Below The Headlines - 96
Is it time for Ram Futures? And the unfortunate shark who swam to Nigeria and turned to meat
Thank you for your continued support in reading our pieces and newsletter. We take nothing for granted. And thank you very much to those who have taken out a paid subscription with us. We hope to continue to bring you even more useful content. Watch out for our next podcast dropping on Wednesday morning. I won’t spoil it for you but all I will say is there is plantain involved.
This week I wrote about the viral video of Amoke Oge who crossed 500,000 sales on the food delivery platform, Chowdeck. Tobi wrote about designing a better financial system for Nigeria. It’s a long read so we also included an AI generated podcast version. Feedback welcome!
Enjoy the usual selection below.
Inside Nigeria
A story as old as time in Nigeria - Sallah approaches, ram prices soar. Someone might say this kind of market is ripe for a ram price futures market:
Adewale, a commercial driver in Lagos, said he opted for a goat this year instead of a ram.
“Last year, I bought a medium-sized ram for N120,000. That same size now costs nearly N250,000. There’s no way I can afford that. I’ve told my children we’ll buy a goat this year. God knows our intention,” he said.
Zainab Yusuf, a 35-year-old provision seller in Agege, said she also would forgo ram this year.
“Usually, I start saving from Ramadan so I can at least buy a small ram for the kids. But this year, everything scattered. Shop rent increased, prices of goods doubled, and sales aren’t moving,” she lamented.
“I priced a ram last week at Agege market—N220,000 for one I could’ve bought for N100,000 last year. I just smiled and left. I’ll buy a turkey or two big chickens, cook well, invite family over, and still celebrate. Sallah isn’t only about rams—it’s about sacrifice, prayer and gratitude.”
An amazing story:
Taraba State Governor, Kefas Agbu, has revealed the true circumstances surrounding the death of his sister, Atsi Kefas, in 2024.
While it was initially believed she was killed by bandits on the Wukari-Chinkai Road, Agbu, while speaking with journalists in Jalingo, the state capital, on Friday, said that investigations show she was shot by a police escort assigned to his mother.
The incident occurred while Atsi was traveling with their mother from Jalingo to Abuja.
“Life is very precious to me. You can’t just end someone’s life and think God will be happy with you. My younger sister was shot and killed by a police escort who was inside the same bus with her.
“Investigation revealed that my sister Atsi was shot at close range. The policeman is still under investigation so that justice should prevail,” he said.
Kefas also confirmed that pellets from the firearm were found in Atsi’s body during surgery before she eventually died from the injuries.
Public infrastructure watch:
In a significant breakthrough in the fight against vandalism, the Sokoto State Police Command has arrested a suspect and recovered a large quantity of stolen aluminium conductor wires during a late-night patrol in Gada Local Government Area.
A statement made available to newsmen on Friday by the spokesman of the command, DSP Ahmed Rufai, said the arrest was made on the night of 26th May 2025, at approximately 10:00 p.m., when officers from the Gada Police Division intercepted a suspicious Golf vehicle during a routine patrol.
A search of the vehicle revealed a cache of vandalised aluminium conductor wires believed to have been stolen from public infrastructure. The driver, identified as 45-year-old Bello Namakkah of Illela town, was immediately taken into custody. Upon interrogation, Namakkah reportedly confessed to collaborating with one Abu Sabo, also of Illela, in the theft and vandalism operation.
Namakkah has been formally charged with criminal conspiracy, mischief, and theft. Meanwhile, the police have launched a manhunt for his accomplice, who remains at large.
One of the ways Boko Haram funds its operations is through an illegal wild life trade. Very interesting report:
Under a tea seller’s makeshift shade in the Molai community in Borno State, North East Nigeria, three men sat closely together in mid-December of 2024, dressed like herders—jackets pulled over faded kaftans, straw hats over turbans, and herding sticks resting beside each. They looked to be in their late 20s, conversing calmly. Suddenly, one of them, who had been carefully observing the horizon, rose and attempted to dash.
