In May, hearing a routine case, the Chief Justice of India remarked from the bench that the country had “youngsters like cockroaches”: young people who, finding no work, become media people and activists and attack everybody. He called them parasites of society.

Within a day, a 30-year-old graduate had founded the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a straight parody of the BJP’s name. Membership criteria: unemployed, lazy, permanently online, and able to complain professionally. Slogan: Voice of the Lazy and Unemployed. Within three days, the account gained 3 million followers; within five days, it surpassed the governing party in followers; and by July, the total reached 22 million.

On 25 July, India’s Education Minister resigned; the first time in 12 years of Narendra Modi’s government that a street movement had removed a member of the cabinet. The organization that removed him was eight weeks old; it had no members, no funds, no offices, no registration as a political party and no program beyond satire.

That is what needs explaining: not the resignation, which was a tactical retreat, but how a joke acquired the power to extract one.

The immediate cause was an examination. In May, the paper for India’s national medical entrance test was leaked and sold in advance to some of the 2.3 million candidates competing for roughly 130,000 places. It was canceled and re-held six weeks later. This is not an isolated scandal; around 70 public examinations have leaked in seven years, affecting 17 million candidates across 15 states. Exams in India are now an industry: testing contractors, printing firms, transport handlers and a coaching sector are drawing 200,000 teenagers a year to one provincial city, and each link is a place where the paper can be sold.

On 6 June, the students occupied Jantar Mantar, the only legally permitted protest site in central Delhi, and refused to leave. An activist held a hunger strike for 26 days before police removed him to hospital against his will. On 20 July, some 20,000 tried to march on Parliament and met barricades, batons, tear gas and a government-ordered internet blackout. Five days later the minister was gone.

That the minister fell at all is the real puzzle. Modi’s government has three responses to opposition, and all three have worked for a decade.

The first is delegitimization. The movement was declared anti-national and foreign-funded; its account was blocked on national security grounds; and television anchors arrived at the usual hypothesis about foreign money. The students replied by filming solemn confessions that China had wired them 60 rupees for bus fare and Pakistan 40 rupees for lunch — about R17 in all. The smear was not defeated so much as digested.

The second is prosecution. India’s Enforcement Directorate, a financial-crimes agency, opened cases against 193 politicians in a decade and obtained two convictions. Conviction was never the objective. The process is the punishment: the summons, the frozen assets, the years in custody before trial, and the standing offer that the file closes if the politician changes party. It disciplines people with careers and property to protect but it is powerless against nineteen-year-olds whose grievance is that they have none.

The third is waiting. Protests are expensive; students run out of money; heat and boredom finish the job. This failed because supporters from other cities and countries ordered food to the site through delivery apps, and a movement distributed across 22 million accounts cannot be outlasted at one address.

What remained was force, and force was the error. The baton charge of 20 July produced the images that turned a student agitation into a national one. Coercion is effective when it is either invisible or total; however, when it is filmed from four angles and applied to young people whom the government’s own rhetoric describes as the pillars of a developing nation, it instead serves as propaganda for the opposing side.

Nor could the government do the thing it does best: redefine opposition as a religious minority in disguise. Earlier movements were coded as Muslim or as Sikh separatist. This one had no such marker. Its base was small-town, aspirational, exam-taking and overwhelmingly Hindu — the ruling party’s own recruiting ground.

None of this explains why so many were willing to fight in the first place. In 2025, India grew at close to 7% and, inflation ran near 2%; meanwhile corporate profits stand at record levels. Yet the connection between economic growth and the people who are supposed to benefit from it has broken down. Fewer than 7% of male graduates find permanent salaried work within a year of graduating; around 40% are unemployed. India has expanded higher education far faster than employment, deliberately, because degrees are cheap for a state to supply and jobs are not. The result is a surplus population of the credentialed: not yet proletarian, but losing the security their parents had and aware of it by nineteen.

This is why the explosion occurred over an examination rather than a wage. The state has stopped promising work, but it still promises fair competition for the little that remains. That promise performs a precise ideological operation: it takes a shortfall produced by the structure of the economy — 130,000 places against 2.3 million applicants — and reassigns it to the individual as a verdict on their worth. The unemployed graduate does not experience an economy. They experience a judgment on themselves, delivered by an apparently neutral procedure. In this way, those who are surplus to the economy experience their exclusion as personal failure and humiliation.

The leak destroys that operation. Once the paper has been sold, the credibility of the exam as a neutral mechanism is undermined, the verdict is exposed as a transaction, and the shame changes address: it stops being mine and becomes theirs. This is why an exam scandal detonates where an unemployment statistic does not. The leak gives the young the standing to be angry; and standing, not information, is what mobilization requires.

It would be easy to compare this with the youth revolts elsewhere and note that India sacrificed a minister, whereas others produced fallen presidents. That scoreboard is worthless. Those movements broke governments. This one confronted a fascist regime: the largest party membership of any political organization on earth, resting on a century-old cadre movement present in tens of thousands of villages, a captured broadcast media, a tested legal apparatus, and something with no equivalent in Kathmandu or Antananarivo: a hegemony that has already organized much of Indian youth into its project. A president who flees is not evidence of a deeper rupture than a minister who resigns.

