I'm a renaissance-man with an eclectic taste (Music, Art, Sarcasm, Anime, Manga, Crypto.. #AnythingGood) ♥ ❤️ Arsenal!!! I (un)follow back immediately 🤝
@DavidHundeyin I grew up in a family united by genuine love, neither of my parents would deny us the children that ultimate price of giving their lives.
So Comrade David, you are very wrong!
Predictably, everyone is mad at me for saying this but here is a very simple thought experiment to prove that I am right. Picture each person in your Nigerian life that "loves" you and imagine a button is placed in front of them with the sole instruction that if they push it, they receive $1M (N1.3bn) cash immediately, no questions asked, but you die instantly. Will they push the button?
If you hesistated for even a microsecond before answering "no" for each person you pictured, that means you yourself have acknowledged that whatever relationship exists there is at best cordial, but cannot be described as "love". Because someone who loves you can never place a monetary amount on the value you bring to their life by existing.
The fact that as you're reading this, you KNOW that the majority of people who know you would push that button is what disturbs you, because it sounds like a moral indictment on Nigerian people. Meanwhile I couldn't care less about the individual morality of Nigerians, because that's not the point I'm making at all.
The point I'm making is that Nigeria by design CANNOT incubate "love" because it is still running entirely on an extractive operating system. Once upon a time when our ancestors still owned their own minds and had sovereignty over their own decisions, it was possible for them to love each other because they were the ones who built their society to fit their own aspirations as a group. Love requires the stability and safety offered by a society that controls its own direction. Love cannot exist under colonial logic.
Under colonial logic, nothing is sacred. Everything exists to be harvested, consumed, extracted and fucked. The land is no longer the place where you and your ancestors have lived for thousands of years. It is now a mine with a quota for vomiting out shiny rocks for a man with a gun who says he "owns" it. Your wife and daughter are now the sex slaves of the man with the gun along with a hundred other people's wives and daughters, and the resulting destruction of social order is none of his business.
Your religion and way of connecting with the divine which have served your people for thousands of years are now suddenly outlawed, and you are now to worship a god that doesn't look like you. Your farm is no longer the thing that feeds your family. It is now a plantation for things you can't eat which the man with a gun forces you to remit to him as tax in exchange for not being locked up or rendered landless. Your entire society is in total chaos and the only way to rise above the chaos is to somehow fight to become the Warrant Chief of the man with the gun, or his armed askari warrior.
This is the same logic that Nigerian society is still operating on 200 years later. Everyone is still fighting to become the economic or political Warrant Chief with enough power to lord it over their neighbour or to emigrate. Or they are the cult, agbero, or police askari warrior whose ability to wield violence gives them an edge in the same mad scramble to survive a hostile, extractive, unpredictable environment. Why on earth would "love" blossom and thrive in such an environment? That would be like slaves on a plantation claiming to "love" each other.
What slaves on a plantation share is not "love." It is the strong bond of shared trauma. It is mutual affinity. It is sexual desire. It can even be affection. But it's not "love". "Love" is a societal condition that can only become a thing after the slaves revolt, kill the slavemaster and his family, take over the plantation, and turn it into a farming community built on the logic of mutual beneficience instead of extraction. Until then, they're just carrots inside a massive blender who, instead of figuring out how to destroy the blades and render the blender inoperable, are busy having lots of pointless carrot sex, making meaningless little carrot babies that will only become the next generation of carrot juice to be extracted from the blender.
Anyway I don't know why I'm arsed to sit and write stuff like this for the benefit of an audience that is as intellectual as I'm Chinese. I'd be better off talking earnestly to the billboards at Spintex roundabout.
I unironically support the alleged Nigerian scammers in this case.
A startup whose premise is to pay poor people to submit their photos and data and use it to train AI models that will inevitably be turned into weapons or tools that destroy livelihoods so that a defense contractor in Silicon Valley can have 3 yachts instead of 2, is a startup I wish death upon.
I hope the Yahoo Boys get around this rudimentary IP ban and continue what they're doing until they make this startup insolvent or render its AI model unusable.
One day in September 2001, when I was a tiny 11 year-old starting secondary school at Atlantic Hall, back when it was located at Maryland, Mrs Adepoju the class teacher announced a group exercise as an icebreaker. All of us were to write our dream holiday location on a piece of paper, and one by one we would read out what we had written.