Just then, armed men of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) and the Nigeria Forest Security Services (NFSS) emerged from behind market stalls and nabbed them. A slightly blood-stained sack lay beside them. They had come, covertly, to trade poached wild animals, Saddam Mustapha*, an officer of the NFSS, said. The three men were from Kawuri, a village in the Konduga Local Government Area (LGA) of the state and close to the Sambisa Forest. The team had earlier received intel about this and lay in an ambush that morning.
However, it was not the illegal wildlife trade that triggered the arrest. Molai, after all, has become an open market for bushmeat. The men were suspected middlemen of the Boko Haram terror group, Saddam said, and had come to help sell these animals for the terrorists. Before further questions could be asked, Saddam recalls, military men of the team blindfolded and took them to the Maimalari military facility in the state. Efforts to get comments from the Theatre Command’s Headquarters, Operation Hadin Kai, in Maiduguri were unsuccessful.
In the days that followed, whispers of the arrest swept through Molai. Many were puzzled—everyone knew the men had come to sell warthogs, and as far as they knew, that was no crime.
But a few knew there was more to this bounty than just meat. Beneath the tough hide and coarse bristles lay something coveted: the curved ivory of the warthog. Dealers and traders, operating quietly and with discretion, collect them. Many hunters do not even understand why this is the case. But for those who do, these tusks are a poor man’s substitute for elephant ivory—smaller, yes, but similar enough in composition to fetch value in black markets.
There is just something very disturbing about this:
An angry mob on Wednesday beat a suspected female member of a ‘one-chance’ gang to a pulp in the Idogbo bypass area in Ikpoba Okha Local Government Area of Edo State.
DAILY POST gathered that the suspect belonged to a gang which specialized in robbing passengers in commercial buses.
Members of the one chance gang usually pose as passengers or drivers of commercial buses and taxis.
They are alleged to specialise in luring unsuspecting passengers to board their vehicle and thereby rob them of their belongings.
It was also gathered that the gang, however, ran out of luck when one of their victims at the Benin-Sapele road axis of the bypass, who identified the female suspect, raised the alarm.
The alarm was said to have drawn the attention of passersby and motorists who gave the suspects’ vehicle a hot chase.
An eyewitness who spoke on condition of anonymity said following the hot chase by the passersby and motorists, the gang abandoned their vehicle and fled in different directions.
The source, who said the gang abandoned their vehicle at the Idogbo bypass, added that a female suspect among them was promptly apprehended and beaten
to a pulp.
New party trick just dropped:
Certain that their little earnings cannot hold their families some average Nigerian households move into the towns, search for where parties are held, bribe the gate keepers and guest tenders alike, to feed themselves and even get packed remnants to serve them for the next day
This strategy according to those who spoke to Economy&Lifestyle work, because both the gatekeepers and guest tenders also suffer same fate. They have very lean and strained pockets.
An eye witness account, Mrs Alade Shodimu, shocked beyond marrows at the new development, said: “I find it difficult to describe what I witness in some parties today. I don’t know whether to put it on the bad economy or on the decayed moral fabrics. The situation where a woman leaves her house, goes to a party venue, bribe the men at the gate to enter the ceremony and also pay the food bearers to get take-away packs of food, defies sound principles; but it now happens regularly”.
Continuing, Shodimu, a lace fabrics merchant in Lagos Island, narrated: “I attended the child dedication ceremony of one of my customers recently in Ikeja. At first, I was shocked that my customer whom I knew to be flamboyant, only had a few guests and access to the venue was restricted to only those with invitation cards.
“However, little did I know a few Naira notes could ice cold gate keepers until a somewhat elegantly dressed woman behind me, opened her purse on approaching them and parted with a few rusty notes and they gave way.
“Seated not far from the woman, I observed her dressing was cheap though she appeared elegant.
“But what shocked me most was when she beckoned on one of the party tenders, whispered into her ears and parted with another set of rusty notes. Just, a little while, after, the tender came with her food and even packed a take-away which the woman grabbed and went away.
“Meanwhile, my customer had earlier muttered to me, she did not invite the woman, and wondered how she accessed the party” she added.
