Below The Headlines - 55
Below The Headlines - 55
To avoid disappearing, stop answering phone calls and Sabitu Adams' multiple streams of income
Here’s another week of Nigerian stories from around the world. Hope you enjoy!
Inside Nigeria
The Sani Abacha Stadium in Kano has now become a drug dealing haven. Are hisbah aware of this?
Daddy and some youths have claimed a corner within the urban area of Kano, a small enclave amidst chaos, where they gather to escape reality. This corner is in the slummy part of Yakasai, a community tucked between Kofar Mata and Kofar Nasarawa in Kano Municipal Local Government Area of the state.
At their black spot, the air was pungent with the mingling smoky flavour of weed and cigarettes—an aroma that acts as a beacon for like-minded souls. The scent has become synonymous with the area, making it a signature perfume that marks the territory as much as debris and dried faeces.
It was here that this reporter met Daddy, a 23-year-old who indulges in the use of numerous substances like Taba or Wee-wee (a local name for cannabis), different pills, and codeine cough syrup.
Despite enjoying a private education up to secondary school, Daddy said his fascination with the hostile local environment while growing up influenced his first use of substance at the age of nine. “We grew up amidst youths constantly fighting with knives and machetes,” he recounted.
While he puffed out a mouthful of smoke from the wrapped cannabis dangling from one hand, he held a grip to a bottle of codeine in the other hand. Daddy had enjoyed a modest living from his parents, but said the rebellious lifestyle of many youths in Yakasai had robbed off on him, pushing him to begin experimenting with classroom chalk at a young age. Over time, he visited ‘joints’ to collect and smoke remnants. “But now, I buy it with my money,” he said.
In case you missed this insane story last week on Nigerian social media:
The Lagos State Government, through the Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency, on Thursday, charged a popular online influencer, Suraj Oyewale, known as #SirJarus, to court for allegedly assaulting his wife.
The DSVA announced that #SirJarus had been arraigned before the Ogba Magistrate Court 5 on two counts: one for alleged assault against his wife, and another for conduct likely to cause a breach of peace.
The DVCA’s post on the X.com platform read: “Surajudeen Oyetunji Oyewole (@SirJarus) has been charged to Court, (Court 5, Ogba Magistrate Court) on Two Counts.
We in Ondo continue to be proud of our innovative son, Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, first class PhD:
Ibrahim mentioned that he was aware of the number of guns around him as he spoke, which he estimated at 277. He attributed this to the national assembly being located within the Three Arms Zone, where an armory is stationed at Aso Rock.
“For intelligence purposes, the army should have devices on their phones to locate these criminals,” he suggested. “As I sit here, I regularly check my phone and know the number of guns nearby. There are over 277 guns.”
Spaghetti is cheaper than noodles so you know what that means for consumers and sellers in Nigeria:
Mr. George Uweni, a manager of a supermarket, said: “The last time we stocked noodles, we nearly ran into a loss.
“We recorded no sales in a week. It was surprising.
“All the customers were purchasing spaghetti and macaroni, whose sales were higher than we had ever recorded in the four years I have been here.
“When I inquired from the sales representative of the store, she told me, people were not comfortable with the price and quantity of noodles whose 70-gram size can hardly fill a toddler.
“Immediately the stocked ones finished, we stopped buying noodles for sale.
“We are still monitoring the market to see if we can start selling again.”
Mr. Cornelius Maduka, a businessman, was surprised when he visited four stores to purchase noodles but was told they don’t sell it.
“Few weeks ago, I visited a market in my area to buy noodles for my kids. We have stopped buying noodles since a carton of 70 gram noodles was sold for N9,000.
“But my kids were disturbing me that week and I decided to get half a carton.
“I entered up to four stores in the market but couldn’t get noodles because the owners stopped selling due to the high cost and low patronage.
“They were persuading me to buy spaghetti, noting that that was what people consume now.
“I left the market without noodles that day.
Incredible things are happening in Abia:
A young man aged 34 years, Mr Onyekachi Kingsley Ugochukwu, has been declared missing by his family in Isiala Akpaa Amaiyi village, Osisioma Ngwa LGA of Abia State.
Ugochukwu, who is said to be fair in complexion, was said to have disappeared without trace after allegedly answering phone calls from an undisclosed person.
According to Onyekachi Alfred Ahuama, the father of the missing person, Ugochukwu was last seen on June 24 at about 5:PM when he picked a phone call from someone and has not been seen again.
