Below The Headlines - 46
Yahoo Boys no longer bother with disguises and Harry and Meghan are on their way
This week’s BTH is an abridged version due to travel commitments. The full fat version will return next week as normal. Until then, please remain on the right side of the law.
Outside Nigeria
Nollywood Week has kicked off in Paris:
With this year's focus on animated film and virtual reality productions, the festival proves Nigeria has the goods when it comes to technology. It also holds a mirror up to a complex and evolving Nigerian society, says festival founder Serge Noukoué.
Eleven features and seven shorts make the line-up. For the first time since the festival was founded 11 years ago they include virtual reality films – an immersive 360° experience with headphones – and animation.
“We don't spontaneously associate Africa with these technological advances," says festival founder Serge Noukoué. "Yet the continent, and Nigeria in particular, is at the cutting edge of these new ways of telling stories."
That's something organisers wanted to highlight this year with new media as well as with mediums such as video games.
"It's really a kind of new expansion of African cinema,” Noukoué adds.
Among the virtual reality films is Daughters of Chibok, about the abduction of the Chibok high school girls just over 10 years ago in northern Nigeria. The film won the award for best virtual reality story at the 2019 Venice Film Festival.
A whole article about someone who is single handedly pushing Nigeria forward, allegedly:
Ure Utah is the founder of Bridge Synergy and technical adviser to the Nigerian Honourable Minister of innovation, science and technology on development finance institutions (DFIs) and international partnerships. Her work aims to push Nigeria forwards on the international stage with sustainable development in mind
Every paper is talking about Harry and Meghan’s upcoming trip to Nigeria:
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have announced they will travel to Nigeria in May 2024, days after the Duke is due to visit London to mark the 10th anniversary of the Invictus Games.
During the trip, the Sussexes will meet military personnel and participate in a number of activities associated with the Invictus Games. Nigeria’s defence ministry went public with its pleasure at the Sussexes' announcement, declaring its ‘honour and delight’. Brigadier General Tukur Gusau, on Sunday, released a statement confirming that the visit would strengthen Nigeria's connection to the games and potentially pave the way for hosting future editions.
Is it true that Nigerians are moving to Portugal? And surely not for the sunshine?:
Around 3,000 Nigerians live in Portugal today. A 2019 Pew survey revealed that Nigerians rank highest among people who say they plan to leave their country in the next five years. Many of the Nigerians who were surveyed cited jobs and educational prospects as primary reasons for wanting to leave their country. Escaping conflict and violence also played an important role for participants, including Irene, who says this was pivotal to her choice.
"I truly value the freedom of feeling safe in Portugal. The sense of security and peace of mind that I experience in my daily life is incomparable," she says. "In Nigeria, I had concerns about my own personal safety due to crime rates and instability in some of the regions, such as Lagos, where I lived." She explains how this increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and says that shopping malls were vandalized, and attempts were made to break into private housing estates. Irene recalls having to increase the security on her estate in Lagos by having armed mobile police and army reserves for protection.
"Once those insurgencies started, mob action quickly stirred up. For me, safety became my top priority," she adds. Irene rationalizes that the wealth disparity in Nigeria is glaring, so it's not hard to comprehend why marginalized and disadvantaged people feel frustrated about their situation.
In contrast, Portugal offers a more stable environment with lower crime rates, reliable public services, and a strong rule of law.
What a headline by this US website - “Biden Says He Told Nigeria to Kill Fewer Civilians — but Nigeria Keeps Killing Lots of Civilians”:
“The pattern of Nigeria’s military operations resulting in civilian casualties is deeply troubling,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “One of the biggest factors contributing to violent extremism is security sector violence against you or someone you know — so we’ll likely see the reverberations of this civilian harm for years to come unless there’s justice and accountability.”
Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid, including weapons and equipment sales, to Nigeria, according to report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. Over that time, the U.S. also carried out more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel.
The U.S. has repeatedly raised the subject of civilian casualties with Nigeria’s government. Earlier this year, in the wake of an attack that killed more than 120 civilians, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly discussed the issue with Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu.
