Below The Headlines - 32
Below The Headlines - 32
NSCDC has advice on how to correctly cheat on your wife and are you Team Chubby Girl or Team Viper Attack?
Happy new year! I can’t believe you are still here reading about the shenanigans Nigerians get up to in Nigeria and across the world. But we will continue to do our part to serve you.
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Inside Nigeria
Another banger from the Gombe State NSCDC:
The Gombe State Commandant of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), Mohammed Bello Mu’azu, has warned men to confirm the HIV status of their girl friends, commonly referred to as ‘side chicks’.
The State Commandant made call while disclosing the arrest of an 85-year-old man, who was said to have lured an uncountable number of young girls into sex and after medical examination, he and his four wives were confirmed to be HIV positive.
Water travel continues to be popular in Nigeria because it is the cheapest form of travel. Yet the sheer number of lives it claims across Nigeria every year is incredible. At the bottom of the linked piece, you can see several other stories of boat accidents claiming lives across the country:
Nigeria’s National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) reports that eight people were killed after a passenger boat capsized in the south-eastern state of Anambra on Sunday, January 7.
The unnamed wooden-hulled vessel was carrying over 50 passengers and was transiting the Niger River between Kogi state and Anambra when it capsized at around 07:00 local time on Sunday.
Conflicting signals on the Nigerian government’s position on the adopted slogan for the year - no gree for anybody. The Police says it’s dangerous while the Army says it’s fine, actually:
During a press briefing on Tuesday in Abuja, Muyiwa Adejobi, the Nigeria Police Force spokesperson, said intelligence reports show that the catchphrase is capable of plunging the country into a crisis of monumental proportions.
Mr Adejobi said although the catchphrase is being seen as “normal talk”, those in the security community view it as a “dangerous” slogan.
He said, “And let me say again on this note that the new slogan, which is ‘No gree for anybody’, we have been informed from our intelligence unit that this slogan is coming from a revolutionary sector that will likely cause problems for the country.
When people operate in a low information environment, they resort to making decisions based on appearances. So it is with law-abiding Fulanis in northern Nigeria being targeted by vigilante groups because they look like their bandit kinsmen:
“They were entering people’s houses and setting them on fire. As we came running out of the house, they shot at me twice, but I was able to escape. My wife fell towards the exit, and they started hitting her before she could stand up,” Umar paused as he turned to his left and back to his right, as if the assailants were still lurking somewhere around, waiting to pounce when night fell.
The attacks on the Fulani communities, carried out by a group of local vigilantes in the area, were a reprisal for an attack on a commercial vehicle along Ruwa Wuri road in the same area. A nursing mother and her daughter had died in the vehicle burnt down by the terrorists, flaring outrages among the volunteer group.
After Kaurawo, the local vigilantes led the rampage to Bugawa, Ba-gida, Manu, Bajaga and lastly, Buta, near the border with the Niger Republic.
“They took my wife away from me, they butchered her in cold blood. I don’t even know the kind of life that awaits me without my wife. I have to leave the two kids with my mother,” the father of two told HumAngle.
An agricultural intervention programme in Kano has worked out well for a number of farmers. So you know what they did next:
Ibrahim Farouk, one of the beneficiaries from Bagwai Local Government Area, said he saw changes after he adopted the climate-smart practices in his rice farm which he had never seen before.
“I was practising traditional farming without considering the kind of seeds and pattern of planting,” he said.
“The KSDPA provided us with all the necessary farming inputs that boost the harvest. Previously, I harvested a maximum number of 50 bags of paddy rice and a minimum of 45 bags, but following the intervention, I got over 75 bags of paddy which I sold some parts and married a new wife,” Mr Farouk said.
With the bumper harvest, I got a new wife, I have a reserve to sell and buy other essential things and carter for the next season of farming, he added.
The transformation of Tompolo into an ‘upstanding citizen’ has been fun to watch:
Succour finally came the way of Mrs. Gladys Omodiagbe, the new quadruplet mum who was stuck in a private hospital in Warri, Delta State from October 2023 over her inability to settle the N4m medical bill incurred on her delivery, after PUNCH Metro learnt that Tantita Security Services Nigeria Limited, owned by the Niger Delta activist, Chief Government Tompolo, cleared the outstanding medical bill of N4m owed the hospital on Saturday.
