Below The Headlines - 50
Nigerian government creates new jobs for women and who were Hushpuppi's partners in crime?
Welcome to the 50th edition of the Nigerian Shenanigans Newsletter. Thanks for staying with us so far even when the news is hardly of the uplifting variety.
This week I wrote a piece on how manufacturing for the domestic consumer market in Nigeria is One Person’s Job.
Enjoy the rest of the show and your weekend
Inside Nigeria
Everyone says the Nigerian government does nothing about unemployment but here is a clear example of a government policy creating jobs for people:
Young women, especially single mothers across the South West geopolitical zone of the country, are gradually abandoning petty trade to join the “booming business” of rice smuggling.
The women are involved in the smuggling of rice from the Republic of Benin into Nigeria through the numerous bush paths around the country’s porous borders with its western neighbour, bringing the produce into Lagos.
[…]
Adenike Odufayo, a single mother, told our correspondent that she used proceeds from the sale of rice to fend for her three children.
“I come all the way from Ibadan to Lagos to buy rice. My husband left me years ago for another woman. One of my friends, who is also a single mother, introduced me to the business. The business of smuggling is risky because one is prone to different assaults and sexual harassment from male security operatives at the borders. The consoling aspect of it is that money comes in at the end of each trip.
Beating for beating:
A crisis broke out at the Aces Nursery, Primary and Secondary School in Abuja when a father, Muhammed Jimeta, assaulted a teacher, Sekinat Adedeji, for allegedly beating his daughter, Karima Jimeta.
The incident occurred on Tuesday, May 28, 2024.
Recounting her ordeal to PUNCH Metro on Wednesday, the teacher, Sekinat Adedeji, said she was holding her three-month-old baby when her pupil’s father, Muhammad Jimeta, assaulted her.
According to her, she teaches the female pupil, Karima Muhammad Jimeta, in Basic Three.
She said, “It happened around 12:30 pm on May 29, 2024, when I used a rule on her leg when she and others were disturbing and were asked to kneel down.
“The pupil shockingly disrespected me by giving me a ‘wanka’, that was why I beat her on the leg with a small rule.”
Pronounced as “uwarka” in Hausa, literally meaning ‘Your Mother’, the word is an abusive expression used by stretching out one’s five fingers towards a person.
Adedeji continued, “The father slapped me four times close to 4 pm because our school closes at 3 pm. His daughter reported what happened at 12.30 pm to him at the close of school when he came to pick her up.
You can see how the financial pyramid works for child trading in Sokoto:
No fewer than 20 children rescued by the au Nigerian Police Force, Sokoto State Command, have been handed over to the state orphanage home for proper care.
The state Commissioner of Police, Ali Kaigama, stated this while addressing newsmen at the command headquarters in the state capital on Thursday.
He said the command arrested 10 suspects relating to the incident.
The suspects include one Bala Abubakar of the Tudun Wada area of Sokoto.
He was alleged to have given out a total of 28 children, including six of his biological children.
He said the suspects gave out their victims to Kulu Dongoyaro and Elizabeth Ojah in exchange for between N150,000 and N250,000, claiming they were being taken to one Abuja-based NGO that is willing to shoulder the responsibilities of their welfare.
No matter the situation, there’s always money to be made I guess:
When the Katsina State Governor, Dr Umaru Dikko Radda recently described banditry as a business venture for some highly placed individuals in the country, some felt the governor of the Northwestern State was merely exaggerating issues out of context.
[…]
Seven months later when Saturday Vanguard took him up on the issue, the governor who gave an account of his stewardship in the last year, explained how a village head was paid N700,000 by bandits, to allow free access to his village, and the consequent killing of about 30 of his subjects.
He said his administration was fiercely addressing poverty having discovered how it fuels insecurity. According to him, it was disheartening that for as little as N2,000, some persons would volunteer information to bandits about their neighbours or relatives.
On the village head, the governor said; “I will say yes, that we have arrested a village head in Guga village in Bakori local government of the state because of his involvement with the bandits.
News from the Customary Court in Mapo, Ibadan:
Grade A Customary Court, Mapo, Ibadan, Oyo State, has adjourned for further hearing, the divorce suit brought before it by a man, Ige, against his wife, Bukola on the accounts of being a dullard, abusive, irresponsible and in the habit of fighting.
Ige stated that his wife is a failure.
According to him, she is academically poor and lacked the ability to learn a vocation.
