#Herroyallongness🌴🌼

I will let you fill that space.

[Lilian the accessories plug @olori_lilian]

So in KG 1, my daughter won most creative pupil ; I was proud of her. I mean it’s kg 1 and hey! My baby got awarded! Wawu!!!

In KG 2, she won best in creative arts and best hand writing and my reaction, even though I didn’t say it to her was “people are winning best in numeracy , phonics , your own is creative arts”. I was not happy , I won’t lie!

I made her repeat KG 2 for personal reasons and at the end of the academic year , she won the same two awards again!

Grade 1 came and she still won best in creative arts and best handwriting awards. In my head , I was like sey people that are winning best in Matjs , English and other subjects have 2 heads???? Ewo ni handwriting and creative arts ??🙄🙄

On Wednesday, we had the yearly award programme which I was invited for again and I honestly hoped she won something “major” and not creative arts but she won best in creative arts again in Grade 2!!!! …The moment her name was called , I clapped so loud for the first time! I decided to appreciate the genius I have . My future Picasso!!!! My creative girl!!!!

I felt so bad that I’ve looked down on the awards she got for years because it’s not Maths, English or the social sciences subjects. Her consistency of winning the same award for 5 years didn’t matter to me! I just wanted the “main” subjects like our parents 😩😩😩

That has changed anyways! I’m going to support the creative genius I have in my house with everything I have! I’ll register here for art school (Oh! She loves drawing so much!) and help her strengthen her skill!

Lauryn is soooo artistic! Drop anything here and she has made something out of it! Her brain and hands are blessed when it comes to creativity!!! I was looking for something else instead of celebrating my baby’s strength.🥹

Dear mummies and daddies , everyone can’t be maths geniuses! Some of our kids are blessed with other gifts! Let’s appreciate and celebrate them! ❤️

[Ghost Writer ✍️ @Prezain_LJ]

You need to see the joy on olodos' faces when a very academically sound person doesn't succeed in life. They relish it. It's almost as if it gives them more reasons to talk down on education and intelligence.

When we were graduating, after I finished as the top student in my class, many of my coursemates were really eager to see how I would turn out. In fact, I would always hear them gossiping: "No be by Best Graduating Student. To make am for life no be by acada. Street na military. We go see."

I'm glad I turned out really well. Even most of those who went to Ghana for "updates" after school and eventually resorted to fraud can't measure up to my accomplishments. Till today, many of them still randomly call me and jokingly ask, "Senior man, you just dey chop dey go. You no wan give men update na!"

Deep down, they genuinely believe I must be secretly involved in fraud. This is the society we live in, where many young people have come to believe that you can't succeed legitimately, and that every young man who is doing well for himself must be involved in fraud. Even many elderly people and police officers aren't exempt from this line of thinking.

I haven't seen a country that is trying so hard to make education unattractive like ours.

"School na scam."

"No be by BSc. You get BTC?"

"Education is the key to success. Oya, use the key start Benz na 😂."

"Lecturer pack 1999 Camry, student don pack Lexus beside am."

If we continue this way, in a few years, there will be nothing left of our educational system. We are so money-centred that we don't even realize education can be an end in itself and not necessarily just a means to an end.

Everything has become, "How much do you have in your account?" or "Use your intelligence buy Benz na."

This is one of the reasons it really hurts me to see highly intelligent and brilliant people end up poor. I'm always rooting for academically sound people to succeed because I genuinely want people, especially young people, to see that you can make it legitimately through hard work and academic excellence.

Any society where only the olodos become financially successful while the brighter minds, the ones who believe in due process, continue to struggle is a society that is bound to fail.

[KING OF ALL SPORTS @Emmanuel_Tips]

They have names. They have families. Bring them home. 💔

[KAT @reallKAT]

I fell in love with this scripture:

“There will come a time when your tears will fall, not because of your troubles, but because God has answered your prayers.”

