Below The Headlines - 129
Fake kidnappings continue and what is the difference between the small and large intestine?
Our conversation with Professor Don Robotham on The Caribbean, Africa and what both places can learn from each other, was published this week. It’s a long and wide ranging conversation but I’m sure it will enrich you.
Enjoy the week’s selection below.
Nigerian Media
Report into how nature reserves and tourism spots have turned into criminal hideouts:
The forest thrived as a game reserve during the colonial period and was used for safaris in the 1970s, with a large population of leopards, lions, elephants and hyenas for tourism. In 1991, the Borno State government incorporated the reserve into the national park of the Chad Basin. But as years rolled by, poor management upended the operations of the reserve until Boko Haram insurgents who fled from Maiduguri town hijacked it in 2013.
Since then, terrorists have carried out a series of attacks from the forest and resisted military raids targeted at flushing them out of the zone. They frequently ambushed Nigerian military convoys and patrols operating around Sambisa, using roadside bombs, snipers, and hit‑and‑run attacks. In April 2021, the terrorists reportedly shut down a military jet, though the Nigerian Air Force insisted the Alpha Jet crashed. Its wreckage was eventually recovered from the forest one year later.
At the peak of a supremacy battle between Boko Haram and ISWAP members in May 2021, a fight broke out as the latter sought to take control of the forest in a fierce encounter.
In an article titled ‘Once Upon a Game Reserve: Sambisa and the Tragedy of a Forested Landscape,’ a political scientist at the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Prof Azeez Olaniyan, traced the descent of the reserve to a terrorists’ fortress to corruption and poor leadership of the military era.
“As was the case with several sectors of Nigerian life, corruption reared its head in park management to the extent that funds budgeted for the game reserve were mismanaged. The number of forest guards and range managers was not only inadequate, but they were also poorly trained and funded. The neglect resulted in an invasion of the reserve by hunters and poachers without many restraints. This was to have effects on the wildlife in the space.
Another fake kidnapping:
The Anambra State Police Command has arrested two suspects after uncovering a case of conspiracy and staged kidnapping done in collaboration between the victim’s boyfriend, after extorting the victim’s parents of ₦240,000.
In a press statement released on Saturday, the spokesman for the command, SP Tochukwu Ikenga, said the arrest was made after a significant breakthrough in several reported cases under investigation in the command within the last two weeks.
Ikenga said the operatives of the Rapid Response Squad, Awkuzu, carried out the arrest on March 14 and also recovered several items, including cash, from the suspects.
The statement read, “The Anambra State Police Command has recorded significant breakthroughs in several reported cases under investigation within the last two weeks.
“Among the feats recorded, the notable ones include the following: The operatives of the Rapid Response Squad Awkuzu on March 14, 2026, uncovered a case of conspiracy and staged kidnapping with the arrest of two suspects, namely: Chinedu Chineye Nwobi ‘M’, aged 25 years and Okwudili Nweke ‘M’, aged 25 years, respectively.
“The victim, Miss Mmesoma Ifediora, aged 18 years, was rescued unharmed in a forest popularly known as ‘Malaysia Forest’ located at Iruayika, Awkuzu.
“Upon interrogation, the rescued victim confessed that the kidnapping was staged in collaboration with her boyfriend, Obiora Okoye, with the intent to extort the sum of ₦3 million from her parents.
Story that’s gone under the radar:
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) has secured the conviction of 10 Filipino sailors and their merchant vessel, MV Nord Bosporus, over the importation of 20 kilograms of cocaine into Nigeria through the Apapa seaport in Lagos.
The agency’s spokesman, Femi Babafemi, disclosed on Wednesday that the Federal High Court in Lagos also imposed fines and restitution totaling $6 million, alongside an additional N1.1 million penalty on the convicts.
The vessel and its crew were arrested on November 16, 2025, following the interception of the cocaine consignment concealed onboard the ship, which originated from Santos, Brazil.
Subsequently, the NDLEA filed a four-count charge against them in suit number FHC/L/1232C/25 before the Federal High Court 2, Lagos, led by the agency’s Director of Prosecution and Legal Services, Theresa Asuquo.
The defendants, however, pleaded guilty and entered into a plea bargain agreement.
Delivering judgment on Wednesday, Justice Ayokunle Faji found the vessel guilty under Section 25 of the NDLEA Act and ordered it to pay a N100,000 penalty and $5.35 million in restitution to the Federal Government.
Three principal officers of the vessel—the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th defendants—were each fined N100,000 and ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution, while the remaining seven crew members were fined N100,000 each and $50,000 in restitution apiece.
In total, the vessel and its crew are to pay $6 million and N1.1 million as fines and restitution.
Why would anyone do this to a cocoa research institute:
The Member representing Oluyole Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives, Tolu Akande-Sadipe, has expressed deep concern over a reported security breach at the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria headquarters in Oluyole, Ibadan.
