Efe_Paul_Azino

Vagabond and doer @lagospoetryfest, @creativeafricang, @marokomag |Author For Broken Men Who Cross Often (@farafinabooks)

[Efe_Paul_Azino @EFEPAUL]

"The Nigerian state, having learned from the Abacha years that direct repression generated too much international attention, developed more sophisticated methods for neutralizing dissent. Instead of killing intellectuals, it began buying them."
https://t.co/dTc6OrApmd

[Salim 🍥 @salimpotter]

It's a good morning to check out the lineup of the third edition of the Kano International Poetry Festival @Kanopoetryfest.

It's happening from 15th of October to the 17th.

Get your tickets!

[Namwali @namwalien]

My fall tour for ON MORRISON starts this week, with a keynote for the New York Black and African Literature Festival at 6pm at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (links below and on my website). Join us!

[Salim 🍥 @salimpotter]

Good afternoon everyone.

We're organizing the 3rd edition of the @Kanopoetryfest, come October. We're inviting magazines, press, influencers and everyone to join us at the festival.

If there's anyone or any organization you think we can work together, please let me know!

[Romeo Oriogun @RomeoOriogun]

Cover art: Oluwafemi Akanmu
Pub date: 05/01/2027

[Ọrẹ Ogunbiyi @OreOgunb]

My latest story for @TheEconomist is one I wish I didn’t have to write. Nigeria is still the deadliest place in the world to give birth and maternal mortality rates are barely any lower than two decades ago. But there are ever-cheaper, available solutions
https://t.co/Vv5qBe5ulB

[AEI @assumpta_idaka]

I’m asking the internet to do something scary:

*Please Take a chance on me*

My name is Assumpta. I’m a Nigerian creative writer living with cerebral palsy, and I’ve spent my entire life learning how to pursue opportunities in a world that doesn’t always make room for my body

[Okey Ndibe @OkeyNdibe]

Cry, my beloved country! A wretched, mediocre ex-governor boldly, shamelessly declares that he and his wife are entitled to 23 cars purchased with public funds! About time Nigerians lost their patience with these knaves masquerading as leaders.

[Wale Gates @walegates]

Let's be fair and kind to ourselves, how many Americans sef get $100k in savings? How many people for naija get N130m in savings for bank?

Unless you're homeless, in serious medical need, or eating on the streets, Be kind in the assessment of yourself & where you are in life.

[Efe_Paul_Azino @EFEPAUL]

@aeolofintuade So sorry for your loss. May she find rest 🤍

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The doctor who delivered Dolly Parton in a one-room Tennessee cabin in 1946 was paid with a sack of cornmeal. Her father farmed other people's land and could not read or write. Eighty years later, the reading program she built in his name has mailed more than 300 million books.

She wrote "I Will Always Love You" on the same afternoon she wrote "Jolene," as a goodbye to Porter Wagoner, and released it in 1974. Elvis wanted it. The night before the session, Colonel Tom Parker called and said Presley would only record it if they got half the publishing, meaning half of everything the song ever earned. She had been in Nashville ten years by then. She said no, and cried all night. Whitney Houston cut her version in 1992, held number one for fourteen weeks, and Forbes later put Parton's royalties from it near $10 million. She put some of that money into an office complex in Nashville and called the place the house that Whitney built.

Dollywood opened in Pigeon Forge in 1986 because she wanted paychecks in the county she came from. Around 4,000 people work there now. Three million visitors come every year. The University of Tennessee put its economic impact at $1.8 billion, and it is the largest employer in Sevier County. Since 2022 the company has paid tuition, fees, and books in full for every worker from their first day, seasonal hires included.

Wildfires tore through those mountains in November 2016, killing fourteen people and destroying more than 2,400 buildings. Her foundation was handing out money within 48 hours. Every family that lost a home got $1,000 a month for six months, regardless of income. The final check was $5,000. Total delivered: $8.9 million.

In April 2020 she sent $1 million to Vanderbilt for coronavirus research. When Moderna's vaccine results ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that November, her fund appeared in the footnotes.

Carl Dean, her husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025. The note she wrote to fans afterward ended with the same five words she wrote for Porter Wagoner back in 1974. She died in Nashville today. Her family asked that instead of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library, which still mails 3.4 million books a month to children who will never get to meet her.

[Rufybaba @Rufyb]

I am afraid, this does not fly, in my opinion.

If you deliberately establish a “first-name” culture, it should apply broadly, including to senior leadership, unless the policy explicitly carves out the board (by the way, imagine setting a culture and it is not starting from the top).

