Darlon TV 🇳🇬

Transport Geography | Urban Planning | Environmental Managent | Private Cab Services | Address Verification | BVB | Port Harcourt |

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

In appreciation to the Artistes, Producers, Record Labels, and even Marketing/Distribution Companies who made Nigerian Music memorable in the 2000s.

In no order of Importance, here we go!!!!!!!!

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@AzeezRahmo86462 @tobyasky Probably the Fax Repairman got to the Office after 1am.

Yikes!

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

Where the issue between Atletico Madrid and F.C. Barcelona all began.

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

Farewell Ogogo

https://t.co/dwEcZ2ctNT

[FTBL_Planet @FTBL_Planet]

When Paul Merson left Aston Villa in 2002, he genuinely thought he still had another year of Premier League football left in him.

Instead, Villa paid him £100,000 to go.

Merson drove home devastated, sat on the sofa and cried, with no idea where he was going to play next.

Then the phone rang.

It was Harry Redknapp.

“I’m in charge at Pompey now, son.”

“Are they any good?”

Harry did not exactly oversell it.

“They’re f****** s***, son.”

“They finish in the bottom half every year, they always have to win one of their last games to stay up.”

“I’ve come in and I can’t believe how s*** they are.”

But Redknapp had cleared most of the squad out, brought in a load of free transfers and wanted Merson to join him.

“Come down, I’ll make you captain and we’ll have a right f****** go.”

The problem was that Merson had remarried, had twins in Birmingham and had no interest in moving the family down to Portsmouth or travelling to the coast for training every day.

Harry found a way around that as well.

“Don’t work Mondays, don’t work Wednesdays and don’t work Fridays.”

“Just make sure you turn it on for me when Saturday comes.”

The wages were going to be much lower than Merson had been earning at Villa.

“Well, that’s William Hill’s loss, not mine.”

“Let them worry about that.”

“Gaffer, I’ll sign.”

Merson had spent his career at clubs where the players were looked after.

At Portsmouth, he suddenly found himself taking his own training gear home every night and washing it.

That lasted until Kev the kit man came up with a proposition.

For £50 a week, Kev would do all of a player’s laundry.

Merson thought £50 a week sounded a bit steep.

But there was something in his Portsmouth contract that gave him an idea.

He had taken a huge pay cut to sign, but if Pompey won promotion to the Premier League, he would receive a £250,000 bonus.

After Harry’s introduction to the club, Merson did not think there was much chance of that happening anyway.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, mate.”

“If you wash my kit for the rest of the season for nothing, I’ll give you ten grand if we go up.”

Merson thought he had got himself a brilliant deal.

Kev nearly bit his hand off.

Pompey beat Nottingham Forest 2-0 in his first game, and Merson could not believe the noise at Fratton Park.

The following week at Crystal Palace was rather less convincing.

Pompey were 2-0 down at half-time and had been battered.

Merson walked off wondering what he had done.

“What the f*** have I done coming here?”

“Don’t tell me it’s one of them ones where we win one week and get battered the next…”

Harry changed the system at half-time, moved Merson into a free role behind two strikers and Portsmouth came back to win 3-2 with a last-minute goal.

The wins kept coming.

And every time Merson walked into training, there was Kev.

“As the campaign got underway and the team went on a winning streak, he’d come into training every day with a smile on his face.”

“He could smell his money.”

By now, the £10,000 laundry bet was looking considerably less clever.

Portsmouth won the First Division title by six points.

Merson collected the £250,000 promotion bonus he had barely considered possible when he signed.

And somewhere along the way, Kev had earned himself £10,000 for washing one man’s football kit.

“It was official: Pompey’s kit man was running the most expensive laundry in the world.”

“The tragic thing was, I was his best customer.”
#football

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

I checked out the base of the Signage and saw that most of the Bolts are not fastened.
Please let it be checked out, before it becomes a disaster.

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

I can't find the handles of Rivers State Signage & Advertisement Agency (RISAA) or Rivers State Min. of Works.
So, I will have to tag the head of the Govt.
Dear @SimFubaraKSC there is a Signage at the Eastern Bypass R/About, in front of Police Intelligence & Surveillance Centre

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@vitanthony @FabrizioRomano Chelsea doesn't look ambitious
A Club with 5 Sporting Directors, more than 40 1st Team Players, can't qualify for Europa Conference League isn't serious.
Enzo wants to defect & rightly so.
Chelsea overpaid for him. They must lower their price or end up keeping an unhappy Player

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@Wickednigerian Happy Birthday Mopatis.

Cheers, enjoy your special day and leave CAF alone 😊

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@realmadriden
@illara4

OTD

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@ESPNUK At least, he could have sang something from the Spice Girls.