According to verified reports, the incident occurred on Wednesday, March 18, 2026, when unidentified armed individuals attacked the nursery section of the facility, resulting in injuries and the abduction of several persons.
Hon. Akande-Sadipe strongly condemned the act, describing it as a senseless attack on innocent individuals.
She disclosed that security agencies, including the Nigeria Police Force and other relevant authorities, have been swiftly mobilised to the area to restore order, secure the facility, and ensure the safe rescue of those abducted.
What a horror story:
Tragedy struck Uli community in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State on Sunday night as a man identified simply as Gozie allegedly killed his lover’s only son for opposing their relationship.
The victim, said to be in his 20s, was reportedly attacked in his room following repeated disagreements with his mother’s lover over his frequent visits to their home.
Residents told PUNCH Metro on Thursday that tensions between the deceased and the suspect had persisted for some time, often resulting in heated altercations.
According to an eyewitness, who identified himself simply as Somto, neighbours became suspicious after not seeing the occupants of the compound for days.
“The incident happened on Sunday night at a compound near the Uli campus of Anambra State University. Neighbours said they heard unusual noises that night, but it was when no one was seen for about two days that they decided to check,” he said.
He explained that residents searched the rooms in the compound and discovered the victim’s lifeless body in a pool of blood.
“When they entered the young man’s room, they found his corpse with deep machete cuts on the head and other parts of the body. This drew a crowd, and youths in the area immediately launched a search for the suspect and the boy’s mother, but they had fled,” Somto added.
The incident was subsequently reported to the police, while the remains of the deceased were deposited in a morgue.
Non-Nigerian Media
Yours truly was in the FT this week with an opinion piece on the Dangote Refinery and what it means for Nigerians:
Nigeria has had a troubled relationship with crude oil since the first commercial well flowed at Oloibiri in 1956. Time and again, the promise of easy money has resolved into a pattern of windfalls that enrich the state without strengthening it.
The “cement armada” — the mid-1970s oil-boom-generated fiasco when Nigeria ordered far more cement for public works than it could handle, leaving hundreds of ships stranded offshore — is only one, vivid example. From the mismanaged windfall of higher prices pushed up by the 1990-1991 Gulf war to perennial controversies over what the national oil company collects, spends and remits to the treasury, straightforward national progress has not transpired.
Yet the most corrosive and lasting aspect gets less attention: the humiliating inability to add value to the barrel before it leaves Nigeria. The embodiment of this is the state-owned refineries that stand idle for long stretches, despite repeated turnaround plans.
Everyone embellishes their CV but this is taking it to a completely different level:
A dietician who bluffed her way into a senior NHS job by exaggerating her experience has been struck off after colleagues found she did not know ‘basic anatomy’ and could have put patients at risk.
Ifenyinwa Chizube Ndulue-Nonso was hired as a dietician at Manchester Royal Infirmary in 2024.
Having moved from Nigeria, she claimed to have experience working with a range of different health problems and nutrition-related diseases as well as working with people with eating disorders and cancer.
However within days of beginning her role, colleagues quickly discovered worrying gaps in her knowledge and inconsistencies with her application.
They found she could barely answer questions about dietetics, struggled to calculate BMI and had only a ‘basic understanding of human anatomy’- even mixing up the small and large intestine.
Mrs Ndulue-Nonso also could not identify a feeding tube, explain what coeliac disease was and believed radiology was used to treat heart failure.
Concerned by her lack of knowledge, the Trust launched an investigation and suspended her within weeks, fearing she was unsafe to practice.
At a disciplinary hearing, the Trust found her guilty of gross misconduct. She was sacked and her appeal failed.
Christianah Ebenezer took photos during this week’s state visit:
A new portrait of the Prince and Princess of Wales taken by a British-Nigerian photographer on Wednesday at a state banquet was released on Thursday night by Kensington Palace.
The photograph was taken by the photographer Christianah Ebenezer, 34, in Windsor, when members of the royal family welcomed Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the president of Nigeria, and his wife Oluremi Tinubu on a state visit to Britain.
The Princess of Wales showed her skill for diplomatic dressing, wearing a dress by Andrew Gn in the evening in the green of the Nigerian flag and a coat dress during the day by Tolu Coker, a British-Nigerian designer.
Ebenezer also took the Duchess of Edinburgh’s 60th birthday portraits last year, and photographs of the actresses Michaela Cole and Letitia Wright that have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria, before moving to London as a child.
The story of Kauna Luka who sent 8 years in Boko Haram captivity:
One night four years ago a group of young soldiers were manning a checkpoint along a remote road in northern Nigeria when a figure began to emerge from the forest. Nervously they raised their weapons, fearing an attack from the terrorists who plague the region.
