Below The Headlines - 40
Even lawyers can no longer be trusted to keep simple agreements in this economy and James Mogaji is visiting Nigeria soon
Hope you all had a good week. Things can only get better, I promise…
Inside Nigeria
Hisbah doing Hisbah things:
The Islamic police, known as Hisbah, in Nigeria's northern state of Kano, detained 11 Muslims for breaking the Ramadan fast by eating.
Hisbah spokesperson Lawal Fagge reported the arrest of 10 men near markets and a female groundnut vendor caught eating from her wares. The arrests followed tips from onlookers.
"We got 11 persons on Tuesday including a lady selling groundnuts who was seen eating from her wares, and some persons alerted us,"Fagge said.
"The other 10 were men and were arrested across the city especially close to markets where a lot of activities happen."
The 11 accused were later absolved of their crimes after vowing to abstain from food or drink. Additionally, their families were requested to ensure they observe the fast.
Another day another story of farmers facing wipeout from pest attacks on their crops. This time, watermelon:
Findings indicate that the hike in fuel price due to the removal of subsidy and poor yield during the last farming season discouraged many watermelon farmers, leading them to abandon it and opt for maize and other vegetables, while hundreds of young farmers relocated to Taraba State and the Republic of Cameroon to continue their watermelon farming.
A watermelon farmer in Bara, Isa Danazumi, said dry season watermelon farmers witnessed poor harvest due to diseases and pests’ attacks that defied all manners of pesticides and control.
“We don’t know the real problem this season because when watermelon is planted, the farmer faces two challenges. It is either the root of the plant dies while growing or after the plant produces the fruits, it will produce small sized watermelon.”
An archaeologist has found evidence of civilisation in Ilorin going back 1,000 years:
My research used archaeology as its prime source of data to investigate the development of the Ilorin cultural landscape, focusing on Okesuna, one of the city’s early quarters. I chose Okesuna because of the concentration of archaeological remains there, particularly potsherds and potsherd pavements.
The excavations also yielded rock-based or stone tools, animal remains, shell and metal objects. A combination of radiocarbon dates and potsherds analysis from Ilorin produced chronological information spanning from the mid-sixth to the pre-16th centuries AD. This covered around 1,000 years of human occupation in the area before the west Africa Atlantic contact.
The research in Ilorin is the first to document a first millennium AD pottery assemblage outside significant known centralised polities of Yorubaland such as Old Oyo, Ile-Ife and Benin. It is the first record of people living in the area such a long time ago.
The dates also suggest that the early Ilorin area was more developed than previously believed. It must have served as a significant socio-political unit at the same time as or even earlier than some important Yorùbáland centres, including Ile-Ife and Old Oyo.
The Anambra State Commission of Police is being accused of defrauding members of an investment club he set up. A head scratcher:
PUNCH Metro learned that the club is fashioned in a cooperative society model and is said to be an online investment set up by Adeoye, whereby members invest money to create wealth for themselves.
PUNCH Metro had reported that some aggrieved members of the club said they made investments in the purchase of landed properties but were yet to receive allocations after five years of payment.
In separate interviews with PUNCH Metro, they also accused the CP of premeditated fraud, a claim Adeoye denied in another telephone chat with our correspondent.
Adeoye had told PUNCH Metro, “We bought land as a cooperative. And we have one document for it in the name of the cooperative for each purchase. Am I supposed to tear the document into pieces and then begin to share them? We are an online investment platform. We published all the receipts and payments on our page, and every member sees them.”
A naira hawker has been convicted. How are people supposed to spray ‘mint’ at parties?:
A Lagos Federal High Court has sentenced one Fabian John Itafor, for hawking the Nigerian currency.
Itafor was handed three months of community service by Justice Kehinde Olayiwola Ogundare after he pleaded guilty to a count-charge slapped on him by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
The convict, according to the prosecutor, Abubakar S. Wara, was arrested on February 24, 2024, at Leisure Event Center Wale Olateju Street, Victoria Island, where he was hawking new Naira notes.
He told the court that during the convict’s arrest, the sum of N347,000.00, $1, £50 were found in his possession.
He also told the court that the convict’s illegal act, contravened Section 21(4) of the Central Bank of Nigeria Act 2007, and was punishable under the same Act.