The settlement itself measures almost nothing: the government conceded a person and kept the structure — no reform of the testing agency, no enforceable examinations law, and nothing about employment. But outside the negotiating room, an examination scandal has become a national argument about work. In Bihar, police fired on crowds, baton-charged in the state capital, and published photographs of a hundred protesters, inviting the public to identify them. In response, leftist student organizations organized a general strike that closed rail and road traffic across the state. On 10 August, the central trade unions and the farmers’ movement filled the jails nationwide on an eleven-point charter, with 12,000 arrested in one small state alone. Days earlier, a seat the governing party had held since 1995 fell to a newcomer in the city where repression had been heaviest.

What broke was not the regime itself, but rather the impression of its permanence; in a formation of this type, that impression is not merely decorative but an integral part of the power structure. This is what leads an editor to self-censor before receiving any calls, a businessman to determine that silence is more cost-effective, and a young person to decide that obtaining a visa is the most sensible option. Twelve years went into building it. It has now been filmed failing.

That permanence rested on more than repression. It rested on an offer, too. What exists in India is not an illiberal drift but a fascist formation, which maintains power through both offers and force. To those it cannot employ, the governing movement sells majoritarian pride as compensation for the absence of a wage: no job, no future, but the nation is yours and you may despise whoever is not in it. Millions have accepted that trade. This is why arguments based on statistics often fail to resonate.

The students made a counter-offer. Told from the highest bench in the republic that they were vermin, they took the word, wore it as a party name, and denied anyone the right to classify them. That is dignity. It is grounded in what one is owed rather than in whom one is licensed to hate, and it is the only currency in which a formation like this can be outbid. The Indian Left surrendered that ground when it decided indignation was unrigorous, and it has been losing ever since: zero state governments, a parliamentary presence rounding to nothing, and a generation with no memory of it as a force.

Nothing in the students’ demands was attainable inside the existing arrangement. A fair examination is unavailable without dismantling a private testing industry. Jobs are only available by confronting a model that has produced a decade of profits without employment. These young people did not begin from class analysis; they arrived at its doorstep by taking the state’s own promises seriously and following them to where they broke.

That is not yet a class movement. But this situation demonstrates that a connection can be made by anyone willing to link the graduate’s blocked ladder to the informal worker’s absent floor. On 10 August the unions and the farmers were already in the street.

Delhi is obviously part of something larger globally, but the list of recent youth revolts around the world is not homogeneous. There are three distinct families in it.

The first are revolts against a stolen count. Georgia has been in the streets for well over 400 consecutive days since October 2024, demanding fresh elections and the release of political prisoners. It has obtained neither — only more restrictive laws, hundreds of detentions and a failed attempt to storm the presidential palace. Mozambique’s post-election protests ran five months and cost close to 400 lives; Chapo was inaugurated regardless, and the sequence closed with an amnesty for protesters rather than a recount. These movements ask that a vote be re-counted, which an incumbent who survives a count will never accept.

The second are revolts against the cost of living, and they carry a signature this magazine’s readers will recognize. Kenya’s 2024 uprising was against a finance bill written to satisfy creditors. Nigeria’s #EndBadGovernance protests followed a fuel-subsidy removal and a currency collapse, in a state spending some 74% of federal revenue on debt service. These are, in substance, revolts against structural adjustments administered by domestic governments on external instructions. Kenya’s young people forced the bill’s withdrawal. Nigerians were met with treason charges carrying the death penalty against 76 people, including 30 minors, as young as 14; several collapsed in court after months of malnutrition in adult jails.

The third are revolts that took the state: Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Madagascar. A quota scheme, a corruption scandal or a social-media ban becomes the trigger; the government falls within weeks; and the movement discovers it has no capacity to govern or even to bargain over what follows. Six months on, most of the substantive demands raised in Nepal and Madagascar remain unmet.

India does not fit neatly into any of these categories. The CJP demanded something else: the integrity of a distributive procedure. In doing so it went, without any theory, straight at the mechanism by which mass exclusion is converted into personal failure.

What unites the cycle is not a generation. It is a global condition: economies that grow without absorbing labor, states that have replaced the promise of employment with the promise of fair competition for scarce entry, and debt-service regimes that squeeze whatever remains. These movements do not solely represent the grievances of young people. They represent the political expression of the effects of structural adjustment on the aspirational classes, with young people the first to experience its impact.

What also unites them is a shared limit. Leaderlessness defeats infiltration, decapitation and prosecution. But it also defeats negotiation, continuity and succession. The characteristic that prevents a movement from being beheaded also makes it impossible to bind that movement to an agreement or to transform it into something that endures beyond its dispersal.

Where that energy is released and nothing is there to receive it, the organized right is usually better placed to harvest it than we are. Brazil’s June 2013 remains the standing warning: an ironic, leaderless revolt over bus fares that won its demand, dissolved, and left a field that, within three years, belonged to Bolsonaro.

So the question India’s cockroaches pose is not whether such movements can win. They can, and this one did, against the hardest target in the set. It is whether anything exists to receive them when they disperse. Nothing was ready in Delhi this time. The next one is coming, because nothing that produced this one has been touched. And the only useful question for the Left, in Johannesburg as much as in Patna, is what we will have built by then.