— 𝖧𝖠𝖡𝖠𝖪𝖪𝖴𝖪 𝟤:𝟥

[Renegade @_wapnen]

I went to secondary school in Barkin Ladi 20 years ago. This is what SS1 - 3 boys were doing, night shifts in the blistering cold. I did it too. My mates in Oyo were sleeping or studying. I’ve watched this shit deteriorate in real time.

Barkin Ladi now looks nothing like it did when I graduated 14 years ago. I went to the same junction we used to buy stuff during outings last year & I was shaking. They don’t speak the same language. Crisis after crisis. Slowly, the people who used to till those lands are now doing menial jobs in the south. The names of the villages have changed. The senator representing that region was killed few days after I graduated when he attended a mass funeral of people who were massacred by the Fulanis who now occupy their homes. 14 years ago guys.

Trying to raise awareness about this state-backed conquest feels like screaming under water.

Few months ago, my aunt in mangu came to ask for money to trade cause she can’t farm anymore. Their farms were attacked 3 years ago. They wouldn’t dare go back.

For more than 10 years, we’ve had internally displaced persons from Borno living in our house, after my mother took them in. They only go back to their so-called homes for funerals. 3 brilliant kids; Elizabeth, Margaret and Grace (named after my now late mother for her benevolence). The dad does security work, the mom cleans. Who knows what they could’ve made of themselves back home? I do, they’d have been compost for aliens.

It always starts small then it spirals out of control. We’ve seen all kinds of terror. I wish they just came and shot people but that’s not fun enough. Bullets are for runners. They’ll slice pregnant women open to kill their fetuses. They’ll feed women their kid’s fingers. They burn people alive, hack them with machetes. When people try to defend themselves, that’s when soldiers come in. They call it farmer-herder clashes. They say cattle was rustled. Cattle was rustled? That’s why you renamed my village and put 200 people in a mass grave ?

I remember @YarKafanchan saying that she wept after the 2015 elections cause she knew her people would die like flies & then what happened in southern kaduna? When people talk, they say where’s the evidence? But what about the bodies? Dying is a morbid thing to be skilled at but boy, we have experience.

We’ve seen “strategists” platform them and defend all manner of wrongdoing on the alter of political correctness.

Omoh, let me just stop here.

[VT @VusiThembekwayo]

David didn't pray for Goliath.
He killed him.

[👑S.A.L.A.K.O🕊 @UnkleAyo]

There’s no sitting on the fence for me. We need people who can clean up the mess and do it while caring about human lives.

Nigeria will be OK. ✅

[SAMBO @_Abdulakeem_]

Bandits entered a school .
Kidnapped all the students and teachers.
Now they just beheaded one of the teachers. 💔💔💔💔
Torturing the rest.

Everywhere is silent like nothing happened.

This country is fucked 😭💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔

[David Hundeyin @DavidHundeyin]

I'll also say this as someone who grew up on the nice side of the barbed wire fences and high gates in the very nice part of town where the Nigerian 0.1% live - learn to touch grass and worry about yourself because rich people really do not care about you. Like, at all.

The Nigerian rich don't even like each other. They barely tolerate one another and make practical alliances to preserve wealth and influence. And now that the economy is too small to support all the children of the Nigerian 0.1%, nearly everyone I grew up with in the nice, leafy part of town now lives in Toronto or London or wherever. You, Mr N250k/month Union Bank contract staff are not part of rich people's thinking at all.

At. All.

The rich have no plans for you. They have no plans to create opportunities for you. They have no plans to fix the things they broke on their way to building that N1bn townhouse in Parkview Estate. They have no plans to contribute towards making society better. If Satan came from Hell with a tail and horns growing out of his head and he ran for political office, the rich would all go make deals with him - because in the world of the rich, the only thing that matters is their own interests, and making sure that they never, EVER have to live like you or next to you.

So all this simping and vicarious fawning over wealth and fame that you people do everyday is the most redundant thing in the world - the rich have no intention of expanding their circle to let you in, and they have no intention of enabling the conditions for you to create your own independent circle of wealth. The only thing the rich need from you is to be poor and obedient, so that your labour can be cheap, plentiful and replaceable.

