Below The Headlines - 31
Man vs elephant in Borno and Somtochukwu has been sentenced to prison because he couldn't take no for an answer
Welcome to the final BTH newsletter for 2023. We hope it’s been worth your while even as depressing as some of the stories often are. The newsletter will return in the second week of January.
Enjoy your Christmas and New Year celebrations and please stay out of trouble. Emphasis should be on December and not Detty.
Inside Nigeria
Interview with a Methodist Church priest who also does incantations and traditional medicines. He says there is no contradiction between them. Includes this gem of an exchange:
Are you saying that the advanced vocabularies used in teaching Anatomy and Physiology are forms of chants and incantations from Westerners?
Absolutely! They are their own esoteric words, very spiritual, so to speak. That’s their ritual language. They follow procedures too which are highly ritualistic in their way, but if a Yoruba man does his own, he is regarded as a devil. We must escape this colonial mentality where our brains were colonised. We must remove the wool that the Western knowledge system put in our brains that made our brains truly African man’s brains. I tell you that if we do that, we are on our way to wonderful advancement. We will rule the world. The only way for Africa to advance is to reconstruct itself; let us re-invent Africa. Let us rethink Africa. If we do otherwise, we will continue to be slaves and continue to be backward.
What does one say to this?:
A housewife, identified as Hafsat Surajo has narrated how she killed their domestic staff, Nafiu Hafiz who prevented her from attempting to commit suicide.
Hafsat who made the confession when she was paraded before newsmen at the Kano Police headquarters, said the ugly incident leading to Nafiu’s death occurred when a quarrel ensued between them as he prevented her from achieving her mission.
According to her, “I killed him because he prevented me from killing myself. “While he attempted to snatch the knife from my hand, a quarrel ensued between us and in the process I had a cut in my hand and blood was gushing out. He asked me to go in and change. It was when I went in to change and was coming out, I saw him lying down saying he was not feeling fine and was on medication. I saw the knife by his side and I seized the opportunity to pick up the knife and stabbed him severally.” Hafsat narrated.
Why are onions expensive in Nigeria? It is the same old story:
According to Alhaji Danladi Umar, an onion farmer in Kano State, one of the reasons behind the scarcity of the commodity is low production during the wet season, coupled with poor storage methodologies. He explained that during the wet season, only Kano and Kaduna states grew the commodity, and as such, the supply couldn’t meet demand.
“Only Kano and Jigawa states produce onions during wet season, and even at that, the issue of poor storage methods didn’t help matters. That is why, at a moment like this you will find out that the commodity is scarce and at a very high cost,” he said.
Boko Haram are still at their destructive worst:
The state capital and communities of Borno and Yobe have been thrown into darkness after suspected Boko Haram insurgents destroyed an electricity tower supplying power to the city.
A husband has been arrested on accusations of killing his wife for cooking only noodles in the Olota area of the Alimosho Local Government area of Lagos.
The incident reportedly occurred last Thursday, December 14, 2023 when the man returned home from work to find that his wife had only prepared noodles for his meal.
Allegedly angered by this, he is said to have struck her on the head with a heavy object and subjected her to severe beating before leaving the house.
Later, a concerned neighbour informed the husband that his wife was experiencing convulsions. Subsequently, the husband, along with neighbours, attempted to rush the ailing wife to the hospital, but unfortunately, she passed away during the transit.
A sad end to a sorry story. I wish I could say lessons will be learnt:
The Nigeria police have dismissed two special constabularies, Jimoh Lukmon and Kareem Fatai, who were caught in a viral video trying to extort money from a Dutch tourist who was on a power bike en route to Abuja.
From skit to court:
A man, simply identified as MC Sweet, who made a fake online post claiming that Aba Ngwa indigenes tried to stop Julius Berger from constructing the Port-Harcourt Road in Aba, has been arraigned at a Magistrate Court in Aba, Abia State.
In the fake post, the online skit maker also claimed that Governor Alex Otti invited some elders and youths of Aba Ngwa to Umuahia for a peace meeting where he (Governor Otti) allegedly ordered that the indigenes be locked up.