Outside Nigeria
An article about a mother in Borno state Nigeria who lost her son due to USAID cuts to a clinic nearby. You will not find a more ironic paragraph than this:
More than 80% of foreign aid contracts were canceled but Babagana's clinic was allowed to resume operations on April 14, after the review was complete and the funding restarted.
But that was more than two months after Mohammed's visit on that February morning. She remembers standing outside the closed clinic with Babagana. "I was shocked and became angry," she told NPR by phone on May 23. She spoke in Kanuri, a local language in Nigeria. "Immediately, I prayed for God to intervene."
That night, Babagana died.
Mohammed says Babagana's care at the U.S.-funded clinic had been free and she didn't have money to take him to the local government clinic, which charges for medical care.
Jimi Famurewa has a new book coming out:
If you want to understand my youthful fussiness around food — how I negotiated the rocky path from fearful avoidance towards eager, plate-licking gourmandism — then you really need to know about the jollof rice incident. It was 1995 and I was in my first year at secondary school in Bexleyheath: a scrawny, bomber jacketed British-Nigerian kid in the early throes of a thrilling, terrifying new life amid the Lynx-wafted halls of a giant comprehensive on the suburban rim of southeast London.
As I remember it, my tutor group and I were standing in a ragged line waiting to go into a classroom. That was when a girl I’ll call Sabrina — already established as the prime motor-mouthed tormentor of most of Year 7 — turned to me with a mischievous sneer. “Is it true,” she said, raising her voice so everyone could hear, “that Africans eat bright orange rice?” She made a comically repulsed face and the other kids turned to me, like a rapt courtroom during a cross-examination.
I thought of the richly spiced, glossy hillocks of my mum’s jollof rice that I would greedily put away at least once a week. I thought of the cool boxes at our family parties, packed with mounds of the stuff — so bright it practically glowed like the MacGuffin briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Then I thought of the overriding adolescent imperative (especially acute in the children of immigrants) to try to fit in at all costs. “Uh, w-what?” I stammered, unconvincingly. “What? No, of course we don’t!” Hurriedly selling out my culinary heritage in order to distance myself from that which was “foreign” or “weird” seemed, in that instance, like a completely fair trade.
This formative childhood moment alights on one of the central tensions of my new book Picky — a memoir on food and identity that charts how I went from a vegetable-averse, determinedly unadventurous eater to an award-winning restaurant critic and MasterChef regular. Despite the fact that I was among a minority of students of colour in a majority white school, this was one of the only occasions I was directly bullied or targeted because of Nigerian cuisine’s supposed weirdness. There’s a complicating wrinkle, too: although she was of Caribbean heritage rather than Nigerian, Sabrina was also black. But that jollof rice incident is instructive — not only because it gives a sense of the pervading atmosphere of that era, particularly in my corner of suburbia — but also because of the lasting effect it had on me.
Another record from the Guinness Book of World Records:
A Nigerian researcher at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a prototype for a GPS tracking device that’s just 22.93 mm x 11.92 mm (0.90 x 0.46 in) – tinier than a thumbprint.
The invention has excited STEM lovers around the world, as its functionality is applicable to small and large scale systems, from medical microchips, to animal tracking monitors, and for everyday use.
Now, its creator has been awarded with a Guinness World Records title for smallest GPS tracking device (prototype) – and his record-setting work was praised by the President of Nigeria for showing the world that “Nigerian youth can!”
Oluwatobi “Tobi” Oyinlola (Nigeria) has been experimenting with science for two decades – as a young student in Nigeria, he first fell in love with technology around age 13, when his secondary school got a fully equipped computer lab thanks to a donation from alumnus and engineer Seyi Makinde. It was the first time Tobi ever laid hands on a computer.
“From the moment I booted it up, I was absolutely captivated,” he told Guinness World Records. “I remember spending hours after class tinkering with basic programs and exploring every part of the system just to understand how it all worked.
“That early exposure ignited an endless curiosity in me and set me on the path that led to where I am today.”
Funny story from Georgia, USA:
The issue of international travel is back in the headlines in the city of South Fulton.
The council approved a trip to Nigeria this week for one of the council members under its new international travel policy.
That policy was put in place after the current mayor spent $26,000 in travel to Paris, Ghana Rwanda and Columbia over the last two years.