But as the figure came nearer they saw that it was a woman with a toddler strapped to her back. What was she doing in the forest all alone, they shouted to her. “I’ve been lost for eight years,” she called back. “I’m one of the Chibok girls.”
Abducted from their school in April 2014 by the Islamist militia group Boko Haram, the 276 teenage girls quickly became an international cause célèbre. Known as the “Chibok girls”, after the town in Borno state from where they were snatched, their plight was taken up by prominent figures including Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie and Pope Francis.
Kauna Luka was one of them. At 16 years old she had been on the verge of going to university and beginning her adult life when the course of her future was suddenly diverted in the most savage way imaginable. For almost a decade she lived as the captive of men whose guiding principle was their rejection of secular education and female emancipation. She subsisted on leaves and rainwater. She was married and gave birth to one of her captor’s children. And then, eventually, she escaped.
Now aged 27, Luka has just begun university. Having spent the four years since her escape going through rehabilitation and relearning much of what she had forgotten from her schooldays, she has this year embarked on the public administration course at Maiduguri University that she had been due to take up before she was kidnapped. She hopes to become a journalist one day.
Who is Zuby Ejiofor?
The minute news broke that Michigan’s star big man, Hunter Dickinson, was transferring to Kansas, Andy Philachack decided he had seen and heard enough. He rented a U-Haul truck that day and drove 500 miles from Dallas to Lawrence, Kan., for the sole purpose of extracting his son from Bill Self’s program.
Zuby Ejiofor did not want to leave. In fact, nearly everyone in Ejiofor’s life outside of the father figure and mentor he calls “Pops” and “Dad” wanted the barely used freshman to stay.
“I had not one person on my side,” Philachack said. “I had to do this myself.”
So, while Ejiofor was taking an exam on this May day in 2023, the AAU coach, chiropractor and professional poker player who first saw him play in middle school entered his apartment, packed up his possessions, and loaded them into the truck. Zuby was stunned when he returned home to find a bare mattress and nothing else.
“We’re leaving,” Philachack told him.
“What do you mean we’re leaving?” Ejiofor responded.
“You can’t make this decision,” Philachack said. “I’m making it for you.”
The 5-4 coach born in Laos and the 6-9 forward raised in Texas and Nigeria met with Self for an hour. According to Philachack, the Kansas coach offered Ejiofor a $200,000 NIL deal for his sophomore season. Philachack explained that money couldn’t solve their problem. He had repeatedly watched Zuby cry on the floor of his room after sitting out entire games.
Fred Akinsanya and Daniel Raji are going to jail:
A predator and his accomplice have been jailed for a total of 21 years after raping a 15-year-old schoolgirl who was plied with alcohol and drugs.
Nigerian national Fred Akinsanya, 34, and 29-year-old Daniel Raji targeted their victim after buying her drinks at Irish pub Paddy’s Yard in Brixton, south London, on February 8 last year.
They invited the girl and some of her friends back to Raji’s flat to smoke cannabis and dance.
The victim’s friends tried to persuade her to leave with them as they felt uncomfortable but she started blacking out and collapsed, Inner London Crown Court heard.
The defendants then put the girl through a prolonged ordeal, with Raji filming her.
Prosecutor Diana Wilson read to the court the victim’s impact statement, in which she told of now finding it ‘hard to trust people’.
The schoolgirl described her attackers as ‘disgusting’, while also rejecting the offer to watch the footage of what happened because it was ‘too stressful’.
Akinsanya, from South Croydon, denied but was convicted by a jury of rape and has now been jailed for 10 years.
Remi Tinubu gets a glowing profile in Tatler with plenty of photos too:
Born in 1960, she has served as Nigeria’s First Lady ever since her husband, Bola Tinubu, was elected President in 2023. No stranger to politics, Oluremi served as the senator representing Lagos Central Senatorial District at the Nigerian National Assembly between 2011 and 2023, as a member of the All Progressives Congress party.
Prior to that, she had been the First Lady of Lagos State between 1999 and 2007, during the period that her husband was the Governor of the Nigerian capital. During her tenure in the role, she set up the New Era Foundation, which aims to support the ‘all round development of young ones and promote public awareness on environmental health and community service.’
[…]
This latest trip to Britain will be another display of the First Lady’s diplomatic prowess, as well as her impeccable style. She will also deliver a sermon at the Lambeth Palace Chapel and join a reception with representatives from the Church of England.
With decades of experience in the political arena, hers is a star that has long been on the rise. Now, it’s time for Brits to get to know the First Lady of Nigeria.
Why are Nigerian archives being buried in the Arctic?
A decommissioned coalmine near the north pole is the last place you’d expect to find Indigenous stories from rural Nigeria, but deep below the Arctic permafrost of Svalbard a storage unit contains a cache of cultural and literary records from the West African country.