She started from the other end of the class, so I got to hear multiple answers before it got to my turn. The answers were basically "London", "America", "London", "London", "London", "London", "London", "UK", "London", "London"...
Now for context, I was already reasonably well travelled at the time, and even though my family was not the kind to go off on a jaunt to London at every given opportunity like some of my new peers, I had been privileged to travel fairly extensively around Africa, and I was visually familiar enough with the places being mentioned to know that people from London generally looked forward to going on holiday to warmer parts of the world in Africa, Asia, Southern Europe and Latin America.
I also knew from personal experience that people from "America" and "London" could be found in their thousands enjoying holidays in Lomé, Zanzibar and Accra. You would often find me as the sole African kid surrounded by white kids playing together in the lobby or private beachfront of Lomé's Hotel Deux Fevrier or Hotel Sarakawa whenever my family was in town.
In addition, the travel sections in the Newsweek, TIME and Readers Digest magazines that my dad bought every week made it clear that safari tours in Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa were among the most highly rated holiday experiences on earth. These experiences were so exclusive that it would actually be easier for a Nigerian to take a trip to London than to go on safari in Kenya.
I'm providing all this context to explain why it seemed pretty obvious to me that writing "Kenya" as my dream holiday destination was a valid and reasonable choice. Instead, what happened when it got to my turn was that I read out "safari in Kenya" - and the rest of the class burst into laughter and giggles. I was utterly confused at first. Did they not hear me correctly?
They did.
As one of them helpfully explained in between subsequent chortles, "We're talking about places like London and New York, what is *Kenya*?" The inference of course, was that *Kenya*, located in Africa as it was, did not belong in the same conversation as "London" when discussing destinations.
What constituted a "dream holiday" for these children of Nigeria's elite was a Virgin Atlantic economy class ticket to Gatwick Airport, a 4-week stay with their NHS auxillary nurse aunty and her 2 kids in a cramped 2-bedroom council terrace in High Wycombe, and an Oxford Street shopping rampage yielding 50kg of excess baggage for the return trip, filled with WH Smith pencils and Primark clothes to show off to each other at the end of term party.
While the actual inhabitants of London used monthly payment plans to save up for their once in a lifetime Thomson package holiday tour in Kenya, these ghettofabulous sons and daughters of the Nigerian "elite" looked forward to a cold, uncomfortable experience on a miserable umbrella island as their "dream holiday". Not because it was a dream holiday, but because that was the social expectation they all enforced on each other.
And if you knew better, they *laughed* you.
That day was the first time I experienced something that I have gone on to experience many, many times over the intervening 25 years of my Nigerian life - the existential dread of being surrounded by people whose information level is so far below the one I operate with that we genuinely have almost nothing in common.
It's an experience I am so used to that I no longer bother to explain myself to Nigerians. The people who think that London is a dream holiday destination definitely think that "Iran is a terrorist regime that murdered 30,000 protesters."
Of course they do.
The problem is that you lot are easily manipulated and distracted, David wouldn’t steal a dime of anyone’s money, and if he is a man ruled by avarice, it wouldn’t be the kobo kobo of the news platform he founded, where he��s unpaid, that he’d steal. This is a hatchet job..
If you're angry that I poached WAW's best reporters when I was leaving, you should ask yourself why they agreed to be poached. How did you treat them? How much were you paying them?
You were paying a 27 year-old adult man N110,000/month ($80) to be a field reporter covering high risk stories including the Lekki Massacre memorial and an attempted undercover infiltration of a Chinese/Filipino scam call centre with armed security on Providence Way.
This dude had a high risk full time job and he couldn't afford a place to stay. He was squatting with his friend while working full time as a investigative reporter! You couldn't even be nice to him, which costs nothing. Everyday insult upon query, to the point that he was already planning to submit his resignation, even before finding another job.
When I made him an offer that came with a living wage and the promise of being treated like an actual human being with feelings, why wouldn't he jump ship? What pull factors were present to make him want to stay put? Isn't he somebody's child too? What effort did you make for WAW to be a non-toxic workplace?
Or were you in fact, a pompous bunch of awful diasporans who thought they had a god given right to treat Nigerian locals as cheap labour trash, because of the small $5 you make in America? Did you regularly mock and belittle your employees to their hearing, making jest of their financial status or lack of travel?