Williams Brown proposed she participate in an week-long international trip to Nigeria in August.
The invitation came from Fulton County chairman Robb Pitts and will likely cost South Fulton taxpayers an estimated $5.
The trip passed by a vote of 5-2, so council member Williams Brown will be packing her bags soon.
As part of the new international travel policy, Councilwoman Williams Brown will be require to submit a detailed written report that includes the trips benefits for the city of South Fulton.
"We are looking to continue the work that has begun. There is an existing MOU with Nigeria, and we are continuing to pursue these types of activities to bring not just the city of softball into the world, but between the world to the city of South Fulton," South Fulton City Council woman Natasha Williams Brown explained.
"The airfare is looking to be about $3,000, if I am able to book this in the morning," the district 6 council woman said during Tuesday night's meeting.
Meet Jude Okeleke:
It’s been three years since Taft football’s junior defensive tackle Jude Okeleke has been home to Nigeria, but as much as he misses his family, he has no plans to return anytime soon.
“We have work to do here,” he said. “For me the standard is the standard. I came here to win a championship and to become a better football player. I just am going to do what I have to do to achieve it. Just work.”
From Okeleke’s perspective, he didn’t live up to his standard last season. He played well enough to earn approximately 15 scholarship offers already, but as impressive as that is, the 6-foot-2, 290-pound tackle expects more out of himself after leaving his family to pursue a dream more than 5,000 miles from home.
A nonprofit organization called Gridiron Imports that helps international players find football opportunities in the U.S. provided him with contact information for potential high schools and prep schools four years ago, and he reached out to them via email and texts.
Taft School coach Tyler Whitley was skeptical at first, because Okeleke’s football background was limited mostly to weight training and one-on-one drills in football pads with his older brother and a few friends at a small club. They also did ladder agility drills and flipped massive tires end over end to develop strength. As for film work, they simply watched games on YouTube.
Intrigued by the strength he saw on workout video clips Okeleke sent him, Whitley kept in contact and checked with Gridiron Imports, which had connected Taft with German and Scandinavian players in the past.
Director Chris Adamson confirmed that Okeleke was the real deal with tremendous upside based on his strength and agility alone, so Taft took a chance.
The Economist on Afrobeats and the diaspora:
IN 2023 ODUMODUBLVCK, a Nigerian rapper and singer, put out his first single. Called “Declan Rice” after an English footballer, the track saw a fresh surge in streams in April when Mr Rice scored two free kicks for Arsenal in a tense match against Real Madrid. On the record the artist, brought up in Abuja as Tochukwu Ojugwu, layers Pidgin English on a drill track to liken Mr Rice’s game-changing star power to his own. Since its release he has signed with Native Records, a Nigerian label based in Britain, and has put out a mixtape featuring an Italian rapper that has proved popular from Britain to Qatar.
Living and working across the world, Odumodublvck typifies a new generation of African musicians who in recent years have won global awards, topped international charts and rocked stages from India to Brazil. Spotify, a streaming platform, found that streams of what is referred to as Afrobeats increased more than six-fold between 2017 and 2022, and by 33% in 2024 alone. As African music has spread around the world, it has also acquired more varied influences and a more diverse sound, partly thanks to its changing audience. Afrobeats now refers to a range of styles that is hard to capture in a single word, changing the business.
The popularity of African music is not new. African acts from King Sunny Ade, a Nigerian juju singer, to Amadou & Mariam, a Malian blues duo, have played on festival stages in America and Britain since the 1970s. But as diasporas have grown, some African artists now perform abroad more often than at home. Yoruba slang and Zulu call-and-response loops echo from London’s O2 arena to New York’s Madison Square Garden. This summer Rema, one of the world’s most streamed African artists, will headline Japan’s first-ever Afrobeats festival, performing alongside Ghanaian, South African and Jamaican acts.
[…]
Artists earn more from streams in richer countries than in poorer ones. Spotify says this is because royalties are proportional to subscription prices which, based on the currencies’ purchasing powers, vary widely across countries. A premium subscription costs around $2 a month in Ghana, but $17 in Switzerland. The financial benefits of producing music that does well in the West can sway artistic choices made in the studios, sometimes to the detriment of an artist’s identity. “The songs were not picked by me, I wasn’t in the right place,” Davido, a Nigerian-American singer, later recalled of a collaboration with Sony.