The false and controversial post which created a sensation across the State last week, was swiftly denied by the Abia State government through Mr Dodoh Okafor, the Special Assistant on Special Communication to the Governor.
The clash between man and nature in countries like Nigeria is often a life and death matter with no room for error or sentimentality. People need help and support to be able to live side by side with nature otherwise they will do damage in a way that leaves no one better off:
Alhaji Babagana, 29, and other residents of Rann, Borno in North East Nigeria, say they have been disturbed by an influx of elephants in the last four years. According to him, elephants, which are the largest land animals alive, have been encroaching on their farms in large numbers and frustrating their efforts.
On Monday, Dec. 18, a video shared on X (formerly Twitter) showed security agents firing multiple shots at an elephant until it collapsed, breathless. The incident drew wide condemnation.
But residents of the community in the Kala Balge area of Borno said the animals are a threat to their livelihoods as they eat their farm produce. Babagana said the problem has persisted even though they have complained several times to the Borno State Government.
HumAngle gathered that the killing of the lone elephant happened on Dec. 17. Personnel of the Nigerian Army and Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) saw the elephant and decided to kill it. The video showed a man in military fatigue and another in regular clothing shooting at the elephant. After repeated gunshots at close range, they confirmed that the animal had died.
Outside Nigeria
In a long article about internet romance scams in general, Nigeria features a fair bit:
Diji’s pre-trial statement had claimed that he was gay, and so needed asylum from Nigeria where homosexuality is effectively illegal; he said friends had taken over his bank accounts. This was undermined by Hole’s opening statement, which noted phone messages between Diji and an adviser in Nigeria, a member of the larger network, concocting this exact cover story two years earlier. The adviser had suggested Diji create a profile under his own name on gay dating sites as evidence, and proposed including a picture of his penis. (Messages found on his devices revealed that Diji had sent a sample which didn’t pass muster: “People are more likely to click and chat you up if they see a full hard and erected dick than a flaccid dick,” the adviser chided.)
And staying with the topic of romance scams:
U.S. District Judge Rodney W. Sippel on Tuesday sentenced a man who helped scam nearly $1.2 million out of a St. Louis area woman to three years in prison and ordered him to repay the money.
Rotimi Oladimeji, 38, of Texas, assisted other scammers in Nigeria and the United States prey on the victim, who thought she was in an online romance with a veterinarian and animal behaviorist living in St. Louis.
After a scammer spotted the victim on an online dating site, Oladimeji and his co-conspirators began an online relationship with her. They made plans to meet with her but never followed through, once leaving her waiting at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In October of 2019, Oladimeji claimed the veterinarian was going to Dubai, then said he wouldn’t be allowed to leave unless she sent money. They continued to make request after request of the victim for four and five-figure sums, court records show.
Oladimeji had the victim send cash and cashier’s checks via FedEx to the Texas home of his co-defendant, Olumide Akrinmade, now 38, of Richardson, Texas. Oladimeji had recruited Akrinmade and Adewale Adesanya, another Texas resident, to receive the funds.
In all, the victim lost nearly $1.17 million. Oladimeji received 20% of the funds he generated. As money mules who transmitted the fraudulent proceeds to people like Oladimeji, Akinrinmade and Adesanya received 20% of the funds they forwarded. The remaining amount went to scammers in Nigeria.
United States Attorney’s Office
A feature on the photographer, Andrew Dosunmu, containing a lot of his photos:
Newly arrived from Lagos, in the early nineties, Andrew Dosunmu, solitary and broke, sometimes slept in the Paris Metro. He had little in his possession beyond his clothes. And it was his manner of dress that first drew the curiosity, and then the care, of a stranger—the nascent fashion designer Lamine Badian Kouyaté. Lamine took Dosunmu into his home, and the two began collaborating on images: Lamine designing the clothes, and Dosunmu capturing them in motion and in life on Super-8 film.
