Chasing money, many have regrettably discovered, is like playing hide and seek with the ghost of Houdini. In Nigeria in particular, money continues to play hard to get with tens of millions of us that the country’s dismaying status as the global capital of involuntary austerity seems quite inescapable, or maybe even destined. Yet, right here in Lagos, there’s a young lady — intrepid, resolute — who has assigned herself the task of coaching a new generation of Nigerians on how to play this game of show me the money and win. This lady, her name is Oluwatosin Olaseinde, Tosin …
Category: INFLUENCERS
When somebody famous dies, Twitter and Facebook go crazy with philosophy. “This Life.” “What a life.” “Life is short.”
When the letter speaking ill of the dead and bearing the name and signature of former president Olusegun Obasanjo materialised on social media last weekend, the question was, Is this fake? But while we raked the internet for evidence, we also knew that, despite the scandalising content of the letter, it wouldn’t be out of place for it to have actually been penned by OBJ himself.
James Altucher has no filter. He exposes everything that has ever happened to him to absolute strangers on the Internet. He talks about his first divorce, he talks about his second divorce, and he won’t stop talking about his many financial failures. There was that time he moved into Hotel Chelsea in New York City, with a troupe of colourful characters as neighbours; and that other time he sold all his belongings so he could relocate into a duffle bag. James Altucher is an American businessman and writer who blogs about every single thing. He’s also Jewish.
In the past 15 years as a writer and consultant, I’ve worked with a number of private university graduates. The best ones are from Covenant and Babcock. Enterprising, entrepreneurial, high capacity to think fast, creative. You know what their schools have in common? They are owned by churches. Churches, especially the successful ones with tens of thousands of members, seem to be unable to spare any expense as they build their facilities and hire faculty.
Nobody does apology tours in Nigeria- this is not America. We just laugh about whatever the issues are, debate them vigorously on Twitter and click “NEXT!” But this time around, D’Banj’s rape accusation, the attendant mess that seized the blogs, and the eventual withdrawal of charges against him has become a hotchpotch of blemish that appears to be impossible to wash out of the fabric of his reputation.
Lindaikejisblog.com is no longer on Alexa’s top 10 list of sites in Nigeria. For about a decade it was there at the top and only got pushed down when the likes of Naij.com first burst onto the Nigerian media scene. At the time, you’d also find Bella Naija and YNaija on the top 10. Now, none of these blogs are in the top 20. So what happened to Linda Ikeji?
A tiktok video went viral last week that spontaneously got some major celebrities vexed. Here’s a quote from the video: “AND THESE PEOPLE (MARIAH CAREY AND NICK CANNON) ARE AWFUL. I HAD TO DEAL WITH BOTH OF THEM SEPARATELY. SHE IS AN ABSOLUTE DIVA AND HE IS AN ABSOLUTE DIVA AND I HOPE THAT NO CAST MEMBER HAS TO DEAL WITH THESE MONSTERS EVER AGAIN.”
I asked a friend the other day what he thought of Senator Dino Melaye’s new house—the gilded one whose photograph the Kogi politician recently posted on Instagram. My friend, who is reputed to possess an excellent taste in aesthetic design, said, Nah, it’s too loud.
One afternoon in 2005, my boss and I stood in the vast newsroom of The Guardian and watched time whizz by. It was 4,5pm-ish. The reporters were back, as usual, sliding across the glazed floor, nearly crashing into the concrete, to rush their stories to the typists and graphic designers who would set the pages for the next day. At this moment, my eyes were locked on a certain senior correspondent—there was something about his tie.
He doesn’t even know it, but Naira Marley is a cult leader. All of a sudden, there’s an army of Nigerians all over the world calling themselves Marlians. They follow the philosophy of the Great One aka Afeez Fashola, who is only 25 years old. Their doctrine, it appears, is smoke a bouyant amount of weed, rage against the authorities, have a lot of sex, and secure the bag aka naira.
Okay, that’s reckless hyperbolism. My grand arrival in that famed continental magazine was anything but sudden. That story took me all of three weeks, plus a couple of extra sleepless nights—factoring in interviews, research, transcriptions, rewrites, edits, and reverts. But one day, just as I languished in one of those Lagos traffic jams on Alfred Rewane Road, Ikoyi, I saw Ayeni Adekunle and Steve Babaeko on the cover of Forbes Africa and I was like, Wait, that’s my story.
For three weeks, Tope Jemerigbe had waited with nerves on fire for this phone call. Now that she was on it, she knew there was only one answer she could accept from the man on the other end of the line. That man, Tarek Abdelnabi, must make up his mind today or Tope and her people would be out of time. Tope didn’t like to be out of time.
Bankulli is a big man– when he stands beside my 5ft 9.5″ I feel he’s 7ft tall. But he also knows how to perfectly fade into the background. This is probably his superpower. He helps other people shine by staying out of their way.
Before the FIFA World Cup, Pepsi was the official sponsor of the Nigerian Super Eagles– this you knew. And when it came time to renew the multimillion naira contract, it was supposed to be easy-peasy because the lads were headed to Russia.