It’s not difficult to see why many people might choose to cooperate with terrorists in Nigeria’s north. It is often the lesser evil:
More than two months after motorcycle-riding terrorists burnt down villages in the Isa area of Sokoto, North West Nigeria, several residents are still waiting to return home.
In April, the terrorists raided many rural communities in the area, including Gidan Sale, Girnashe, Kuka Tara, Tozai, and Tubali, in retaliation for being reported to security forces.
A recent report by HumAngle documented the devastation caused by the assault. The report revealed how the terrorists razed more than half of the settlements in the region, leaving hundreds of locals displaced and their food storage destroyed. Many of those displaced, including women and children, are now forced to seek shelter in public facilities like the Mai Tandu Model Primary School in the main town.
Lucky for some I guess:
To mark the first anniversary of President Bola Tinubu’s administration, the Ministry of Youth Development invited at least 50 youths from across Nigeria’s 36 states to the presidential villa. This venture cost the ministry N20 million, paid in violation of the financial regulations, FIJ has gathered.
Tinubu assumed office on May 29, 2023, and immediately began policy changes he claimed would save the country some money. “Fuel subsidy is gone,” he said during his inauguration, immediately increasing the cost of living and dividing expert opinions.
One year after taking the reins, the presidency organised a celebratory event at the villa to mark the milestone. As part of preparations, the Jamila Ibrahim-led youth ministry shelled out N20 million to invite youths to attend.
Ibrahim’s ministry made N10 million payments twice to one Dahiru Jibril on May 25, 2024, for the same purpose. Each payment, FIJ found on the Govspend portal, has a different payment number.
Outside Nigeria
Real London OGs have been Lolak patrons for decades. Glad to see them getting mainstream recognition now:
You’ll find Lolak Afrique only a few minutes walk away from the station. Having opened in 1996, it’s one of Peckham’s longest standing Nigerian restaurants. Halima, widely known as Mama Lolak, is the proud owner, serving popular Nigerian dishes with the help of her family.
‘Where I come from, Nigeria, our meals are just so delicious,’ says Adekunle, operations manager at Lolak Afrique. ‘A very popular one is Abula. We serve it here everyday and people just love it. Being able to serve that to anyone who walks through the door just shows the influence behind these meals. They get to experience Nigeria here in London.’
Abula is a mixture of three different stews. First, there’s gbegiri, made from brown beans, crayfish, palm oil, locust beans, and salt and pepper. The second stew is ewedu, made from jute leaves with added seasonings, cooked in just under fifteen minutes. The third and final stew is a red pepper dish made with a meat of your choice. It’s all served with the staple ‘swallow’ dish, amala: brown and maze-like, made from pure yam flour.
The recent suicide bombings in Nigeria did not seem to get much local coverage at all:
At least 18 people were killed and 30 more injured in co-ordinated attacks by suspected female suicide bombers in Nigeria, local authorities said.
The first suspect detonated an explosive device during a marriage celebration in the north-eastern Nigerian town of Gwoza on Saturday.
Minutes later, another explosion went off near a hospital and then a third attack took place at a funeral service.
The suspect at the funeral service was dressed as a mourner, according to the state emergency agency.
Children and pregnant women were among those killed and 19 of those injured are seriously hurt.
What would happen if Nigeria was the ground zero for an alien invasion? Tade Thompson’s novel tries to imagine that:
Inspiration aside, Rosewater subverts the expectations of invasion narratives and what the cost of survival for humanity might be, while at the same time being a story about people, not technology or fantastical set pieces.
The premise? Nigeria as ground zero in an alien invasion. Our main character, Kaaro, gets powers from the aliens, but people like him are dying. Why? How to stop this? The answer has consequences for humanity.
It’s a Trojan horse story where the wooden horse is universal healthcare and unlimited power supply; at the same time, it’s a story of alien invasion as a slow, unrecognised pandemic. I’m a doctor, and I can’t help thinking in pestilential modes.
I harkened back to the symbolism of empire in H. G. Wells, but I didn’t think aliens would come in ships or utilise tripods. Space travel is expensive. What would we have that would make it worth the travel for extraterrestrials?
Traditional midwives are alive and well in Lagos and they still use rat soup:
Afterwards they are ready to see Ronke Oje, the founder of the medicine clinic. She takes their pulse, asks about headaches, sleep and eating routines, checks the foetuses’ heartbeats, and provides personalised blends of herbs and seeds.
Later, when the women are ready to give birth, she will give them palm oil or fermented seaweed water to speed the delivery process; if a woman is bleeding more than usual she will insert a mixture of powdered snail shells and lime juice into the vagina to stop it.
