Below The Headlines - 98
Tinubu economy is increasing gender equality and dogs are now eating Indomie
Hope you are all enjoying the summer months (I know it’s always ‘summer’ in Nigeria, but still).
This week I wrote a short parable about tall buildings and what they might be doing to kids who grow up around them or without them.
Our next podcast drops on Wednesday and it was a real privilege to record it. Keep your eyes out for it and also be sure to catch up on the last one before it goes behind a paywall after 30 days!
Enjoy the usual selection below
Inside Nigeria
We have previously covered the story of Abigail Katung, the wife of the Nigerian Senator who became the Lord Mayor of Leeds. But Nigerian elite gonna Nigerian elite and now she has forfeited a £1m home she bought due to an unbelievable level of anyhowness in she and her husband’s financial transactions when buying the house:
The UK High Court investigated the source of £360,000 originating from Nigeria with Mrs Katung explaining that due to the new government policies in 2015, she used the black market to transfer funds from Nigeria to England. She said some of the funds were sourced by her husband.
However, there are questions regarding the transfer process, and Mrs Katung did not disclose documentation to prove that the transaction was lawful.
In an oral interview, she told the court that her husband obtained a loan of N120 million from a Nigerian bank and then used a Bureau De Change Operator (BDCs) in Nigeria to exchange naira into pounds sterling and remit it to a Barclays bank account in the name of 1st Resource, a company owned by Mrs Katung.
Mrs Katung sent the court extracts from bank statements purportedly showing transfers her husband made to Bureau de Change operators in Nigeria, who then used agents in the UK to get the money to her via her company’s account of 1st Resource.
The judge held that the use of Mrs Katung’s company for the purpose of that transaction was improper but the Mayoress of Leeds maintained that she did that because it was easier to transfer from a company account than a personal account.
The court also found that the majority of payments made into the bank account of 1st Resource could not have been from UK agents of BDCs in Nigeria.
You cannot parody Nigerian government officials. Anyway prayers up:
The federal ministry of agriculture and food security has declared a three-day fasting and prayer programme for divine intervention in the country’s agricultural sector.
In an internal circular dated June 11 and seen by TheCable, Adedayo Modupe, the ministry’s director of human resource management, said the spiritual exercise is intended to seek God’s guidance for Nigeria’s food security efforts.
Modupe said all members of staff of the are expected to observe the fasting and be part of the prayer sessions.
“This is to invite all staff of the federal ministry of agriculture and food security to a solemn prayer session for God’s guidance and success in supporting the government’s efforts to achieve food security,” the circular reads.
“The theme of the session is ‘Divine Intervention for Protection and National Development’.
“The prayers will hold at Conference Hall ‘B’ of the FMAFS headquarters in Area 11, Garki, Abuja, from 12:00 p.m. to 12:30 p.m. on each scheduled date.”
According to the circular, staff are expected to come fasting on Monday, June 16, and continue on June 23 and June 30.
News from Katsina:
The Katsina State Police Command said it has uncovered a kidnapping syndicate involving a 14-year-old girl who conspired with three others to abduct her four-year-old sister and fake her own abduction to demand ransom.
Spokesperson for the command, Abubakar Sadiq, disclosed this on Wednesday while briefing journalists on the command’s activities for the month of May.
He said the incident was reported on February 20, 2025, by one Alhaji Badamasi Bala of Madaci Yan Nono Quarters, Katsina, who informed the police that his two daughters, aged 14 and 4, had been kidnapped.
The abductors demanded a ransom of ₦50 million for their release.
The very difficult Nigerian economy is leading to increased gender equality. Stay with me:
It may look hilarious to see a man in a local restaurant – buka, in local parlance, turning amala (a meal made from yam flour), in a big pot and, at the same time, scooping it into customers’ bowls and adding soup.
But today, that is a common sight, particularly in many suburbs around Lagos metropolis. It is the fallout of the economic hardship faced by many men who had lost their jobs due to many companies downsizing to stay afloat.
Yes, it is a different thing entirely for a man to be a professional chef, but another for a man to embrace cooking for survival.