Now that I took the best talent with me and we're flying in our new project, and your organisation has clearly crumbled into a rotting mess that will soon be worth nothing, you're busy throwing tantrums, acting drama and telling lies on the TL about "David was disengaged" and "financial irresponsibility" - exactly how "irresponsible" it was mathematically possible to be while essentially working with a zero budget, nobody has explained.
Enjoy your meme replies and retweets from the sub-3-digit IQ morons but remember that as always, in exactly 5 working days, none of the idiots you are performing for will remember any of this, and you will be back to being a group of clueless, pompous asshats who don't know their ass from their elbow, running a forgotten platform that only ever had any relevance because of its attachment to me.
Your eba is cold. You should warm it.
"Disengagement"🤷🏿🤷🏿🤷🏿🤷🏿🤷🏿
My brothers in Christ, I still own 50% of the company in case you have forgotten. I was never an employee and I was never paid a salary. I founded the whole damn thing and you just came along for the ride. It was basically a passion project for me, before I decided to focus my energy elsewhere.
"Financial irresponsibility" on top free work? "Financial irresponsibility" based on what finance???? Who drank alcohol and made this ridiculous tweet? On a handle that I personally created in 2021 and later verified using my Revolut card?
Is everything OK over there????
That's because my personal Substack (https://t.co/RbiUrC4pxI) is a completely separate entity to West Africa Weekly. WAW started off on Substack, but the moment you guys invested in 2023, you made it very clear that WAW would be a standalone website (https://t.co/9np1l5NksV) and the Substack platform would revert to me, which is why I changed the name from 'https://t.co/wUeOjmDklc' to 'https://t.co/RbiUrC4pxI.'
Yes, I have 160 paid subscribers there, which is the sole result of the sweat of my own brow, without your help or involvement. I built that subscriber base while writing dangerous stories inside a safe house in Central Accra with armed police patrolling outside. Were you bunch of barawos under the impression that you were entitled to what I built without you that was not covered by the purchase agreement? What did you think you were paying for? A slave?
I left WAW since last year and I didn't make a song and dance about it, but since you people want to behave like a scorned ex on the internet, let me remind you that I still own half of this company, and in fact I still control many of its digital assets. Its Instagram page is literally under my personal Meta accounts centre. Ditto its LinkedIn page. I took these screen recordings less than 10 minutes ago showing that as of right now, I still have full access to the WordPress backend, Zoho email suite and Zoho Cliq workplace.
If you "disengaged" me for "financial irresponsibility", kindly explain why I still have full access to all of your backends? Because you know what actually happened - I left WAW to found The Spearhead in August 2025, and you are angry because everything useful about the platform left with me, including its 2 best reporters, and in just 6 months of operation, we have created much better material and outperformed post-2023 WAW by every metric available.
You know that I was right about everything. I was right about pivoting away from Nigerian news and Obidient-slop to focus on more important African geopolitical content. I was right about investing real money in creating visual content. I was right about looking beyond Nigeria for an audience. I was right about hiring a full time Sahel reporter. I was right about the fact that you needed to let go of the dream of WAW becoming a mainstream media outlet making money the conventional Nigerian media way, because the gatekeepers would never let you in simply based on the platform's association with me. I was right about boosting reporters' pay instead of expecting miracles from somebody's child whom you're paying N110,000/month to be a field reporter in Lagos.
And now, instead of accepting that I was right about everything and that you know nothing about journalism or media business, your petulant response to your own horrible failure is to try to throw mud on my name and to destroy the platform in the process - a platform that you did create and whose value you cannot possibly understand because you're so poor that all you have is money.
Well, you can't destroy a reputation that you didn't build. Many before you have tried. You won't be the last. The Mayowa and Kangmwa that you used to mock for being broke and unpolished have now traveled and seen the world perhaps more so than you have. They now create great material that the whole world now sees and engages with. You're still there paying people peanuts and looking for NNPC advert gigs that you will never get.
Like many diasporans, once you have some small $5 in your pocket, you think everyone back home should kneel before you. After dealing with racism and insults to make your 2 kobo in Houston, you now come to reflect the same energy back to your people in Lagos because that makes you feel good about your life. Whatever floats your boat.
But from the bottom of my heart, I don't care. I am better than you and there's nothing you can do about it.
My offer remains open: if you can, buy me out and do what you want with WAW.