In extreme cases she will “bewitch the flow” by boiling a sample of the patient’s blood on a stove in the clinic’s kitchen until it dries out.
Oje is a traditional birth attendant (TBA), or midwife, known locally as lya abiye in Yoruba, meaning “mother and child are alive”. She is one of thousands of such attendants in Lagos state and has been helping women in Mushin, one of the poorest districts in Lagos, get pregnant and deliver babies for 26 years.
If you want to take the ‘Yoruba smell’ with you anywhere you go around the world, Ope Dina has built a fragrance business just for you:
“I stopped carrying candles quickly when I realized they were a fire hazard,” she tells Travel Noire jokingly. “[The more I traveled], I realized hotels and larger residential buildings with lobbies used the cold diffuser technology.”
However, many manufacturers didn’t sell the technology small enough for apartments and hotel rooms. Dina had to do some deep digging and eventually found something suitable for smaller spaces just in time. She had to move back home to the UK quickly during the pandemic.
It was no surprise that her essential oils were the first items in her luggage. As chaos ensued throughout the world, her scents calmed her.
“I was happy to take my scents with me and make that space home,” she says. “I was able to settle quickly and experience the feeling of ‘home.'”
Exploring the world is no doubt exciting and invigorating, but there is also comfort with familiarity, like those times when relaxing at home. Dina is making sure people have access to that feeling through Kathari.
She launched two different products that are easy to pack. The fragrance nebulizer is a waterless, cold-day fusion machine. It also serves as an eye-catching piece in your home, Airbnb, or even the comforts of your hotel room.
“This brings the technology hotels use to scent their space consistently into your home,” Dina says. Meanwhile, her essential oils pay homage to her foundation as a Yoruba woman from Nigeria.
As dangerous as crossing the Mediterranean into Europe is, it is not even the most perilous part of the migrant journey:
The United Nations and partners say more migrants and refugees in Africa are heading northward toward the Mediterranean and Europe, crossing perilous routes in the Sahara where criminal gangs subject them to enslavement, organ removal, rape, kidnapping for ransom and other abuses.
A report released Friday by the U.N. refugee and migration agencies and the Mixed Migration Centre research group estimated that land routes in Africa are twice as deadly as the sea lanes across the Mediterranean - which is the deadliest maritime route for migrants in the world.
The report said new conflict and instability in countries including Mali, Burkina Faso and Sudan have been behind a rise in the number of journeys toward the Mediterranean. But Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Guinea were the top countries of origin of migrants.
Team Nigeria will be dressed by Actively Black - a small black owned company based in the US - at the Olympics:
The fashion game at the Summer Olympics continues to heat up. The latest competitor to step forward: Team Nigeria, which will be dressed for the opening ceremony, the closing ceremony, the podium, the Olympic Village and the track and field competition by Actively Black, a small label in Los Angeles founded by Lanny Smith, a former professional basketball player, in 2020.
For Actively Black, a company with only three employees, that’s the equivalent of getting a gold medal before the Games have even begun.
“To see a Black-owned brand on the same global stage as Nike and Lululemon and Adidas, it makes everyone start to look at us differently,” Mr. Smith said via video from his office in Los Angeles just before the looks were unveiled. “It’s a major moment for us.”
The partnership with Nigeria puts Actively Black in a whole new fashion league, one that does not involve just sports brands, but also the high-fashion names dressing their countries for the opening ceremony, like Berluti (the LVMH brand outfitting Team France), Giorgio Armani (Italy), Ben Sherman (Britain) and Ralph Lauren (the United States).
Let us visit the world of people who eat hot dogs as a competition:
First, the body. Every one of these eaters is trying to do two things: expand stomach capacity and improve technique. Gideon Oji, 32, a former college basketball player from Nigeria who by day is a management trainee at Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Atlanta, runs “six or seven” miles a day in training — for “endurance,” he said, adding that he performs best when he’s leanest.
“It’s a lot of sacrifice for what we love,” said Mr. Oji, who devoured 35 hot dogs at this year’s Nathan’s qualifier in Times Square, and holds the world record in kale (22½ 16-ounce kale salads at Kale Yeah! — The World’s Healthiest Eating Championship, in 2017).