Statistically as a Nigerian, you will NEVER be rich or close to it. You will NEVER live in Maitama. 99.99% of Nigerians who have existed since 1960 have prayed and fantasised about becoming rich, and 99.99% of those prayers and fantasies never came true. That's just math. You will never be a rich and famous celebrity. You will never be a successful content creator. You will never make millions shilling crypto, trading Forex, sports betting, or whatever the fuck is the latest quick wealth fantasy in town. It's just not going to happen.

That being the case, a much more constructive use of your time would be to fight for the material elevation of what you actually have, where you actually have it. Instead of daydreaming about the N300m house in Lekki that 3 generations of your family cannot buy, get involved in a local effort to give your own immediate neighbourhood a facelift, or a political campaign to pressure the state to build high quality social housing.

If you hate being harassed without consequence online, instead of vicariously enjoying how a celebrity has used their wealth and influence to jail someone for making a horrid tweet, fight for a judiciary and legal system that is transparent and accessible to all, so that a singer living in the UK on a global talent visa doesn't get to have more access to your Nigerian justice system than you who lives in Nigeria 24/7.

Instead of building your mental architecture around the false idea of being a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" who will someday take your rightful place on Banana Island, touch grass tonight and accept that it will never happen, and what you need to do instead is fight for where you are to become a better, more liveable place that you no longer wish to escape from. Stop cosplaying as rich folk. Stop cooing and fawning over rich folk. Stop daydreaming about someday "blowing up" and buying a house next to Burna Boy. Rich people have no intention of sharing their world with you. Free yourself from the tyranny of living vicariously through people who don't care that you exist.

Them no really send any part of your papa at all.

[Oyinkansola Alabi (Dr.) @EmotionsDoctor]

WOMEN are NO LONGER like your Mothers. If you want a woman like your mother, you may have to marry someone from your mother's generation.

Today's women have learned how to CHOOSE THEMSELVES. If you cheat on them, they will honor you with the gift of distance.

When we are all ready, we will RAISE OURSELVES.

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

Almost 5,000 people waited for hours in the rain at a swabbing event in Worcester, to get tested to see if they were a match to help save the life of a five-year-old boy fighting a rare cancer, after his parents asked for help

[ICYESTTWAT @FUCCl]

a child cannot seduce an adult.

[Zekeri Idris Jnr @IdrisZekeriJnr]

Let’s be clear, I will support him wherever he goes!

[Big Chops @iamBigChops]

END POLICE BRUTALITY!

[JUST KINGS @JustKingss]

If this appears on your timeline just repost it.

#EndPoliceBrutality ✊🏾

[@𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗷𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗯𝗼𝘆 @OneJoblessBoy]

❗️‼️❗️

[Ọládélé 🇳🇬👑 @Oladele]

The cure for sickle cell disorder is now available at sickle cell foundation Nigeria, LUTH. 🥺

Please retweet for others to see.

[PJ ✂️ @OAeoleon]

UPDATE on my father’s story.
Life of a contract staff in Nigeria Pt 2.

So many of you asked us to keep pushing. We did. I wish I had better news.
We finally got access to his RSA pin and logged into his pension portal.
₦3.1 million.
28 years of work. ₦3.1 million in pension 😢
We stared at the screen for a long time without speaking.

But that wasn’t even the worst part.
The contribution history showed his employer only started remitting pension 10 years ago. Before that? Nothing. 18 years of blank entries. 18 years my father assumed someone was keeping his future safe.
Nobody was.

We went to the pension fund administrator’s office in Victoria Island. Sat in their waiting room for hours. The customer service officer was polite. Professional but completely unbothered.
She explained that he cannot access the full ₦3.1 million.
He gets 25% now as a lump sum, which is a little over 750k. The rest will be paid monthly. She quoted figures. Something around ₦18,000 to ₦22,000 per month depending on final calculations.
My father is 56 years old.
₦18,000 a month in this present economy?!