Economy&Lifestyle discovered that men now embrace the trade of selling amala (a swallow food made from yam flour) in bukas for survival.
Nigerians are familiar with entering a buka and seeing a woman turning amala and, at same time, scooping portions in bowls for customers.
Now such a sight has the male folks incorporated.
Mr. Solomon Adeyanju, a former supervisor in a company had started running an amala business after being sacked from his place of work due to downsizing.
“I was devastated at first and worried about which company would want to employ me at my age.
“My wife and sister were the ones who encouraged me to start up an amala buka.
Staying with the theme of committing matters to God:
The Senator, representing Kogi West Senatorial District, Senator Sunday Karimi, has noted that plans are underway to organise the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and clerics under the Council of Ulaamau to organise a three-day fasting and prayer session that would help free the people of his district from the activities of these miscreants who are terrorising the area.
Senator Karimi, in a statement made available to journalists in Lokoja while reacting to the death of Major Pastor Joe Ajayi, rtd, who died in the hands of abductors, lamented that the whole of Kogi West is now under siege owing to the activities of criminal elements.
“The time for us to go spiritual in fighting these miscreants and kidnappers who have refused our people to breathe and live freely from the hands of the people is now. I’m putting machinery in motion to help organise and hold this spiritual intervention, because we are no longer safe to live our normal lives,” he said.
The ‘Canada returnee’ description cracked me up so much:
A Magistrate court sitting in Bolade, Oshodi, Lagos, on Friday, sentenced a 52-year-old Canada returnee, Mr Morufudeen Idowu, to three months imprisonment for crossing the Ojota Expressway, resisting arrest and assaulting a KAI officer in the process.
In a statement on Friday spokesperson for the Lagos State Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, Kunle Adeshina, said Idowu pleaded guilty when the charge was read to him, and was subsequently convicted for the offenses before he was sentenced.
Speaking in reaction to the conviction, the Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment and Water Resources, Mr Tokunbo Wahab, warned that the state will not tolerate any attack or acts of aggression towards any of its operatives on lawful duty.
I don’t know who these people are but the story seems important and interesting:
Biola Adebayo has addressed the backlash she has received over announcing her divorce on her ex-husband’s birthday.
On June 3, the actress revealed that she and her now ex-husband, Oluseyi Akinrinde, had been separated since April 2024, while also wishing him a happy birthday.
The announcement sparked criticism from some fans who accused Adebayo of deliberately sharing the news on his birthday to subject him to public backlash.
Reacting via a YouTube video, Adebayo revealed she decided to announce their divorce publicly to avoid “anyone else telling my story for me”.
She said people had already begun questioning why she stopped posting about her husband, which prompted her to clarify that they were no longer together.
Adebayo also noted that her ex-husband was informed before the announcement and emphasised that it was not meant to tarnish his image.
“About my divorce, I spoke out because I didn’t want anyone else telling my story for me, and that is just my style,” she said.
Outside Nigeria
Another story about sextortion which led to a young teen’s death:
Shannon Heacock told her 16-year-old son, Elijah, to go to bed early one night in February. There was a district basketball playoff the next day in their hometown of Glasgow, Ky.
Heacock coached the high-school cheer team. Elijah had made props and was planning to help her set up. At 10:24 that night, he texted her about getting coffee at the next day’s event.
An hour after Heacock silenced her phone and went to sleep, her daughter woke her up. Elijah had been found bleeding in the laundry room, from what turned out to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died the next morning.
In that hour, Elijah had exchanged more than 150 text messages on his iPhone with someone else: a criminal who was demanding $3,000. If Elijah didn’t send the money, this person said, he would share a nude image of the teen with his friends and family. Heacock said she believes the image was AI-generated.
[…]
Though locked, his phone displayed a text notification from a Florida area code. His father, Jim, put the phone’s SIM card into his own phone and reached out, soon learning it was a sextortion scam. Local police traced the crime to Nigeria. Two men associated with the case have been extradited to the U.S. and are awaiting sentencing, and a third man is awaiting extradition, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The elder Sullivan learned that Jack had paid the men $3,200 over the course of 15 hours, in $100, $200 and $500 increments. “They keep pushing until they get it all,” he said. “They break these kids.”