I have moved on.
The truth is visible to the blind and audible to the deaf. While I was there, WAW was leading national and regional coverage and conversations, even with the crap I had to work with.
After I left, it dropped off a cliff and disappeared entirely. The Spearhead that started operating in October already has more social media following than WAW which is 5 years old.
Everybody knows they fucked up and treated me disrespectfully and I left quietly to set up something that has become more successful than what I left behind, but as typical Nigerians, rather than introspect or think sequentially about where the problem actually is, it's easier to start making noise and acting drama on the TL.
It's been 8 months since I left. No drop of creativity, no visible passion, zero success at anything. The only hits the website gets are for stories created when I was in charge, or for the cheap Obidient-slop stories they write with ChatGPT.
But apparently, I was the problem. And some unspecified "financial irresponsibility" when I didn't even have access to the organisation's funds. Wó, everybody will be fine jare.
I could have exited with bang last year and taken the entire platform down with me, like these this same group of people did when they took the Parallel Facts website down while exiting before they invested in WAW 3 years ago.
But I'm not that kind of person.
I had grouses. I had beef. But I won't destroy something I built just because I have beef with someone who is running it. I'd rather leave it for the person and go do my own thing, which is exactly what I did. It's like the biblical story of Solomon and the 2 women claiming to be a child's mother. It's easy to see who the real mother is by gauging who is willing to light it on fire to prove a point.
West Africa Weekly was my child. I told the story of how it began in my book. I was living in this dirty Airbnb studio apartment in a dingy building called French Hostel in Akweteyman, Achimota, Accra. It was called French Hostel because most of the tenants were students from Cote d'Ivoire and Cameroon. This was where I was at rock bottom in 2021. Still winded and confused from ending up in exile after End SARS, running out of money and options, waking up everyday and wondering where the hell I fit in this new world post-October 20.
Then someone here on Twitter tagged me on a post about something called the 'Substack Local Fellowship', and even though I wasn't really sure whether I wanted to go back to investigative journalism, it was at least a temporary way out of my existential conundrum. In my application, I named the prospective newsletter "West Africa Weekly", because I thought I would put out a new piece every week and since I was in Ghana, I wanted to cover Ghanaian stories too. I ended up getting it, and they asked me to nominate a graphic artist and editor. I nominated my editor from @NewsWireNGR, @TheFavoredWoman and that was how it all began.
Just me in a cheap, dingy apartment that had a cockroach problem, a cheap Dell Latitude laptop, a Vodafone 4G MiFi router, the promise of a $7,500 funding tranche every 3 months, some editorial support from Fola, and however far I was willing to go to get a great story. That's where all of this began. Just me and my cheap laptop in an urban slum somewhere in Accra.
From there, the world heard my voice. I told Itunu Babalola's story and nearly got arrested in Cote d'Ivoire in the process. I went after loan sharks owned by Chinese triads. I went after Nigeria's biggest corporates. I told the story that could have ended my career because of how close I was to it. I went after a drug lord-turned-politician who was running for president, and eventually won. I took the FBI, CIA, DEA, IRS, USAO and State Dept to court and won, only for them to refuse to carry out the court order to date.
Somewhere along the line I was granted political asylum and I got taken into the journalistic equivalent of a witness protection program because my life was under threat. Nigeria's National Intelligence Agency attempted to kidnap me from Ghana. It was the craziest adventure of my life, and it was nearly the last one.
So naturally when it was time to accept investment and move this operation from one crazy daredevil with his newsletter and YouTube channel to a structured operation with a board and reporters and HR, I wasn't going to say no. I was tired and I needed to rest.
And so despite all the subsequent humiliations, annoyances and grievances after I let other people control what I built, I was never going to burn it all down just because my time there was up. My baby is always my baby regardless of who controls it. Most people are just finding out today that I left WAW nearly 8 months ago, only because the new management decided to act this drama on the TL.
They will be fine or not. I wish this could have been handled differently, but to each his own. Nobody can take my memories away from me, and I will always remember what I built. Not what it has become.
Peace and love be unto ye. ��🏿
As I have mentioned before, I ceased to be the owner and majority shareholder of @WestAfricaWeek since December 2023, and I ceased all day to day involvement in the running of the platform in August 2025.