Hmmmmm:
While Hart said he was born out of wedlock and was living with his mother and her live-in-lover who always assaulted her physically, Raphael said his mother was in a relationship with a man that was not his father and has had four children fro him, in addition to three children he had from another man.
Unable to stand the sight of their mothers being beaten, they sought solace in cult group
Explaining how he was able to conquer his mother’s lover, Raphael, said, “I went to speak with some of my old classmates at Bonny National Grammar School who were cultists.“They offered to ‘blend’ me into their cult group, Dey-Bam, and I consented. Then, I was 18 years old.
“They took me to the Bonny Sand filled at night , where I was blindfolded, beaten and given a gin mixed with blood to drink. There, my journey into cultism began.
“Thereafter, I confronted my mother’s partner, i revealed my identity as a Dey-Bam cult member and threatened to hurt him if he touched my mother again. That was the last time I saw him in my mother’s house”.
News from Uyo:
“A report was received on Monday from one Enobong Sampson that her sister had been kidnapped and that the kidnappers were demanding N4 million as ransom.
“As a result, operatives of anti-kidnapping squad of the command embarked on an intense and intelligence-driven operation to track down the kidnappers and rescue the victim.
“On Tuesday, however, the purported victim and her boyfriend were arrested at a hideout at Mbierebe Obio, Ibesikpo Asutan Local Government Area.
“She confessed to have conspired with her boyfriend and three others to proclaim her kidnap to raise money from her aunty based outside the country,’’ Ayilara said.
The economic crisis in Nigeria shows no signs of abating:
A 26-year-old lawyer named Ekunife Emmanuel from Jahi, Abuja, was taken to court on Wednesday for allegedly refusing to pay a prostitute.
The court accused him of breaking the law by not paying her, hurting her, and causing trouble.
The problem started when the woman, Queeneth John, who works as a sex worker in Wuse Zone 5, Abuja, reported to the police on March 12.
She said that on March 11, around 10 p.m., Emmanuel approached her while she was selling things in Wuse. He took her to Bannex Plaza, promising to pay her for sex. But when it was over, he didn’t give her the promised money and instead hurt her.
A man tells the tory of how his wife, the breadwinner of their family, died in the recent stampede to obtain cheap rice from Nigerian Customs:
“On that day, I went to work, my wife called me, and I told her not to go,” Michael told FIJ. “What she did was for the benefit of the family, so I cannot blame her for it.
“Later in the evening, at about 7:30 pm, Austin called me to say he was looking for his mother. I called her family in Ikorodu, and they had not seen her. I knew something was wrong because, as I knew my wife would not sleep outside. I went with a search party to check hospitals, but we did not find her.
“By morning, we found her in IDH. There, we were told six females and one male were brought in dead. It was there that I saw my wife. We filed the paperwork and took her for burial.”
Kids in Jigawa have found a manure side hustle:
Muhammad said some of these children are sons of government workers living in semi-urban areas where they do not expect this kind of business to thrive.
The farmer said they prefer the local manure as they cannot afford to buy NPK fertilizers due to the cost.
“Farmers prefer the manure because NPK fertilizer is not affordable now. The fertilizer costs about N30,000 and above at the moment and not many farmers can afford it.”
Muhammad said sometimes, the organic manure is better than the NPK fertilizer in terms of enriching the soil and quick germination of seeds.
Another buyer, Lawan Umar, who usually patronises these children said women also engage in selling the manure.
“To my surprise, I saw most of the mothers collecting the manure from the animal hut with a view to selling it when the value gets to N500 and above,” he stated.
Outside Nigeria
Profile of Tigran Gambaryan, one of the Binance executives who flew to Nigeria for talks with the Nigerian government and has been detained, along with his colleague, for 2 weeks and counting now:
In his years as a US federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan helped to lead landmark investigations that took down cryptocurrency thieves and money launderers, dark-web drug dealers, and even crypto-funded child exploitation networks. Now, in his post-government role at the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, he has become the target himself of a very different sort of federal crypto crackdown: For the past two weeks, he and another Binance executive have been detained against their will by Nigerian officials.
