Podcasts about kogi state

Greetings Glocal Citizens! This week's guest is a dynamic activist that I had the pleasure of working with while distributing a documentary (see other topics of interest) featuring the work that has become his origin story in the world of Pan-African development. Hamzat “Hamzy!” Lawal is a global citizen, community organizer, an award-winning advocate and humanitarian who has successfully led grassroots campaigns in over 40 African countries. He specializes in practical issues associated with climate change, open data, advocacy and development policies affecting rural and deprived communities. He is the Founder of Follow The Money (http://followthemoneyng.org), a home-grown, Pan-African grassroots, data-driven initiative currently in 10 African countries. As the Chief Executive of Connected Development (CODE) (http://connecteddevelopment.org/), an organization he also founded, CODE won the ONE Africa 2016 Award recognizing, rewards, and advances the exceptional work of African organizations; dedicated to helping the continent achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). When he is not social entrpreneuring, Hamzy sits on the Executive Board of the largest Youth Movement in Africa: African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC) (http://ayicc.net/), and has joined his voice on different platforms and policy influencing coalitions across Africa such as the Not Too Young To Run (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Too_Young_To_Run) movement which drives youth political inclusion. And also serves as an Education Champion with the Malala Fund, organization working for a world where all girls can learn for 12 years and lead without fear. This is definitely a listening and learning opportunity with wonderful insights into the work of empowering the youth that are poised to lead the Continent. Where to find Hamzy? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamzat-lawal-85409129/) On Facebook (https://web.facebook.com/hamzatblawal/?_rdc=1&_rdr#) On Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/hamzycode/) What's Hamzy reading? Love Does not Win Elections (https://www.narrativelandscape.com/product/love-does-not-win-elections/) by Glocal Citizen Ayisha Osori (https://glocalcitizens.fireside.fm/guests/ayisha-osori) Other topics of interest: The documentary that started it all Perspective (https://vimeo.com/272930033) About Kogi State (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kogi_State), Nigeria and the Ebira (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebira_people) people About #SaveBagega (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagega) Another side of Bauchi State (https://youtu.be/a7KJxxKTVkA?si=VS0FSk157OAF3dSy) Special Guest: Hamzat Lawal.

Natasha-Akpabio Saga - Kogi Receives Senator, Brushed Aside Gov, Police Banhttps://osazuwaakonedo.news/natasha-akpabio-saga-kogi-receives-senator-brushed-aside-gov-police-ban/01/04/2025/#Issues #Kogi #Akpabio #Bello #Natasha #Ododo #Senate ©April 1st, 2025 ®April 1, 2025 7:48 pm Nigeria Senate President, Godswill Akpabio on Tuesday was alleged to have planned with the immediate past Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello to assassinate Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, the Senator representing Kogi Central Senatorial District, this, the female lawmaker made the allegation in addition to her earlier allegation of sexual harassment leveled against the Nigeria third highest ranking government official which led to her being suspended by the Senate for six months and more actions taken apparently by her political enemies who may have encouraged her constituents to file a petition before the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC to recall her from the National Assembly, which, she accused her political enemies of forging and gathering fake signatures to mislead INEC into doing a dirty job, as such, she was warned to cancel her homecoming rally and procession after the Kogi State Governor, Usman Ododo banned political rally and procession in the state, subsequently, the Kogi State Command of the Nigeria Police Force issued a stern warning threat message on Tuesday morning that the political gathering maybe hijacked by hoodlums based on intelligence gathering, but despite the threats, the people of Kogi State came out in a very large numbers to receive and honour the female Senator who arrived the venue of the homecoming Sallah celebration with helicopter. #OsazuwaAkonedo