Hate to be a party pooper but it looks like someone is about to incinerate capital chasing ephemera in the Nigerian market:
Nigeria’s food delivery start-ups are attracting attention from international investors optimistic about the growing demand in Africa’s most populous nation for restaurant fare at home even as soaring food inflation bites.Homegrown industry leaders Chowdeck, FoodCourt and Heyfood, each backed by start-up incubator Y Combinator, as well as Spain’s Glovo, are jostling to grab market share and cater to a population whose average family spends about 60 per cent of their income on food. The market in Nigeria is expected to more than double to $2.4bn over the next eight years, with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 11 per cent, market research group IMARC estimates in a report. “Africa has huge potential,” Glovo co-founder Sacha Michaud told the Financial Times. “We’re seeing the rapid growth of our business across Africa and above all Nigeria,” helped by better internet speed and reach.
Two-year-old Chowdeck in April unveiled $2.5mn in seed funding from investors including California-based Y Combinator, a backer of Instacart and DoorDash, and the co-founders of Bogotá-based Rappi, the largest online delivery platform in Latin America.
Review of Samuel Kolawole’s new novel about migration:
Countless Christian songs exalt the ableness of God, but the tune that makes up my childhood soundtrack is the one my mother, a gospel guitarist, would sing when her faith hit the rockiest of shores: “If you’ve tried everything and everything failed …You know God is able … try Jesus.”
Her melodies floated back to me as I read Samuel Kọ́láwọlé’s debut novel “The Road to the Salt Sea,” which follows the story of Able God, an ambitious Nigerian man disillusioned with his stagnant life. He gets drawn into a crime that sends him into the clutches of a charismatic religious leader promising impoverished Lagos residents better-paying jobs in Italy. As Able God and his fellow migrants embark on this journey, there is a foreboding sense that what lies ahead might be even more treacherous than the realities they’re leaving behind. This harrowing migration story wrestles with themes of family pressure, personal ambition, modern-day slavery, religion and that ever-prevailing Western insistence on positive manifestation — a self-help philosophy that can feel disconnected from the horrors of war and other calamities.
Completely unprovoked, the FIFA website decided to do a throwback to Nigeria’s pain. I believe Nigeria should now seriously consider a military invasion of FIFA:
FIFA looks back on Roberto Baggio's masterful brace against Nigeria and its tournament-changing implications.
Roberto Baggio recorded a heroic brace against Nigeria 30 years ago today
The Italian had previously struggled at USA 1994
He went on to inspire his nation to the final
For more than an hour of their last-16 clash with Nigeria, Italy were crashing out of the 1994 FIFA World Cup™. The Azzurri, who had seized bronze on home soil four years earlier and still boasted Franco Baresi and Daniele Massaro from their victorious Spain ‘82 side, had failed to live up to the considerable hype in the States.
Kano may be Nigeria’s ‘divorce capital’ but Mahmud and Rabiatu have been married for 50 years:
A couple who live in Nigeria’s “divorce capital” are being hailed for their long marriage having recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
Mahmud Kabir Yusuf and Rabiatu Tahir spoke to the BBC about the secrets of their happiness, and about why so many marriages fail in the northern city of Kano, in a video that has generated much comment.
Mr Yusuf puts it down to his wife’s generous nature.
“She is a very unselfish person and she overlooks a lot which has contributed to the success of our marriage,” the 76-year-old told BBC Hausa.
This prompts a smile from Ms Tahir, who is in her late sixties. Together the couple have had 13 children - and she praised her husband’s ability to remain calm in the face of the difficulties all families confront.
“He is a very patient man and I feel that was also key to our success,” she said.
The pair say they love and respect each other - and they clearly enjoy each other’s company, breaking off to laugh several times during the interview.
For Hassana Mahmud, it is a revelation. The 39-year-old divorcee has been married five times and is impressed by the couple and their evident contentment.
"In all my marriages I have only spent four years with a spouse - so to see them on social media celebrating this milestone was refreshing,” she said.
“My husbands were all nice and caring during courtship but changed after the wedding," said the mother of four.
Sabitu Adams has really taken the multiple streams of income mantra to heart:
Sabitu Adams, whose name we have changed to protect his identity, has not resigned from his position as a junior official at a government agency and still gets paid each month, despite leaving Nigeria two years ago.
He now works as a taxi driver in the UK, but told the BBC that he was not worried about losing the salary as he sees Mr Tinubu’s comments as an empty threat.
Mr Adams added that the loss of his monthly Nigerian salary of 150,000 naira ($100; £80) would not be a great hardship, as he earns a lot more driving a taxi.
“When I heard about the president's directive, I smiled because I know I am doing better here - and not worried,” the 36-year-old said.
But why not make it clear to the civil service that he had left?
“To be honest I didn’t resign because I wanted to leave that door open in case I choose to go back to my job after a few years.”