Yes, non-executive directors occupy a different governance position from employees and executive management, but their unique position within the company does not inherently exempt them from the first-name policy.

If a company says “we operate a first-name culture. Irrespective of seniority, employees address one another by their first names”, then having an unwritten exception “but obviously you don’t call a director or person xyz by their first name” undermines the philosophy behind the policy.

After all, the purpose of a first-name culture is usually to reduce unnecessary status signaling, make senior people more approachable and create a less hierarchical working environment.

If management wants the convention to be “first names for everybody below the board, formal titles for directors”, then say so.

It is highly problematic when the written or communicated policy says one thing while an invisible hierarchy says something else.

What is all these talk about “wisdom”, “culture”, etc.? If those things indeed were a big deal, why the performative stunt of “first-names policy”?

Or why is no one directing the “wisdom” yarn to TOE that the young lady is still very young, maybe inexperienced, and does not understand yet how things ideally work, and so you do not come off as conflicting what the laid-down principle is publicly?

If the irritation comes from “I am way older and way above you in status”, was that not considered before setting a policy? You all didn’t know that?

You import the form of an institution without accepting the behavioural implications that give the institution meaning. The company gets to present itself as having a flat, progressive culture without senior people actually surrendering any of the status markers associated with the old culture.

This is how we bastardise concepts and principles.

If the organisation is not comfortable with the consequences of that philosophy, there is much cleaner solution… “Simply don’t adopt the policy”.

Be hierarchical. Be formal. Require whatever title or whatever conventions you consider appropriate.

I wouldn’t call TOE by his first name too, but that’s me. But saying “we are on a first-name basis here” and then humiliating someone doing that is an inconsistency that is worse.

At the heart of it, this really speaks to a broader problem of weak institutional culture and “big-manism ” in the corporate world, where formal policies supposedly apply to everyone until they clash with status and hierarchy.

“Can you call Aliko or Femi Otedola by their first name?” Let them not implement first-name policy if it would be an issue or if the “cultural context” is that very strong (and that would be perfectly fine).

Institutions should be stronger than personalities. Let’s quit all that performative nonsense.

[HIBAF @hausabaf]

Introducing the 6th edition of #HIBAF26 with the theme: Afrophony/Hausa Philosophies.

This year's theme invites us to rethink whose languages produce knowledge, whose ideas are archived and remembered, and what it means to imagine the future through African languages.

#HIBAF26

[HIBAF @hausabaf]

LIVE INFORMATION SESSION |
CROSSING TONGUES POETRY RESIDENCY

Join us for a live information session where we'll share more about the residency.

📅17 16 August 2026
⏲️12-1 PM WAT
💻Google Meet: https://t.co/eNHaXoOGbX

[my book is better than my tweets @MichellCClark]

Your relationship with yourself cannot be built entirely around improvement. At some point, you have to become someone you are allowed to enjoy being. You get to be proud of who you are. Present tense.

[deji toye @dejitoye]

That other twin made a failed bet on the Nigerian social media crowd--a Roman mob, if there ever was one. His brother was being roundly roasted for a slip-up on "Nigerian languages" and he thought to pile on. He was the better twin for a minute... until he wasn't.

[Abiodun @bin_gbada]

A crate of Eggs is now 6,600.

In 2015, before the emergence of the party of Doom, APC, a crate of eggs was N700.
With 5,000, you would buy 7 crates of Eggs.

Reforms aren’t meant to kill you, it’s meant to ease your life as a citizen.

BAT has to go!!

[Le Spectateur @LRNZH]

The legend of Gilbert Chagoury, the President's confidant, continues:

"'There was no competitive bidding. There was not even restrictive bidding'... Mr Doherty filed a lawsuit against the government and HiTech... The court threw out his case, arguing it was not his to bring."💥

[Mofiyinfoluwa Odubanke. @__mofiyinfoluwa]

For the last 3 years, The Abebi AfroNonfiction Foundation has empowered Nigerian women writing creative nonfiction. This year, we’re inviting African women from ALL over to join us for our inaugural fellowship and anthology publication.

Full details https://t.co/xP6vDOD1kj

[Sada Malumfashi @sadaoverall]

If you write poetry across Hausa and English this fully funded and all expenses covered trip to Scotland is for you

👇🏾

https://t.co/bnLmTzG9Ke

[Chuma Nwokolo @chumanwokolo]

In the 70s, they scavenged the railings on our flyovers. Today, they mine the pillars for rebars. It's an allegory for the progress of political corruption from millions thru billions into the trillions of naira: brain dead thieves, scavenging recklessly, until the house falls.