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Dapo Okubanjo
@Dapsieb
Broadcast Journo,media trainer who loves life,likes reading especially auto biographies. And oh I'm a die-hard @Arsenal fan
Abuja,Nigeria
Joined March 2010
3.3K Following
2K Followers
22.3K Posts
Pinned Tweet
"Younger Nigerians who had no knowledge of the political struggles of the 1990s were brainwashed to see @officialABAT as one mafia kingpin that could be blamed for anything from flooding in Abia to poor governance on the fringes of the Lake Chad."
https://t.co/FdJ5aha2GA
We need to shine more light on the positive impact of government instead of focusing on rubbish. Last week, I was in a restaurant at Jabi mall and the girl attending to me looks too young, so I had to engage her in a conversation.
During our discussion I discovered she was just 19 and when I asked why she wasn’t in school, she told me her parents couldn’t afford to send her to the university.
I told her about @NELFUND and she has NEVER heard of it. She already wrote JAMB, so I quickly called @TheresaTekenah and asked her to help me put her through and when her colleague saw what was happening, she became interested in the conversation and also informed me that she needed such assistance too. So Theresa spoke to them on my phone and exchanged numbers with them to enable her follow up
Apparently, there are a lot of people out there who have no idea what the government is doing, meanwhile the radio and TV stations are daily focused on negative stuff. All the radios stations have daily call-in programming where all they do is to abuse the government. The TV stations too and so called influencers are all focused on attacking the government but NOBODY is interested in helping to point our youths to positive policies that can benefit them?
Anyway, that is about my experience last week. Thanks to @TheresaTekenah that I have handed those young girls to. I hope they can now fulfill their dreams of going to the University soon.
Dear Blessing,
I just came across your tweet, and it truly inspired me.
To graduate with a First Class in Mathematics from UNILORIN and then earn a fully funded Master's admission in Italy is an extraordinary achievement. You have demonstrated excellence and the promise that exists in so many young Nigerians.
No young person who has worked this hard should have such an opportunity limited by the cost of getting there. It would be my privilege to support your journey by covering what is left in the cost of your relocation.
@nancy_i_i from my office will reach out to you today.
Congratulations once again. Go, excel, and continue to make Nigeria proud.
JUST IN: The Nigerian Education Loan Fund is investigating about 34 tertiary institutions over allegations that they failed to refund students whose tuition fees were paid twice under the Federal Government’s student loan scheme, Managing Director Akintunde Sawyerr has said.
@AhmedIbrah99223 @OpeBee A lot. SA is benefitting a lot from relations with Nigeria with over 100 companies operating here. A threat to cut off or suspend trade links if dialogue fails could force the hands of the Ramaphosa government.
Throwback to when Trossard almost killed Porro
Leandro Trossard. THAT goal. Forever in Arsenal history. 🤍🇧🇪
We have seen the police report on the appointment letter and it was clearly established that the signature of the Chief of Staff was forged.
- SSA To the President on Media and Publicity Temitope Ajayi
I can see pictures of Prof.Osita Ogbu and Tanimu Yakubu and of course Dr Doyin Salami. These were former Chief Economic Advisers to previous Presidents. Whoever gave that fellow access to that office needs to be unearthed.
I INDEPENDENTLY SEARCHED NIGERIA'S BUDGET DOCUMENTS FROM 2019 TO THE PRESENT. HERE IS WHAT I FOUND ABOUT THE PFIPC SCANDAL THAT NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT.
THE NAME DID NOT COME FROM NOWHERE
Everyone is focused on Adeyemi the man. Nobody has gone back to ask where the name "Presidential Economic Advisory Council" actually came from. I did. And the answer changes this entire story.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is not a Tinubu creation. Tinubu's economic body is called the Presidential Economic Coordination Council. He established it in March 2024, inaugurated it in July 2024, and chairs it himself alongside Dangote, Elumelu, the Senate President and the Governors Forum Chairman. It has a different name, a different structure and a different budget code.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is a creation of Buhari. Buhari established it in September 2019 to replace the Economic Management Team that Osinbajo was heading. It had real named members. Prof. Doyin Salami as chairman. Charles Soludo. Bismark Rewane. Eight economists reporting directly to the President with a defined mandate and a legal institutional identity.
