Below The Headlines - 37
What happened to Prophet Oriyomi on Valentine's Day? And Brian Fok is in soup
Hope you all had a good week? This week on 1914 Reader, I wrote a short story about food and farming in Nigeria.
Enjoy your weekend and the usual selection of stories below.
Inside Nigeria
The Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria has a ‘solution’ to the Japa ‘problem’ affecting the banking industry in Nigeria. It is something called The Human Capital Retention Fund. Details to follow, I guess:
The Chartered Institute of Bankers of Nigeria says it has introduced a Human Capital Retention Fund to address the trend of mass emigration bank workers out of the country.
President and Chairman of Council of CIBN, Ken Opara, disclosed this on Thursday when he led a team from the institute on a dialogue with the leadership and members of the Senate Committee on Banking, Insurance and Other Financial Institutions.
While speaking on contributions of the institute to the banking industry, Opara said the institute had embarked on several key initiatives in its effort to support the industry and the economy at large.
He said, “Some of the initiatives include, strategic intervention in industry related issues such as the japa issue with the introduction of Human Capital Retention Fund. This has given rise to the Banking School project which will commence later.
Fertiliser prices have spiked:
One of the fertiliser dealers in Minna, the Niger State capital, Mr Danjuma Yarima, said Urea is now N36,000 from N25,000 it was sold two months ago while NPK is now sold at N37,500 instead of N27,000 it was sold before.
In Benue State, on the other hand, the price of Urea remains at N35,000 while NPK hovers between N28,000 and N30,000.
In Kwara State, a former AFAN scribe said “Initially Urea fertiliser was sold at about N22,000 per 50kg bag but it has gone up to N40,000.
“As for NPK, you know we have Walcot and Notoric among others and the prices vary. But the one that was sold last for N30,000 is now around N40,000.”
Farmers are also expressing concerns about how prices are just increasing.
“Imagine how prices are rising on a daily basis. By the time the wet season fully starts, a bag of Urea may hit N50,000 or N60,000. How many farmers would be able to buy even just two bags for their farms? A farmer, Yakubu Danjuma in Karu, Nasarawa State, wondered.
Sankera, a yam producing hub in Benue State, has been overrun by bandits:
But the good old days seem to be over because of the invasion of the area by terrorists, armed robbers and kidnappers, who slaughter human beings like animals and capture others for ransom.
As a result of the evil activities of bandits, kidnappers and other criminals, life has been snuffed off Sankera and it is no more the cynosure of Benue StateEvil has since replaced the good life in Sankera and stripped the natives of the economic benefits that yam was bringing to them.
The Sankera axis of Benue State, which is made up of Logo, Ukum and Katsina-Ala local government areas, is generally known as the economic power house of the state given the number of truckloads of yam that leave that axis to other parts of the country on a daily basis. It is no doubt the hub where over 90 per cent of yam produced and consumed in Benue and hauled to other parts of the country is produced.
But instead of enjoying benefits of this, Sankera has become topical for its growing insecurity, killings and kidnappings which have begun to force the hordes of yam traders from all parts of the country to desert the place and seek safer markets for their dealings.
The town has witnessed too many killings and kidnapings in recent weeks and months that sent shivers down the spines of the inhabitants. Within a short spell of time, the chairman and the chief security officer of Ukum LGA, Rev. Gideon Haanongon, were seized by the evil merchants while some persons were killed by hoodlums around Sankera.
Strange story about the death of a Prophet in Lagos on Valentine’s Day:
The Lagos State Police Command has commenced investigation into the death of Remilekun Oriyomi, a prophet of the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC), Shogbamu Parish, Gbagada.
Youths of the church had organised a Valentine feast at the Beach Resort in Ogombo, on Saturday, February 17, 2024.
It was learnt the shepherd of the church had cautioned the youths against making the journey. However, they insisted.
Oriyomi, who led 15 others to the beach, was declared missing afterwards.
Following a search, his body was found on Monday, February 19.
The railings on a pedestrian bridge in Oshodi have gone missing and people are now using it in fear. A word from Moses Adejare is enough for the wise:
A driver, Moses Adejare, urged the government to repair the bridge before the damage worsens.
“Although I barely ply the bridge because I use my bus to pass the other side, I have noticed that people always use the bridge with fear and they are always very careful lest they fall off the bridge. The situation of the bridge is not good.
“I want to plead with the government to fix the bridge because they do not have to wait for someone’s death before they know what to do.”
