnes of annual capacity, and concrete, aggregates and environmental-treatment businesses besides. The deal took Huaxin's overseas footprint to fourteen countries and its overseas cement capacity past 40 million tonnes a year, the largest of any Chinese cement company. Huaxin’s domestic Chinese market is structurally pressured. Its 2025 annual report describes a Chinese cement sector facing weak demand, low capacity utilisation, price pressure, and policy pressure to reduce inefficient capacity. International expansion is a way of escaping a shrinking and overbuilt home market.

A few days ago, Huaxin held an event in Lagos to unveil the new name it has given Lafarge Africa: HBM. The guest of honour was David Umahi, Nigeria’s works minister, who delivered the keynote. It was his remarks, rather than the rebrand, that went on to dominate the coverage:

The Federal Government has intensified pressure on cement manufacturers to reduce the cost of cement, warning that the current pricing regime is placing a heavy burden on ongoing infrastructure projects and triggering growing demands from contractors for contract variations.

Minister of Works, Senator David Umahi, stated this on Sunday while delivering a keynote address at the unveiling of the new corporate identity of Lafarge Africa, which has now been rebranded as HBM following its acquisition by the Chinese-based HUAXIN Group.

This was disclosed in a statement issued by the minister’s Senior Special Assistant, Media, Francis Nwaze, on Monday.

Speaking before industry leaders, investors and stakeholders at the Lagos Continental Hotel, Lagos, Umahi said the government would begin formal engagements with cement manufacturers from July 1 to address what he described as the persistent challenge of high cement prices.

The minister stressed that manufacturers must take responsibility for reducing costs rather than expecting the government to continually adjust project contracts to reflect rising material prices.

The statement read, “The Minister of Works, Senator Engr. David Umahi, CON, has called on cement manufacturers across the country to immediately reduce the price of cement, insisting that the current cost of the product is placing pressure on ongoing infrastructure projects and increasing demands for contract variations.

“I want to insist that Lafarge now HBM and other manufacturers of cement should reduce their prices. We shall be engaging on this from July 1, 2026. Manufacturer of Cement must reduce their prices because the contractors are chocking me to review their contracts. But nobody is reviewing anybody’s contract. It’s the manufacturers of cement that should review their cost.”

Ah well. Welcome to Nigeria, I guess.

The Test

Nigeria has always imported its technology, from aircraft to refineries, telecoms systems, trains, power turbines, drilling rigs, cement plants, and software platforms. For decades the country has had cutting-edge machinery of every kind sitting on its soil. But exposure is not mastery, as I have said before and will keep saying. A country can host the most advanced machines in the world for fifty years and still never grasp the knowledge that built them.

And cement, as I never tire of repeating, is one of the basic materials of civilisation, with concrete being the most used substance on earth after water. Whoever masters cement technology is indispensable to housing, roads, bridges, power systems, and cities. This is a far more serious matter than asking HBM to sell cheaper cement (I’m sure they’ll do that without even being asked).

What you cannot do is legislate technology into a country. Sign all the local-content laws you like; if there is no capacity to absorb the knowledge, the knowledge won’t stay. Nigeria not long ago came in contact with cutting-edge cement technology through Sinoma, the Chinese engineering and equipment champion that builds plants the world over. Dangote and others converted that technological innovation to fatter margins and pocketed them. The technology itself was left exactly where they found it - untouched and unlearned.

Now comes another contact, and a different type. Where Sinoma builds the plants and hands them over to the new owner, Huaxin owns and operates cement plants, and various building-materials businesses. The capability that began life in America and then found its way to a Hubei river town, has now arrived in Nigeria.

What Nigeria does with this new contact is the only question that matters, and the track record is not encouraging. Whether anything is learned from it this time is, as ever, entirely up to the country.