Magic is getting popular again with young Nigerians:
“Looks like all the beatings I’ve dealt you with my belt haven’t done anything,” Caleb the Magician recalls his father saying when he caught him trying card tricks for the umpteenth time in his bedroom. “Next time, I’ll use my fists.”
This wasn’t an empty threat — it was a final warning. In Caleb’s devout Christian home in Benue State, Nigeria, magic wasn’t a hobby; it was blasphemy. Card tricks weren’t clever; they were corrupt. His father saw them not as art but as evidence of spiritual defilement — the kind that demanded cleansing, not coddling.
Caleb, 19 at the time, had been caught before. But it was this time, on Christmas Eve three years ago, that broke whatever thread of patience his father had left. Caleb had fallen asleep with a notebook of tricks beside him — notes scribbled in the margins, diagrams drawn like spells. His mother found it before dawn and quietly showed it to his dad. “He didn’t say anything at first,” Caleb says. “We finished morning devotion, then he asked for the book — and the belt.”
The first strike came quickly, then again. When the leather side failed to make a dent in Caleb’s resolve, his father flipped it. Metal buckle to skin.
Caleb remembers the sting, the cold metal slicing air before it kissed his head. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he says. “After, I grabbed the belt and said, ‘Daddy, it’s okay’ — tears free falling. He dropped it — then came his fists. He punched my back, my hands, then my lip. It burst open. My blood mixed with the saliva in my mouth. At some point I almost thought I had gone deaf.” To his father, it was an intervention to keep his child from the devil. To Caleb, it felt like an exorcism of imagined demons.
Caleb’s ordeal reflects the fraught and sometimes dangerous endeavor young Nigerian magicians are embarked on as they reclaim illusion from the shadows of fear and folklore. In Nigerian society, magic is often conflated with “jazz” — a euphemism for the mystical or malevolent — and Christian and Muslim orthodoxies both condemn it as a dangerous transgression. Though the Abrahamic faiths hold sway over most of the country, traditional folklore looms large, and it isn’t uncommon to find those who still believe people endowed with otherworldly powers can cast spells and wreak havoc in their lives. What might be celebrated elsewhere as entertaining theatrical artistry is mistaken for spiritual subversion.
News from Nottingham:
A convicted drug dealer’s deportation case is to be reheard after the Home Office wrongly accepted he had been a lawful UK resident for most of his life.
Olajiire Obafemi Shoyombo, a Nigerian national, was jailed for 40 months in 2023 after being convicted at Nottingham Crown Court of two offences involving the supply of heroin and crack cocaine.
He had argued he should be allowed to stay in the UK under the “private life exception”, which can apply to foreign nationals who have spent most of their life in Britain lawfully and would face “very significant obstacles” if returned to their home country.
His initial appeal on human rights grounds was allowed by a lower-tier tribunal but has since been referred back to them by the upper tribunal, which found the decision had been based on a “mistake as to fact”.
According to tribunal documents, Shoyombo was unlawfully in the UK for more than eight years after arriving on a visitor visa in 2005, when he was three years old.
A new comedy featuring a Nigerian lead is out in India:
Michael Okeke (Samuel Abiola Robinson) left Nigeria six years ago to make a home for himself in Delhi, but it hasn’t been easy. He still has to spell out his name – “It’s not OK OK. It’s Okeke”. That’s the least of his problems.
Racial slurs come his way from adults and children alike. He is even accused of cannibalism. Although he wants to be a marketing manager, he sells drugs to pay his bills – thereby fulfilling one of the stereotypes about his community.
His fortunes change when he meets Maansi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan), a self-declared spiritual guru. Michael’s survival comes to depend on a woman who claims that she can work miracles on infertile women.
Dibakar Das Roy’s Dilli Dark is ambitious and provocative, a comedy that is consciously in bad taste. Completed in 2023 and out only now, Dilli Dark applies the lack of luminosity contained in the title liberally and literally.