How on earth can you not sing, when your wife is a Singer?

I blame Vicky for this mishap.

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@jtdolfin51 @AOL Open the link

[Ziyad Yakubu @Ziyad_yakubu]

There was a time in Nigeria when the man carrying a sewing machine on his shoulder was called Obioma.

Because almost all the artisanal tailors were Easterners of Igbo descent.

After the Civil War, many Easterners emerged from one of the most devastating chapters in Nigerian history with almost nothing but skill, mobility, discipline, and a survival instinct.

Some carried sewing machines from street to street, patching clothes, repairing trousers, adjusting school uniforms, and moving from compound to compound looking for work.

That image became so common that the name stuck.

Obioma.

A man with a sewing machine on his shoulder, moving under the sun and doing work many people looked down on.

But the same people who were once reduced in the public imagination to street tailoring slowly began to move.

From roadside tailoring to shops.

From shops to markets.

From markets to importation.

From importation to manufacturing.

From apprenticeship to industrial clusters.

From survival to ownership.

Go to Nnewi.

Go to Aba.

Go to Onitsha.

Go to Alaba.

Go to Ladipo.

Go to Ariaria.

You will still see poverty, struggle, disorder, bad roads, poor power supply, and all the normal Nigerian problems. Nobody is pretending the Southeast has become Singapore.

But you will also see something powerful.

You will see a people who took humiliation, displacement, and economic ruin and built a survival machine around trade, apprenticeship, mobility, and family capital.

And this is what makes my heart sink as a Northerner.

Today, the mai guard, mai ruwa, mai shayi, mai kaya, shoe repairer, the man pushing a wheelbarrow, carrying loads, shining shoes, patching clothes, riding okada, clearing construction sites, packing refuse, digging soakaway pits, hawking small goods, or sleeping beside a kiosk in Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan, Onitsha, and other cities is often called "Aboki."

That is the story we don't want to face.

One people moved from grass to grace.

Another moved from grace to grass.

This is not to take anything away from the Igbo people. I have nothing but admiration for them.

And it is not an insult to the Hausa people or to menial jobs. I am a proud son of Arewa, and in Arewa we do not look down on any vocation earned through halal means.

This is a history lesson.

Now look at us in the North.

We did not begin from the bottom.

Long before colonial Nigeria existed, Kano was already one of the great commercial cities of West Africa. Merchants from Tripoli, Fez, Agadez, Timbuktu, and Bornu passed through its markets. Caravans crossed the Sahara carrying leather goods, textiles, kola nuts, salt, and livestock. The city walls of Kano were not built around a village. They were built around a thriving urban economy that connected West Africa to North Africa.

We had cities that were centres of commerce when many parts of modern Nigeria were still organized around smaller local economies.

We had emirates that provided administration, taxation, courts, and political order across vast territories.

We had centres of Islamic scholarship that attracted students from across the region. In places like Kano, Katsina, Sokoto, and Borno, generations of scholars produced manuscripts and taught jurisprudence, theology, grammar, astronomy, and history. The reputation of northern scholarship travelled far beyond Nigeria's borders.

We had trade routes that linked us to the wider world. For centuries, merchants moved goods across the Sahara and across the savannah belt. Northern markets were not isolated local markets. They were part of international commercial networks.

We had cattle wealth on a scale few regions could match. Fulani pastoralists moved millions of cattle across grazing routes stretching from Senegal to Cameroon. Livestock was not merely food. It was wealth, trade, transport, status, and economic security.

We had one of the most respected leather industries in Africa. Kano leather was famous across the continent. Tanned hides from northern Nigeria found their way into trans-Saharan commerce and international markets. The famous red goatskin known as Morocco leather often originated from skins processed through West African leather networks in which Kano played a major role.

We had textile industries that employed thousands long before modern factories arrived. Hand-spun cotton was woven into cloth across northern towns. Entire communities depended on spinning, weaving, dyeing, trading, and transporting textiles.

We had the famous dye pits of Kano.

Not one or two pits.

Dozens of them.

For centuries, the Kofar Mata dye pits transformed locally woven cloth into richly coloured fabrics using indigo. Traders came from different parts of West Africa to buy these textiles. The dye pits became one of the oldest continuously operating industrial sites on the continent. They supported craftsmen, traders, transporters, farmers growing indigo, and entire commercial networks built around textile production.

We had the groundnut economy.

There was a time when the groundnut pyramids of Kano were not merely tourist attractions on postcards.

They were symbols of enormous agricultural wealth.