Outside the courthouse waiting, cameras at the ready
Perp walk in prospect, vultures killing time
Jaded, one of the photographers explained
"We're basically waiting for people that don't want their picture taken..."

The nannies with their ruddy charges seeking the shade in the plaza
Grandma demographic, patiently observing, tiring them out
Who knew that Haitians had so many blond toddlers?
Homeless man conversing with the invisible crowd
A righteous lecture on grievances continuing and past

Eyewitness news WABC-7 New York
Truck and supporting cast, reconnaissance
Photogenic correspondent, hair piece steadied, swank
Checking angles, anticipating, the video man readies the camera
"This is federal, once they've got you in their sights, game over"




Court lets out, the morning session is over
The lawyers on their break, gray suits suitably somber
Homeland Protection Services crew fall out, looks of relief
The old man emerges, and could it be? Ooh, his daughter

Then the rush, furtive as he exits the courthouse
Coverage, first spotted by the indie stringer as he moves to the left
Caught, unexpected this development, indecision
Now the dance, the choreography begins
Questions hurled as they all move to the right
Telephoto lens activated, daughter lets out a yell.
He falters, stuck mid-street, then moves right, resigned
Can't avoid it, they have to walk through the plaza

Outrage and shame cross the face of the daughter
Shame and more shame on the part of the father
Click, shutter, click, more questions
He stutters - big mistake - and starts to answer
Ooh, this is a live one here
Protests vehemently, "We will appeal."
Passing the homeless man whose patter suddenly becomes distinct
"This country was never innocent... Repent"
Click. Gotcha, all in a day's work

Soundtrack for this note

• Plaza de Toros by Larry Young
  Featuring Grant Green and Elvin Jones. The album is called Into Something.

...

Timing is everything
Observers are worried

File under: culture, observation, life, city, media, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: June 1, 2023

Welcome to all the new subscribers who have joined us over the last couple of days. This is our weekly newsletter that, as the title says, tries to share stories about Nigerians in Nigeria and around the world doing things you may have missed. Goes out every Saturday morning at 10am UK time.

This week on 1914 Reader, I wrote about my original research into the Nigerian national honours system and what I found looking into more than 2,000 awards going back to 1963. I also looked at the upcoming Dangote Refinery IPO’s prospectus (I’m still an accountant!) and shared my thoughts on it.

Enjoy the week’s selection of stories below

Nigerian Media

It seems that a guy in Kano was murdered over his social media posts:

A quick check on his social media handles shows that Dan Shagamu was fond of posting selfie-recorded videos of him commenting on various issues.

In his videos, he literally attacked everyone ranging from politicians, traditional rulers, opposing religious groups to his neighbours. This, according to analysts, could make each of the groups he attacked potential suspect in his killing.

A resident of the area who preferred not to be mentioned confided in Weekend Trust that beyond what is in the public, residents of the area suspect that he could have been be involved in something that made his neighbours uncomfortable.

The source said even the account that he shared in one of his videos in the past alleging threats to his life over an encounter with a small child wasn’t normal.

He said, “There is no way everyone in the area could turn against a person unless there is something underground. He had a good relationship with little children who are always after him, which made people suspect that the relationship wasn’t normal, hence the hostility.

“But nobody could substantiate the kind of relationship with them. He was also living alone in his house after his divorce. He asked his six children to leave the house for their grandparents’ after he alleged there were threats to his life, saying he should rather be killed alone than with the children. That was why when he was found killed in the house, he was alone,” the source added.

He also said late Dan Shagamu’s life represented a paradox: outspoken on social media, but reserved and with limited friends in reality.

Daily Trust

27 deaths from a drink elsewhere will be huge news but in Nigeria there is always so much going on that stuff like this usually passes below the radar. And why is the official focus here for it to “die down”:

The death toll from the incident involving residents of Odigbo Local Government Area of Ondo State has risen to 27, as the state government has commenced a crackdown on the sale of herbal drinks and other unapproved substances in the affected communities.

PUNCH Metro reports that residents of Araromi Obu and Odigbo town had reportedly fallen ill after consuming substances suspected to be herbal drinks, with 24 deaths initially recorded in the two communities.

The Chairman of Odigbo LGA, Taiwo Adegoroye, told our correspondent on Thursday that the number of deaths had increased to 27.

Adegoroye said eight people had earlier died in Araromi Obu, while 16 deaths were recorded in Odigbo town, adding that the situation had since subsided following the intervention of medical teams from the state and local governments.

He said, “The number of deaths is now 27, but if not for the proactiveness of the medical teams from the state government and the local government, the death toll would have risen further. But we thank God that the situation has subsided.

“Today, the task force has moved around the parks, markets and streets to enforce the ban on the sale of herbal drinks. As I’m talking to you, a number of them have been seized.

“The environmental and health teams of the state government are already in town, carrying out investigations. I’m sure very soon it will die down.”

Punch

Very bizarre story. 87 year old?

The Adamawa State Police Command has arraigned an 87-year-old man, Dahiru Garba, for allegedly attempting to murder an Area Court judge in Fufore Local Government Area of the state.

According to a statement issued on Tuesday by the command’s spokesman, SP Suleiman Nguroje, Garba allegedly cut the hand of the presiding judge, Hon. Dauda Hamman, with a cutlass.