Update on the story last week about the Anambra man who was killed by a. masquerade. The masquerade has now been declared wanted by the state government:
Reacting to the development, the Commissioner, said that the act is against the state’s law on masquerading enacted in 2022 which specified that communities using masquerades as a form of entertainment, during festivals or festivities should have an arena where people seeking such fun should go and enjoy themselves.
According to him, the state’s law stipulates that on no account should a masquerade or masquerades obstruct people’s movement or block a community’s road or cause any problem in a community as he said that masquerading as a culture is all about fun and entertainment.
He said that it is against the law for the particular masquerade to stop people going on their way, talk less of killing someone.
In parts of Kano, sand mining is a big problem creating a distraction from everything else:
FOR the past 15 years, residents of Tassa village in Dawakin Kudu Local Government Area, LGA and Mazan Gudu community in Gabasawa LGA, have been battling with sand mining activities in the community as it causes huge losses in their farming activities, environmental degradation, drug addiction and is also affecting their children’s education.
From 2022 to 2024, about 500 pupils have dropped out of school due to activities of sand miners in Mazan Gudu and Tassa.
Students absent themselves from school to work and earn some money at the sand mines. While the boys engage in manual work, including digging and diving into a deep river to fetch sand into tipper trucks or grinding machine sites, the girls hawk and sell food at the mining site.
Premium Times published an investigation some weeks ago about how staff of Nigerian Population Commission (NPC) were extorting Nigerians who needed to collect birth certificates and other documents from their offices. In response, the staff have modified their extortion practices. On a positive note, the bribe is now heavily discounted, perhaps the only thing that has gone down in price in Nigeria lately:
The extorting officials are, however, not deaf or blind to their management’s statement. In response to it, they have modified their method to ward off scrutiny and reduce complaints as much as possible.
Firstly, they have removed the notice that was brazenly pasted to their office walls requesting the illegal cash payment of N2,000 administrative charges from applicants.
They have also slashed the illegal charges from N2,000 to N1,000.
To cap their strategy, they have also stopped allowing applicants into their premises, a departure from the previous practice of letting applicants into the office building when this reporter visited the office in January.
In the modified strategy of continuing the extortion, the official who had distributed printed forms to the first set of about 50 applicants on 9 February, returned about 30 minutes later to retrieve the completed forms.
To a distant observer, the official arrived to just collect the forms and return to the office building to process them. But the reality is that the official had managed to spread the instruction to applicants to tuck their N1000 “admin charges” in their documents.
Outside Nigeria
A whole industry has been built by middlemen scamming people of tens of thousands of pounds to bring them to the UK for care work. Nigerians are unsurprisingly prominent in this industry:
The ban on foreign care workers bringing dependants with them is designed to reduce net migration. More than 120,000 children accompanied the 103,316 care workers who came to the UK in the year to September.
An investigation by UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI), the Home Office agency responsible for the visa system, has found widespread abuse, some of it extending into criminal behaviour.
They found some agents charging migrants more than £25,000 for services including forged documentation such as fake passports and hospital letters stating they have worked in the health and care sector.
Those same migrants are sometimes then given children to traffic to the UK. The UKVI’s investigation also found several individuals were advertising certificates of sponsorship for sale over social media. The most common countries for middlemen to operate in are India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.
Random spot checks by Border Force officers have found fraudulent applications, including one migrant who was sponsored by a care provider who had been granted 498 visas since May 2022. The CQC subsequently confirmed that this care provider had been dormant since September 2021 and was no longer providing any services.
Peter Zeihan, a controversial writer on geopolitics, wrote his take - amusing in parts - on what he thinks will happen to Nigeria in the future when America no longer has any interest in it:
Because right now, much to the Saudi’s happiness in Nigeria is very self-limiting, just like Venezuela has been very self-limiting these last 20 years. And you can count on Nigeria never significantly increasing its oil output for any period of time, which makes them a non-factor. As far as the countries who try to actually manage the oil markets see things.
But if you break down global stability, oil’s just not going to be transported as far. And in places that have a little bit of a hotspot going them like say, the Persian Gulf or Saudi Arabia is you should expect significant reductions in output because there’s going to be a lot of militancy and state militancy, not to mention new imperial activity, either tried to take the oil offline or take the oil period.
And in that scenario, I would expect that the stuff that’s coming out of the Persian Gulf is probably going to fall by conservatively half and take most, if not all, of say, Iran’s crude with it. But Nigeria is not in that sort of situation. Nigeria is on the western side of the African continent. While it has plenty of territorial disputes with its neighbors, it’s not like it’s facing an outright war with anyone.