Professor Hadiza Galadanci is on the Time 100 list this year:
In 2020, for every 100,000 Nigerian women who gave birth, about 1,000 did not survive, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hadiza Galadanci, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Nigeria’s Bayero University, knows that problem all too well, and decided she would be the one to solve it. Over the past few years, Galadanci, who is also the director of the Africa Center of Excellence for Population Health and Policy, has worked with a network of collaborators in other countries to implement and study a simple yet effective system for preventing fatal postpartum hemorrhages, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality.
Another day another article in the foreign press about Nigerian online scammers. The damage being done to Nigeria is slow and steady:
Most scammers and cybercriminals operate in the digital shadows and don’t want you to know how they make money. But that’s not the case for the Yahoo Boys, a loose collective of young men in West Africa who are some of the web’s most prolific—and increasingly dangerous—scammers.
Thousands of people are members of dozens of Yahoo Boy groups operating across Facebook, WhatsApp, and Telegram, a WIRED analysis has found. The scammers, who deal in types of fraud that total hundreds of millions of dollars each year, also have dozens of accounts on TikTok, YouTube, and the document-sharing service Scribd that are getting thousands of views.
Inside the groups, there’s a hive of fraudulent activity with the cybercriminals often showing their faces and sharing ways to scam people with other members. They openly distribute scripts detailing how to blackmail people and how to run sextortion scams—that have driven people to take their own lives—sell albums with hundreds of photographs, and advertise fake social media accounts. Among the scams, they’re also using AI to create fake “nude” images of people and real-time deepfake video calls.
The Yahoo Boys don’t disguise their activity. Many groups use “Yahoo Boys” in their name as well as other related terms. WIRED’s analysis found 16 Yahoo Boys Facebook groups with almost 200,000 total members, a dozen WhatsApp channels, around 10 Telegram channels, 20 TikTok accounts, a dozen YouTube accounts, and more than 80 scripts on Scribd. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
The Olaleye sisters have slowly been building their puff puff business for the last few years. Now, recognition is starting to come. If you’ve never ordered from Puff Puff Ministry (and you live in the UK), I urge you to do so. You will not regret it. They didn’t quite win this time but that is not a verdict on the puff puffs!:
A North London bakery is set to appear on a Channel 4 competition to get their authentic Nigerian treats stocked in Aldi supermarkets. Marianne Olaleye and her four sisters run Puff Puff Ministry with the help of their mother and her secret puff puff recipe and will appear on Tuesday's (April 30) showing of Aldi's Next Big Thing.
Puff puffs are a traditional Nigerian fried dough treat, similar to doughnuts. After growing up in Lagos in their mother's bakery, based in the back of their grandfather's home, the sisters knew they had a great puff puff recipe and so brought it over to the UK and started their baking company in 2020 which is now based in Wood Green.
Interesting idea for Nigerian table cloth:
Recently in our inbox, from Nigerian designer Samiat Salami of ready-to-wear fashion and homewares line Oya Abeó: a collection of hand-drawn, sustainably printed textiles for the table.
About the collection: “Inspired by her childhood in Lagos, Oya Abeo draws from centuries-old Nigerian textile traditions to create modern whimsical and artful handprinted textiles that celebrate the colors, textures, and landscape of Nigeria. Our prints are created digitally in our studio in Lagos, Nigeria before they are hand-drawn and hand-dyed by Batik artists. Our culture is a never-ending source of inspiration for our prints.”
Regular BTH readers will by now be familiar with stories like this:
Monday, Berry and the Browns signed OT Roy Mbaeteka (pronounced: mm-BEH-tick-uh) to take that position and become Cleveland’s 91st player.
Mbaeteka is a 6’8”, 330-pound tackle who spent two seasons on practice squads starting with the New York Giants in 2022 and with the Chicago Bears last season. He learned football just two years before joining the Giants with the help of former New York great Osi Umenyiora.