Thousands of farmers cultivated groundnuts across the North. Rail lines carried produce southward for export. Groundnut exports generated foreign exchange, supported industries, created jobs, and helped finance government revenues. The pyramids themselves represented mountains of produce waiting to enter global markets.

And if we move into the colonial and post-colonial era, the advantages become even harder to ignore.

We had numbers.

The North occupies roughly three-quarters of Nigeria's landmass. Depending on how one defines the region, the nineteen northern states account for well over half of Nigeria's population. Kano State alone has a population larger than many African countries.

We had manpower.

For decades, millions of young people entered the labour force every year. We were not a small minority struggling to find relevance. We were one of the largest demographic blocs in Africa.

We had land.

Hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of territory stretching across the Sudan and Sahel savannahs.

Land suitable for millet, sorghum, maize, rice, cotton, groundnuts, and livestock.

Land crossed by major river systems such as the Niger and Benue, and supported by irrigation projects in several states.

We had agricultural potential that many countries would envy.

We had political influence.

From independence onward, northern politicians, military officers, civil servants, traditional rulers, and power brokers occupied some of the most influential positions in the Nigerian state for long periods.

Prime ministers.

Heads of state.

Presidents.

Military rulers.

Senior ministers.

Powerful bureaucrats.

Influential legislators.

Whether one likes that fact or not, the North was never politically invisible.

We had religious authority.

The Sultanate of Sokoto remains one of the most influential Islamic institutions in Africa.

The emirates commanded legitimacy that extended beyond politics.

Mosques, Islamic schools, scholars, judges, and religious networks shaped social life across millions of households.

We had institutions.

Not perfect institutions.

But institutions nonetheless.

Emirate councils.

Traditional courts.

Islamic learning centres.

Agricultural boards.

Marketing boards.

Regional administrations.

Cooperative systems.

Educational establishments.

Commercial associations.

Structures that survived for generations.

We had a head start.

That is what makes the present situation so painful.

Because today, when millions of young Hausa and northern boys enter any big city, what work are many of them known for?

These boys are not lazy.

A lazy man does not leave Kano, Katsina, Zamfara, Sokoto, Jigawa, Bauchi, Kebbi, or Borno and sleep under a bridge in Lagos just to survive.

A lazy man does not push water from street to street.

A lazy man does not carry cement until his back bends.

A lazy man does not guard another man's house all night and still open a kiosk by morning.

The problem is not laziness.

The problem is that too many of our people enter the modern economy from the lowest possible point.

No certificate.

No skill that scales.

No capital.

No protection.

No formal training.

No strong educational foundation.

No industrial ladder waiting for them.

So they sell their bodies first.

Their backs.

Their hands.

Their legs.

Their sleep.

Their youth.

That is the real tragedy.

The Igbo Obioma story became a ladder because it was connected to apprenticeship, trade discipline, family networks, and commercial ambition.

The Hausa Aboki story too often becomes a trap because it is connected to poverty, broken schooling, rural collapse, insecurity, and survival migration.

One system turns a boy into a trader.

The other turns a boy into cheap labour or, worse, a recruitment ground for terrorism.

This is the painful contrast.

The Southeast came out of war and produced commercial networks.

The North came out of power and produced surplus labour.

That sentence is harsh, but look around before you reject it.

Who is carrying the load?

Who is guarding the gate?

Who is pushing the cart?

Who is fetching the water?

Who is sleeping in the market?

Who is leaving the village because bandits have made farming impossible?

Who is entering the city with nothing but strength?

If the answer to all the questions above is Arewa youth, then you must not be offended by the diagnosis. Instead, start asking your leaders the harder questions.

Because what is happening to Arewa is a failure of social organization. We shield our leaders too much and outsource criticism of them.

Our fathers inherited a civilization.

Too many of our boys inherited migration.

Our fathers inherited functioning economic systems.

Too many of our boys inherited survival.

Our fathers participated in trade networks stretching across continents.

Too many of our boys participate only in daily labour markets.

Our fathers built industries around leather, textiles, livestock, agriculture, and commerce.

Too many of our boys now rent out their muscles by the day.

And the painful thing is that the word Aboki, which originally means "friend," now, in the mouth of the Nigerian city, often becomes a class marker.

It becomes a way of saying: the northern poor man who does the work nobody respects but everybody needs.

That should break our hearts.

Not because the work is shameful.

No honest work is shameful.

What is shameful is that a whole region with history, population, religious authority, political influence, institutions, agricultural potential, and vast territory keeps producing young people whose first contact with the economy is desperation.

This is why history matters.

The question is not whether the Igbo are better than the Hausa.

That is a childish argument.

The real question is: what system turns hardship into enterprise, and what system turns heritage into dependency?

Because poverty alone does not explain everything.