Those who understand this story should explain it to those of us who do not understand it:
A housewife, Sa’adatu Ayuba, has asked a Dei-Dei Grade I Area Court for divorce after a 27-year marriage to Jalija, over impotence.
The petitioner got married to Jalija by Islamic law in 1997. They are blessed with five children ages 25, 22, 14, nine and seven.
What is the age limit on flogging children? Parents in Abuja have given their opinion:
Some of the respondents were of the opinion that flogging was advisable but should be done with caution, especially with consideration to the age of the child.
However, others objected to the idea of flogging in totality.
Mrs Justina Umeanadu, a school principal, said flogging was not a good method of discipline. She added that most times, it did more harm than good to the children.
Umeanadu said that counselling goes a long way in redirecting a child’s character.
“Talking about age limit and flogging, it is a risk to discipline a child who has reached adolescent by flogging.
“At this age, children display characters that are strange or least expected.
“A child who has reached adolescence may, in the process of trying to flog him/her collect the cane from the parents break it, throw it away and wait to know the next action.
Outside Nigeria
Enroly, a company that helps international students study in the UK, recently published some data on a drop in the number of students getting visas to study in the UK and paying deposits:
The latest real-time data from Enroly Data Insights forecasts dramatic falls in international student numbers for the UK’s January 2024 intake when compared to January 2023.
The data, taken from a representative cross-section of small to large UK universities, is based on over 58,000 international students and compared to the same point in the January 2023 intake.
As we enter the latter stages of the processing window, the numbers show that overall deposit payments are down by 52%, CAS issuance is down by 64% and visa issuance is down by 71% when compared to January 2023.
The falls are partly driven by a collapse in the Nigerian market, where deposits and CAS/visa issued are down by 74% and 76% respectively. There are indications there will also be large falls in students from the UK’s largest market, India, with deposits down 52% and CAS/visa issued down by 66%.
At the same time, plagiarism is on the rise in applications to UK universities:
The number of pupils caught plagiarising on university applications has doubled in the past two years.
The number of personal statements flagged for plagiarism by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) reached 7,300 last year, up from 3,559 two years ago.
International students accounted for one in five applications to British universities but represented three in five cases of plagiarism. The most prolific countries of origin for plagiarism, after the UK, were India, Nigeria, Romania and China.
A big profile of Anna Makanju who is credited with being behind the transformation of Sam Altman into the face of AI:
“She’s de facto the foreign minister of one of the most important companies in the world,” said Michael McFaul, who served as the United States ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration and is the director of Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, where Makanju sits on the advisory council.
Tech companies traditionally shun Washington until trouble emerges, asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Mark Zuckerberg first testified in front of Congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the political consulting firm gained unauthorized access to the platform to harvest user data. The testimony was more than 14 years after he founded Facebook, now Meta.
But Makanju, a veteran of SpaceX’s Starlink and Facebook, has turned the Silicon Valley lobbying blueprint on its head. Rather than waiting for scandal like Zuckerberg or exhibiting bravado like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, she has spent years courting policymakers with a more solicitous message: Regulate us.
Thanks to her strategy, Altman has emerged as a rare tech executive lawmakers from both parties appear to trust.
Also:
Her Nigerian father received a scholarship to study medicine in the former U.S.S.R., through what Makanju calls effectively a Soviet “soft power” program. “They would be trained in the Soviet Union and then they could bring communism back to their home countries,” she said. He met her mother in a bar popular with Soviet students trying to practice English.
Makanju spent much of her early childhood with her grandparents in St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, where she said few residents had seen other Black people. She bounced around Lagos, Nigeria; Germany; Arizona and Kuwait before she attended high school in Texas, moving with her mother, an engineer struggling to find work amid the Cold War.
The Chinese owner of West Brom Football Club in the UK is trying to sell the club:
Three consortiums – including one from the United States and one from Nigeria – are in advanced talks over a takeover of the stricken Championship club.
