Babatunde-Anifowose O.Dan

Creative Arts

[Big Uncle @Usmanashafe]

Serving her fishes in heels 👠 like a queen that she is

The true boss lady 😁

[Babatunde-Anifowose O.Dan @daniel_olaniyi]

The Gap Was Never Talent https://t.co/KsKL3BIhDa

[Makaveli @NimoTheG_]

@readJerome Link below
https://t.co/66nwER0GfK

[ALEXIS ™I ❤️🇷🇼• @dufitalexis1]

You planted this bamboo yourself. With enthusiasm. For a screen. Within two years you regretted it — and within five you understood you could not go back.

Running bamboo (Phyllostachys and related genera) is one of the most frequently self-inflicted garden disasters in Britain. The gardener plants it voluntarily, pays for it, and then pays considerably more to try to remove it.

What the garden centre tells you: fast-growing, evergreen, architectural, forms a screen in two seasons. All true.

What the garden centre does not tell you

The rhizomes of running bamboo (Phyllostachys, Pseudosasa, Sasa, Pleioblastus) spread laterally through the soil at one to two metres per year. They do not grow downward like normal roots — they run horizontally at 15-30cm depth, in every direction, under the lawn, under the border, under the patio, under the neighbour's fence. Every rhizome node produces a new culm that emerges without warning — in the middle of the lawn, between paving stones, through a neighbour's garden.

In three to five years, a bamboo planted as a three-metre screen has rhizomes occupying 50-80 square metres — the entire garden. In ten years they reach neighbouring gardens, irrigation pipes, house foundations, and drainage systems.

Cutting the canes does nothing

Bamboo cut to the ground regrows with more vigour than the year before. Every cut stimulates the rhizomes to produce emergency culms. Cutting weekly for an entire season does not weaken the root system — it causes it to expand faster in search of undisturbed ground.

Digging it out is a serious undertaking

Phyllostachys rhizomes are as hard as beech wood, interlaced in an underground network extending in every direction. Hand digging requires days of work per square metre. Mechanical excavation must reach 50-60cm depth across the entire colonised area — and every rhizome fragment left in the soil starts again. A single forgotten node restarts the problem from zero.

The root barrier

The only reliable way to contain running bamboo is a root barrier — a sheet of HDPE (high-density polyethylene) at least 1.5mm thick, installed at minimum 60cm depth, surrounding the entire planting area before the bamboo goes in. The barrier must be continuous with no joins or weak points. It costs more than the bamboo itself. If it was not installed at planting time — which covers the vast majority of cases — it cannot be retrofitted without excavating everything.

The distinction nobody explains at the garden centre

Running bamboo (Phyllostachys, Pseudosasa, Sasa): rhizomes that travel metres from the original plant. INVASIVE. Never plant without a root barrier.

Clump-forming bamboo (Fargesia, Borinda): rhizomes that grow as a compact clump without running. NOT INVASIVE. Fargesia is the correct choice for a British garden screen — it forms a dense hedge, stays where it is planted, and will not colonise neighbouring gardens.

Eradication protocol

For running bamboo already established, the method with the highest documented success rate is:

Year 1: cut all canes to ground level in June — when the plant has spent its stored energy on new growth and rhizome reserves are at their lowest. Cover the entire colonised area with thick black weed-suppressing membrane, edges weighted or buried. Leave covered for the full season.

Year 2: remove covering in spring. Cut every shoot that emerges immediately. Re-cover. Repeat through the season.

Years 3-4: monitor weekly. Cut every shoot within 24 hours of emergence — a bamboo shoot left for a week is already a metre tall and has re-stocked the rhizomes. Consistency is everything.

Alternative: systemic herbicide (glyphosate) injected into hollow cut stems immediately after cutting in late summer. The same protocol used for Japanese knotweed — to which this problem is closely comparable in persistence and difficulty.

The most architectural screen in the street is also the most expensive to remove. Consider it before planting, not after.

[Irish Artmart @Irish_Artist_ie]

🎨 Interview with the Artist : Daniel Olaniyi 🎨

🔗 Read the full interview here: https://t.co/kDlWwTb9aB

#ArtistSpotlight #DanielOlaniyi #IrishArtmart #MeetTheArtist #ArtisticJourney #CreativeInspiration #EmergingArtist #ArtInterview #ContemporaryArt #SupportArtists

[Katyayani Shukla @aibytekat]

Warren Buffett literally gave a free 1-hour masterclass on business

[DAYVID✒️ @is_ur_boi_Davis]

Earth without art is just Eh!

[Tunde Onakoya @Tunde_OD]

Chess is a crazy game

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

For households with a washing machine, these are must-learn repair tips every husband should know

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done.

Money loves speed. Poverty loves waiting.

[mitsuri @0xmitsurii]

How Richard Branson started an airline with no money.

[Mao Ning 毛宁 @SpoxCHN_MaoNing]

🚀 In SE China’s Jiangxi, a teacher and his students built a two-stage rocket from plastic bottles and powered by water pressure!

This is the kind of hands-on joy that makes science unforgettable.

[HYPETRIBE @hypetribeng]

Throwback video of Asake performing at the Theatre Arts surfaces 🤯🔥

[Pharaoh👳🏾‍♂️👑 @MrMekzy_]

Man buys his neighbor’s houses and demolishes them to create a bigger garden for his wife. He sent her on vacation so he’ll surprise her with it when she gets back. Love is sweet o, when money enter love is sweeter.🥹❤️

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

What matters is not education or money, but your persistence and the intensity of your desire to learn; that failures, mistakes, and conflicts are often the best education of all; and how true creativity and mastery emerge from all this.

[sp★rq @sirmuelsparq]

I wanted to push the “Ghana must go” idea beyond bags…
so I imagined a @Crocs clog with woven travel bag pattern + wooden sole

shares/feedback welcome 🙏🏾

[Think Yoruba First, Ogun Chapter @TYFOgun]

Kehinde Wiley, an American Nigerian portrait painter, shows off his private villa in Lagos Island, Nigeria. The villa is a shift from the regular overly extravagant interior most homes in rich neighbourhoods like Lagos Island possess. The villa contains simple, yet magnificent African-inspired designs.

Kehinde Wiley is a renowned painter in the United States. He painted former U.S. President Barack Obama's portrait for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, which was unveiled in 2018.

The house is shaped by art, culture and the rhythms of his creativity. It contains sculptural furniture that embodies Africa's rich culture of weaving, with layered textures. The rooms are also bright and open, with a purposeful sanctuary tailored to Wiley's artistic taste.

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

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.