Microphone Manhandler

Experimental artiste. In search of his own sound...

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God

Mark 10:25

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

I laugh when I see Nigerians abroad complain about white people not being able to pronounce their names. Such a weird hill to die on. Meanwhile Nigerians from the south cannot properly pronounce Katsina. I can count on one hand the number of southerners (who do not speak Hausa) who I have heard properly pronounce Katsina or Zazzau.

I remember doing oral defence of the Marxist literature our history lecturer forced us all to read in first year of law, and practicing with a classmate from Benue and he could not pronounce Zazzau or Katsina. I gave up trying to help because he just kept saying Zauzau and Kastina.

Nigerians very often cannot properly pronounce each other's traditional names but somehow want to virtue signal when people from a whole other continent mispronounce their names.

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

Your first project is the most important one in my opinion. He needs all the support and patience to get it right.

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

No Vaseline 📌

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

6 years today and a 7-album run from here.

Thank you for sharing these memories with me.

It has been and always will be God’s Engineering 📌

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@chikachiglobe I see what you did there

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

I usually ignore arguments around “white supremacy is the cause of our problems” or “foreign influence is why Nigeria or Africa remains backward,” but this time I will bite.

Foreign influence is real. It has always been real. There are countries whose economies and politics have been bent for profit, for strategy, for prestige. There are elites trained, financed, flattered, installed. There are debt regimes, trade asymmetries, security partnerships, and propaganda ecosystems that shape outcomes long after flags are lowered.

Even the US, the world’s loudest preacher of sovereignty, has spent the last decade arguing publicly about foreign influence operations burrowing into its politics, media, and intellectual class. Look at the Epstein files and all it has revealed about how deep Russian influence got into everything: from finance, to elections, public intellectuals to entertainers, politicians on both sides of the political divide. So yes, foreign influence exists. It matters.

But foreign influence does not operate by magic. It works through local hands. It succeeds because people on the ground open doors and then swear the doors opened themselves.

The problem with leaning on “foreign influence” as the main explanation of Nigerian or African dysfunction is that it quietly casts Africans as mentally fragile, politically weightless, intellectually weak, incapable of agency. It implies that Africans collapse the moment external pressure appears. That history happens to Africans, never through them. It is a deeply degrading position, even when dressed up as radical critique.

Plenty of countries around the world endured colonialism, Cold War meddling, proxy wars, ideological capture, relentless external pressure and what you might call neocolonialism. Some still managed to build functioning states, industries, infrastructure, and public services that work. They did not escape the world. They organised themselves inside it.

The foreign influence argument insists that Nigeria is uniquely cursed.

Take the palm oil example, since people love throwing it around. Oil palm is West African in origin. That much is not in dispute. Of course industrial cultivation in Southeast Asia did not begin with Malaysia sneaking into Nigeria to steal seeds as the myth goes. It began in the 19th c, when European colonial and botanical networks moved oil palm from West Africa to the Dutch East Indies, where it was planted, studied, propagated, and later spread through regional networks, including places like the Singapore Botanic Gardens.

So while Malaysia did not take seeds from Nigeria, they took a crop native to the region, treated it as an industrial problem to be solved, and built a multibillion-dollar industry around it. Nigerians treated the same crop like background scenery, argued endlessly about who wronged us, and now import what we could have produced at scale.

This is the pattern. Everything becomes a conspiracy so nobody has to name the conspirators at home.

Nigeria has no excuse for the daily humiliations it has normalised. No excuse for electricity that barely exists outside private generators. No excuse for public hospitals so derelict that the political class will not enter them even for routine procedures. No excuse for the anyhowness that passes for governance.

There are villages and towns so abandoned by development that if someone who died forty years ago were resurrected today, he would be able to find his way from the grave back to his village on foot, by memory alone. The roads, the paths, the absence of change would guide him. Time passed. The state did not.

This is not white people remote-controlling Nigerians like puppets. This is a political economy built for extraction, protected by stories that turn failure into fate and looting into grievance.

You ask whether the military rulers who accelerated this destruction really came up with it on their own. They did not need to invent greed. They did not need to invent impunity. They did not need to invent the pleasure of power without consequence. Foreign powers may have preferred certain outcomes. Local actors did the work of turning preference into policy, policy into habit, habit into culture.

So yes, you can talk about foreign influence. Study it. Expose it. Fight it. But keep the same energy for the Nigerians who signed the contracts, looted the budgets, dismantled institutions, outsourced their shame, and converted governance into a private inheritance.

Because the argument that foreign influence explains everything ends in one place: Nigerians explain nothing.
And for me, that is the most degrading story of all.

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@Ol0ye @Nosawema They say a lot about David but they all know they can't talk down on his name; man's integrity is intact

[Olóyè. @Ol0ye]

When you have been a victim of power abuse, you learn very quickly that proximity to power is everything.

In a way, it's a psychological win for the powers that be.

They only need to discipline you once to make you understand the importance of their friendship shake.

It's why people like David Hundeyin remain a maverick to me.

That brother is a different breed.

[gst @wearegst]

The current National Assembly sneaked almost ₦7 trillion of dubious projects into Nigeria’s 2025 budget while we slept.

First the budget scam, now the tax scam. It’s time to push back.

Add your voice:
#RejectTaxScam

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@Mystery_Girley @dam_____dam Lol wild how they immediately rationalized it with "life doesn't reward confidence, it rewards understanding."

We are terrible people.

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@kay_sesen @cchukudebelu Man, this is heartbreaking. But only because it's true

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@Itsihcego Oh my! Happy New Year! @Itsihcego

It's been a long, long minute 🤕

[gst @wearegst]

While Nigerians struggle to survive, the Tinubu presidency is advancing a forged tax law that lets authorities seize money and property without a court order. Too powerful to ignore.

Act now: https://t.co/y1DtXG5riU
#RejectTaxScam

[Kofo is excited for caustival @kofoisart]

This isn’t reform. It’s a grab. They forged a law to reach into our accounts. I’m sharing my call. You should, too. #RejectTaxScam
https://t.co/4WXW9fVZmU

[Crypto_Terminus @BenchShone]

@elonmusk Hey @elonmusk this is me kindly asking why kyc needs to be done for starlink users in Nigeria to continue using starlink? Just asking nicely because I always felt like starlink was a decentralized network from the beginning. I have been a user for 2 years plus but this

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@whoistunde @paoloabamwa @OsaGz Lol I read it the same way you originally did

[Microphone Manhandler @TheKabacci]

@AristokratLagos @followlastma @Olodeoku_Mosope Unfortunately you don't need any serious plans to become governor. The evidence exists.

[Gilbert Bani @thisisAQ]

B.O.M.B. Exclusive 5/11/... 5pm WAT.

[Onye Nkuzi @cchukudebelu]

If you've dealt with Nigerians, especially the typical Southern Nigerian, just know this; their entire worldview on driving social change/improving the society they come from, consists of;

1. "There is nothing we can do".
2. "Only God can help us".
3. "America will come and help us".
4. "It is well".

Beyond this, there is nothing. Their heads are completely empty.