He didn’t say anything in the office. Just nodded slowly the way men of his generation do when they are dying quietly inside. I felt terrible.
On the way out he asked me if we could stop to get something to munch as we were famished.
We sat in the hot car and ate the rice we bought from mama put and didn’t talk about any of it, me wondering what’s going through his mind and him taking deep breaths every minute.

Then we started making calls about the NHF, his office helpline rang out the first four times. On the fifth attempt someone picked, asked for his NHF number; which we couldn’t provide, put us on hold for 11 minutes and the call dropped.

We went in person to his former office, which he was reluctant to go but I persuaded him. They searched the system. His name appeared but his contributions showed zero remittance. The officer suggested his primary employer may have deducted the NHF from his salary without remitting it.

As if this is a minor clerical possibility and not theft.

NSITF was the same story. The office confirmed his employer was registered but contributions under his name were inconsistent and incomplete. They gave us a form to fill.

So this is where we are.

18 years of pension contributions stolen or ignored. NHF deducted from his salary, destination unknown. NSITF contributions, missing. The company that took 28 years of his life and the MD is probably still in Dubai.
And my father is filling forms.
He worked every single day so that this moment, this difficult moment, would be cushioned. That was the deal. That was the promise of showing up.

They collected his loyalty and left him with paperwork and ₦18,000 a month.

If this happened to your parent, your uncle, your family member, please check their RSA portal today. Check their NHF number. Don’t wait until it’s too late.
Because the system is not going to tell you it failed you.
You have to find out yourself.

Make this too loud to ignore.

[PJ ✂️ @OAeoleon]

Corporate Greed vs Everyday workers: Life of a contract staff in Nigeria

My father worked at Zenith Manufacturing Ltd in Apapa for 28 years. Never missed a day. Won Best Staff twice at their annual dinner.
Last Monday, the HR manager called him on WhatsApp. 4 minutes. That was it. Retired early. No severance. Nothing.
The same month, the MD flew to Dubai for the company’s “executive retreat.”
Dubai.
My father left Ikorodu at 5am every morning to beat third mainland bridge traffic. Every single day for 28 years. He turned down a government job in 2009 because he believed in that company.

They let go of 280 staff that week. 280 families.
The disengagement letter came via email. They spelled his surname wrong. After 28 years, they couldn’t spell ADEYEMI correctly.
He sat in the parlour that evening and just stared at the wall. My mother kept bringing him tea he never touched. We didn’t know what to say.
He’s 56. No pension processed. NSITF contributions? Unaccounted for. NHF? Nobody is picking up.
This is happening in companies all over Lagos, Abuja, PH. Everyday Nigerians sacrificing everything while oga at the top is chilling.

Make una repost. Make this reach.

[Harley knows you are lonely and so she @miss_ezeani]

Prime, Netflix left Nigeria.
TikTok, Instagram doesn’t pay Nigerian creators because low priority, guess why?
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube pay way less per Nigerian viewer.
Roll outs, perks, only get to us after years of creators in other climes enjoying them.

There’s no light.
There’s no regulation of rent.
Data tariff increases depending on the network provider’s mood.
Fuel is 1300 per liter.
Fuel has become lighter, evaporates quicker.
5 liters of 2022 is not same as now.

But yeah!!! Bring your tax.
File your tax!

I won’t give you job but if you create one for yourself, I still won’t make it easy for you because I’ll make sure bulk of your money goes to rent payment and electricity. And things will also get ridiculously expensive because $1 is 1450 naira.

But yeah, FILE YOUR FUCKING TAX!!!
We pay VAT per online transaction.
We pay VAT per light purchase.
We pay VAT per every purchase or transaction.
But hold on… FILE YOUR TAX!!!!

And no matter what ridiculousness that happens, we swear that the “next one” that will “definitely” be our tipping point.

Bloody hell!