The statement read, “On 31st August, 2026, there was mild drama at Mayo-Ine Area Court, Fufore Local Government Area of Adamawa State, after an 87-year-old man, Dahiru Garba of Korawa village, allegedly cut off the hand of the Presiding Judge, Hon. Dauda Hamman, with a cutlass.”

Nguroje said the incident occurred while the judge was presiding over a case involving the suspect and one Ismail Yusuf.

He said, “The suspect attacked the presiding Judge with a cutlass and severally cut his hand, causing him grievous injuries.”

Punch

For as long as humans have been moving around, water has always been the cheapest form of transportation so its important to be clear about what is driving this:

At the waterfront of the popular Ose-Okwodu market, Onitsha, located at the bank of the River Niger, boat and canoe transport business thrives. The Canoe park there is always busy with paddlers, and their loaders make brisk business.

They work daily and make money to sustain them and cushion the effects of economic downturn.
It may be assumed that the present economic downturn in the country, coupled with the high cost of both formal and informal education prompt many young men to embark on boat and canoe paddling business so as to make ends meet, despite the high risk associated with it.

But some of the young peddlers dismissed that, saying it is a choice they willingly made. They dismissed the issue of risks, insisting that water transport is much less risky business than road transport.

According to them, the issue of high risk is not really real, unless for those who failed to wear life jackets and who do not know how to swim, who are vulnerable to losing their lives by drowning in case of the canoe capsizing and in the absence of divers and a rescue team.

The canoe paddlers maintained that it is cheaper and safer for travelers to go by canoe or boat than to travel by road to their various destinations.

According to Friday Idakwo, a 20-year-old canoe paddler and an indigene of Kogi State, “we charge about N4,000 per passenger traveling from Onitsha in Anambra State to Kogi State and vice versa, but road transporters charge as high as N15,000 for the same journey by road”.

Idakwo, popularly known by his fellow paddlers as “Mammy Water Boy Friend” because of his efficiency in swimming, explained that there is little or no risk for a passenger to travel by water when compared with traveling by road.

He said that in water transportation, there is less delay, there is no police extortion, no task force harassment, no armed robbery attack, no kidnappers or criminal Fulani herdsmen to fear, and no auto crash on water as witnessed on highways.

Vanguard

News from Mapo Customary Court:

Grade A Customary Court, sitting in Mapo, Ibadan, Oyo State, has asked a couple, Kayode and Michelle, to go their different ways on account of irresponsibility, clubbing and excessive drinking.

Kayode stated that Michelle had proved to be irresponsible from the first day of their marriage, adding that she lacked all the virtues he expected to see in a woman.

The plaintiff explained that he and the defendant had been together in their marriage for five years, but that they had nothing to show for it.

According to Kayode, Michelle had been unable to conceive, despite various efforts and measures taken in an attempt to have a child.

He added that, to his chagrin, his wife, instead of being sad for not having a child, went clubbing.

The plaintiff added that the defendant went to club every day and always got drunk.

Kayode explained that the more he tried to make Michelle see reason, the worse she became.

The plaintiff stated that he could no longer bear the embarrassment caused by his wife’s behaviour.

He thus prayed that their union be dissolved.

Michelle refused to make an appearance in court despite been served court summonses.

Kayode, in his testimony, said, “My wife and I got married in April 2020 and I paid N25, 000 as her bride price.

Tribune

Truly an amazing story. And of course it was started on Tiktok, which is a completely different part of Nigeria:

The Federal High Court in Abuja has sentenced a fake spiritualist, Solomon Odigie Moses, to one year in prison after he defrauded an Indian woman of $1,100 and recorded her during a private spiritual bath.

Justice C.N. Nwabulu sentenced Moses on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, after he pleaded guilty to a one-count charge of cheating and impersonating a spiritualist.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, said Moses was arrested in Ekpoma, Edo State, after obtaining the money from the Indian woman, who had sought spiritual healing.

The commission said Moses used a fake TikTok account to pose as a spiritual leader and received the $1,100 through his Zelle payment platform, after which the naira equivalent was paid into his local bank account.

The EFCC said Moses later deceived the woman into taking a nude spiritual bath, which he recorded without her permission, before threatening to make the video public unless she paid him.

Daily Post

A story you’d typically read about America, not Nigeria:

A 13-year-old boy, Mubarak Mohammed has died after allegedly pulling the trigger of a loaded Dane gun in Udubo village,Gamawa Local Government Area of Bauchi State.

According to the Bauchi State Police Command, the tragic incident occurred on Saturday, September 5, 2026, at about 4:30pm, when the teenager reportedly entered the room of a 35-year-old hunter, Suleiman Hamza, after the latter returned from hunting.

According to the Bauchi State Police Command, Hamza had allegedly left the loaded Dane gun inside his room before going out.

The teenager was said to have picked up the firearm and pulled the trigger, causing it to discharge and inflict fatal injuries on him.

The incident was reported to the Police at about 8:45pm by a 50-year-old resident of Udubo village.

Following the report, detectives attached to the Gamawa Police Division immediately mobilised to the scene and evacuated the victim to the General Hospital, Gamawa, where a medical doctor on duty confirmed him dead.