When Tinubu came in and created the PECC in 2024, the Buhari-era PEAC was never formally dissolved. No gazette removing it. No Budget Office circular revoking its institutional identity. It simply went dormant. But dormant in Nigeria's government system is not the same as deleted.
That dormant status is exactly what was exploited.
©️ @enitandev
Well said, GSW!
I took a long breath before engaging with this.
Over the years, due to the nature of my work, I have come to realise that many of those who live abroad and in urban cities in Africa don't really understand what development and advancement mean to the people in rural communities.
When they write of poverty, they largely do not understand what it means, and some of them do not engage with the poor; therefore, they do not understand the layers of poverty and the power of a poverty mindset.
I travel widely, and you can see me on a yacht in Monaco today and also on a farm in Ughelli tomorrow. I traverse all the layers of society.
From the world of the old money, the upper class, the nouveau riche, the working class, the middle class, the lower class, and the very poor.
Sometimes those in the lower class see themselves as poor, and sometimes those in the middle class see themselves as poor; many in the working class see themselves as poor.
This is why they responded to the Akara and Kulikuli statement of Nigeria's first lady with bile
A friend of mine is the head of the legal department of a financial institution in Lagos.
Her older brothers, all three of them, are thriving in their careers.
Their father recently clocked seventy, and they decided they would upgrade his house at Fiditi Village and buy him a new Toyota Prado while they buy their mum a new Toyota Highlander to upgrade their lives.
Their mum had a local roadside bukateria built with planks, which she had been running for years, while their dad was a retired principal.
They decided to build a proper Lagos-level eatery for their mother and to start a consulting service company for their father, where he could work with teachers in AFIJIO local government who are struggling with their professional careers for a token.
Their parents had struggled to send all four of them to school, and they had made it in life; they felt it was time to repay the kindness.
When they shared the idea with their mother, she hushed them and said they must be crazy. "Where will I get the customers to come and eat in an air-conditioned eatery in Fiditi? Do you want people to say that I am using their destinies to make money? Don't you understand how the folks in this environment think?
That you are now big in the city does not mean you should all be foolish; kill that idea immediately!"
Their father was more gentle; he told them they would ostracise him from his friends if they bought him a big car and changed his small house into a mansion.
He said, "My friends whose children are still struggling will see this as an affront; they will think I am showing off, and many of them will not feel comfortable sitting and eating or drinking with me anymore.
They will call me proud, and they may even decide to do something diabolical to your children so that you will not use your blessings to spite them anymore.
Your ideas are well-intentioned, but they will disrupt my life and lead me to an early grave.
Please come to church and do thanksgiving party with me, let us take pictures and allow my friends the honour of being comfortable to attend the birthday celebration with me. God bless you."
When my friend was sharing this with me, she said she had forgotten that the paradigm of measuring development and achievement in cities is very different from the one used to measure the same in rural areas.
Apart from those who are just being disruptive for political reasons, the idea that empowering people at the very last rung of the economic ladder with money to boost their trade and acquire a skill is being frowned upon is shocking to me.
I have run a widows ministry since 2019, where we give the widows from all over Nigeria who registered with us 5000 naira stipend a month (it was later increased to 7,500 Naira.)
I toyed with the idea of shutting down this ministry a while ago because I felt the money was too little, and despite trying very hard, I couldn't increase the funding as I had hoped.
One of the widows living in Ota, Ogun State, called me and said, "Sir, I had a dream that you stopped sending me money. In that dream, I was crying to God that he had cut off my oesophagus, and I could no longer swallow spit" (She said it in the Yoruba language.)
I assured her that we would not stop sending out the stipends and stuck to it.
When those who live in New York, London, Paris, Monaco, Dubai and so on read news of people surviving on 50,000 Naira a month in the cities in Nigeria, they look at how much they earn per hour and curse Nigeria.
I went to Gombe, and I met with a Master's degree holder who said she had just been sacked from her job. I asked her how much she was earning, and she said twenty thousand Naira a month.
I cringed.