I am proud of what I accomplished at West Africa Weekly, having taken it from a Substack newsletter I created in a dingy Airbnb in Akweteyman, to Nigeria's premier investigative journalism newsletter, and then to a significant regional West African publication that attracted investment that came with a team of bright young reporters. However, all good things come to an end and I made the decision last year to pursue a new journalistic direction with @Spearhead_Af.
I am openly, explicitly and unapologetically Pan-Africanist in my journalistic outlook, and the team at The Spearhead - which includes some familiar faces from West Africa Weekly like @joyfwen and @mayordeah_ - shares a similar worldview. And while I am not a cheerleader for any individual, I can indeed be described as "Pro-Traoré" as you put it, because Ibrahim Traoré's politics closely track with mine.
For the record, I completely disagree with the context, framing and tone of the WAW article in question, and if I were still the substantive E-I-C, such an article would never have been published under my watch. Any reporter who worked there will tell you that one of my most regularly repeated editorial phrases was "Why does this sound like BBC Africa? Please fix it."
In fact it was partially because of my ideological disagreement with the board over issues including editorial framing and political direction that I decided to make my exit. I wanted WAW to pursue an ideologically Pan-Africanist editorial strategy. The board, made up mostly of Nigerian diasporans living in western countries did not want to potentially pick a fight with the US government. They wanted WAW to become the "Obidient" news platform that offered only soft occasional criticism of US foreign policy. I wanted something entirely different.
I wish it well in it's future endeavours, and I still remain a significant minority shareholder at WAW, but I have to publicly dissociate myself from its current editorial direction. I am not involved, it has nothing to do with me and I do not agree with it.
For those who aren't keeping up, this means that the entire "no blood transfusion" doctrine has been quietly gutted, because under this new doctrine, you can now receive a transfusion of lab-grown red blood cells cloned from your own red cells - since the cloned blood is still technically your own blood.
Since it is medically possible to create patient-specific, lab-generated blood for transfusions using your own blood, that means that the entire blood transfusion question for Jehovah Witnesses has now become a technical and economic one. JWs who live in rich countries where blood cloning facilities exist can get infinite transfusions of "their own" blood without breaking the cult's rules, while the Aunty Esthers of Darkest Africa who have no such facilities get to die young and faithful to the end, because a white man told them to.😊
As always, any African wey no gree obtain sense, na oyibo go kill am.
While this looks aesthetically pleasing and creative, and aligns with sustainability efforts like reducing carbon footprints through the RRR approach (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), there are important environmental and health concerns that should be considered.
Plastic-based construction materials can pose significant fire hazards, as plastics tend to melt and release toxic fumes when exposed to heat. There are also concerns about microplastic pollution, since plastics degrade over time due to sunlight, heat, and physical wear, potentially releasing microplastics into the surrounding environment.
In addition, many plastics contain chemical additives such as phthalates and other plasticizers, which can slowly leach into indoor air or dust, contributing to long-term exposure risks.
So while recycling plastic into building materials may help divert waste from landfills, innovations like this should ideally be carefully tested and regulated for fire safety, structural durability, and environmental health impacts before being widely adopted for housing.
Seidu Lawal: 'VIOLENCE Is The Only Way To Solve Anything'
There is little doubt that the United States has historically relied on coercive force to advance its hegemonic interests, particularly against resource-rich but non-nuclear-armed nations in the Global South.
In this clip, Nigerian commentator Seidu Lawal argues that a U.S. military invasion of oil-rich Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro would itself constitute an act of violence. He adds that for governments, including the United States, to enforce citizens’ obedience, the concept of “violence” must first be demonised and presented as inherently immoral, even though it is often treated as the primary means through which power is exercised and outcomes are achieved.
1. You're not getting any visa. The world is closing up and making it clear that your class of immigrant labour is no longer wanted.
2. No dream job is coming your way because you live in a depressed colonial economy that doesn't create such jobs in large quantities.
3. You will most likely remain single because you live in a depressed colonial economy that doesn't create the economic opportunities for marriage to be a realistic consideration.
4. No dream contract is heading your way because [refer to 2].
5. No amount of Inspiritum Heavinus and fervent belief will bend the material reality of an entire country/continent to favour you as an individual.
6. The only positive change that will ever happen is the one you create with your brains, hands, and feet. No miracle is coming and your case is not special.
7. Thank you for your attention to this matter.