Guardian

Non-Nigerian Media

Which one of you is earning £400/month from Nigeria?

Darya Simanovich could be described as “having it all”. The serial entrepreneur not only manages several businesses but also runs her own string of companies while juggling three children. But late-night working isn’t part of her routine.

Darya’s secret is not getting up at 5am or hiring a nanny. Instead, Darya has chosen to outsource less desirable aspects of her life, leaving her free to be a listening ear for her growing children while keeping up with her impressive career.

“When I was first pregnant in 2012, I was worried about fitting everything in after the baby was born,” says Darya, 38, who lives in Chelsea with her children aged 14, 11 and 9.

“Then a friend suggested that instead of hiring a nanny, I could get someone to do the tasks I’d rather not do, such as cooking and cleaning. That way I could spend quality time with my baby. It seemed like a great idea.”

Darya employs a virtual assistant based in Nigeria to help with personal admin, freeing her to focus on her job and entrepreneurial ventures, including running Chelsea Swim Spa and her property management company. This sets her back £100 a week for approximately 10 hours of support.

Telegraph

This piece about Chimamanda Adichie and the death of her son in Nigeria is truly harrowing to read:

Esege said the doctor had urged him not to call Adichie until the hospital could do a CT scan, but he replied that he couldn’t keep the information from her. He texted his wife and asked her to come back, and she returned around midnight. In the next few hours, Nkanu’s heart stopped at least two more times.

“So they basically are doing cardiac resuscitations on this poor boy for more than four hours, until 8 in the morning, when they decided to call it,” Egese said. “Nkanu, our son, was gone.”

It seemed that Esege’s theory about the timing of Nkanu’s death was not one he had shared with his wife. Adichie looked at him, incredulous, and asked, “So, sorry. We don’t actually know when our son died?”

She paused and then said again, in disbelief, “We don’t know when he died.”

Turning to me, Adichie said, “I’m actually hearing this for the first time. Some of it.” She then referred to Esege by his nickname. “I didn’t know about IV’s conversation with the doctor when I went home to try to get the payments for the ambulance. I think IV’s tried to protect me.”

New York Times

This story has broken containment:

A social media influencer allegedly wanted by Nigeria over drugs trafficking died after having penis enlargement at a clinic in Bangkok.

Igho Ubiribo, known as “Ego”, who lived in Shepherd’s Bush, London, died in early March from a pulmonary embolism caused by a cosmetic injection into his penis.

An inquest confirmed “genital hyaluronic acid injection” as a medical cause of death.

Ubiribo, 43, who was born in Sapele, in the Delta State of southern Nigeria, had built up a reputation as a glamorous jet-setter on Instagram, where he had 186,000 followers under the name “Ego2222”.

He posted photographs of himself and his wife, Daniella Simba Allen, a Zimbabwean designer and socialite, in luxury hotels around the world, often posing in yachts, helicopters and supercars.

They were also accused by Nigerian authorities of recruiting teenage girls as drug traffickers.

An inquest at Westminster coroner’s court last month heard how Ubiribo had gone to the clinic in Bangkok for penis enlargement treatment on March 5. He received injections of hyaluronic acid, a filler commonly used in cosmetic procedures, and lidocaine, an anaesthetic.

Later that day, while having a massage at the Marriott Hotel, he complained of severe chest pain and collapsed.

He was still alert when taken by ambulance to Samitivej Hospital in central Bangkok, but lost consciousness before a CT scan could be performed. He was given CPR before being pronounced dead in the early hours of March 6. The post-mortem examination and toxicology tests determined the cause of death to be the hyaluronic acid injection.

The Times

Three London fashion designers and their mums talk to The Times. First up is Tolu Coker and her mum, Olapeju:

Even as a little girl Tolu had an eye for intricate styling. There was a time when she was small that a friend took her to a party and thought she’d lost her on the dancefloor. Of course, Tolu had just transformed her outfit — removing her jacket to reveal a sparkling disco top underneath.

Growing up in Nigeria gave me the privilege of having many of my clothes custom-made. I come from a creative family and creativity has always influenced the way I dress. I also enjoy making my own garments and designing jewellery to complement them. This allows me to choose quality fabrics and materials while creating pieces that genuinely reflect who I am. It brings me immense joy to think that this might have influenced Tolu.

The Times

A different way to get to the US it seems:

Six Nigerian nationals linked to an organized criminal network that allegedly swindled American women out of over $6 million through online romance scams will be extradited to the United States on Friday, South African police said.

The men, who were arrested in the South African city of Cape Town in 2021, are set to be handed over to officials from the FBI on Friday and transported to the U.S. to face wire fraud and money laundering charges.

They are accused of belonging to a criminal network known as the Black Axe, which Interpol describes as being part of criminal groups responsible for a significant share of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams.

According to South African police, the men are alleged to have targeted more than 100 women in the U.S., defrauding them of more than $6 million through online romance or love scams.

Among the alleged victims were pensioners and businesspeople who were reportedly targeted through sophisticated online relationships.

“Through the coordination of Interpol South Africa, the six will today be transported from a correctional facility in Cape Town to Cape Town International Airport, where they will be handed over to officials from the FBI and the United States Secret Service, who arrived in South Africa this morning,” said police spokesperson Katlego Mogale.

