Below The Headlines - 47
Pepper Sellers Association explain their pricing and Oscar money is coming to Nigeria
Welcome to yet another week of Nigerian shenanigans via your favourite newsletter.
This week on 1914 Reader I shared details of an interview I gave on the Binance drama in Nigeria.
Inside Nigeria
Cabbage is the current money spinner for Katsina farmers:
Garba further said the best a farmer could sell a bag of cabbage last year was N6,000, but this year, he sold the same bag at N12,000.
“The crop requires watering at an interval of seven days, with a period of 90 days. Unlike tomato that needs numerous application of pesticides, cabbage needs pesticides and fertiliser at least two times. In one farm alone, I harvested cabbage of over N10 million at an average rate of N11,000 per bag,” he said.
Another farmer, Abashe Muntari, said the high market demand of cabbage this year was occasioned by galloping inflation in the country, especially food items.
“The high cost of food items has made cabbage to be part of menu in many households, not only for its nutritional value but the complimentary role it plays in many dishes,” he said.
Muntari added that a ball of cabbage cost between N200 and N700, depending on size, but it was between N100 and N300 last year.
The alleged murderer in this case is a fairly popular Nigerian twitter personality it turns out:
The Kano State Police Command has arrested one Sadiq Zubairu who killed his friend, Bello Adam over his failure to help the victim secure a job after receiving the sum of N3 million.
Zubairu had promised the late Adam, who was his former colleague at the Kano Electricity Distribution Company, to help him secure a job at the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
There is a Pepper Sellers Association and they are explaining their pricing:
The National Pepper Sellers Association of Nigeria, Oyo State Chapter, has blamed the increase in the price of farm produce, especially pepper, on the hike in the pump price of premium motor spirits, otherwise known as petrol.
The president of the association, Alhaja Fausat Azeez, disclosed this during the conferment of the award of excellence on the Commissioner of Police, Oyo Command, Adebola Hamzat, at the state secretariat of the association, Oja “ba, Ibadan, on Friday.
She stated that an unofficial increase in the pump price of the PMS is taking its toll on the prices of various commodities, including pepper, at the market.
According to her, a family of four now spends between N8,000 and N10,000 to prepare a pot of soup that will not last more than three days. The situation is becoming unbearable.
Investigation into sex (and cash) for marks at a Nigerian University:
The lecturers most often do not collect the cash directly. They have agents in each class. If a teacher is taking three classes, he appoints three agents, one in each class. It is the agent who collects the money and hands it over to the lecturer. In the case of sex, if the lecturer fancies a student, he instructs her to pay for a room in a guest house or hotel where they meet. An average sorting sum begins from 20,000 for an A, 15,000 for a B and 10,000 for a C score.
Interestingly, many classes are bloated. A class that is ordinarily meant for sixty students now takes about three hundred students. So, if in a class of three hundred students, one hundred ‘sort’, and in most cases sixty per cent ‘sorts’, one can estimate how much the lecturer makes in a semester of just three months.
Just a now common story of young men being arrested by the dozens for internet fraud. A cancer eating away at a generation:
Investigators of the Ibadan Zonal Directorate of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, has arrested 64 suspected internet fraudsters in Osun State.
The suspected cybercriminals were arrested in Ede, Osun State on Wednesday.
According to a statement by the anti-graft agency their arrest followed actionable intelligence on their suspicious fraudulent activities in their environs.
Items recovered from them include 18 exotic vehicles, 18 laptops, 112 mobile phones, three Play Station games, five motorcycles and other incriminating documents among others.
A fascinating and long read about the social impact of a mining site in Nassarawa state. Though the article never really says what exactly is being mined there:
Curiously, Grace parted ways with her husband soon after relocating to the Opa mining site. Although she claimed that their separation had nothing to do with her movement to the camp, sources at the site privy to the matter confided in Daily Trust Saturday that her relationship with her husband went awry when she started making enough money from the business. Like Grace, findings by Daily Trust Saturday indicate that several other female artisanal miners who travelled to Opa from different parts of the country in search of daily bread made fortunes and ended up separating from their husbands.
“They either became so rich from the business or got enticed with money by their rich male counterparts, thereby turning their backs against their spouses,” a source said. A truck driver based in Nasarawa town who wished to remain anonymous, whose wife deserted him after moving to the Opa mining field, said he regretted allowing her to go to Opa. “It got to a point when my wife was no longer regarding me as her husband; she even stopped calling or answering my calls. I made inquiries and found out that she was being enticed with money by the rich male mining merchants. She eventually told me that it was over between us; thereby leaving me while retaining our five children”, he said.
Outside Nigeria
Harry and Meghan in Nigeria is getting wall to wall coverage in the international media:
Though the couple are touring Nigeria without their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, the duchess mentioned both children during the events at the school “Our son Archie’s five. He turned five last week,” Meghan said, according to Town & Country, referring to Archie’s May 6 birthday.
In her onstage remarks, meanwhile, Meghan told a story about Lili. “Our daughter, Lili—she's much, much tinier than you guys. She's about to turn three,” Meghan said. “A few weeks ago she looked at me, and she would just see the reflection in my eyes. And she [said,] ‘Mama, I see me in you.’ Oh, now she was talking really, literally. But I hung onto those words in a very different way. And I thought, yes, I do see me and you, and you see me and you, but as I look around this room, I see myself in all of you as well.”
On the underrated menace of the water hyacinth in Nigeria and what some entrepreneurs are doing to deal with it:
In their adopted homes, hyacinths are considered a menace: forming impenetrable mats that clog up waterways, disrupt transport and local livelihoods, reduce water quality, breed disease-carrying vectors, and kill off native aquatic life, among other deleterious effects
Because of this, water hyacinths bear an ignoble reputation. “It’s the world’s worst floating invasive plant because of its reproductive ability,” says Julie Coetzee, a botanist at South Africa’s Rhodes University, who has spent two decades studying the plants and how to control them.