An alert has been issued to all school children in the UK about the risks of sextortion on the internet:
Blackmailers then threaten to release nude or semi-nude photos of them, either real or fake, to their friends and family unless they pay up.
The NCA warned yesterday that at least three children killed themselves as a result. In December, Murray Dowey, 16, from Dunblane, Perthshire, took his own life hours after being targeted in a sextortion blackmail plot with potential links to Nigeria.
An article, about how people around the world are keenly following this year’s Premier League title race, has a section on Nigeria:
Mayowa Adeshina should, really, be at work. It is the middle of Sunday afternoon, and he has not yet finished his shift at the barbershop. He is here, clad in a red-and-white Arsenal jersey, only by the good grace of his boss. Well, grace is one word. Resignation is another. “I took a break for the love of the game,” Mr. Adeshina said. “The manager knows this. He’s not new to the routine.”
Many West Africans live to the rhythm of European soccer, with mostly male crowds massing outside bars, hair salons, street restaurants — any establishment, ultimately, with a screen — to watch idols playing thousands of miles away. Real Madrid, Barcelona and Paris St.-Germain all have considerable followings in the region, but in Nigeria, nothing matches the appeal of the Premier League.
On game days, fans of all stripes flock to viewing centers — street venues equipped with a few screens, a jigsaw puzzle of wooden benches, a thicket of wires and a canopy to block out the sun and reduce the glare — like the one Mr. Adeshina and his friends descended on to take in his beloved Arsenal’s meeting with Tottenham Hotspur.
Mr. Adeshina became an Arsenal fan in the late 1990s, when Nigerian cable channels first began broadcasting the Premier League. His older brother instructed him on which team he should support, at a time when Nwankwo Kanu, one of Nigeria’s greatest stars, was a fixture in the team’s lineup.
If anything, though, Mr. Adeshina says his connection to the team is even deeper now. Arsenal’s academy is stacked with English prospects of Nigerian ancestry. One of the club’s brightest stars, Bukayo Saka, grew up in a Nigerian family in London. “He’s Yoruba, I’m Yoruba,” Mr. Adeshina said, in a tone rather softer than that with which he celebrated his idol’s first-half goal against Spurs.
To avoid being sent to Rwanda, some asylum seekers in Britain have decamped to Ireland:
Otumba, a Nigerian man in his forties, arrived in the UK four months ago on a six-month tourist visa aiming to claim asylum to escape “persecution” in Lagos.
He said: “I came into the UK. I wanted to seek asylum. Then five weeks ago we heard that the Rwanda bill is going to be passed, and we don’t want to go back to Africa. Africa is not an option. It is not safe. Africa is like a volcano that can erupt at any time. We decided to go to Ireland on information that Ireland is safer and more accommodating.
“I didn’t know we were going to be sleeping in tents. I thought we were going to get proper houses and stuff. We’ve been here for five weeks now and the situation has just been the same.”
Another piece on the disinformation campaign against the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska. It remains really bizarre that the campaign originated out of Nigeria, in President Tinubu’s The Nation newspaper no less:
It then spread to other sites across Africa, first appearing in English in the Nation, a Nigerian publication.
But on closer inspection, the story had clearly been planted. It was labelled as a “sponsored post”, which means someone had paid for it to appear there.
I'll layeth the (verbal) smackdown on anyone trying to drag me over yahoo. Yes, Nigerians are poorer, less 'geopolitically' strategic and much more likely to knuckle under than Chinese or Indians (both with problematic scam ops of their own) but so damn what?
The sort of people who think Nigerian Prince jokes are a good ice breaker aren't likely to be worth much anyways. And, besides, everyone from countries north of 80m lives in a glass house on the subject of globalised crime syndicates.
I'd Bukele (Nayib?) the lot. But crime seeps, and nooks and crannies plenty for Naija. Little I can do. Don't mean I'll let foreigners born of a woman, like me, come and catch cruise on my head on top wetin I no do! Six days for church mind; one to show crazehead nah my way of the ninja.
Safe travels; Nigerians to disgrace you less and ManU keep doing what they do best these days o: