I have been privileged to work across over 20 countries including the United States and UK as a Gen Z. In many rooms I have been in, I was the youngest person.
So I can tell you, the greatest skill you need in your corner is not your certificate, but the ability to work across cultures and systems.
The fact that the 76-year old CEO in my workplace 3 streets away from the White House asked me to call him by his first name Damon doesn’t mean I should come back to Nigeria and call Dr. Oby Ezekwesili by her first name.
It’s lack of social intelligence. When you are in Rome, you behave like a Roman. Adapt quickly or be left behind.
Today’s a public holiday, most are at home relaxing or just having fun. Guess who are denied of doing such? The children kidnapped in Oyo, Borno and now Kogi. It’s almost a month with no food, proper care or shelter.
Pls Bring Them Home 🙏🏾
Africa has two loud unserious camps pretending to be intellectual movements.
One camp looks at Europe and America the way village children used to look at white missionaries: everything from there must be superior. Their roads, their accents, their laws, their schools, their atheism, their democracy, their fashion, their manners, even their confusion. If the West sneezes, they call it civilization. If Africa breathes, they call it backwardness.
The other camp is the mirror image of the same sickness.
They claim they are anti-West, anti-imperial, Pan-African, decolonial, revolutionary, conscious, radical. But scratch the surface and you find another type of laziness. Their own fantasy is that Africa can wake up one morning, shout “down with the West,” chase away every foreign influence, reject Islam, reject Christianity, reject liberalism, reject capitalism, reject everything that came through history, and then somehow industrialize by vibes.
It is Wakanda for people who do not understand steel production, electricity grids, ports, banking, military logistics, semiconductor supply chains, pharmaceutical production, aviation, insurance, food systems, or the simple fact that no serious country builds itself by shouting slogans at the global system.
They think revolution is a mood.
They think development is anger.
They think anti-imperialism means refusing to understand the world as it exists.
That is why their politics always sounds powerful for thirty seconds and childish after two questions.
Ask them how Africa should industrialize.
They will say: “Decouple from the West.”
Okay. Decouple how?
From which technology? Which machinery? Which export market? Which financial system? Which shipping route? Which medical supply chain? Which aviation standard? Which internet infrastructure? Which currency settlement system? Which university research network? Which pharmaceutical input? Which military equipment? Which refinery component? Which fertilizer supply? Which spare parts?
Silence.
Then they return to slogans.
“Reject the West.”
Fine. After rejecting the West, what exactly are you producing on Monday morning?
Can your country manufacture MRI machines?
Can it produce aircraft engines?
Can it refine crude at scale without importing critical components?
Can it produce industrial chemicals?
Can it build ports, rails, power plants, transmission lines, and machine tools without foreign inputs?
Can it feed its population without imported fertilizer, imported machinery, imported improved seeds, imported pesticides, imported fuel, or imported logistics systems?
Can it defend its borders without imported drones, imported surveillance systems, imported aircraft, imported ammunition, imported communications equipment, or imported spare parts?
This is where the fantasy collapses.
They do not want statecraft. They want emotional revenge.
And emotional revenge is not a development model.
The funny thing is that even the people they worship did not live inside this childish fantasy.
They worship Ibrahim Traoré, Abdourahamane Tchiani, Assimi Goïta, the AES, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Gaddafi, whoever is currently wearing military fatigues and speaking hard against France.
But look closely.
Their own heroes were not religious-free cave revolutionaries trying to return Africa to some imaginary pre-Islamic, pre-Christian paradise.
Tchiani is Muslim.
Ibrahim Traoré Muslim.
Goïta Muslim.
Thomas Sankara came from a Catholic background.
Kwame Nkrumah was baptized Roman Catholic.
Julius Nyerere was Roman Catholic.
Gaddafi was Muslim.
Nkrumah did not build Ghana by telling people to return to the bush and worship the ancestors.
Sankara did not rename Upper Volta Burkina Faso because he wanted everyone to abandon modern institutions and live inside precolonial nostalgia.
Nyerere did not build Tanzanian nationalism by declaring war on Christianity and Islam.
These men understood something today’s Twitter revolutionaries do not understand: Africa’s problem is not that history touched us. Africa’s problem is that we have not learned how to consciously select, adapt, discipline, and organize what history left behind.
That is the difference.
A serious society does not ask, “Is this foreign?”
A serious society asks, “Does this serve our survival, our order, our productivity, our dignity, and our future?”
That is statecraft.
Japan did not become strong by rejecting everything foreign. Japan became strong by studying foreign systems, copying what was useful, adapting it to Japanese needs, and protecting Japanese sovereignty while doing it.
China did not rise by shouting “West bad” and running into the mountains. China studied Western science, Soviet planning, global capitalism, manufacturing, export markets, finance, infrastructure, technology transfer, and then bent those tools toward Chinese power.
Singapore did not become rich by romanticizing village life. It built a disciplined port state with law, housing, education, bureaucracy, trade, finance, and ruthless competence.
Even Iran, the country many of these people secretly fantasize about, did not survive by rejecting modernity. Iran has universities, missiles, engineers, nuclear scientists, industries, bureaucracies, religious institutions, intelligence networks, oil infrastructure, and a deep state that can actually execute policy. 9
That is what our slogan merchants do not understand.
A state is not a flag.
A state is not a speech.
A state is not a young soldier in sunglasses.
A state is not “France out” written on a placard.
A state is the boring machinery of power: tax collection, internal security, energy, courts, ports, roads, census, schools, hospitals, land administration, industrial policy, agricultural extension, standards agencies, intelligence, procurement discipline, currency management, and the ability to make people obey rules without collapsing into ethnic and religious suspicion.
That is the work.
And that work is not sexy enough for people addicted to revolutionary theatre.
They want Africa to “decouple,” but they do not want to discuss the capacity required to decouple.
They want sovereignty, but they do not want bureaucracy.
They want industrialization, but they do not want technical education.
They want dignity, but they do not want discipline.
They want anti-imperialism, but they no idea how to build production.
They want Pan-Africanism, but plan of how we can even talk to one another without hauling insults.
They want to defeat the West, but their entire movement is hosted on Western platforms, typed on Chinese phones, powered by foreign operating systems, boosted by American algorithms, and explained using Marxist language from European intellectual history.
Then they turn around and say Islam and Christianity are foreign.
This is the part that exposes the shallowness.
Some of them are not really against foreign influence. They are only against the foreign influences they have chosen to hate.
Marx is foreign, but acceptable.
Lenin is foreign, but acceptable.
Socialism is foreign, but acceptable.
Military fatigues copied from modern armies are foreign, but acceptable.
Twitter is foreign, but acceptable.
Smartphones are foreign, but acceptable.
French language is foreign, but acceptable when quoting Sankara.
English is foreign, but acceptable when insulting Christianity.
But Islam and Christianity? Suddenly, purity must return.
If your argument is that Africa must reject everything that came from outside, then be honest and throw away the whole package. Throw away the phone. Throw away the internet. Throw away the modern university. Throw away the hospital. Throw away Marx. Throw away the AK-pattern revolutionary aesthetic. Throw away the imported microphone you use to record your anti-foreign podcast. Throw away the English language you use to preach ancestral purity.
But they will not do that.
Because they do not actually want purity.
They want a costume.
They want the emotional satisfaction of sounding “more African” without doing the hard work of building a functioning African state.
There is also another childish assumption inside this movement: the idea that precolonial Africa was one clean, peaceful, spiritually balanced paradise before Arabs, Europeans, Islam, Christianity, and capitalism ruined everything.
That is nursery-school history.
Precolonial Africa had beauty, knowledge, art, trade, kingdoms, scholarship, architecture, moral systems, diplomacy, and deep civilization.
It also had war, slavery, conquest, hierarchy, patriarchy, superstition, human sacrifice, internal oppression, ethnic conflict, and ruling classes who exploited people like ruling classes everywhere.
The past was not hell.
