Welcome back and hope you are enjoying the weather wherever you are. To our Band A readers, I hope you’re enjoying 20 hours of uninterrupted power? Or else…
Inside Nigeria
EFCC has revealed how it used the latest cutting edge technology, superior to artificial intelligence, to track down and convict Naira mutilators like Bob Risky:
Aje narrated to the court that the EFCC received intelligence on some individuals, who are in the habit of mutilating and spraying the Naira notes at social parties and event centres in Lagos.
“Based on the intelligence, the EFCC set up the Special Operations Team to observe and monitor activities of individuals, who are involved in the habit of mutilating the Naira.
“The team visited many event centres and monitored social media pages, where the Naira was being abused.
“During the course of the monitoring, the team came across videos on social media, where the defendant was seen abusing the Naira.
“The team then proceeded to download these videos via our office laptop computers and also went further to copy these videos on compact discs.
Watermelon is a popular way for muslims to break their fast during Ramadan. Consequently, farmers who cultivate the fruit in Yobe are balling:
Daily Trust on Sunday learned that in this month of Ramadan, a basket that contains 100 watermelons, which was sold at N50,000 during the rainy season, has doubled to N100,000 as a result of demand.
Alhaji Maina Bukar, a watermelon farmer, said farmers usually looked forward to the Ramadan fasting period to harvest their watermelons and make huge profits due to demand.
‘‘I have spent at least seven years in watermelon farming. I rely so much on rain due to its low risk, unlike irrigation. Last time, during the rains I spent over N800,000 on my farmland, with the expectation that I would make profit, but unfortunately, I lost due to some reasons.
‘‘This time around, I invested over N300,000, hoping to harvest watermelons worth N600,000 because it is believed that this period (Ramadan) is a time for us to smile.
I have finally found a group of people willing to be upgraded to the dreaded Band A for power:
The Chairman of Magodo Phase One, Otunba Oyeleke, said that the estate sent a letter to Ikeja Electric expressing their willingness to pay a higher amount in electricity bills. However, the firm responded saying they lacked the required funds for such an upgrade.
He noted that if the blackout situation is not resolved, the estate residents will stage a protest.
He said, “All along we have had a steady supply, and all of a sudden, we noticed that other zones have electricity but we do not.
“Our problem is that we have been ready to pay more, and we have signed an agreement with Ikeja Electric for a premium (Band A), but they have refused to execute it with the excuse that they do not have the capacity.
“We wanted to stage a protest, but we suspended it. We have reached an agreement that on Thursday we will carry placards. It has nothing to do with payment because Magodo GRA is ready to pay.”
The Nigerian Police declare they are now born again and have renounced their ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’:
He said, “We don’t torture in the police again. That era has gone. We are actually carrying out what we call interview and interrogation sessions in a professional way to get them.
“We are conscious of the provisions Anti-torture Act of 2017. We don’t need to torture anybody. It may take us time to get information from them but we will surely get information from them.”
News from Kano:
The Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) has suspended the Chairman of the Kano State Anti-Corruption and Public Complaints Commission, Muhuyi Magaji from his position.
The suspension followed a 10-count corruption charge preferred against him by the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) on November 16, 2023.
Amotekun will hunt you down and they will find you:
Disclosing the arrest in a press statement obtained in Osogbo on Wednesday, the spokesperson for Osun Amotekun Corps, Yusuf Idowu, alleged that the suspect, living in Modakeke, had used a magic ring made for him by a cleric to commandeer the victim, identified simply as Sofiyat, out of her husband’s house and move her to Modakeke, where she was kept as a sex slave.
According to the Amotekun spokesperson, luck ran out for the suspect last week Friday when he took the victim to Campus Area in Ile-Ife and abandoned her by the roadside.
After Babalola had left the vicinity, the woman suddenly regained her senses and raised the alarm, attracting some Amotekun operatives.
A long and sad read on the war of attrition between the Nigerian military and Boko Haram:
It was a Wednesday in June 2014, around 8 a.m. Her people had scuttled indoors when they heard trucks pulling closer as the soldiers inside them launched bullets in different directions. The gunshots continued for a long time. The villagers heard something else, too: the cracking sound of things burning. Outside, the house’s shade, made of sticks and grass, was darkening, shrinking, and falling apart. Fortunately, the fire did not creep into the mud room where Zara hid with the rest of her family. But her husband, Abatcha Goni, was not with them. He had stepped out earlier to attend a relative’s burial ceremony. When the soldiers climbed back into their trucks and zoomed off later that afternoon, Zara came out of hiding to find that a large chunk of her community had been burnt to the ground. Worse, Abatcha had sat under a tree with three other people at the function. They were all shot dead.