Senator Natasha Hadiza Akpoti-Uduaghan, born on December 9, 1979, is a Nigerian lawyer, social entrepreneur, and politician representing Kogi Central Senatorial District in the 10th National Assembly since 2023. She is notably the first elected female senator from Kogi State. Akpoti-Uduaghan gained prominence through her advocacy for the revival of the Ajaokuta Steel Mill and her commitment to industrialization in Nigeria.  In March 2025, Akpoti-Uduaghan accused Senate President Godswill Akpabio of sexual harassment. Subsequently, she faced a six-month suspension from the Senate, officially cited for violations of Senate Standing Rules. This suspension has sparked national and international debates, with women's rights groups condemning the action and organizing protests under the banner “We are all Natasha.” Akpoti-Uduaghan has challenged the suspension's legality, asserting it as an attempt to silence her and an assault on democracy.  The situation has drawn attention to issues of gender inequality within Nigerian politics, where female representation remains significantly low. The controversy continues to unfold, highlighting the challenges faced by women in leadership positions in Nigeria.In this episode, Babah Kay describes the implications of her suspension on Injustice to women all across Nigeria and the effect of women in politics in Nigeria.Thanks for listening... visit our website at https://www.battabox.com

Here's the latest news from the world of Omniglot. New language pages: Mpiemo (Mbimu), a Bantu language spoken in the Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo. Ebira (èbìrà), a Volta-Niger language spoken mainly in Kogi State in central Nigeria. Gun (Gungbe), an Eastern Gbe language spoken in southeastern Benin and southwestern […]

Nigerian striker Leke James takes AyoT through his football journey, from playing in Kogi State, moving tot Norway, going to China at a young age, playing in Saudi Arabia, and then returning to Europe with Sivasspor. He also discusses how the doctors at Sivasspor potentially caused him to have a career-threatening injury.

Nothing To Fear, Former Kogi Governor Yahaya Bello Says As He Reports Self To EFCC ~ OsazuwaAkonedo #Kogi #Bello #EFCC #Yahaya https://osazuwaakonedo.news/nothing-to-fear-former-kogi-governor-yahaya-bello-says-as-he-reports-self-to-efcc/18/09/2024/ #Breaking News Published: September 18th, 2024 Reshared: September 18, 2024 10:10 pm Former Governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello on Wednesday reported himself

In 2018, Nigerian lawyer and politician Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan publicly announced her intentions to run for a seat in the Nigerian Senate, representing the people of Kogi Central. What began as a journey to advocate for laws favoring industrialization in the country led to years of political intimidation, gender bias, and violence for her.This episode explores Natasha's turbulent journey to becoming Kogi State's first woman senator. It also sheds light on how Nigeria's constitution grants women the right to run for office, but in reality, the experience is painful and difficult.To get inside information about every episode, subscribe to our newsletter here. You will get behind-the-scenes information from Aisha Salaudeen.

In this Making Leaders podcast, we hear from Onyinye Nwankwo, PhD Candidate in Atmospheric and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and one of three Promise Award Recipients in 2023. Onyinye is an accomplished scientist in the field of upper atmospheric and space sciences, currently pursuing her PhD in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Physics and Industrial Physics at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in her home country of Nigeria before obtaining a Master's degree in Space Geophysics from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Brazil and a second Master of Science in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering from the University of Michigan. During her undergraduate studies, Onyinye served as an industrial trainee “Radio Signal Officer” at the Nigeria Port Authority in Lagos State, where her skills in maintaining radio signals and signal processing were key to ensuring efficient communication and navigation services. She went on to become a Scientific Officer with the Center for Atmospheric Research, National Space Research and Development Agency (CAR-NASRDA) in Anyibga, Kogi State, Nigeria, where she showcased her expertise in data processing, management and the operation of cutting-edge imaging technology. In this role, Onyinye provided key raw data handling for the All-Sky Airglow Imager and Fabry Perot Interferometer and made significant contributions to the understanding of atmospheric phenomena, which also bolstered Nigeria's stature in space and atmospheric research. Before joining CAR-NASRDA, she worked as a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Physics at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture in Umudike, Nigeria, where she handled a range of responsibilities for the department, including course instruction, design and implementation of research methodologies, contributions to lab experiments and management of administrative tasks.