She saw the look on my face and said, "I use it to meet my needs, sir. I really need this job"
I found her another job that started paying her 50,000 Naira a month. She said the money was too much, but it would help her increase her savings.
In development communication, one does not isolate an issue without considering the dynamics at a local level.
If you build a big mall in Akinmoorin or Aawe, where would you get the customers to rent the shops and stock goods there or the people who would patronise them?
Empowerment programs aimed at helping the non-literate, unskilled, the poor and rural dwellers to feel the impact of government and get economically engaged should be lauded and encouraged.
I recently wrote about the large number of beggars in Oyo Town, strong young men who should be farming or engaged in other positive activities are hanging out in front of Ace Supermarket, Chicken Republic, Owode Area in general, Ajiwunmi canteen and other places, constituting a nuisance to car owners.
If they can be empowered and incentivised to work, it will be of great benefit to society, but no right-thinking person will give them millions to squander.
They must learn how to earn money by contributing their quota of value to society.
I recently told a dear sister that when we are talking about poverty, she should sit it out. I said this because whenever she talked about the poor, the picture I get is of an average family at the beginning of their rise in life.
Two graduates cannot be poor unless they choose to be.
The poor have no formal education, have no formal skills, wake up not knowing where the day's meal will come from, are not located in an environment brimming with opportunities, are limited by time and space, and cannot create wealth by themselves.
The people in this category are the ones that we must encourage to benefit from any welfare and empowerment scheme the government, corporate entities or individuals may offer.
We must not attack the government for helping such people for political reasons or just because we need a talking point.
We may not be able to relate to them or identify with them, but that does not mean they don't exist or need all the help they can get.
-GSW-
I took a long breath before engaging with this.
Over the years, due to the nature of my work, I have come to realise that many of those who live abroad and in urban cities in Africa don't really understand what development and advancement mean to the people in rural communities.
When they write of poverty, they largely do not understand what it means, and some of them do not engage with the poor; therefore, they do not understand the layers of poverty and the power of a poverty mindset.
I travel widely, and you can see me on a yacht in Monaco today and also on a farm in Ughelli tomorrow. I traverse all the layers of society.
From the world of the old money, the upper class, the nouveau riche, the working class, the middle class, the lower class, and the very poor.
Sometimes those in the lower class see themselves as poor, and sometimes those in the middle class see themselves as poor; many in the working class see themselves as poor.
This is why they responded to the Akara and Kulikuli statement of Nigeria's first lady with bile
A friend of mine is the head of the legal department of a financial institution in Lagos.
Her older brothers, all three of them, are thriving in their careers.
Their father recently clocked seventy, and they decided they would upgrade his house at Fiditi Village and buy him a new Toyota Prado while they buy their mum a new Toyota Highlander to upgrade their lives.
Their mum had a local roadside bukateria built with planks, which she had been running for years, while their dad was a retired principal.
They decided to build a proper Lagos-level eatery for their mother and to start a consulting service company for their father, where he could work with teachers in AFIJIO local government who are struggling with their professional careers for a token.
Their parents had struggled to send all four of them to school, and they had made it in life; they felt it was time to repay the kindness.
When they shared the idea with their mother, she hushed them and said they must be crazy. "Where will I get the customers to come and eat in an air-conditioned eatery in Fiditi? Do you want people to say that I am using their destinies to make money? Don't you understand how the folks in this environment think?
That you are now big in the city does not mean you should all be foolish; kill that idea immediately!"
Their father was more gentle; he told them they would ostracise him from his friends if they bought him a big car and changed his small house into a mansion.
He said, "My friends whose children are still struggling will see this as an affront; they will think I am showing off, and many of them will not feel comfortable sitting and eating or drinking with me anymore.
They will call me proud, and they may even decide to do something diabolical to your children so that you will not use your blessings to spite them anymore.
Your ideas are well-intentioned, but they will disrupt my life and lead me to an early grave.
Please come to church and do thanksgiving party with me, let us take pictures and allow my friends the honour of being comfortable to attend the birthday celebration with me. God bless you."
When my friend was sharing this with me, she said she had forgotten that the paradigm of measuring development and achievement in cities is very different from the one used to measure the same in rural areas.