“I didn’t know this brother from nowhere,” Dosunmu recalls to the cinematographer Arthur Jafa, in the introductory conversation to “Andrew Dosunmu: Monograph,” a collagist collection of Dosunmu’s portraiture used across film, music, video, and photography. But knowledge arises from the gravity of a slung belt, the height of a gele wound about the head. Dosunmu is a great chronicler of presentation as a portal to personality.
The sorry saga of Tingo has finally come to an end. No idea what the damage to Nigeria from this will be but we can only hope the right lessons are learned from the episode:
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Nigerian businessman who bid for an English Premier League football club with “massive fraud”, alleging that he and his three companies inflated their financial metrics to defraud investors. The SEC alleged on Monday that Dozy Mmobuosi, head of Tingo Group, Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo International Holdings, had led a scheme that fabricated their financial statements and those of their Nigerian affiliates, Tingo Mobile Limited and Tingo Foods. “The scope of the fraud is staggering,” the SEC wrote in the complaint. “Since 2019, defendants have booked billions of dollars’ worth of fictitious transactions through two Nigerian subsidiary companies Mmobuosi founded and controls, reporting hundreds of millions of dollars of non-existent revenues and assets.”
Latest Irish government data on asylum seekers into the country:
International Protection Office
Chap who came to the UK for a masters in 2021, fell for a girl and when she turned down his advances, he threatened to unleash terror on the university campus. The matter has now been concluded in court:
A student who claimed he would carry out a mass killing on a Scottish university campus has been sentenced to 40 months in prison and will be deported.
Somtochukwu Okwuoha, a Nigerian masters student, threatened to wreak mass murder and carnage at Dundee University.
Okwuoha claimed he had enlisted Isis to help bomb the university and told staff that he planned to target the city in a chemical warfare attack.
Sheriff William Wood told him: “Your presence in the United Kingdom is not conducive to the public good, and I make a recommendation for your deportation in due course.
Lovely story of a Nigerian man marrying a Turkish woman in the UK:
They began going out in Year 10. Sevim liked Moses’s sense of humour, and they shared an interest in R&B music. She was not allowed a boyfriend and they did not have mobile phones, so they had to be sneaky and would go to the cinema. “We have friendship at the heart of our relationship,” he says.
“I think we loved each other,” says Sevim. After seven months, she panicked that she was too young to be in love, and ended it. “I don’t regret that,” she says. “It got us to where we needed to get to now. I’m glad we had time apart.” Moses did not take it well.
They went to different sixth-form colleges, but stayed in touch, falling in and out of friendship. Sevim went on to study philosophy and history at the University of Southampton. Moses studied business and economics at Kingston University London. During that time, they were both in different relationships.
In 2013, when they were both single, they met for dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the O2 Arena in London. Sevim thought she was catching up with a friend and realised Moses might be thinking otherwise when he tried to pay the bill. They decided to take their time and gradually rekindled their relationship. “We took it easy,” she says. “We never had an anniversary of when we got to together.“
A boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of Libya, killing 61 people:
Many of the victims were from Nigeria, Gambia and other African countries, the IOM office said, adding that 25 people were rescued and transferred to a Libyan detention centre.
I grew up in Kaduna watching Dambe on TV every Sunday afternoon. Nice read on how the sport is reinventing itself:
In the past, some fighters used to embed glass shards in their 'spear' arm to maximise damage, but this practice is now outlawed.
"I'm not going to lie, I've seen some bad cuts, bruises and bloody noses in dambe," Kalu says.
In a push to make dambe safer and fairer, African Warriors has introduced a fresh set of rules, including three three-minute rounds (where before there were none) and a points system to score the style of fighting.
"We also properly articulated what it means to knock down your opponent," Kalu adds. "And made sure it's easier for a person to watch, and ultimately to keep the fighters safe."
Moreover, African Warriors says health personnel are always available to fighters at match sites.