AP News

Le Monde feature on AbdulSamad Rabiu, one of Nigeria’s billionaire Instagram influencers:

His Instagram account reveals a life that is both deeply rooted and globalized. He is most often seen in a caftan and hula (a Hausa headpiece), receiving guests in his bright office with cream leather sofas, overlooking the lagoon in Lagos, the economic capital in the predominantly Catholic South. Or attending a flamboyant engagement ceremony, a favorite pastime of Nigeria's high society. Another day, he appears in a T-shirt, sneakers and cap, aboard his new Bombardier Global 8,000 jet – he was the first African to own one – or on his yacht, the Raniya, named after his youngest daughter. It is a life of opulence. On this account, he also describes himself as "Africa's biggest giver," highlighting the work of his foundation, the ASR Initiative, which allocates $100 million annually to education, health and development. "I don't think we are doing enough in terms of giving back," he told the Nigerian press a few years ago.

Le Monde

Uncle Chris Osagbaekhoe is now a graduate:

A 68-year-old grandfather from south-east London has graduated with a first-class degree in social work.

Chris Osagbaekhoe, from Thamesmead, gained his Bachelor of Arts (BA) from Goldsmiths, University of London at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, four years after starting his studies.

Chris, who was born and raised in Nigeria, had previously studied psychology and counselling between 2013 and 2015. He has four children and 12 grandchildren.

He said: “Part of the inspiration was to empower people to empower themselves, and part of the motivation was to be a voice to the voiceless – that was my inner drive.”

BBC

Do you care for some spag jollof? Joke Bakare has got you covered with a recipe:

There’s a long-standing tradition of pasta-making in northern Nigeria that’s sadly dying out as good-quality dried pasta becomes available. We’ve served a couple of pasta dishes in Chishuru, my restaurant – most recently gnocchi made with gram flour and flavoured with moringa, a nutrient-rich leaf, served with a caramelised yoghurt sauce.

For the 100th anniversary of legendary Soho restaurant Quo Vadis, my dear friend Nick Bramham of Quality Wines and I were asked to collaborate on a celebration dinner. Nick loves to cook Italian so we decided to do an irreverent Italy-meets-Nigeria dinner including spaghetti with jollof sauce. Jollof rice is one of the most famous dishes of West Africa – there’s a never-ending argument about whether Ghanaian or Nigerian jollof is better, I honestly don’t care. Anyway we took the sauce base of jollof and applied it to pasta. We didn’t invent this – it’s a popular late night snack dish in Nigeria – but it was Nick who christened it “spag jol”.

Observer

A truly unexpected twist to this story where Nigerian scammers helped to catch a paedophile in the UK:

A paedophile who was spotted by a passenger watching child abuse videos on a train to London also tried to buy a 13-year-old girl - and was paying for her in instalments.

David Johnson, 35, was caught viewing videos of young children being abused while on a train from Stafford to London on September 23, 2025.

Messages from a supplier read: ‘I got all videos. Don’t worry, sweetheart [I] supply all kinds of videos.[sic]’ The vile predator responded: ‘Just kids videos’.

But unbeknownst to him, a horrified passenger sitting behind him witnessed the disturbing exchange as well as the videos that followed.

After moving to another carriage, he alerted British Transport Police, who swooped in to arrest Johnson as soon as the train arrived at London Euston.

Officers seized his phone, which was found to have an indecent image of a child saved as the wallpaper, but the CPS said more evidence was required to charge him.

While in custody, brazen Johnson even asked officers for his phone back because he ‘needed to delete some stuff’.

Further analysis of 150 electronic items belonging to Johnson, where they uncovered nearly 200 indecent images, including 105 Category A pictures – the most serious.

In an episode of Channel 4’s 999: What Happened Next, it was also uncovered that Johnson was trying to buy who he believed was a 13-year-old girl named Lola.

[…]

Johnson had planned to meet the 13-year-old girl at her home on the day of his arrest and had condoms and a train ticket in his possession at the time.

Police went to an address in Wolverhampton where they believed Lola was living; however, people living there did not know anything about the child.

It was later uncovered that neither Lola nor Shanelle were real and were fake personas created by scammers in Nigeria to whom he was sending money.

Daily Mail

Here is the short version of a story that has been told wrong for 30 years.

Kenneth Nnebue was born in Mgbidi, Imo State. He left school after sixth grade and apprenticed under his brother, a handbag maker, before entering trade himself in the Onitsha market. By the late 1980s, he was in Lagos, importing VHS tapes from Taiwan, distributing pirated foreign films, and trying to move product in a difficult economy. When the tapes stopped selling, he put an original story on them instead. That story — Living in Bondage (1992) — cost 150,000 naira, about $7,000 at the time. It sold over 100,000 copies in its first weeks through informal markets in Lagos, Enugu, and beyond. It launched a global industry.

What gets left out of most tellings: before Nnebue made Living in Bondage in Igbo, he had already produced at least 27 Yoruba-language films. An Igbo trader, operating in Lagos, making Yoruba content, who then made the Igbo film the world decided was the beginning of everything. The ethnic ownership of that origin — who gets to claim Nollywood, which tradition gets the credit, which city gets the heritage tourism — has been contested ever since. Not because the evidence is unclear, but because resolving it requires someone to say plainly what Nollywood actually is: an art form rooted in Yoruba theatrical tradition, or an industry born from an Igbo trader’s logistics problem. These are different things. The confusion between them is not innocent.