From exploring Michael’s encounters with prejudice to the darkness that is waiting to leap out at every turn, the 101-minute film squeezes its premise dry. A story that starts out by highlighting racism becomes a generalised diatribe about the city’s uglier side.
Das Roy’s screenplay fires over Michael’s shoulder at Delhi’s cruel attitude towards outsiders, the tendency of its residents to stereotype any experience they don’t understand, and the all-round coarseness of life in the capital.
Delhi’s well-recorded instances of treating people from African countries badly suggests that whatever is happening to Michael isn’t fictional.
A shark swam from Mozambique to Nigeria last year. How did it do it? An attempt to find out:
When Turawa Hakeem caught a bull shark near Lagos, Nigeria last summer, the Ghanaian captain had no idea his crew was reeling a record winner onto his wooden fishing boat.
The eight-foot-long female had made an epic journey of at least 4,500 miles, the longest known movement of its species and the first time a bull shark was documented swimming through two oceans. The shark traveled from the Mozambique Channel in the Indian Ocean, swam around the southern tip of Africa, and then voyaged north through the Atlantic to Nigeria, according to research published this month in Ecology.
“Wow, I was surprised,” says Hakeem. “I didn’t know they could travel that far.”
When his crew began butchering the shark to sell its meat at a local market, Hakeem found a black finger-length cylinder inside its body that read: ‘Research: Reward if returned.’ Curious, Hakeem emailed the address. He reached Ryan Daly, the paper’s lead author and a shark ecologist at the Oceanographic Research Institute, a marine science and service facility that leads research projects in the western Indian Ocean. He implanted the acoustic transmitter in the bull shark in South Africa in 2021.
Daly was equally shocked—and very skeptical at first. “I thought it might be a scam,” Daly admits. “The chances of this happening are like one in a million.”
This lucky catch is providing new insights into how bull sharks move and shows how climate change may break down the environmental barriers that historically limited the migration of certain ocean animals.
Update on this story we previously covered in BTH:
A nightclub security guard accused of raping a 19-year-old was not permitted to work in the UK and used false ID to get the job, a court has heard.
Morenikeji Adewole, 47, from Dartford, Kent, is on trial accused of raping the woman in his car near Heaven nightclub in central London in the early hours of November 1, 2024, which he denies.
He had been in the UK on a five year tourist visa that did not allow him to work in the country, Southwark Crown Court heard on Tuesday.
It also meant he could not stay for more than six months at a time and he returned to Nigeria when those stints were up, jurors were told.
The defendant had been employed at Heaven under the name Olusola Julius Alabi and gave a fake name to police when he was arrested following the alleged rape, the court heard.
He was charged for having a false Immigration Residence Permit Identity Card under the name of Olusola Julius Alabi and a false SIA (Security Industry Authority) card with the name O Alabi.
Officers discovered his real name through finger print evidence after his arrest, jurors were told.
Adewole previously pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of an identification document with improper intention.
Swiss Police recently killed a Nigerian father in Lausanne. His family are demanding justice. Article in French so will need google translate:
His name was Michael Kenechukwu Ekemezie. He was the father of a two year old boy and a two month old girl. He and his wife had just married. He was born on April 23, 1986 in Nigeria. And the police of Lausanne killed him on Sunday, May 25, 2025». It is in these terms that the collective Kiboko - Justice for Mike came back this Wednesday on the death of this Nigerian of 39 years in the premises of the police Lausanne sunday evening.
A death after a malaise following a muscular intervention for a supposed drug trafficking, according to the police, and which earned four officers to be sued by the court for suspicion of negligent homicide, according to the Vaud public prosecutor.
However, these four agents are still in service, denounces the collective. So even «that the testimonies accumulate and report the extreme violence of police intervention», he adds. According to the collective, Michael was part of Canopy, a group fighting on the themes of the right to housing and work, and for the regularization of undocumented migrants.
«History repeats itself, and with it the impunity of a racist and colonial police institution», denounces the collective. He notes that the drama took place a few meters from the place where Nigerian Mike Ben Peter was already killed, «in almost exact circumstances», in 2018.