According to the plaintiff, the only things the defendant was good at were abusing and fighting him.
Ige explained that Bukola targeted his manhood during fight and pulled it, thus leaving him screaming.
He pleaded for divorce and custody of their children.
I wonder why feeding has to be covered as part of the government’s hajj subsidy anyway. Just take your own feeding money. If you can afford N8m you should be able to feed yourself:
Nigerian pilgrims currently in Saudi Arabia for the 2024 Hajj have expressed dissatisfaction with the quality and quantity of the food they are being served, despite paying over N8 million for the pilgrimage.
Babagana Digima, a Facebook user, shared a photo showing a small portion of pap and three bean cakes that were served as breakfast to the pilgrims on Tuesday morning.
Digima’s post highlighted the pilgrims’ frustrations, stating, “After paying N8 million for Hajj, see the breakfast that our pilgrims are being given!
“Nahcon Nigeria Fatima Mustapha. This is what was given today 28th May 2024. In fact, some pilgrims have already started begging to get money to buy food because even their remaining $300 that was promised to be paid to them in Saudi (out of $500) is not forthcoming from the authorities!”
This sounds like a lot of spaghetti. The spaghetthieves are now in custody:
The police in Lagos have arraigned two haulage drivers, Abdullahi Yahaya and Abduljabar Jubril, before an Ikeja Chief Magistrate’s Court for the alleged diversion of N54 million worth of Honeywell spaghetti.
Yahaya, 48 and Jubril, 39 whose addresses were not mentioned are facing a two-count charge of conspiracy and stealing.
The prosecutor, Inspector John Iberedem, told the court that the suspects committed the offences between February 17 and 18 in Lagos.
Iberedem alleged that on February 18, at Shagamu Road, the drivers were entrusted to convey a haulage of 4,725 packets of Honeywell spaghetti valued N54 million.
A very sad story about a ‘strange disease’ devastating a ginger harvest in Kaduna:
On a sunny morning last August, Jatau Malichy, 65, left his home in Mafo-fadia, a village in Kachia Local Government Area, in the southern part of Kaduna State, north-west Nigeria, to inspect his farm. After retiring as a librarian with the state government, Malichy had devoted himself to cultivating ginger on the five-hectare farm. But what he noticed about the crops that day left him bewildered and heartbroken. The crops were wilting.
Over a few weeks from July, a ‘strange disease’ gradually devastated the crops. Malichy’s 58-year-old widow, Bathsheba, believes the shock over the loss of his crops led to his death a few days later, on August 7.
The community had practised ginger farming for as long as she could remember. She and her husband used proceeds from their farm to build their house in the village in 2019.
“Our plan was that after that 2023 harvest, we would not farm again. So, we doubled what we normally planted, hoping for more proceeds,” she told this reporter in February.
The family employed 50 people from neighbouring villages to work on the farm during the planting season.
Outside Nigeria
A new and long piece on Hushpuppi which details who his co-conspirators in the crime that brought him down were:
Abbas was born on 11 October 1982 in Bariga, a poor area of Lagos. Like many smart youngsters in Nigeria at the time, he struggled to gain steady employment. He joined the ‘Yahoo boys’ – the small but increasingly powerful minority of Nigerians who’d turned to online scamming to make ends meet. Abbas’s future lay far beyond the country, however, and his fate would be intertwined with that of a man living thousands of miles away.
Ghaleb Alaumary was born two years after Abbas into a world which could not have been more different to the Nigerian’s.
Alaumary lived with his family in Montreal, Canada, where they owned the eight-bedroom property Château Olivier. From its back garden (complete with hot tub), a private entrance led directly into a lush public park. As Abbas was dodging Lagos’s grinding traffic, Alaumary could simply open his back gate and disappear into the greenery.
By 2009, however, Alaumary’s privileged life had started to go off the rails. After a string of relatively low-level fraud and credit-card crimes he moved online and discovered the dark web, a hidden corner of the internet, where he offered his financial crime services to other cybercriminals. The underworld nickname he chose for himself demonstrates his hubris: Alaumary became ‘Big Boss’.
He wasn’t the only one reinventing himself. Ramon Abbas was also forging an online persona. In Abbas’s case, however, his emergence into a new identity would take place under the full glare of social media. In 2012 he created the Instagram account through which millions would come to know him – like Madonna or Prince – by just one name: ‘Hushpuppi’.