Lai, the Chinese entrepreneur and club’s controlling shareholder, is under heavy pressure to sell up and expected to grant exclusivity to the best option within the next 10 days.
West Brom are available for around £30 million, plus the various debts and loans owed which take the overall price closer towards £60 million.
China is trying to sell its Y-20 Kunpeng aircraft a.k.a Chubby Girl (their version of the Hercules C-130) to foreign buyers. Will be fun to keep an eye on this one:
In November, the Y-20BE model was unveiled to the global market, showcasing its capabilities to visiting Nigerian Defence Minister Mohammed Badaru Abubakar in Beijing, added the report, citing the military magazine Ordnance Industry Science Technology report published last week.
Elsewhere, the US Department of Defence confirmed it had approved the sale of 12 Viper Attack helicopters to Nigeria:
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has confirmed the sale of the Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter to Nigeria, with a related contract notification posted on 19 December.
Having been approved for the sale of 12 helicopters in 2022, Nigeria's procurement was confirmed with the announcement that Northrop Grumman had been awarded a USD7.7 million contract modification “for the production and delivery of an additional 32 H-1 tech refresh mission computers in support of the AH-1Z aircraft for the government of Nigeria”. Work on this contract is expected to be completed by June 2024.
Nigeria's total AH-1Z procurement was estimated by the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) to be valued at USD997 million, and comprised the helicopters, related equipment, spares, weapons, training, and support.
Piece about Japanese identity and what the experience is like for those who are ‘hafu’ (mixed race). With lots of photos, too:
Yuka Busari, who has two Nigerian and Japanese children, said that she was worried that they “would be stuck on the fact that they’re hafu.” She added, “When you grow up outside of Japan, it’s normal to have your ethnicities be mixed.”
The unstoppable international march of Nigerian food continues. This time the New York Times does a day-in-the-life feature on Nigerian chef, Ayo Balogun:
Since moving to New York in 1997, Ayo Balogun has cooked his way through Italian deli classics, Indian recipes and nouveau British dishes, all the while dreaming of showcasing the cuisine of his native Nigeria.
A restless restaurateur, Mr. Balogun, 45, opened three Brooklyn eateries — The Civil Service Café, The Bureau Café and Trade Union Diner — between 2013 and 2022, but his big hit came in 2022 when he opened Dept of Culture near his apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn.
“Our guests feel like they’re in someone’s home, like a family,” Mr. Balogun said. “That’s the standard of service we look for.”
In 2023, Mr. Balogun opened Radio Kwara, where he melds music and food. He will be hosting a pop-up dinner at the New Museum on Feb. 20 and will be one of the featured chefs at the James Beard Foundation’s Taste America event on Feb. 27.
Catfish is the most overrated thing humans have ever contrived to put in their mouth. But this is a nice piece on the ‘Catfish King’ in Nigeria’s south east, Moses Njoku Uwa:
From 1993 until 2007 I worked in the motor parts trade in Burkina Faso, but when I was about to get married to a Fulani from Burkina Faso I started thinking of returning to Nigeria so I could raise my children in the Igbo culture. Even though I was successful in the motor part business, after speaking with a lady who manages a catfish farm inside the Ojo Agric Settlement, in Lagos. I decided to start my own catfish farm, called St Mosco FeedNation, in 2011
Also:
We are into farming, smoking and drying catfish. We sell retail and wholesale. Before now, we hatched our own fish for grow-out. But I decided to focus on producing to help us reach our financial goal, which is to reach an annual turnover of one billion naira (€1,090,654), up from N780 million (€850,576) last year. Another mission is to produce 1,000 tonnes of fish next year. After that, I plan to create a hatchery.
There are not that many elephants left in Nigeria (most were killed in the 19th century) so this story points to something else - that Nigeria is now a transit hub for the smuggling of ivory. And I wonder why:
The Nigerian government has destroyed an $11m (£7m) stockpile of confiscated elephant tusks that had been smuggled from various African countries.