But it was not heaven either.
A mature people can honor their ancestors without lying about them.
A serious African does not need to pretend that everything before colonialism was perfect.
The Western worshipper says: “Africa was nothing before Europe.”
The nativist romantic says: “Africa was perfect before Europe.”
Both are wrong.
Both are childish.
Both are allergic to reality.
Africa was human before Europe. Brilliant in some places, broken in others, advanced in some sectors, weak in others, moral in some traditions, cruel in others. Like every civilization on earth.
Our job is not to worship the past.
Our job is to study it, rescue what is useful, reject what is harmful, and build something that can survive the modern world.
That is conscious adoption.
Not Western worship.
Not ancestral cosplay.
Conscious adoption means you can take English as a tool without worshipping England.
You can use Chinese infrastructure lessons without becoming China.
You can use Western science without accepting Western political domination.
You can use capitalism where it builds productivity and reject it where it creates oligarchic extraction.
You can use socialism where it protects the vulnerable and reject it where it kills incentive and creates bureaucratic stupidity.
That is what serious civilizations do.
They select.
They adapt.
They discipline.
They absorb.
They domesticate.
They do not scream at history like wounded children.
This is why the fantasy of total decoupling is so empty.
Africa should absolutely reduce dependency. Africa should absolutely build industrial capacity. Africa should absolutely stop being a raw-material appendage of richer powers. Africa should absolutely resist military, financial, and diplomatic manipulation. Africa should absolutely stop behaving like a continent of client states.
But reduction of dependency is not the same thing as childish isolation.
You do not decouple by announcement.
You decouple by building capacity.
You build power generation, technical schools, rail, ports, refineries, machine-tool capacity, pharmaceutical production, competent customs systems, courts that enforce contracts, armies that can secure your territory, intelligence services that understand threats, central banks that understand production, local capital markets, food systems, manufacturing clusters, bureaucracies that can survive one president, and a ruling class that is afraid of consequences.
That is decoupling.
Everything else is noise.
And let us be honest: many African “anti-imperialists” do not even want that kind of decoupling because it is too demanding. It requires study, patience, institutional discipline. It requires telling your own people uncomfortable truths. It requires admitting that foreign exploitation is real, but local incompetence is also real. It requires admitting that France is not the reason your local government chairman stole the borehole money. America is not the reason your customs officer collects bribes. Britain is not the reason your university laboratory has no reagents after twenty years of budget allocations. The IMF is not the reason your governor buys SUVs while schools collapse.
Imperialism, Neocolonialism, Unequal exchange, and Foreign sabotage are all real.
But if your analysis stops there, you are not doing politics. You are doing therapy.
A serious anti-imperialism must be able to say two things at once: the global system is rigged against weak states, and weak African states are also kept weak by their own corrupt, lazy, predatory ruling classes.
That second part is where the slogan merchants start coughing.
Because it is easier to curse Paris than to build a tax system.
It is easier to insult Washington than to reform procurement.
It is easier to shout “sovereignty” than to stop soldiers from becoming politicians.
It is easier to praise the AES than to ask whether military governments can build durable institutions beyond charisma, uniforms, and emergency decrees.
It is easier to worship Traoré online than to ask what happens after Traoré.
That is the question unserious people avoid.
What happens after the hero?
What happens when the assassination attempt is successful?
What happens when the young captain becomes old?
What happens when the military council disagrees?
What happens when insecurity persists?
What happens when the economy needs foreign exchange?
What happens when wheat prices rise?
What happens when fuel supply is disrupted?
What happens when Russia, China, Turkey, the Gulf, or any new partner starts pursuing its own interest?
What happens when the same people who shouted “France out” discover that every major power is transactional?
That is when fantasy meets statecraft.
There is no permanent friend in geopolitics.
There is no savior civilization waiting to rescue Africa.
Not France.
Not America.
Not China.
Not Russia.
Not Turkey.
Not Iran.
Not the Gulf.
Every serious power wakes up every morning thinking about its own interest. The only people still looking for moral saviours are Africans trapped between colonial trauma and revolutionary immaturity.
The pro-West camp wants the West to come and save us.
The nativist camp wants the ancestors to come and save us.
The tankie camp wants China or Russia to come and save us.
The religious cynic say leave Islam and Christianity and we would be saved.
The cultural romantic wants precolonial memory to come and save us.
Enough.
A serious continent must grow up.
Africa’s future will not come from rejecting everything foreign or swallowing everything foreign. It will come from building states intelligent enough to know what to take, what to modify, what to resist, and what to discard.
That is the actual work.
I am not someone that likes to mock people's ideology no matter how ridiculous I find them. But in service of humanity we must mercilessly mock this fantasy.
We must mock it because it deserves mockery.
We must mock the person who wants to defeat the West using Western apps, Western languages, Western theories, Chinese hardware, while hunting for western payouts in western currency, and then claims he is returning Africa to purity.
We must mock the person who thinks Islam and Christianity are “foreign poisons” but quotes Marx like his village elder.
We must mock the person who thinks wearing cowries and shouting “ancestor” is an industrial policy.
We must mock the person who thinks anger can substitute for electricity.
We must mock the person who thinks coups are automatically revolutions.
We must mock the person who thinks anti-French slogan is a substitute for food security.
We must mock the person who thinks decolonization means deleting 1,000 years of African Islamic history and 500 years of African Christian history, as if millions of Africans did not live, think, write, trade, fight, build, pray, govern, and create through those traditions.
We must mock it because childish ideas become dangerous when they start sounding deep.
But after mocking it, we must offer the serious alternative.
Africa does not need Western worship.
Africa does not need nativist cosplay.
Africa does not need revolutionary cartoons.
Africa needs conscious adoption.
Take what works.
Reject what weakens you.
Build what you lack.
Protect what is yours.
Discipline your elites.
Produce more than you consume.
Trade without kneeling.
Partner without becoming a client.
Modernize without becoming culturally empty.
Remember the past without becoming trapped inside it.
That is the path.
Everything else is la-la land with a flag.
There is one Super Story intro where a father asked the son to jump down from the roof that he would catch him, and asked the son to jump, only for him to pull away as the son fell flat. He then told the son not to trust anybody, even him his father.
I always wanted to address that.
As a parent, one of the best things you can give and should give to your kids, is trust. You owe them a duty to get them to trust you. A child must be able to say without doubt that "my father/mother said this, they would do it." You will not understand the importance of it until it is too late. There is no moral lesson in that super story, it was simply bad parenting. If I ask my child to jump, he should have 100% faith that daddy would catch him.
I don't have a child yet, but I avoid lying to kids. I would rather a child says "Relax, if Uncle Wisdom said he would do it, he would surely do it." How much more my own child? There is something parents used to do when we were growing up, where they ask you to go get your slippers and before you come back, they have disappeared. I learnt from my brother not to do that. If he isn't taking his son along, he tells him straight up. The worst that would happen is that, he would cry. If he tells him to go get his slippers, he would wait for him where he is. The boy has learnt to trust that daddy is not leaving him behind if he goes to get his shoes. Trust is fickle, it is easy to lose it.
Children are impressionable beings, how do you want them to see you? You are the first line of trust for your own child. You shouldn't be teaching them not to trust you. With trust comes security. The are the adult, the responsibility is on you. Trust is not a gift. You have to earn it.
Today makes it exactly 2 years since I set out to break a chess world record in Times Square New York. Changed my entire world, helped us build an education centre for children and gave me a life of endless imagination.
Happy anniversary,I’m grateful.
I’ll tell you 4;
1. Every single day, your body produces at least one cell that has the potential to become a full-blown Cancer. But your immune system destroys it quietly without you ever knowing.
2. Your skeleton is very active. It constantly breaks itself down and rebuilds itself from scratch. Because of this process, you get a completely NEW skeleton every few years (about 10).
3. You actually have a second brain in your stomach called the Enteric Nervous System. About 90% of your Serotonin (the chemical that makes you happy) is produced there, not in your head!
So when you eat rubbish, it tells your brain to ruin your mood. That’s what is responsible for the 'butterflies in your stomach' feeling.
4. Cervical cancer is one of the ONLY cancers in the world that gives a 10 to 15-year 'notice period'. The virus that causes it (HPV) can hide in a woman's body for over a decade with ZERO symptoms. It is almost 100% preventable, but only if you catch it during that silent period.
The Russian guy gist is not funny. He has an exotic advantage which is okay. Maybe the women slept with him because he is white and that is also okay. Whether he paid them for the sex or not, is irrelevant. When someone or people have sex with you, they trust you to protect their dignity.
There is no valid reason for documenting it and posting them online. They had sex with him and so what? Don’t Russian women have sporadic sex? People have shifted the conversation to “African women are cheap” but that is off point. He violated them by leaking those videos.
He should be arrested.
Guys.
A foreigner travels to African countries, engages in consensual sex with women, secretly records them, and then publishes the videos online.
The sex was consensual.
The recording and distribution were not.
That is sexual exploitation.
What’s troubling is that instead of focusing on the violation, many are laughing at the women.
Now, before the familiar “why did they go there?” question comes up, let’s separate the issues.
Adults make personal choices every day. Some wise, some risky.
But no such personal decision cancels the right to privacy, and grants one permission to secretly record and expose someone.
We can debate ethics, morality and safety.
But those debates must not erase the principle of consent.
Consent to sex is not consent to filming.
Consent to filming is not consent to publication.
If we blur that line, we normalise exploitation.
@osazenoo I have a Hyundai Elantra Sport 2015 model for sale. It's foreign used and non-accidented - 15million (slightly negotiable). Contact 08034610811. Thank you.
Farewell to Kasali Akangbe Ogun, a master of the Yoruba wood carving tradition and foundational member of the New Sacred Art Movement of Osogbo, who passed away on Friday, January 16, 2026. Ifá rere kó jẹ ni morere.
We sometimes forget that social media is a recent invention and that if it existed from time immemorial, most books would not exist. There’s no difference between a book and a well written Twitter article, functionally. But many performative people here would “book” mark that article and swear they will NEVER read a self help book.
There is nothing in that article that isn’t well documented in various self help books and just like the article is not self-enforcing, no self help books is intended to hand-hold you through personal development, at best they give you insights or perspectives. But ironically, only books get the flak for being too abstract, too subjective and what-not.
It is far more intellectually honest to admit (1) that you don’t like reading certain genres of books because they’re more cognitively demanding as opposed to other genres that are more relaxing, or (2) that the structured nature of books in general can induce anxiety and you prefer to stumble on interesting things to read (which social media makes easy). These are perfectly reasonable reasons.
What is utterly performative is the continuous denigration of a sub category of books as serving no purpose, when the vast majority of people barely read ANY books. Unsurprisingly, the people who really like reading are the ones likely to read that long article for the same reason they would casually pick up a book to read. Self help or otherwise.
Most of you here perform your intelligence as you perform your criticisms. Neither is that deep.
Please allow me to provide a slight different perspective. I don’t think the problem is ignorance, or lack of exposure. Let me begin with the ones on top.
Most of the people wrecking Nigeria, and many of the idiot aides defending them online, have travelled widely. Some shuttle in and out of London, Dubai, Paris, Berlin with enviable regularity. They know exactly what functional airports look like. They have used steady electricity. They have enjoyed public transport that works. They have tasted what it means to live in a place where the state does its basic job.
And yet they return home perfectly comfortable reproducing dysfunction.
Now this is the same with those at the bottom. Even for them the issue is not that they don’t know what a good country looks like. There is social media, or they have relatives who probably live abroad. They know it is possible. It is that many people, even poor people, but especially those close to power, are deeply uninterested in true equality, uninterested in reducing our violent hierarchies, uninterested in living in a society where there is no one beneath them. It sounds harsh but I really do think that even on a cultural level, Nigerians do not desire equality. They just don't want to be at the bottom of the ladder. But you see that ladder, too many people want, even need it. In Hausa we say, duniya kwandon dankali - Manya kan kanana -- the world, a basket of potatoes, the big ones piled on top of the small ones. (You know like how those people who sell tomatoes or potatoes on highways hide the small of bad tomatoes or tomatoes at the bottom of the basket🤣). We love that basket arrangement. We just don't want to be the rotten tomato or small potato at the bottom.
The middle class madam does not want to sit in the same train as her housemaid, even if she is happy to sit next to people she is richer than in public transport abroad. The junior political aide, who has narrowly escaped extreme poverty and begun to put on flesh since leaving his village to work for a politician, does not want shared amenities either. He wants to go back to the village and be bowed to. Be called oga. Have people kneel.
How many Nigerians genuinely want their children in the same schools as their drivers’ children? How many want to use the same hospitals as their gatekeepers as the women braiding their hair in the market? How many want public goods so good that private alternatives become unnecessary?
So airlifting everyone abroad, like the Devil took Jesus to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, will not magically produce consensus for reform. Exposure alone does not create virtue.
What many people actually want is the ability to escape, not the obligation to fix. They want to travel abroad occasionally, take photos in Cape Town or Joburg or Seychelles, and return home to lord those images over people who cannot leave. Mobility becomes a status weapon. Dysfunction becomes useful.
I remember a moment in Kaduna that clarified this for me. NEPA took light. It was getting dark. A young girl shouted to their gateman: Maigadi, bambamta mu da saura!—“Gateman, distinguish us from the others.” She wanted the generator turned on. She was delighted at the idea of being the only house glowing on a pitch-dark street.
That sentence contains a political philosophy.
This is why Nigerian elites are comfortable building vulgar mansions surrounded by potholes, shanties, hunger, and decay. Wealth means nothing without visible poverty to frame it. Power requires contrast. Hierarchy needs spectators.
If everyone had access to dignity—reliable electricity, clean water, functional transport—how would big men be worshipped? How would pastors promise what governments should provide? How would politicians and traditional leaders maintain relevance? How would people (even average Nigerians) find poor people's children to turn into slaves, aka housemaids? How else would someone have the temerity to beat his chest and ask: do you know who I am?
So the problem is not that Nigerians don’t know better. Many know. They just don’t want a society where dignity is common. They want one where it is scarce—and personally controlled.
That is a harder problem than ignorance. And it cannot be solved by excursions.
I believe children are our ancestors. We assume ancestors are only those who came before us, but consciousness is older than all of us and it’s cyclical. Children are not new souls, they are returning souls. Their wonder, their lack of ego, their raw awareness, are all evidence of uncorrupted presence which we mistake for naivety.
When you embark on your journey to spiritual maturity as an adult, these are the traits you begin to recover again. It’s just that when the truth is too obvious, it becomes invisible and we lose the ability to notice it completely.
What’s ancient in spirit often returns in a new body, a new time. Children remind us of that; how wisdom, purity, and curiosity existed before we learned our ego, our ambition, our cynicism.
To be spiritually awake is to remember what the child already knows. That’s why many sages, saints, and prophets speak of becoming childlike. Not childish, but pure of heart.
Please retweet. His mother is in extreme distress. She’s a single mother and she’s losing her mind.
This kid has been missing for a few days now. Around Agbara and Ojo. Bikonu, retweet. Please retweet. His name is Chidera.
PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT
The Ekiti State Government wishes to notify the general public that booking is now open for commercial flights to Ekiti on the United Nigeria Airlines platform.
Residents, visitors, and business travellers can now book direct flights to and from Ekiti, Abuja, and Lagos via the airline’s official website:
https://t.co/h6nddShQqG
This development marks another significant milestone in the transportation and economic agenda of the Biodun Oyebanji Administration, providing safer, faster, and more convenient travel for all.
The Ministry encourages the public to take full advantage of this opportunity as Ekiti opens its doors to greater connectivity and growth.