Elijah Heacock’s family learned that someone in Nigeria had first connected with their son on social media before moving to the Messages app, where the monetary demand began. Elijah sent $50 via Cash App but didn’t have more to give.
On the boom in luxury property in Nigeria and Africa. As a wise woman once said, it is very expensive to be rich in a poor country:
In the lagos edition of Monopoly, a board game, the priciest neighbourhood up for grabs in Nigeria’s commercial capital is Banana Island. The sand-filled annex in Ikoyi, a rich part of town, was created just two decades ago. It has since become some of Nigeria’s hottest property. To enter the enclave, non-residents need special security codes that change every hour. There are curfews for domestic staff and rules on loitering. Banana Island was supposed to have more reliable power than the rest of Lagos, too, though in practice it has not quite worked out that way . No matter. These days one square metre of land goes for almost $2,000, about the same price as in Camps Bay, a fancy suburb of Cape Town in South Africa. Despite a cost-of-living crisis, plots are selling fast.
The skylines of west Africa’s coastal cities are being reshaped by a surge in luxury property development. The changes offer an insight into how wealthy Africans are spending their money. They also show that the property sector is beginning to play a more important role in African economies, becoming a source of much-needed dollars.
Lagos is a particularly obvious case, perhaps because it sits on a small, densely populated peninsula where there is little choice but to build upwards. One property developer reckons that at least 600 flats that are worth $1m or more each are currently being built there, even though gdp per person is still just $800. Property contributed more than 16trn naira ($10bn) to Nigeria’s gdp in 2024, or 5.8%. That is almost as much as crude oil and natural-gas extraction, which accounted for 17trn naira ($10.7bn), or 6.2%, a remarkable feat in an economy that is still largely dependent on oil.
Update on this story we previously covered here at BTH (even though not a Nigerian story):
A teenager who was tricked into going to boarding school in Africa has won a significant legal victory against his own parents.
The 14-year-old boy, who cannot be identified, was taken from London to Ghana in March 2024 after being told a relative was ill.
In fact, his parents wanted to get him out of London as they feared he was being drawn into criminal activity.
Unhappy and homesick in Ghana, the boy found lawyers and brought a case against his parents to the High Court in London, which ruled against him in February. On Thursday, he won a Court of Appeal bid, so the case will be reheard.
The most senior judge in the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, said there had been confusion in the previous decision.
"We have become more and more concerned as to the exercise the judge undertook," he added.
"For those reasons - we are agreed remittal should be allowed."
He urged the family to find a solution through constructive dialogue.
At the hearing, the boy's barrister, Deirdre Fottrell KC, said he is "desperate" to return to the UK.
"He is culturally displaced and alienated," she said.
"He considers himself abandoned by his family. He feels he is a British boy, a London boy."
The boy remains in Ghana and has been attending a day school there.
A Nigerian Jamaican wedding in New Jersey went exactly as you’d imagine:
When Ayokunle Olufemi Apampa first joined the Goldman Sachs office in Salt Lake City in 2011, there were about 20 Black professionals in the entire building, he said. He and a few colleagues led efforts to build a community of Black professionals in the city, which included recruiting summer interns.
Nia-Imani Adyira Mitchell, who joined a summer program at Goldman Sachs in 2017, was one of those interns. Before the internship started, a few members of the Black Network, an employee resource group at the office, held a welcome barbecue during the Memorial Day weekend. There, Mr. Apampa, who goes by Kunle, and Ms. Mitchell first locked eyes while he was flipping burgers behind the grill. He gave her a wave.
[…]
Their celebration included several nods to their Jamaican and Nigerian backgrounds. They jumped the broom to “One Love” by Bob Marley. At the cocktail hour, John Randolph, a violinist, played Afrobeats tracks by Davido, Burna Boy and Wizkid. During the reception, after changing outfits, they walked into a ballroom waving huge Jamaican and Nigerian flags. And the theme of the after-party at Polygon, an event venue in Brooklyn, was “Afrobeats meets Dancehall.”