This is a very welcome development:
Clinical trials for the first new treatment for Lassa fever in almost 40 years are planned to be held in Nigeria this year.
The neglected tropical disease kills about 5,000 people a year and is endemic in west Africa.
The trials will begin in September at the Federal Medical Centre, Owo (FMCO), in Ondo state, which has high rates of the rodent-carried virus. It is the first work on a new treatment since ribavirin was approved for use in 1986. The drug’s efficacy has recently been questioned.
Dr Femi Ayodeji, FMCO’s head of infection control and research, said: “It’s important to get new treatments to avoid severe cases. By having new drugs that treat the Lassa fever virus better, the need for supportive treatments for some patients who develop acute kidney injury, and cardiovascular respiratory complications, will be reduced.”
Perhaps the most hilarious part of the Harry and Meghan war is how the words of Nigeria’s First Lady provided the latest fuel to pour on the ever raging dumpster fire (her office has since issued a statement ‘clarifying’ what she meant):
“We have to salvage our children,” she declared. “We see the way they dress. We are not having the Met Gala. And everyone, the nakedness, is just everywhere and the men are well-clothed.”
She continued, “Tell them we don’t accept nakedness in our culture. That is not beautiful. It’s not beautiful at all.”
While Tinubu didn’t explicitly criticize Meghan Markle, she referenced the Duchess’s recent visit to Nigeria where Markle emphasized her Nigerian roots, revealing she is 43% Nigerian according to a DNA test.
“Why did Meghan come here looking for Africa? That is something we have to take home with [us]. We know who we are. Don’t lose who you are,” Tinubu stated.
Nigeria has taken up the case of the students being kicked out of their university in the UK (see last week’s newsletter) over unpaid fees:
Delegates from the Nigerian high commission in London are to meet bosses from Teesside University to discuss the treatment of a group of students who were ordered to leave the UK after failing to meet tuition repayments.
The Nigerian students were left distressed and in some cases suicidal after they were involuntarily withdrawn from their courses and ordered to leave, in what has been described as a “serious diplomatic issue”.
I take a very dim view of the whole crypto and memecoin space. So it was really disappointing to see Davido pump a worthless coin to his followers:
Although Davido has remained silent on the issue, his fans and the crypto community have widely criticized his withdrawal of substantial figures from his DAVIDO token stash while encouraging people to buy.
Rume Ophi, a local crypto expert, believes that Davido could have made a more strategic move by advocating for regulatory clarity and exchange licensing in Nigeria’s crypto space rather than launching his own token.
Ophi said Davido’s memecoin risks becoming a pump-and-dump scheme, undermining industry credibility and sparking SEC scrutiny.
Cointelegraph reached out to Davido for comment but had no response by the time of publication.
Incredible detail from a recent Boko Haram attack in Niger State:
Niger state, which borders Nigeria’s capital Abuja, has experienced repeated kidnappings for ransom by armed groups, including mass abductions, in recent years.
Najume reported that about 300 gunmen arrived on motorbikes and stayed for several hours, making themselves at home before leaving with the abductees. “They made a fire to curb the cold because it was raining throughout that day,” Najume said. “They cooked and made tea; they made Indomie (instant noodles) and spaghetti.”
European countries have tried to block content from Russia’s RT network. They have been popping up elsewhere. And you can’t help but wonder what Nigeria is doing on a list like this:
Working from more than 1,500 RT articles published last year, the researchers looked for websites that featured similar content or metadata, limiting their search to results geolocated in the United States and Belgium, the European Union’s de facto capital.
Some of the sites were probably circulating RT’s content with the network’s permission, the researchers said, while others had plagiarized RT without its knowledge. The sites may have been ideologically aligned with the Kremlin, or more intent on driving traffic to boost visibility or ad revenue. Some of the sites disclosed that they were reposting RT content. (Man Stuff News ended its copy of the article about Mr. Putin’s arrest warrant by posting the web address of the original RT story.)
Verbatim replicas of RT articles appeared on media outlets affiliated with governments in Cambodia, Iran, Nigeria and Yemen, as well as on one Lebanese outlet owned by Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Lebanese militia. Researchers connected one website to a conservative Catholic online ministry in Texas that had posts about abortion, candlemaking and, in an example lifted from RT, the lack of aid after an earthquake in Syria.