The Yoruba side of the argument is not a retroactive claim. The Yoruba Traveling Theater tradition, Alárìnjó, reaches back to the 19th century. Its modern form is usually traced to Hubert Ogunde, whose touring theater company toured Nigerian cities through the 1950s and 1960s, its work politically sharp enough that a regional premier banned it outright. That stage tradition migrated to celluloid film through the 1970s and 1980s, and by 1985 Moses Olaiya’s Mosebolatan was one of the country’s first genuine blockbusters. Critically, Yoruba filmmakers moved onto VHS format in 1988, four years before Living in Bondage. If the question is who touched the video format first, it wasn’t Nnebue.

So why does his name carry all the credit? Because Living in Bondage wasn’t first, but it was the first to look like it knew what it was doing, packaged with a glossy, full-color cover styled after pirated Hollywood tapes, presented as a professional product instead of a stopgap. The story helped too — a man who joins an occult society and sacrifices his wife for wealth, only to be haunted by what he’s done — landed hard in a country deep in structural adjustment-era desperation, when stories of ritual money were part of the cultural air people breathed. And despite being shot entirely in Igbo with no subtitles for a full year, the film crossed ethnic lines anyway — co-producer Okey Ogunjiofor would later say simply that people who didn’t understand the language still understood the story, because the pictures carried it.

What Nnebue actually contributed, then, wasn’t the invention of video filmmaking — Yoruba practitioners had that four years earlier. He contributed a “template,” an industrial model of direct-to-video production that the entire industry would replicate for the next two decades. Every straight-to-video Nollywood film that followed, regardless of language, was built on the business logic Nnebue stumbled into while solving an unglamorous warehouse problem.

Laid side by side, these two histories aren’t actually contradictory; they’re answering two different questions. It’s the single phrase “who started Nollywood” that collapses them into one, forcing a false contradiction. The Yoruba lineage answers where the art form came from. The Nnebue story answers where the industry came from. Ogunde’s company built the grammar. Nnebue’s warehouse problem built the factory.

I’m writing this from Enugu, one of the cities where Living in Bondage first sold by the hundreds in market stalls. Here, Nollywood’s Igbo roots aren’t distant history but lived memory, passed down the way a family recipe is. That memory is real. So is Ogunde’s banned theater company. Neither one needs to lose for the other to be true.

But Nigeria rarely lets cultural origin stay this generous. Who started Nollywood is never just a historical question here — it’s tied to tourism revenue, festival programming, whose language gets state funding, whose grandchildren get to say “we built this.” Thirty years on, the debate hasn’t been resolved because resolving it was never really the point. Someone benefits from the ambiguity every time it stays open, and someone loses something every time it closes.

That, more than the biography of one trader from Mgbidi, is the story worth telling.

Bureaucratic maneuvering born of sharp elbows
Directing the ultimate operational examples
We have only interests and shades of gray

So. Thoroughly flesh out the preferred option
While presenting limp policy alternatives
These fig leaves adorn the poisoned chalice
We have only interests, it's worth the price we pay

Constructing straw men in this intellectual game
Realpolitik when it comes to brass tacks
A balancing act of supposed hard choices
We have only interests, tough decisions have to be made

Deflection, play down the issue of an embargo
Encourage accommodation and liberal treatment
Throughout, proffer expressions of sorrow
We have only interests come what may

Moral blinders in the form of dual purpose equipment
Facade of toothless sanctions against de jure illegality
Exchange programs in all categories, including military
We have only interests, suffice to say

As to the unfettered pursuit of power and wealth
Cynical calculation asserting favored preferences
The strange architecture of misdirection
We have only interests, the decisions have been made




After National Security Study Memorandum 39 And The Future Of United States Policy Toward Southern Africa by Edgar Lockwood


File under: USA, politics, policy, cynicism, rogues, war, language, hatchet job, Great Game, Strange Bedfellows, Africa, Observers are worried, poetry, toli

Writing log: May 24, 2023

Lesotho is two years into a national state of disaster: US tariffs have gutted its garment factories, unemployment has passed 30%, and its main trade lifeline is guaranteed for less than a year. To understand how the mountain kingdom keeps ending up here, start almost forty years earlier.In 1987, something extraordinary happened in this small kingdom, completely surrounded by South Africa. Money sent home by Basotho men working in South African gold mines reached 236% of Lesotho’s entire GDP. Not 23%. Not 60%. More than double the value of everything the country itself produced in a year. Today, that figure sits at around a fifth of GDP. The money didn’t slow down gradually. It collapsed, and it has never recovered. To understand why, you have to understand what that money actually was.

Why one country’s economy ran on someone else’s mines

For over a century, Lesotho had almost no domestic industry of its own. What it had instead was proximity: a small, mountainous, landlocked territory sitting right next to the richest goldfields on Earth. South African mining houses needed enormous numbers of workers willing to do dangerous, underground labour for low pay, and they built an entire recruitment system to draw men from Lesotho, in their hundreds of thousands, to fill that need.