Claims that Detty December is muted this year due to the economic situation. But this is not what I’m seeing on my Instagram feed:
A normal December for Nigerian student Ibukun Ometesho involves a seemingly endless roll of music concerts and dinners out with friends. This year, however, she is hosting friends at home because she can’t afford to party.
Ometesho wanted to attend the Palmwine music festival in Lagos, but a student ticket costs 21,100 naira (£20) – double what she paid last year, and three times more than in 2021. “I saw the prices and I was shocked. It just does not make sense,” she says.
She checked the cost of other events being held this month, and the prices were the same – or more. She gave up.
Each December, Lagos, Nigeria’s cultural powerhouse and home of the global music phenomenon Afrobeats, becomes a month-long party city. Local revellers are joined by members of the Nigerian diaspora for what has been called “Detty December” – a corruption of the word “dirty” – which can generate billions of naira for the local economy.
A piece on Calvin Bassey, the Nigeria and Fulham football star:
He now goes by the surname Bassey but before he became a senior player, team sheets would often refer to him by his father’s surname — Ughelumba.
His parents are Nigerian and moved to Italy — where Bassey was born, on the final day of the previous century — but his mum came to London with her four sons alone after his dad left home.
“He’s just not in my life — we lived with him but that was when I was really young,” Bassey says. “Since I was six, it has been Mum and us boys. I knew that if I got the chance to put my name on the back of a shirt I wanted it to be my mum’s name — my way of saying thank you.
Cocoa from illegal farms is being grown and exported from Nigeria and ends up in foreign chocolates. But what is an illegal cocoa I hear you ask? :
Men in dusty workwear trudge through a thicket, making their way up a hill where sprawling plantations lay tucked in a Nigerian rainforest whose trees have been hacked away to make room for cocoa bound for places like Europe and the U.S.
Kehinde Kumayon and his assistant clear low bushes that compete for sunlight with their cocoa trees, which have replaced the lush and dense natural foliage. The farmers swing their machetes, careful to avoid the ripening yellow pods containing beans that will help create chocolate, the treat shoppers are snapping up for Christmas.
Over the course of two visits and several days, The Associated Press repeatedly documented farmers harvesting cocoa beans where that work is banned in conservation areas of Omo Forest Reserve, a protected tropical rainforest 135 kilometers (84 miles) northeast of the coastal city of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria.
An article that looks into the persistent rumour that a number of the Chinese nationals working in Nigeria are prisoners from China:
Chinese businessmen found talk of prisoners sent to Africa to be unimaginable, according to Sautman. "Of course they have all kinds of problems in terms of bringing their personnel to Africa. And those problems are bad enough with bringing people who are free laborers. To bring somebody who is a convict and have to manage and secure that person — to them is just comical."
One cause of the rumor, Sautman suggested, is the kind of gated and secured compounds found across Africa where Chinese workers live. "Some Africans who I speak to about it have seen these kind of compounds and they think 'this looks like a prison to us'. They also know that in some cases companies will bring their workers out as a group to go shopping, they have entertainment… and then they come back."
I’m ashamed to say I have never heard of, let alone drank, plantain wine:
Agadagidi is traditionally produced from overripe plantain by fermenting the juice, known as must, for three days and filtering it thereafter. The juice has a cloudy appearance, is effervescent and has a sweet-sour taste.
Given that plantain is readily available in the country, and imported wines are expensive, we conducted research to establish if it was possible to make better quality agadagidi.
As I’ve been telling anyone who cares to listen, Nigerian food is currently have its breakout year across the world. Two Nigerian food themed restaurants in London make the Evening Standard’s list of restaurant of the year. I have been to both and I recommend them highly:
That last one is another example of contemporary West African cuisine’s steady march towards the centre of things. Terrible news for Nigerian humility, obviously (I speak from experience). But excellent news for the palates and bellies of Londoners, as exemplified by the all-new Chishuru (W1W, chishuru.com): a gorgeously put together, throbbingly warm and hospitable West End pleasure palace that gives Adejoké Bakare’s scintillating, one-of-a-kind cooking the home and the platform it deserves.