“It was lit; that Jamaican-Nigerian energy definitely came through,” Mr. Apampa said. The celebration carried over into the wee hours of the morning.
Anne Merriman a.k.a The Mother of Palliative Care has died at the age of 90:
By the mid-1980s, the Irish doctor Anne Merriman had seen enough in her then three-decade-long career to be distressed by how poorly modern medicine served people at the end of life—the blind compulsion many doctors felt to keep prolonging patients’ lives, even if they wound up only prolonging their suffering.
She thought back to her initial impulse to go into medicine: how, at age 4, looking at photographs in a magazine of missionary nurses helping children in Africa, Merriman announced to her mom that she would grow up to be a nurse who helped children in Africa, too. “I said I wanted to be a nurse because nurses were caring, and doctors were more after curing,” Merriman explained in a talk earlier this year. “I wanted to be a caring person.”
Merriman had in fact started her career in Africa, at a hospital in Nigeria, then continued on to practice medicine and do research in the United Kingdom and India. In the mid-1980s while working in geriatric medicine in Singapore, she discovered the emerging fields of palliative care and hospice—an approach to death that gave priority to a patient’s comfort and self-determination. Merriman had become a doctor after all, but she wanted to be one committed to caring in cases where no curing could be done.
Funny story on the practice of naming things after military leaders in Nigeria:
As President Bola Tinubu praised his country's quarter century of democratic rule Thursday, many of the streets around the Nigerian capital carried a different, perhaps less-inspiring message.
To name a few: Sani Abacha Way takes commuters into downtown Abuja. Ibrahim Babangida Way meanwhile cuts through upscale Maitama. Murtala Muhammed Expressway passes next to the presidency and the National Assembly, where Tinubu delivered his Democracy Day speech.
All three are named after the heads of military juntas.
As other countries in west Africa have gone on a renaming spree -- mostly throwing out roads named for colonial figures -- Nigeria's strongmen have survived this final, symbolic purge.
All eight of Nigeria's military leaders have at least one street named after them in the capital -- a fact that's often met with a shrug, even as Thursday's holiday celebrates the transition to civilian rule in 1999 after decades of coups and military rule.
Meet Damson Idris, if you’ve been living under a rock:
Damson Idris has made a meteoric rise from South East London’s hustling streets to becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable actors. Born Adamson Alade‑Bo Idris in Peckham, the British actor’s entertainment resume keeps getting better. With nearly 20 acting credits to his name at just 33 years old, his life story flows with authenticity, resilience and a windfall of swagger. So, who is Damson Idris? Some may know him best from his six seasons on the FX drama series Snowfall where he played the lead role. These days, you can catch Idris in the upcoming action-packed film F1: The Movie, alongside Academy Award-winning superstar Brad Pitt.
While he’s living the lavish celebrity life now, the actor’s childhood was anything but glamorous. His family home was small and tight. Damson has described it as “dirt poor,” with roaches, stained carpets and a mattress picked off the curb, according to the London Standard. But beneath the economic struggle was a core of love. His mother, Philippa Idris, a Nigerian entrepreneur from Oyo State, hustled hard to provide for her six children. As the primary provider, Philippa raised the family on her own, instilling faith and work ethic in her children.
Another one:
A Nigerian man who participated in the extortion of a Montgomery County college student — helping to perpetuate a twisted and elaborate online scheme that ultimately led the 20-year-old to kill himself in Jenkintown — was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison.
Samuel Olasunkanmi Abiodun, 25, effectively served as a money launderer in the tormenting of Jack Sullivan two years ago, court documents say. One of Abiodun's codefendants, also from Nigeria, had created fake social media accounts posing as a woman named "Alice Dave" and persuaded Sullivan to share intimate photos of himself — then repeatedly demanded money to keep the images private.