This wasn’t diversification. It was concentration. An entire national economy came to depend not on a sector but on the hiring decisions of one industry, in one neighbouring country, that Lesotho had no ownership of and no influence over. The arrangement generated enormous sums of money. But it meant Lesotho’s prosperity was never really Lesotho’s to control. It belonged to the price of gold, the depth and cost of South African ore bodies, and the mining houses’ own calculations about profitability: decisions made in boardrooms far from Lesotho.

Why the mines emptied out

South Africa’s gold mining industry has been declining for decades. Ore grades have thinned, extraction has moved ever deeper and more expensive, and profitability has steadily eroded. Industry data shows gold mine employment falling from around 536,000 workers in the late 1980s to roughly 94,000 in 2023, a loss of more than 440,000 jobs. What is far less well understood is when that decline first showed up on the ground in Lesotho. That is what our research set out to trace.

The illusion of insurance

Here is the idea we set out to test, in ongoing research that is not yet peer-reviewed: a common assumption in development economics holds that remittances act like insurance for vulnerable countries. When disaster strikes at home, such as a drought or a bad harvest, the theory goes, migrant workers send extra money to cushion their families. It appears again and again in World Bank reports and climate-adaptation policy documents. If it were true anywhere, it should have been true in Lesotho. So we tested it every way we could think of: immediate effects and delayed ones, good mining years and bad, average years and the very worst.

So far, we have found nothing. At no point did Lesotho’s own climate conditions appear to move the money flowing into the country. This work is ongoing. But that absence is the whole point. Real insurance responds to your shocks: your drought, your bad year. What Lesotho had was money that moved in response to conditions entirely outside its own borders. That isn’t insurance. It’s exposure to a risk you don’t control, wearing the appearance of a safety net.

What the sequence suggests, and what it does not prove

Our analysis cannot show that the mining industry’s decline directly caused Lesotho’s remittance collapse. Establishing causation from national data alone is genuinely difficult, and we want to be honest about that limit. What we can show is a sequence, dated using statistical tools that detect when a long-running trend breaks.

Net migration out of Lesotho reversed course in 1986: families were already pulling back from the mines before anything else in the data moved. Just two years later, in 1988, around the same time mine employment across the industry peaked before its long decline, Lesotho’s remittances began their long, uninterrupted fall. It would be a full decade, until 1998, before international aid to Lesotho showed any measurable shift. That was also the year of Lesotho’s post-election crisis and SADC intervention, so donors may have been answering the political emergency; either way, aid moved ten years after the money did. And South Africa’s own gold production statistics did not formally register a structural decline until 2004, sixteen years after Lesotho’s remittances had already begun falling.

That gap matters. Ordinary households were responding to what was happening in the mines well before it showed in industry figures, and years before aid responded. We treat this as a striking, dated pattern worth taking seriously, not proof of a single mechanism.

The navy line tracks remittances as a share of Lesotho’s economy; the orange line tracks South African gold mining output; the vertical dashed line marks the 1987 remittance peak. Both series trend downward over the long run, though their statistical turning points sit sixteen years apart (1988 and 2004). The closer, two-year link we found is between Lesotho’s own migration reversal (1986) and its remittance collapse (1988). Data: World Bank (remittances); South African Reserve Bank (gold production). Chart: authors.

The sequel is playing now

If this were only history, it would be warning enough. But Lesotho is living the sequel. After the gold remittances collapsed, the country rebuilt its external lifeline around textiles: garment factories serving American brands under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which became the country’s largest private employer. Then, in April 2025, the United States imposed steep tariffs on Lesotho’s exports. Orders from American buyers dried up, factories cut shifts or closed, and the government declared a two-year national state of disasteras unemployment passed 30%. The 2026 renewal of AGOA guarantees market access for less than a year, so orders remain cautious and investment is on hold.

Swap Johannesburg’s gold for Washington’s tariffs and the structure of the story is identical. An economy leans its external income on an industry it neither owns nor controls, located in, or dependent on, someone else’s country. Decisions taken far away determinewhether Basotho households eat. The mechanism is the same one, wearing different clothes.

Why this matters beyond one small country

It would be easy to read this as a specific, unfortunate story about Lesotho. It isn’t. It’s a warning about an assumption embedded in much development thinking: that migration and the remittances it generates are a durable form of resilience a vulnerable country can lean on.

Individual families may well cushion each other when disaster strikes; household studies elsewhere have found exactly that. But the version of this idea that matters for policy is the national one, and Lesotho was the strongest possible test case, and so far it fails. Its remittances never moved with Lesotho’s own climate shocks. And when the broader system they depended on began to weaken, there was no cushion, because there had never really been one built at home. There was only ever a single foreign employer, and an economy that had quietly organised itself around never asking what would happen if that employer changed its mind.

For Lesotho, whose garment workers are today learning the lesson its miners’ families learned forty years ago, and for the many other economies whose fortunes are tied to a single foreign industry or a single migration corridor, that is the real lesson: a safety net that depends entirely on someone else’s decisions was never a safety net to begin with. It was a bet, one an entire country made without ever quite realising it had.

The post Why Lesotho’s remittance ‘safety net’ was never really its own, and why it is failing again in 2026 appeared first on African Arguments.