The countries that are to the northwest, the north and the east are either in the Sahara, so don’t have military to speak of, or in the Sahel, where the densest concentration of populations is in Nigeria. So when we had all of those coups in back in 2022 and 2023, there is a real concern slash hope based on your politics, that the Nigerian military might just move into some of these places and knock off the computers because the Nigerian military, something like three times as large as all of the French coup belt in the Sahel combined, they ended up not doing that.
But the point remains is that Nigeria is the undisputed superpower in the region, from the Sahel down to the tropics. There’s no one else that can hold a candle to them. And if there was a conflict, I have no doubt while it would be messy that the Nigerians could give a lot more than they could take. But ultimately, we’re talking about oil here in a place where the Persian Gulf has problems, in a place where Russia is treated like Russia, and a lot of that stuff goes offline.
Interpol elections are coming up and Nigeria thinks it has spotted an opportunity:
Interpol has never had a secretary general from outside the United States or Europe, and Mr. Urquiza is finding receptive ears to his promise of being the change candidate. A lawyer by training, he has a background in combating human trafficking and in environmental policing, an area of particular importance in Africa, and international work.
The election process — rounds of secret balloting and quirky rules for deciding ties by drawing lots — is hard for anyone outside the room to track.
Governments are nevertheless eager to be wooed. Some officials were unabashed — speaking on the condition of anonymity, at least — about the horse trading. Governments might offer international funding or promise to vote a certain way on another issue.
“We are the beautiful bride in this vote,” one senior Nigerian official said.
Giannis in his own words:
I grew up in a Nigerian household. We had Nigerian food, my mom played Nigerian music, we had Nigerian news on. When I left home, I went to Greek school. My friends were Greek. Now going back, I understand why I am the way I am. People there operate and go about their day in the same rhythm that I go about my day. I felt like I fit in immediately.
Don’t get me wrong. I was nervous. I was very nervous to go there. I didn’t know what to expect—if I’m going to be welcomed, if I’m going to be loved. There was part of my life where I felt like I was the outsider. But it was the opposite.
If you don’t know who Porsha Williams and Simon Guobadia are, lucky you. Here, we have to cover the news without fear or favour. The summary of the story is that she has filled for divorce from him and rumours are that it is due to his residency status in America which is ‘complicated’:
The Nigerian businessman reportedly came to the U.S. on a six-month visitor’s visa in 1982 but returned to Nigeria in 1985 after overstaying the visa. Guobadia was denied citizenship after marrying his first wife, Karron English, according to recent revelations. He came back to the U.S. in 1986 on another six-month visa but again failed to return home after the visa expired. Reports also claim he pleaded guilty in 1987 after he was arrested for felony bank and credit card fraud.
Between 1988 and 1991, Guobadia allegedly using a fake identity on his temporary resident pass-through and failing to disclose his criminal past on immigration documents. He was also allegedly arrested for unauthorized use of a vehicle and credit card fraud, resulting in his deportation in 1992.
However, his 1988 application was approved and Guobadia was issued a green card. He returned to the U.S. and applied for citizenship again in 2016, but he was denied because “his temporary resident status was unlawfully granted,” the court documents purportedly say.
In 2020 and 2022, Guobadia was denied again. He filed a complaint to challenge the decision in 2023, but it was denied in early 2024. Despite his immigration drama, Guobadia seemed unfazed about his possible deportation in a post shared on Instagram on Feb. 20. The post featured Guobadia seated in a golf cart smoking a cigar.
The FT has a feature on Burna Boy with some really great photos (the photoshoot took place in Kehinde Wiley’s house):
African Giant established Burna Boy on the global stage. His fourth album, which would garner him a first Grammy nomination for best world music album, was a critical success, praised for its cohesiveness even as it melded genres and sounds. This fusion has always been part of Ogulu’s goals – it would be naive to reduce him to “Afrobeats”, even if that genre’s success has driven the interest in Nigerian and African music (between 2017 and 2022, there was a 550 per cent increase in Afrobeats songs streamed on Spotify). “I foresee a future where cross-pollination of styles will result in groundbreaking fusions, which defy traditional musical boundaries,” he says.
Picture story about Nigerian music album covers over the last 70 years. Nostalgic:
Opemipo Aikomo is a self-taught digital designer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He started out making posters at university and it was an early attempt to create a magazine that sparked his interest in Nigerian albums. “I struggled to piece together a story about the history of Afrobeats, but in the process I got interested in the designers creating cover art for what is now a big cultural export,” he says. Working with the makers’ collective Wuruwuru, Aikomo created Album Cover Bank, a digital archive of album artwork reaching back to the 1950s. Aikomo personally loves the recent output – such as artist Funto Coker’s design for Roots – but Cover Bank is about much more than art, he says. “Every album cover is a story, and this is an archive of thousands of stories waiting to be told.”