In this Better Satellite World podcast series, we ask the question: "What would you do if you had the power to make the world a better place during your career?" Joining SSPI's Lou Zacharilla to answer that question in the first episode are 3 members of the "20 Under 35" cohort of 2023: Onyinye Nwankwo, Atmospheric and Space Scientist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Amy Comeau, Lead Member of Boeing's CST-100 Starliner Chief Engineer's Office; and Dr. Justyna Kosianka, Senior Remote Sensing Scientist at Ursa Space Systems. Onyinye Nwankwo is an accomplished scientist in the field of upper atmospheric and space sciences, currently pursuing her PhD in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Physics and Industrial Physics at Nnamdi Azikiwe University in her home country of Nigeria before obtaining a Master's degree in Space Geophysics from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Brazil and a second Master of Science in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering from the University of Michigan. During her undergraduate studies, Onyinye served as an industrial trainee “Radio Signal Officer” at the Nigeria Port Authority in Lagos State, where her skills in maintaining radio signals and signal processing were key to ensuring efficient communication and navigation services. She went on to become a Scientific Officer with the Center for Atmospheric Research, National Space Research and Development Agency (CAR-NASRDA) in Anyibga, Kogi State, Nigeria, where she showcased her expertise in data processing, management and the operation of cutting-edge imaging technology. In this role, Onyinye provided key raw data handling for the All-Sky Airglow Imager and Fabry Perot Interferometer and made significant contributions to the understanding of atmospheric phenomena, which also bolstered Nigeria's stature in space and atmospheric research. Before joining CAR-NASRDA, she worked as a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Physics at Michael Okpara University of Agriculture in Umudike, Nigeria, where she handled a range of responsibilities for the department, including course instruction, design and implementation of research methodologies, contributions to lab experiments and management of administrative tasks. Onyinye was selected as one of the three Promise Award Recipients for the 2023 "20 Under 35" cohort. Amy Comeau is a lead member of the CST-100 Starliner Chief Engineer's Office at Boeing, a position that requires solving complex system-level design and integration challenges. As part of her current role, she facilitates factory tours of the Starliner program for key stakeholders, including legislators, community leaders, national and international customers, universities and other organizations, making constant use of her powerful communication and leadership skills. Amy began her career at Boeing in 2018 as a satellite systems vehicle engineer as part of a rotation program, where she led an in-depth analysis of test equipment anomalies and supported the setup and functional checkouts of various satellite payloads. Before joining Boeing, she worked in a fellowship for start-up Bryce Space and Technology as a Brooke Owens fellow – one of only 36 women selected for the fellowship in 2017. She also participated in NASA's Micro-g NExT challenge as a student, during which she designed, developed and manufactured a tool that could seal micrometeorite debris holes on the International Space Station. Amy graduated from Purdue University with a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. Dr. Justyna Kosianka is a Senior Remote Sensing Scientist at Ursa Space Systems, with a history of designing and developing algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) analytics, geospatial modeling for synthetic SAR training data generation and data fusion. Within this she has focused on change detection as well as environmental monitoring analytics. Dr. Kosianka serves as the manager for Ursa's SAR-based Analytics Team and has served as the technical lead for the company's suite of SAR-based Earth observation analytics, including National Catastrophe, soil moisture, stockpile measurement, flood mapping, well monitoring and oil storage measurement and supply chain management. She was recently assigned the role of Product Owner for Ursa's commodities-based product offerings. In this role, Dr. Kosianka is responsible for planning for design and development of commodities and Earth observation products, which helps set the direction for an entire suite of SAR-analytics-based products for the company. She has made particular progress in the area of 3D Change Detection while at Ursa, resulting in her being awarded 2 patents for SATELLITE SAR ARTIFACT SUPPRESSION FOR ENHANCED THREE-DIMENSIONAL FEATURE EXTRACTION, CHANGE DETECTION, AND VISUALIZATIONS (A-1 and B-1).