Outside Nigeria
Davido did not find an April Fool’s joke by a Kenyan website funny:
Nigerian singer-songwriter Davido has said he is taking legal action after an April Fools article said he had been arrested for drug offences.
The popular Afrobeats singer, 31, said in a statement on X that he had received a "barrage of calls" after the story - which claimed he had been detained after cocaine was found on his private jet - went viral.
"I find the fabrication of allegations of such international crimes extremely irresponsible regardless of the light of 'April Fools'," he wrote.
Nigeria’s Kanye is a 14 year old genius in Abuja with non-verbal autism:
Kanyeyachukwu Tagbo-Okeke – better known as Kanye – was two years old when he began showing a proclivity towards art, scribbling abstract forms on paper and on the walls of his family’s home in Abuja, Nigeria.
His mother, Silvia Tagbo-Okeke, had not yet considered the significance of the works. “They were non-figurative,” she says. “And it was difficult for us to say, ‘okay, this is art’. He was just doing his thing around the house.”
Tagbo-Okeke did keep a few of his pieces, but as they increased in number, she had no choice but to discard most of them. She did, however, come to notice the marked impact drawing had on Kanye. Her son, who is diagnosed with non-verbal autism, is usually unable to keep still, moving from one action to the next with an erratic demeanour. Yet, as he draws or paints, he is relentlessly focused. He usually has a big smile on his face. Sometimes he even bursts into dance. Art engages him in a way that nothing else can.
“You can see he’s all over the place,” Tagbo-Okeke says. “But when Kanye paints, it’s as if he’s a different person. He can stay still for six hours straight.”
I remember Babs Fafunwa’s Nomadic Education programme when growing up. It’s making a return in some form:
Aisha did not access formal education back in Abadam. Had she stayed there, she would have likely continued to tend cattle and, sooner than later, become a milkmaid. She may also have been married off at the age of 12. These are trends noticed among people in the community and of Aisha’s circumstances.
But now, as the eldest child in her family, she is the first one to have the opportunity to go to school. Today, Aisha Malik is a secondary school student, among over 500 enrolled in the Aisha Buhari Integrated Secondary Fulani school in Maiduguri.
“I want to become a medical doctor to help my people; I also want to become a journalist to be seen on social media. In fact, I want to be everything,” she said.
Disney+ has a new documentary on Anthony Madu, the young Nigerian who went viral for ballet dancing in Lagos and is now in a prestigious British dance school:
You might remember Anthony Madu from a video that went viral in June 2020. Shared to millions on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) by celebrities like Viola Davis and Cynthia Erivo, the video captured an 11-year-old Madu dancing barefoot and in the rain on a backstreet of Nigeria—and even then, the elements couldn’t dampen his lofty ballon.
Now, millions more will get a glimpse of not just Madu’s talent but his story, which, at present, is unfolding at one of England’s most prestigious training grounds for dance: Elmhurst Ballet School.
Released on Disney+ on March 29, Madu follows the young dancer’s journey from Lagos to Birmingham, and the highs and lows of settling into the rigorous dance classes, academics, and social life at Elmhurst. We caught up with the star of the film about moving away from his family, his career aspirations, and what he hopes other dancers take away from the documentary.
A funny (or maybe not?) letter to the Dear Prudence advice column in Slate magazine:
Dear Prudence,
I am a British man of West African extraction, living in the eastern United States. I am reasonably educated and not impoverished. I work for a mid-sized regional law firm. I lived a pretty unremarkable life until about a year ago, when my Nigerian father died. As my mother was already dead and I was an only child, it fell to me to set the estate to rest. As I was doing so, I discovered something uniquely hilarious. I know this sounds remarkable, but as it turns out, I am in fact a Nigerian prince by birthright, though nobody in my family has held any true title to nobility for several generations.
It gets worse: My family fortune is lying unclaimed in a bank in Zurich, under sanction dating to a 40-year-old diplomatic dispute involving smuggling diamonds and a coup-d’état. Not that this pertains to my problem at all—I don’t want the money nor could I get it if I did. No, my problem is that my life is now an ironic spam email; my ethnic and familial identity is reduced to a stale meme. I have not told anyone in my personal or work circles about this development in part because of my fear that I will not be believed, or will become the butt of jokes. It is already hard enough being a Black bloke with a heavy British accent in America. And yet I don’t know how to process this newly-revealed disclosure into my personal background. I asked my therapist, who did not believe that I was serious until I provided written documentation to substantiate my claims. This is exactly indicative of the problem.