Apart from those who are just being disruptive for political reasons, the idea that empowering people at the very last rung of the economic ladder with money to boost their trade and acquire a skill is being frowned upon is shocking to me.
I have run a widows ministry since 2019, where we give the widows from all over Nigeria who registered with us 5000 naira stipend a month (it was later increased to 7,500 Naira.)
I toyed with the idea of shutting down this ministry a while ago because I felt the money was too little, and despite trying very hard, I couldn't increase the funding as I had hoped.
One of the widows living in Ota, Ogun State, called me and said, "Sir, I had a dream that you stopped sending me money. In that dream, I was crying to God that he had cut off my oesophagus, and I could no longer swallow spit" (She said it in the Yoruba language.)
I assured her that we would not stop sending out the stipends and stuck to it.
When those who live in New York, London, Paris, Monaco, Dubai and so on read news of people surviving on 50,000 Naira a month in the cities in Nigeria, they look at how much they earn per hour and curse Nigeria.
I went to Gombe, and I met with a Master's degree holder who said she had just been sacked from her job. I asked her how much she was earning, and she said twenty thousand Naira a month.
I cringed.
She saw the look on my face and said, "I use it to meet my needs, sir. I really need this job"
I found her another job that started paying her 50,000 Naira a month. She said the money was too much, but it would help her increase her savings.
In development communication, one does not isolate an issue without considering the dynamics at a local level.
If you build a big mall in Akinmoorin or Aawe, where would you get the customers to rent the shops and stock goods there or the people who would patronise them?
Empowerment programs aimed at helping the non-literate, unskilled, the poor and rural dwellers to feel the impact of government and get economically engaged should be lauded and encouraged.
I recently wrote about the large number of beggars in Oyo Town, strong young men who should be farming or engaged in other positive activities are hanging out in front of Ace Supermarket, Chicken Republic, Owode Area in general, Ajiwunmi canteen and other places, constituting a nuisance to car owners.
If they can be empowered and incentivised to work, it will be of great benefit to society, but no right-thinking person will give them millions to squander.
They must learn how to earn money by contributing their quota of value to society.
I recently told a dear sister that when we are talking about poverty, she should sit it out. I said this because whenever she talked about the poor, the picture I get is of an average family at the beginning of their rise in life.
Two graduates cannot be poor unless they choose to be.
The poor have no formal education, have no formal skills, wake up not knowing where the day's meal will come from, are not located in an environment brimming with opportunities, are limited by time and space, and cannot create wealth by themselves.
The people in this category are the ones that we must encourage to benefit from any welfare and empowerment scheme the government, corporate entities or individuals may offer.
We must not attack the government for helping such people for political reasons or just because we need a talking point.
We may not be able to relate to them or identify with them, but that does not mean they don't exist or need all the help they can get.
-GSW-
Right of Reply:
THE UNFILTERED MIND OF ABIMBOLA ADELAKUN.
“ She wants the skyscraper without the foundation”.
There is a particular brand of intellectual vanity that blossoms in the sterile, air-conditioned comfort of diaspora academia. It is a posture of superiority that masquerades as empathy while harbouring a profound, almost visceral disdain for the very people it claims to champion. Abimbola Adelakun, a regular purveyor of this cynicism, has once again treated the Nigerian public to a masterclass in this elitist arrogance.
In her latest broadside, she attempts to dissect the “unexamined life,” yet in doing so, she reveals nothing but the breathtakingly shallow, unfiltered mind of the professional critic, a mind that is as divorced from the grit of the Nigerian reality as it is obsessed with the sound of its own polemics.
Adelakun’s prose is a performative act of scourging. She writes not to illuminate, but to diminish.
To her, the Nigerian woman frying akara by the roadside is not a person of agency or a symbol of resilience; she is a sordid prop in a narrative of state failure. She looks at the sweat of a mother’s brow and sees only a failure of national imagination. It is a putative approach to discourse: if a solution is not perfect, if it does not immediately transform a developing nation into an industrialized utopia, then it is not merely insufficient, it is a crime.