As a part time photographer myself, I have always lamented how badly under-photographed Nigeria is. For the simple reason that it is just too risky to bring out your camera anywhere in the country. I once had a gun cocked and pointed at me by a soldier because I took a photo of the President’s parked car in Abuja. Here’s something I saw in an obituary for Ron Ayers, an aeronautical engineer who once designed the world’s fastest car:
Shortly after their marriage, Ayers left the aerospace industry and moved to London to run the family business Adana, which made hand-operated printing presses. This was a big change in scale and engineering, but he adapted quickly and was soon travelling the world building up export markets. On one trip to Lagos, in Nigeria, he was arrested for industrial espionage after taking a photo, but the “misunderstanding” was resolved with some quick thinking and a pile of cash.
A very bizarre story about a scam around the sale of Elvis Presley’s former home, Graceland:
A self-described scammer based in Nigeria has taken credit for a bizarre, failed attempt to auction off Elvis’ iconic Graceland property.
Earlier this month, a mysterious company with little paper trail, Naussany Investments and Private Lending, contacted Promenade Trust, which controls the Memphis estate, claiming it owed millions for failing to repay a loan. The company then attempted to auction off the property in a foreclosure sale.
Riley Keough, Elvis’ granddaughter who inherited Graceland after her mother Lisa Marie Presley died last year, sued Naussany on 15 May. She claims her mother’s signatures on the documents were forgeries and that Naussany is not a real company.
[…]
On Tuesday, the apparent perpetrator of the scheme was revealed when The New York Times reported that an individual based in Nigeria with a Naussany-associated email address contacted them and took credit for it.
China is selling more weapons in Africa. They are cheaper and come with ready made financing:
They are signing deals with an increasingly diverse list of clients, from historic friends to would-be buddies, keen to be kitted out with Chinese weaponry. Among the weapons China has delivered are warships to Djibouti and Mauritania and drones to Nigeria and Congo, according to a database maintained by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (sipri), a think-tank. It found that no fewer than 21 countries in sub-Saharan Africa took major deliveries of Chinese arms between 2019 and 2023. Perhaps seven in ten African armies now field armoured vehicles that are, like so many other products, made in China, reckons Janes, a publishing company specialising in defence.
[…]
Western officials are worried. General Michael Langley, who heads America’s Africa Command, warned Congress last year that delays in approving American arms sales were pushing west African governments to turn to China, which is offering not just weapons. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has pledged more joint exercises and involvement in security problems. Officers from 50 countries in Africa take military-education courses offered by China. Among graduates of these courses are eight defence ministers and ten defence chiefs. (Nigeria’s General Musa is a graduate of both America’s Army War College and China’s National Defence University.)
The American football star who nearly died after catching malaria on a charity trip to Nigeria last year is now doing ok:
New England Patriots star Calvin Anderson has returned to the Boston hospital that saved his life after he suffered a near-fatal bout of malaria last year.
The 28-year-old and his wife Sheree visited Nigeria on a charitable trip during last year's offseason.
Anderson contracted the disease while visiting but it was only after returning to Massachusetts that his symptoms began to show.
A thermometer showed his temperature to be an extremely dangerous 104.5 degrees, and his wife forced him to go to the hospital.
I suppose this can be counted as a happy ending to the story:
A woman who was catfished by a scammer pretending to be Gary Barlow has now met the real singer, after he saw her story and reached out to help.
Janet Smith, 62, from Colchester, Essex, genuinely believed she was talking to the Take That singer for about a week after she added him as a friend on Facebook.
The fake Barlow bombarded the pizza restaurant worker with compliments and messages and said he had 'split up', which Janet took to mean from his wife.
But when he started asking Janet for money, she grew suspicious and convinced the scammer to reveal their true identity.
The cheat was unmasked as a 24-year-old man from Nigeria. He told Janet he was sorry for lying to her, but said he really did love her and praised her dancing in videos.
After hearing about what had happened, the real Gary Barlow invited Janet to Take That's Carrow Road gig in Norwich on May 28.
You may have seen the video of her husband, a Nigerian senator, thanking his colleagues in the Nigerian Senate for turning up for his wife at her swearing in:
Nigerian-born Abigail Marshall Katung pledged to tackle inequality as first citizen of Leeds at the council’s annual general meeting.
Coun Marshall Katung has taken over from Al Garthwaite as Lord Mayor and will act as an ambassador for the city over the next 12 months.
People from her country of birth travelled to the city for the ceremony at Leeds Civic Hall.
Well done on 50! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