Musician, Band Members Kidnapped In Abuja Regain Freedom ~ OsazuwaAkonedo #Kogi #Abuja #band #Gunmen #Kidnappers #Musicians #Omoba https://osazuwaakonedo.news/musician-band-members-kidnapped-in-abuja-regain-freedom/21/12/2023/ Nigerian Juju musician, Omoba De Jombo Beats, and his band members have regained freedom four days after they were kidnapped on their way to Kogi State fromfrom --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/osazuwaakonedo/message

At least three people have been killed in an explosion in Nigeria's Kogi State, a few hours before President Buhari was due to visit nearby. Plus, Kenya's government bans the export of baobab trees to Georgia following a public outcry, amid environmental concerns. And we take you to Statues Also Dream, the unique live play connecting performers thousands of miles apart.

On The Town With Tanya sits down with Director of Public Health of Ministry in Kogi State Nigeria, Dr. Francis Akpa, to Discuss the state of health in Koji and what some challenges and solutions are. Please like share and subscribe. Thanks To: Photo/video, Foreign Correspondent, Steven Izekor *On The Town With Tanya is committed to bringing world news and views. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tanya-cooper/support

On The Town With Tanya sits down with Director of Public Health in Kogi State, Nigeria, Dr. Francis Akpa, on "The State of African Health". Special thanks to our Foreign Correspondent/Nigeria, Steven Ezekor for bringing us the latest in Africa. We hope to create fluent dialogue amongst all African diaspora, all people, together we learn, heal and move forward by sharing and finding solutions. We are also committed to positive images and news from those that are on the ground world wide. *As of broadcast this particular town has had issues with light and wifi, forcing residents to work during daylight hours. Remember as we judge, "By the grace of god, there ye goI" Parts of South Africa is also dealing with no lights, we are blessed. we will try to have the Dr back again, thank you --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/tanya-cooper/support

The Dangote Cement Plant located in Obajana, Kogi State, has been reopened after being closed by the Kogi State Government over issues bordering on the legality of the company's acquisition of the defunct Obajana Cement Company. The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, says that an agreement had been reached between the Dangote Group and the Kogi State Government on the need to reopen the factory while urging both parties to respect the agreement. The reopening of the plant came after a 10-day disagreement by both parties over the legality of the acquisition of the cement plant. The Commissioner of Information, Kingsley Fanwo, the Kogi State Government had maintained that the acquisition of the cement plant by Africa's richest man did not follow due process.

The flooding being experienced this year is the worst in the last 10 years in Nigeria, says the National Emergency Management Agency, NEMA.Recent images of the flood have shown how an entire local government area has been submerged in water in Kogi State.In this episode of Nigeria Daily, we look at the untold hardship of victims and how they are coping with it.

With a few days to the deadline of presidential candidates selecting running mates, Oluwakayode hosted a few guests, Kunle Lawal; Executive Director, Electoral College, Achike Chude; Poet, Author and Social Commentator and, Petra Onyegbule – Former Chief Press Secretary, Gov. Yahaya Bello, Kogi State, to have them express their views on the situation of things.

In this episode, Gift shares her growing up experiences in Idah, Kogi State and Russia, where she currently resides. She also shares reactions she's had over the years introducing herself to people as an Igala lady. Happy listening. || Thank you, Hikod Ushering Services, for sponsoring this episode. Need ushers for your events? Send them a DM on IG - @hikodusheringservices || Please, share this episode. I'd love to get your feedback on Whatsapp: +2347046055029, IG: @temi_ademi or Email: adetemi47@gmail.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

At least 240 inmates have escaped the Medium Security Custodial Centre (MSCC) in Kabba, Kogi State, following an attack by yet to be identified gunmen.