The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a data storage unit where organisations and individuals can deposit records kept on specialist digitised film called Piql that lasts up to 2,000 years. On 27 February, Nigeria became the first African country to place archives at the facility 300 metres beneath a mountain where the cold, dark, dry conditions are perfect for preservation.
Inspired by the nearby Svalbard global seed vault, a collection of more than a million seed samples stored as an insurance policy against catastrophe, AWA was established to hold the “world’s memory” for future generations. Started in 2017 by the Norwegian technology company that developed Piql, it contains an eclectic range of historical and creative records originating in 37 countries, from sources including the Vatican Library and the European Space Agency, and works as diverse as Chopin’s manuscripts and the work of Belgian photographer Christian Clauwers, who has documented the Pacific’s disappearing Marshall islands.
The Nigerian records are a mix of social and cultural history, and archives from its creative industries, drawn from 12 Nigerian organisations, including private art foundations, museums and libraries.
The collection was initiated by historian Nze Ed Emeka Keazor when he was appointed chair of Piql’s first Africa office in Lagos in 2022, and started to approach cultural organisations in Nigeria to encourage them to preserve their records.
“It took me a year and a half of going to Abeokuta in Ogun state to speak to the head of archives at the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library,” says Keazor who travelled to Svalbard last month with colleague Esona Onuoha to hand over the archives.
New mocktail (if you’re a mocktail connoisseur like me) just dropped:
A mocktail inspired by a classic Nigerian beverage has been specially created for the King’s banquet as the monarch hosted the first state visit by a Muslim leader during Ramadan in nearly a century.
Guests at the opulent dinner held in honour of Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who is Muslim, and his wife, first lady Oluremi Tinubu, will be offered a non-alcoholic after dinner tipple called Crimson Bloom.
England rugby captain Maro Itoje and his wife Mimi, Olympic 400m gold medallist Christine Ohuruogu, former Lioness and football pundit Eni Aluko, space scientist Dame Maggie Aderin, broadcaster Ade Adepitan, singer Tiwa Savage and the UK’s first black female Michelin-starred chef Adejoke Bakare were among the 160 guests who gathered with the King, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The special mocktail is one of a number of adaptations made at the banquet in St George’s Hall in Windsor Castle because it falls during the holy month of Ramadan.
For the first time in living memory, canapes will be offered ahead of the dinner to offer sustenance to Muslim guests who were unable to partake in iftar – the breaking of their fast – earlier at sunset.
Quite the escalation in punishment here. This guy is having his citizenship revoked for fraud:
Today, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it has filed and served a civil denaturalization complaint in the U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Maryland, against Emmanuel Oluwatosin Kazeem, a native of Nigeria who organized a vast conspiracy to steal identities and file fraudulent tax returns. In 2017, he was convicted of 19 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and sentenced to 15 years in prison. But in 2024, then-President Biden commuted his sentence after only six years.
“The Trump Administration will not permit wrongdoers to retain the U.S. citizenship that they were never entitled to in the first place,” said Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division. “U.S. Citizenship is a privilege, and we will continue to ask courts to revoke a status that was obtained through fraud and deceit.”
The newly filed denaturalization complaint alleges that Kazeem’s fraud scheme, which he committed in the years before and after his naturalization, along with his concealment of his crimes, precluded him from obtaining his naturalization lawfully. The complaint also alleges that Kazeem had, prior to his fraud scheme, engaged in a sham marriage to obtain permanent resident status and then married a second woman, further disqualifying him from naturalization.
According to court documents and evidence presented at Kazeem’s criminal trial, in May 2013, a victim in Medford, Oregon, notified the IRS that false federal and Oregon state tax returns were filed electronically using her and her husband’s personal identifying information (PII) including social security numbers and dates of birth.
An IRS investigation led to search warrants of residences in Illinois, Maryland, and Georgia and to numerous email and instant messenger accounts used by Kazeem and other co-conspirators. At a Chicago residence, agents seized approximately 150 prepaid debit cards and $50,000 in money orders. In Maryland and Georgia, agents seized more than 50 electronic devices, 40 money orders in amounts exceeding $29,000, $14,000 in cash and numerous prepaid debit cards containing over $12,000 in fraudulent tax refunds. The search warrants helped agents identify Kazeem as the leader and mastermind of the scheme.
Read the FT article. I must admit surprise at its almost adulatory tone for Aliko’s refinery enterprise. It was definitely a sharp contrast with all your previous commentary. Was this a reconsideration in the light of the additional benefits made manifest by Gulf War III? Or perhaps going mainstream requires putting on the kids gloves?
Does it matter? Not so much except that there is a surfeit of Dangote hagiography particularly at this moment across all the leading Western business and finance media, and frankly, it was always a pleasure to hear from people who take a different view. It’s beginning to look like the holdout skeptics have been worn over at last and the Alhaji has won again.