When the codefendant, Imoleayo Samuel Aina, needed a new place for Sullivan to send money, he turned to Abiodun, who ran a cryptocurrency account for people to store and hide illicit proceeds. In all, prosecutors said, Sullivan transferred more than $3,000 to accounts controlled by Abiodun, Aina, or a third man, Afeez Olatunju Adewale.
But the harassment reached a tragic end on Jan. 4, 2023.
After the plot's mastermind, Aina, demanded more money, Sullivan sent a message back saying: "I don't think I have enough for it."
Three minutes later, court documents said, he walked onto the tracks near the Jenkintown SEPTA station, where he was struck and killed by a train.
Must be true love, I guess:
A 68-year-old woman has shared her experience of being in a relationship with a significant age gap, after marrying a man 43 years her junior. Kay and 25-year-old Ablack first connected on social media, little knowing that their online interaction would lead to matrimony.
Just three days after meeting face-to-face, the pair were engaged. Despite scepticism from online observers, they maintain that their love is genuine. Speaking on the YouTube channel Love Don't Judge, American-born Kay recounted their initial encounter: "He liked something I posted. I don't even remember what it was." She added: "He went from somebody who liked my post to my very best friend. I could tell him any and everything and it just grew stronger and stronger."
Kay revealed that she "had a dream" about visiting Nigeria which sparked her desire to travel there. After discussing her plans with Ablack, he arranged her flight and assisted with other travel requirements.
"When he showed up at the airport to come and get me it was like, 'Oh my God you're real, you're really here', it's not a scam," Kay said.
The CTO of the tech giant Palantir wrote about why he is joining the US Army:
My father grew up in a mud hut in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India. He was the youngest of nine children and the first in his family to attend college—an education made possible only by his eight siblings pooling their wages. After graduation, he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to build and run a pharmaceutical plant. Through ingenuity and an enterprising spirit, he became successful at a remarkably young age.
When I was 2, our life in Lagos ended violently. Five armed men broke into our home, killed our dog, pistol-whipped my father, and threatened my mother as they demanded money from the company safe. We fled Lagos with nothing, and started over in America.
Simon Guobadia has now been deported:
Porsha Williams's estranged husband Simon Guobadia has been deported back to Nigeria after a four-month ICE detainment.
DailyMail.com has confirmed that the 61-year-old ex of The Real Housewives Of Atlanta star, 43, was released from the U.S. Immigration And Customs Enforcement's custody and sent back to his home country.
Guobadia is also no longer listed on the system of the U.S. Department Of Homeland Security.
His friend Tai Savat told Us Weekly that Guobadia was sent back on a flight home to Nigeria a couple of days ago and was in 'good spirits' despite the tough experience of four months at the detention center - the first time he's been imprisoned.
Amid the ongoing immigration protests in Los Angeles, Savet said that Guobadia is not mad at President Donald Trump and would actually like a sit-down meeting with him.
Even dogs are going through it in Nigeria:
Nigeria's two-year-old cost of living crisis, which has seen the price of grocery staples like rice rise over 100% since 2023, has reached the relatively affluent class of dog owners, who are struggling to feed their pets because of soaring food costs.
Keeping animals as pets is a recent trend in Nigerian society, where traditionally people were more likely to live with chicken or goats reared for food.
Over the past two decades, there was a rise in the number of households in urban areas keeping pet dogs, often for security in a country plagued by violent crime, but also for companionship. No precise data are available on dog ownership, but a 2023 survey by research agency TGM Statbox indicated that around 42% of Nigerians own pets.
However, in a sign of economic hard times hitting across society, that is an increasingly expensive luxury.
One dog owner, Peter Anthony, a student who lives with his parents in the southwestern city of Ibadan, said feeding his German Shepherd, Flora, was never previously a concern for the family.
"Before the whole high cost of living saga, feeding her was so easy," he said, waiting for Flora at a pet hospital where she had been treated for an ear condition.
"But now, by the time you pick out that money from your pocket, you'd know that something has left you," he said.
The family now feeds Flora a smaller daily ration of noodles mixed with fish or eggs, Anthony said.