Environment Minister Iziaq Salako told an event in Abuja that he wanted to send a clear message that the illegal wildlife trade would not be tolerated.
Experts say tens of thousands of elephants are killed worldwide each year for their tusks.
That is despite a decades-long ban on the international trade of ivory.
The haul of elephant tusks destroyed on Tuesday was one of the biggest ever seized in Nigeria, weighing almost 2.5 tonnes. Some had been carved into artworks ready for sale.
There is a black market for blood donation in Nigeria, of course:
Obtaining blood for her daughter is a source of great anxiety for Dasola. Severe blood shortages have left patients in Nigeria scrambling to find their own private donors, a practice that is illegal, according to the country’s blood regulator, the National Blood Transfusion Commission. The unmet demand for blood, however, has spawned a black market in which people donate blood for profit and where there are few regulations to ensure the blood is free of disease and safe to use.
And:
Oloyede Adebola, a 37-year-old mother of two, has had to deal with racketeers twice. Talking to Al Jazeera at her home in Sarumi, a quiet neighbourhood in Ibadan, she explained that her eight-year-old daughter suddenly fell ill in 2021 and received a transfusion at an Ibadan hospital that then refused to discharge the girl until the blood was replaced. Like most Nigerians, she prefers not to donate blood, so she was connected by a friend to a network of middlemen, which in turn connected her to a commercial donor. Adebola told the hospital this man was a relative and paid $23 for donating a pint (nearly half a litre) of blood – three times her monthly earnings. The middleman took half the money.
A community in Oyo State has declared war on open defecation. Things you love to see:
"There is no shit, there is no shit in Jago! There is no shit, there is no shit again! I walked around, no shit, no shit. I search around, no shit, no shit. I turned around, no shit, no shit! So therefore, no shit again in Jago," sang a jubilant chorus of community members one overcast Thursday as they welcomed a group of visiting journalists.
People in Maine are angry at their state government spending millions of dollars on luxury accommodation for migrants to the state:
Migrants started being housed in the first 24 apartments this week, and dozens more units are expected to be completed in the coming weeks.
Competition for the apartments was fierce, and the application list was capped at 250.
Esther, an asylum seeker from Nigeria who was awarded a home, said it felt like a 'palace' compared to her previous digs.
'In [a] hotel, there are rules and regulations,' Esther told local reporters.
'In a shelter, too, we have so many people. We share the kitchen together. We share the restroom together.'
Even after finding out their internet lover is a scammer, some women remain in love with them. One woman has told her story to explain why:
That was the case with Sammie. She eventually discovered that 'Rob' was a 20-year-old scammer from Nigeria. And, once she knew, she still wanted to talk to this young man who had captured her heart.
He told her his real name was Smith, and they both cried over the phone, with Sammie describing him as 'remorseful'. He set up a new account using his own photograph and they carried on messaging.
He told her he had used the money she had given him to get out of Nigeria and that he was now living in Cyprus, where he wanted to start college. He said he had fallen for her and couldn't bear the thought of leaving her.
Smith told her that, aside from the lies about the circumstances, when he talked to her as Rob, it was how he always felt as himself. She said: 'It was like having him back.'
After a few months, he started to ask her for money again. Sammie was angry and the relationship cooled, but a couple of weeks later he messaged her through Snapchat with a love heart — and she messaged straight back.
More on Nigerian food going international. From a list of new food joints opening in London this year:
Meanwhile, there’s African, Caribbean and South American flavours promised at Soul Mama (Islington Square, N1, soulmama.co.uk). British saxophonist YolanDa Brown and entrepreneur Adetokunbo Oyelola are behind this one, as is everyone who contributed to the kickstarter for the project (£248,000 raised). Beside food, the venue will host plenty of live music. Autumn is the ETA.
Elsewhere, in Brixton, the fourth Alhaji Suya (Kiosk 9, Station Road, SW9, alhajisuya.com) will open in the spring. It’s West African, serving Hausa cuisine, which mostly originates from Nigeria and its surrounding countries. Go for suya (obviously), jollof, and kilishi (a kind of beef jerky, heavily spiced).