Since February 26, Gambaryan, who now leads Binance's criminal investigations team, and Nadeem Anjarwalla, Binance's Kenya-based regional manager for Africa, have been stripped of their passports and held in confinement at a government property in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Neither has been informed of any criminal charge against them, according to their families. Instead, the two men appear to have been swept up in Nigeria's broad actions to ban cryptocurrency exchanges amid a drastic devaluation of the country's national currency, according to the Financial Times, which was first to report the two executives' detention without identifying them.
“There’s no definite answer for anything: how’s he’s doing, what’s going to happen to him, when he’s coming back,” says Gambaryan’s wife, Yuki Gambaryan. “And not knowing that is killing me.”
Gambaryan, a US citizen, and Anjarwalla, a dual citizen of the UK and Kenya, arrived in Abuja on February 25, their families say, following the Nigerian government’s invitation to address its ongoing dispute with Binance. They met with Nigerian officials the next day, intending to speak to the government about its order to the country’s telecoms to block access to Binance and other cryptocurrency exchanges, which regulators blamed for devaluing its official currency, the naira, and for enabling “illicit flows” of funds.
Adaobi Nwaubani on the epidemic of kidnapping in Nigeria:
Nearly everyone I know in Nigeria has a relative or friend who has been abducted. Kidnappers often threaten to kill their victims if the ransom demands are not met, leading to tragic outcomes in many cases. Thus, families are sometimes forced into dire financial straits, resorting to selling their property or accruing significant debt to secure the release of their loved ones.
Communities of well-wishers sometimes initiate WhatsApp groups or email campaigns in an effort to raise the required funds. In October 2022, Adigun Agbaje, who had served as the deputy vice-chancellor of my alma mater, the University of Ibadan in southwestern Nigeria, was kidnapped while traveling on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, which connects Lagos, the commercial capital, with Ibadan, the third-largest city and a prominent academic and cultural hub.
The kidnappers demanded a ransom of 50 million naira (about $100,000 at the time), a sum far beyond what his family could afford. To assist in raising the necessary funds, messages were circulated among the university’s alumni, urging us to contribute towards his release. Agbaje was freed in just a couple of days, after an undisclosed amount was raised and paid.
The pandemic has widened inequality between countries, according to the UN’s latest Human Development Index:
The development gap between the top and bottom groups of countries last year returned to the same levels as 2015, widening at a record pace over the preceding two years, according to the report released on Wednesday by the UN’s Development Programme. The gap between countries that score low on the development index, such as Nigeria and Pakistan, and the medium group, which includes Kenya and India, also increased sharply, rising 17 per cent between 2021 and 2023.
Oil is coming to an end, everyone knows that. But how is it going to end? This analysis says it will be very disruptive on its way out:
Meanwhile, other oil powers will be left behind. Today national oil firms in several dozen countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia are pumping oil that is higher-cost and more carbon-intensive than the oil in the Gulf. By one measure, some $1.2trn of the $1.8trn in investments planned for the next decade by national oil companies could turn out to be unprofitable if countries make good on their official pledges to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Nigeria’s nnpc, Mexico’s Pemex and Indonesia’s Pertamina are among those most at risk of being stuck with stranded assets. Because governments in many producing countries are often unduly reliant on commodity revenues, the failure of some national oil firms could lead to debt crises, bankruptcies and a decade of lost development. This would be a mirror-image of the debt crises that engulfed Latin America in the 1980s, after rising oil prices widened importing countries’ trade deficits and crippled their ability to repay their debts.
I stayed with my family at this same resort around the same time in 2019. A most tragic and terrifying story at the time:
There was 'no proof' two children and their church minister father who drowned on holiday in front of the rest of their family could swim, an inquest heard.
Comfort Diya, nine, her brother, Praise-Emmanuel, 16, and their father, Gabriel, 52, all died after Comfort 'got into difficulty' in a pool at the Club La Costa World resort in Spain.
Praise-Emmanuel and Gabriel jumped in to help, while Comfort's other sister, Favour, 14, threw a lifebuoy into the water in a bid to save them, Croydon Coroner's Court heard.
Tragically, the bodies of all three family members ended up at the bottom of the pool and, despite receiving CPR, they all died 'within minutes of each other', the court was told.
Favour and heartbroken mother Olubumni Diya both witnessed the horror from the side of the pool.