What is most scathing about Adelakun’s position is its inherent dishonesty regarding the nature of progress. She mocks the "day of small beginnings," dismissing the micro-economic activities that have sustained millions as "petty" and "subsistence" farming masquerading as enterprise.
One must ask: what is the alternative? Does she propose that these millions of women, while waiting for the elusive, fully-industrialized Nigerian miracle she demands, simply fold their arms and starve? Her critique of the "ladder" is a prime example of the intellectual trap she sets for herself. She frames the pursuit of micro-capital as an attempt to "trap the poor." This is the ultimate elitist fallacy.
It assumes that those who start small are doomed to stay small, and that any effort to help them grow is a cynical ploy. It is a rejection of the fundamental history of commerce. Wealth, in every corner of the globe, has always been a ladder. It is built rung by rung. To suggest that a small grant or the act of trading is "unproductive" is to display a profound ignorance of how capital multiplies. It is the language of those who have never had to build anything from nothing, yet feel entitled to judge those who do.
Adelakun’s piece is rife with the pillaging of history to suit a predetermined outcome. She attempts to invalidate the progress of my generation by claiming it was achieved in a "functioning Nigeria." This is a convenient revisionism. Every generation has had its monsters; every generation has faced its demons. The difference is that while she chooses to dwell in the darkness of what has been lost, millions of Nigerians are choosing to build in the light of what is possible.
She attacks my own journey, as if the story of a mother selling goods in Jos is somehow negated because I now serve in government. She demands to know why that mother did not become a multi-billionaire, as if the purpose of every small enterprise is to reach the scale of a global conglomerate, and as if a child rising from humble origins to contribute to their nation’s leadership is not the very definition of success. Her resentment is palpable. She is not interested in the "dignity of the labourer", a phrase she borrows and strips of its meaning, but in the humiliation of anyone who dares to suggest that the Nigerian spirit is not yet defeated. Adelakun sneers at the informal sector as a sign of poverty, oblivious to the fact that it is the engine room of global resilience.
@BonaventureE7 @SundayDareSD @aonanuga1956 @OfficialAPCNg @DOlusegun @officialABAT She is a back page columnist with Punch who is noted for scathing articles.
Nice analysis but you forgot to add that the real organisation used by the fellow is the funny-sounding Presidential Foreign Intervention Promotion Council. It was just added to the defunct Presidential Economic Advisory Council to make it sound better. Def not a one-man racket.
I INDEPENDENTLY SEARCHED NIGERIA'S BUDGET DOCUMENTS FROM 2019 TO THE PRESENT. HERE IS WHAT I FOUND ABOUT THE PFIPC SCANDAL THAT NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT.
THE NAME DID NOT COME FROM NOWHERE
Everyone is focused on Adeyemi the man. Nobody has gone back to ask where the name "Presidential Economic Advisory Council" actually came from. I did. And the answer changes this entire story.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is not a Tinubu creation. Tinubu's economic body is called the Presidential Economic Coordination Council. He established it in March 2024, inaugurated it in July 2024, and chairs it himself alongside Dangote, Elumelu, the Senate President and the Governors Forum Chairman. It has a different name, a different structure and a different budget code.
The Presidential Economic Advisory Council is a creation of Buhari. Buhari established it in September 2019 to replace the Economic Management Team that Osinbajo was heading. It had real named members. Prof. Doyin Salami as chairman. Charles Soludo. Bismark Rewane. Eight economists reporting directly to the President with a defined mandate and a legal institutional identity.
When Tinubu came in and created the PECC in 2024, the Buhari-era PEAC was never formally dissolved. No gazette removing it. No Budget Office circular revoking its institutional identity. It simply went dormant. But dormant in Nigeria's government system is not the same as deleted.
That dormant status is exactly what was exploited.
“The media must resist the temptation of becoming megaphones to terrorists and kidnappers….”
One month ago today...
@Bayo_Bilisi He knows his followers don't read!
Peter Obi is out of touch with what's going on in the country. His administration wants to focus largely on TVET?
Is it the same TVET Programme that PBAT has Kickstarted and has started paying 40k monthly to youths who enroll in the programme?
He couldn't even mention how he will beat this.
Agulu Messiah 😂
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