There are a handful of ways to manage the scourge: removing them manually or with machines; applying herbicides; and releasing insects to devour the plant. But efforts to tame water hyacinths in Nigeria—where over a million hectares of waterways across 20 of its 36 states are infested, impacting more than 40 million people’s livelihoods—have so far failed “despite the huge amount of money that has been spent controlling this weed,” says Opeyemi Ayanda, an environmental biologist at Covenant University in the country’s southwest.
Truly weird behaviour:
A civil service agency worker who blew £18,000 on calls to a church in Nigeria using a Cabinet Office phone has been spared jail. Alessandra Akiwowo made over 1,100 calls during and after her time as a contractor in the Race Disparity Unit, where she worked twice between 2020 and 2021, contributing to a race report setup in the wake of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests.
The 43-year-old from Romford, who now lives in Ipswich, was employed at the Civil Service through recruitment agency Allen Lane, working there from August 2020 to March 2021 and June 2021 to September 2021. On request, she was given an iPhone SE and laptop, along with a policy telling her to limit personal calls and not to call abroad, Snaresbrook Crown Court heard on Thursday, May 9.
But the loquacious grifter - whose denials were dismissed as 'a tissue of lies' by the judge - ignored the policy, and continued making calls between her time in employment, and for nine months after she left the department. Prosecutor Ryan Evans said she 'abused' the usage terms by making a 'substantial' number of calls, running the total bill for the taxpayer to a staggering £18,529.46.
TimeOut does a list of the best Nigerian (and West African) restaurants in London. Here’s the entry for Ikoyi:
Since 2017, Ikoyi has stood as a beacon of innovative cooking and fine dining – first in St James’s and now at hipster haven 180 Strand. The elaborate tasting menu is priced at a mammoth £320 (with a £200 lunch option) and incorporates influences from across sub-Saharan Africa, woven in with British micro-seasonality. Alongside smoked jollof with scotch bonnet custard, you’ll find buttermilk-fried plantain with smoked kelp and blackberry, and innovative creations such duck with bitter uda pepper, and turbo-broiled pork belly with egusi miso. Ikoyi received its second Michelin star at the start of 2022, proof of its unerring commitment to excellence – and maybe, just maybe, making that hefty bill worth it.
Letitia Wright has a new movie coming out:
Wright’s Aisha Osagie is a Nigerian refugee who has been in Ireland for a year, having fled her homeland after her father and brother were killed and she was brutally assaulted because her father had been unable to pay back loans he had taken to pay for Aisha’s university education. Under Ireland’s strict and much-maligned Direct Provision system (hence that earlier title of “Provision”), Aisha must stay in a residence that feels like a quasi-prison, as she prepares for the interview that will determine whether she can stay in Ireland and also bring her mother (Rosemary Aimyekagbon), who is in hiding in Lagos and is still in danger, to stay with her.
A sextortionist is going to appear in court for making £2m from blackmail, allegedly:
Olamide Shanu, 33, will appear in court in London later this month after an extradition request from the United States.
Shanu is accused of posing online as a teenage girl to persuade boys to send sexually explicit photos.
It is alleged he then threatened to send the compromising images to his victims' families, friends and even the media if they refused to pay him.
At least three British schoolchildren have killed themselves as a result of being blackmailed over sexually explicit images.
One alleged victim set up a payment plan with Shanu, sending him £240 a week until he had handed the blackmailer almost £8,000.
Shanu's cryptocurrency account is believed to have received more than 6,000 payments over three years, leading investigators to estimate the number of victims to be into the hundreds.
A former US representative from Nebraska has had his bribery case reopened:
At issue are donations Mr. Fortenberry received from Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire, who later admitted to his part in a scheme to make illegal campaign donations to candidates for president and Congress. Foreign citizens are not allowed to make political donations to an American candidate.
In January 2016, Mr. Chagoury contributed $30,000 to Mr. Fortenberry’s re-election campaign, routing the money through other people. The host of the fund-raiser, who is not named in the indictment, started to cooperate with the F.B.I. in September of that year.
In June 2018, the fund-raiser host spoke with Mr. Fortenberry over the phone and told him the 2016 donation was from Mr. Chagoury. According to the indictment, Mr. Fortenberry did not take steps to amend his campaign finance report or return the donation. He did, however, ask about the possibility of hosting another campaign event.
The Oscar people are sharing the money:
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday announced a global $500 million fund-raising effort to help diversify its base of support and ensure its financial future in a period of transformation for the film industry and the nonprofit cultural sector.
[…]
As part of the effort, the academy plans to host gatherings and events in locations around the world to “become increasingly global,” press materials said, and help develop a global “pool of new filmmakers and academy members and support the worldwide filmmaking community.”
The academy said its “expanded international outreach” will include Buenos Aires; Johannesburg; Kyoto, Japan; Lagos, Nigeria; London; Marrakesh, Morocco; Melbourne, Australia; Mexico City; and Mumbai.
When the basketball star met the chess prodigy:
Game, it is said, recognizes game. Not long ago, two mutual admirers from different domains—Jaime Jaquez, Jr., a six-feet-seven standout rookie for the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat, and Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a five-foot-six, thirteen-year-old chess prodigy who lives on the Lower East Side—met for a skill exchange of sorts. Adewumi first won fans five years ago, as a third grader, when he conquered his category at New York’s state championships while living in a homeless shelter with his family, who had fled Nigeria as refugees under threat from Boko Haram. More recently, Jaquez, a chess devotee, sent Adewumi, a budding hoops fan, a video message suggesting that they trade tips. When the Heat came to New York, a meeting was arranged.