A Nigerian artists in Nigeria has been drawing hyper realistic images of football players who play for the Premier League club, Wolves. Interesting choice:
The computer engineering student enjoys the club's style when playing in the Premier League, along with the sense of community that comes with the team.
Travelling to the UK to see Wolves play would be so exciting, Mr Ogide said, as he has never left Nigeria.
"I love to watch the games at home but it would be the best day of my life to see them play live," he added.
Since discovering Wolverhampton Wanderers, Mr Ogide said he had found where he belongs.
Olam says it found no evidence of the fraud its Nigerian unit was accused of after carrying out an investigation. Shares went up in response:
On Feb 19, Olam said its review was led by an investigation team comprising Olam’s ARC, external counsels and independent external accountants.
Work performed by the team – which was approved by the ARC and Olam’s board during the review – did not identify that Olam Nigeria was involved in any of the specific allegations mentioned in the media reports.
“Olam Nigeria has cooperated fully with the Nigerian authorities and assisted in their inquiry. No charges were brought against Olam Nigeria or any of its officers by the Nigerian authorities,” stated Olam.
The group added that all its businesses in Nigeria “continue to operate normally”.
“Olam regards Nigeria as an important part of its future strategic plan, and it will continue to seek future opportunities to grow its business there. Olam will also continue to further strengthen its governance and compliance in Nigeria.”
The Ngel Nyaki forest on Nigeria’s Mambila Plateau is rich in diversity. But all that is under threat from the usual suspects so some conservationists have come up with an interesting idea:
Much like the rest of the region, the reserve is threatened by farming, grazing, hunting and logging. But the natural artistry of its terrain, with montane forests laced by shrubby grasslands and river valleys, dotted by waterfalls, caves and steep hillsides, also makes it a prized tourism destination.
To help protect its biodiversity, researchers and conservationists are turning to its namesake: bees.
Ngel Nyaki means “forest of bees” in the Fulfulde language, which is widely spoken by the Fulani ethnic group in West and Central Africa. There are more than a dozen bee species in Ngel Nyaki, according to a 2023 study, published in the Asian Journal of Research in Agriculture and Forestry. Its authors noted the presence of stingless bees (Meliponula beccarii), bumble bees (Bombus sp.), carpenter bees (Xylocopa augusti), squash bees (Penonapis sp.), violet bees (Xylocopa violacea), memic bees (Megachilesp.), and mining bees (Andrena cineraria) in the area.
But the most abundant species, accounting for over 40 percent of the study’s 575 sampled bees, is the western honey bee (Apis mellifera). The species is widespread worldwide, but genomic research suggests it is native to Africa.
In and around Ngel Nyaki, the western honeybee is the backbone of the local honey industry, providing a major source of income for communities within and near the reserve. The forest also provides a bevy of other natural resources, from herbal remedies and thatching grass to fresh water and wild fruit.
Biometric checks are spreading across airports around the world and Nigeria is once of them. Useful for context and benchmarking of Nigeria.
3 football players in Hong Kong are in court for match-fixing charges:
Three footballers linked to Hong Kong’s biggest match-fixing scheme in recent years have appeared in court over charges of illegal gambling, with one being accused of offering bribes of HK$50,000 (US$6,400) to two players to rig games in the city’s top league.
The trio, together with a betting agent involved in the same case, on Thursday secured bail in their first appearance before a magistrate at Eastern Court, as prosecutors asked for a four-month period for further investigations.
Among the defendants is former Hong Kong Under-23 player Brian Fok. He was hit with five charges, including three over offering an advantage to an agent in violation of the Prevention of Bribery Ordinance.
The Nigerian-born defender, 29, allegedly attempted to bribe two of his then teammates at Hong Kong Football Club to ensure a predetermined outcome in games involving the team, which competed in the city’s Premier League during the 2021-22 season.
A zookeeper in Osun, Nigeria was killed by a lion he had raised from birth:
A zookeeper in Nigeria has been mauled to death by a lion that he raised from birth.
The tragic and unprovoked incident happened when zookeeper Olabode Olawuyi was feeding the lions at Obafemi Awolowo University's zoo in Osun state.
Graphic video purports to show the aftermath of the mauling, in which Olawuyi can be seen lying on his back, still and bloodied, with his eyes still open.
He was unable to be saved after enduring fatal injuries.
The lion was later shot dead by zoo staff, something that was also captured on film.