War did not stop the Igbo from building trade networks.

Lack of oil did not stop Nnewi from producing industrialists.

Bad Nigerian roads did not stop Aba from becoming a manufacturing symbol.

Weak government did not stop apprenticeship from creating business owners.

So what stopped us?

What happened to the North that inherited thriving cities, trans-Saharan commerce, respected scholarship, textile industries, leather industries, livestock wealth, agricultural exports, demographic strength, political influence, and enormous land resources?

How did a people with so much historical structure produce so many young men with so little modern preparation?

That is the conversation we need.

Not insults.

Not denial.

Not ethnic pride.

Not hiding behind "our culture."

Not pretending every criticism is hatred.

The Obioma story should humble us.

Because it shows that a people can begin with a sewing machine on the shoulder and still build a commercial ladder.

The Aboki story should disturb us.

Because it shows that a people can begin with history on their side and still end up supplying cheap labour to other people's cities.

That is the mirror.

Igbo moved from Obioma to enterprise.

Hausa must not remain trapped inside Aboki survival.

The North needs a ladder.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

Saw this yesterday (1st of May, 2026) within Ikokwu axis in Port Harcourt.

Damn!

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Nike spent ten years trying to break the 2-hour marathon. They named a project after it. They built special shoes. They paid the greatest marathoner alive to chase it. Yesterday, a Kenyan runner finally did it in 1:59:30, wearing Adidas.

Sabastian Sawe used to be a pacemaker. A pacemaker is the kind of runner you hire to set the speed for the first few miles of a race and then drop out before the finish. In January 2022, Sawe got booked to do exactly that at a half-marathon in Spain. He'd never raced more than three miles in his life. He stayed in for the full 13 and won the whole thing. Adidas signed him not long after. Four years later, he became the first human ever to run an official marathon under 2 hours.

Nike, meanwhile, started this whole project in 2016 with a public goal called "Breaking2." They paid for the shoes, the pacemakers, the science labs, and Eliud Kipchoge himself. Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but the event was a closed-course exhibition with rotating pacemakers and a pace car projecting a green laser line onto the road. The sport's governing body never recognized it as a real race. It didn't count.

Then Nike's running business cratered. Digital sales fell 26% in one quarter. Their share of footwear sold at Dick's Sporting Goods went from 39% to 32% in five months. On Running grew from $330 million to $1.8 billion between 2020 and 2025. Hoka nearly quadrupled. Roger Federer left Nike for On. Nike's board fired the CEO in October 2024.

Adidas spent the same period building a better shoe. The new Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 took three years to develop. It weighs 97 grams, about 3.4 ounces, lighter than a deck of cards. A Wall Street Journal-cited study found that wearing a shoe 3.5 ounces lighter saves a runner around 57 seconds across a marathon. Sawe beat the third-place finisher by 58 seconds.

Adidas also did something Nike never did for Kipchoge. They wrote a $50,000 check to the official anti-doping body for track and field, asking it to test Sawe more aggressively than any other runner alive. He got tested 25 times in the two months before last year's Berlin Marathon, and Adidas signed up to fund this for the length of his contract. The logic: the moment Sawe ran a marathon this fast, the world was going to ask if he cheated, especially after his countrywoman Ruth Chepngetich got a 3-year doping ban in 2025. Adidas got out ahead of it.

The shoe retails at $500 and is barely available. Adidas's Adizero shoes won half of all major marathon races in 2024. Yesterday in London, four of the top five finishers wore the same Adidas shoe. Yomif Kejelcha crossed the line 11 seconds after Sawe and also broke 2 hours. The top three runners all beat the previous world record.

Nike's only response was an Instagram post. Three sentences long: "The clock has been reset. There is no finish line." That was their entire public reaction to losing a 10-year moonshot to their biggest rival.

[Nnamdi Obi @nnamdiobiii]

Every time the West calls an African country "unstable" they mean the resources stopped flowing.

I made a glossary of 100 diplomatic words they use and what they actually mean.

https://t.co/hivzYl1N0Z

Bookmark this before your next history book. 🧵

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@ecobank_nigeria I have sent via DM.

Regards.

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

Dear @ecobank_nigeria
Look at the type of SMS you sent to me on an Account I'm using regularly.
Is this April fool or what?

[Nofanboymma @nofanboymma]

Israel Adesanya vs Joe Pyfer - FULL FIGHT https://t.co/wk9PczsgsT

[Darlon TV 🇳🇬 @Datimah]

@Bofbaba @Phonomobile1 @NigeriaStories Then, why did they give the preceding MVP Award to William Troost-Ekong, even as Nigeria lost to Cote d'Ivoire in the final?