A group of college students in Rhode Island came together to raise money for the security man in their building to allow him go visit his family in Nigeria who he hadn’t seen for 10 years:
"Once we learned that James hadn't seen his family in over a decade, that's what kickstarted this for us," freshman Brandon Reichert told WLNE of their decision to fundraise online to raise money for Mogaji. "We take care of our own and we firmly believe that James is one of our own."
Sophomore Daniel Singh called Mogaji's consistent presence at the residence hall magnetic.
"He is someone that you are drawn towards. He is really kind and compassionate," Singh told WLNE. "After a long day, you go out on a Friday night after class and you come back, James is there."
The college students started a fundraiser on Feb. 29 and have since received nearly 800 donations, exceeding their original goal of $3,500.
From a debate in New York about who should get reparations for slavery:
But others disagreed, saying any black people who moved to the US for better opportunities have no right to reparations for slavery in this country.
“It was our choice to come here,” said Mona Davids, a black South African who moved to New York as a child.
“The only beneficiaries of reparations should be descendants of chattel slavery — not African immigrants or Afro-Caribbean descendants.”
She added: “Descendants of slaves didn’t have a choice. White people benefited from slavery.”
Davids, who publishes “LittleAfrica News”, which serves that African community in the US, said reparations advocates should also go after the African countries, where rulers rounded and sold people to slave traders.
“In many cases it was black Africans who sold slaves. Ghana is rich. Nigeria is rich,” she said.
More Chinese photos of Lagos, better than anything you can find in Nigerian media. This time of the new Lekki Port:
The Lekki port is a commercial cooperation project between China, France and Nigeria. Constructed by the China Harbor Engineering Company Ltd (CHEC), it stands as Nigeria's first deep seaport and one of the largest in West Africa. The construction, initiated in June 2020, was completed in October 2022. The port began commercial operations in April 2023, with a design capacity to handle 1.2 million standard containers annually.
An article that tries to situate Nigeria in the context of a wider global fight between the anti and pro lockdown ‘schools of thought’. It pins the blame for the current economic crisis on the response to Covid:
This suggests that the real cause of Nigeria’s crisis is what scholars Ruben Andersson and David Keen aptly label “wreckonomics” in their provocative new book of the same name: a label that describes how the setting of a war economic model is used for profiteering by existing institutional interests. For these interest groups, the purpose of the war is not necessarily in winning it, but in extracting profit from the crisis situation — often by extending it for as long as possible.
Such analysis offers a different twist to the concept of the neoliberal “permacrisis”. While these rolling crises are usually spoken of in political terms, wreckonomics shows that it is part of an economic framework. In each crisis framed as a war — whether real wars such as in Ukraine, or the “war on Covid” — existing economic interests have the institutional frameworks to leap in and profit from them. This corporate money printing comes at the cost of state budgets, leading to future indebtedness, which is paid for by those who had no hand in the profits — and who must put up with crumbling state services.
The Nigerian crisis perfectly fits the wreckonomics mode. A “war on Covid” was declared worldwide. This created a massive external shock and led to the printing of money financed with credit from the IMF. Existing interests took advantage of this to profiteer from the debt in Nigeria, as also happened in Senegal, the UK and the US. And none of this had anything to do with the threat posed to the Nigerian population by Covid itself, since, with a median age below 20, this was always low risk compared to a disease like malaria that kills 600,000 people annually across Africa. Indeed, at present, the registered Covid deaths in Nigeria total 3,155.
Throwback: 45 years ago, Nigeria flexed its economic muscle against Barclays Bank:
Earlier this month, Barclays Bank ran a full-page notice in the Daily Times of Nigeria reassuring the public that it was not going under.
"There has emerged a climate of fear and uncertainty among our shareholders, businessmen and depositors about our financial strength and mobility to maintain our status as one of the major commercial banks in the country," the statement said.
With deposits of more than $1.5 billion, the bank told Nigerians, "our financial strength remains solid and we have sufficient reserve assets to meet and honor our obligations to our depositors and shareholders."
What had touched off the run on Barclays was a government decision the week before to withdraw all its deposits from the bank and send one-third of the bank's 60 white expatriates packing in retaliation for a decision by Barclays Bank of London to buy $14 million worth of South African defense bonds.