—Reluctant Scam Prince
This article about Abiodun Adegoke does not include any photos of him but claims he is 7’ 11” and can dunk a basketball without leaving the ground!:
There aren’t many people on the planet who are able to make Shaquille O’Neal look small, but there’s at least one very notable exception in the form of Abiodun Adegoke, a 7’11” basketball behemoth hailing from Nigeria.
Shaq stands at 7’1″ and tipped the scales at over 400 pounds at certain points of his legendary NBA career, and his size made him one of the most formidable centers to ever step foot on the hardwood. However, he’s not even close to being the tallest player to ever do their thing in the league.
That particular honor goes to Gheorghe Mureșan and Manute Bol, who set the mark to beat in the NBA thanks to their 7’7″ frames. The latter was a native of Sudan who paved the way for African centers like his son Bol Bol, Dikembe Mutombo, and Tacko Fall, but none of them have anything on Abiodun Adegoke.
Adegoke, who hails from Nigeria and is known as “Big Naija,” popped up on Shaq’s radar a few years ago after O’Neal shared a video of the man who then stood at 7’9″ on Instagram.
A woman started researching online scammers after a number of them tried to contact her online. Now she’s written a book titled Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud and no prizes for guessing which country features a lot:
By the end of “Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You,” Holmes’s charming grasp of romance fraud, unpolished as it is, is undeniable. Still, her autodidactism has its limits. During the course of her research, Holmes accessed a message from a Yahoo Boy that she describes as the most “vitriolic” statement she’s ever read, “even in fiction.” Yahoo Boys are the spiritual descendants of the Nigerian prince — their name comes from the woebegone email service, and they’ve been linked to a surge of social media sextortion in the United States. In the message that Holmes publishes verbatim, the anonymous scammer writes, “When your British people was colonizing, enslaving, exploiting and impoverishing us, stealing our crude oil and other natural resources, creating artificial boundaries in Africa, making us hungry and the dying breeds, what were you thinking/ How do you want us to survive?” The scammer goes on to threaten the message’s recipient, promising to “use your picture for impersonation too.”
Recent photos of Sade Adu had everyone wondering whether she has been ageing backwards:
Decades after the peak of Sade’s success in the 80s and 90s, many fans are still taking to social media, puzzled by the singer’s age-defying appearance in her rare public outings.
One Instagram-user left a comment under a Sade-related post stating: “I could look at her forever, she just doesn’t age! So beautiful still.”
Who is Nneka Ihim? Well, I don’t know but she’s on something called Real Housewives of Potomac:
Before Nnkea Ihim made her debut on one of America’s largest television platforms, she was an attorney and award-winning businesswoman. The daughter of native Nigerian parents, Ihim grew up in the Midwest before embarking on her law career in Los Angeles. But her couple of forevers union to beaux Dr. Ikenna Ihim would go on to land her in Potomac, Maryland, the impetus to her TV debut on “The Real Housewives of Potomac.”
As the newest member of the popular Bravo TV network series, Ihim joins the group of cherry blossom beauties in their eighth season. Beyond the drama, what fans miss out on, though, is her love of travel, two business ventures, and passion for her culture. Despite her hot topic introduction to the world, Ihim firmly stands on her love of Nigeria and Nigerian culture. She’s also the founder of a dating app that helps connect African daters worldwide and anticipating the launch of her sparkling wine brand, BIDO.
Jumia Foods shut down in December 2023 and it’s not been fun for their now former delivery drivers:
Several former Jumia Food workers said they were worst hit because the company did not give them any warning before shutting down.
Israel Oloba, another student in Lagos, said he had 35,000 naira ($26.12) on the app that he never received. “I sweated and wasted all my energy and effort riding a bike for nothing,” Oloba told Rest of World. Oloba now works with a local food delivery company called Chowdeck.
Uche Okafor, a former regional manager for Bolt, believes this incident demonstrates both the down- and upsides of gig work. “There is potential instability in the gig economy, where workers can face sudden job losses,” Okafor told Rest of World. “[But] while some drivers [in Nigeria] may experience temporary financial strain due to job changes, the booming food and package delivery startup scene offers them a wealth of new opportunities.”
New York Times list of best 100 restaurants in New York features Ewe’s Delicious Treats:
The deeper I get into Ewe’s repertory of Nigerian dishes, the more impressed I am. The egusi and ogbono stews are deeply flavored and complex, and the fish pepper soup has a strong aromatic backbone that is the sign of a careful hunt for ingredients. Chile heat is an accent, but it’s not used timidly, and don’t go looking for relief in the jollof rice, which is an event in itself. The restaurant recently got its beer and wine license, and a bottle from the refrigerator can make a useful companion when the Scotch bonnets make their presence felt.