People assume I’ve interviewed Tunde Wey—the artist, writer, and cook whose work has been the subject of other people’s award-winning profiles—before because I’m a big public fan of his work, but I hadn’t felt myself properly prepared. His work touches on everything from racism to immigration to colonialism to capitalist extraction, and I didn’t really know my way into a focused interview. I was nervous, basically. But I think we had a good conversation, one that gets at a lot of issues with food as a lens toward bigger systems and problems.In many cases—most cases, if I’m honest—I’m doing an interview in order to work out a problem I’ve been thinking about, and this one was no different. We waded into whether food can really be an agent of change in a capitalist world, because I’ve been wavering on that idea myself, and Wey has the economic knowledge to discuss why it isn’t so in depth. Listen above, or read below.Alicia: Hi, Tunde. Thank you so much for taking the time. Tunde: Thank you. (:07) Alicia: And I know you are in Lagos, now. Can you tell us about how that's going, what you're doing there?Tunde: Oh, I'm actually not in Lagos. [Laughs.] I was supposed to fly two weeks ago, and my COVID result didn’t come in time. So I just pushed for my flight till a couple of months from now. Next month or something.Alicia: Ok, cool. Well, can you tell us about where you grew up and what you ate?Tunde: Yeah.I grew up in Lagos. I ate regional Western Nigerian food, I guess. So I'm Yoruba, so I ate Yoruba food. My mom is Edo, so I ate that food as well. My dad is also part Efik, so I ate that as well. So I'd Yoruba, Efik, and sort of the Delta region food, so Edo, Itsekiri food. And then we ate, I guess, white food too.Alicia: Which white food? Tunde: When we were growing up, we used to call it breakfast things. But when I came here, then it was lunch meats and s**t like that. So sausages and hams and stuff like that. So, we ate that. So it was a mix. We usually would eat that on Sundays. My dad would cook, and we'd go out to this store. My data would buy a whole bunch of things, and then he'll cook. Pasta. My mom would mix s**t like beef stroganoff, just random s**t. She went to school in England, so she came back with certain notions around food. So, we have those kinds of things. And growing up in Nigeria, I came from a middle-class background. It wasn't out of the norm for folks to eat that kind of stuff. So cereals and pancakes, stuff like that. Plus, we also watched a lot of American television with that kind of stuff on the TV.Alicia: Right, right. Yeah. And you self-identify as an artist, a cook and a writer. And I wanted to ask, which were you first and how did the rest come? [Laughter.] Tunde: Which was up first? [Laughs.] Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Which identity? Or which came to you first, in terms of your work? Tunde: Right. I don't know how to answer that question. I feel like it just depends on who I'm, who I am talking to. I think I say I'm an artist because it's just easier to convey what I'm trying to do. I remember, I was trying to raise money for a restaurant. And I was telling people that this restaurant is not going to make any money. And they couldn't understand that. They were like, ‘Huh, what does this mean?’ But then if I was talking to, say, a curator, and I'm like, ‘Well, this project is this and I need this amount of money,’ then they get it. So it just depends on who I'm talking to. So I guess in the chronology of what is on public records? Artist came last, and it's probably still not on record. So, maybe that’s the first time.Alicia: Well, it is difficult, I think, for multi-disciplinary people to use that word, to make themselves legible, I suppose, in a world where you have to make everything legible to obtain what you need to do your work at all. You have to be very, very strict about what you are. That is really funny that saying artist allowed you to get the capital for the projects that you needed, that you wanted to do. [Laughs.]Tunde: Yeah, I have a friend who's a curator. She's a friend, but she's also a colleague. She's based in Pittsburgh, Chenoa, and she was the first person—I did a dinner in New Orleans, and she happened to be there ’cause she was there for the opening of some hotel or something. And she had read about it. She just came through. And then, that's how we became friends. But she saw it as art. And then she gave me sort of the words to be able to describe myself to myself and to other people. And then she sponsored the project as art. So I'm like, ‘All right, I f**k with this.’Alicia: Right. And your work focuses on power, colonialism, capitalism, racism. You've written for food sections and food outlets. But lately, you've been self-publishing, I wanted to ask if that was a conscious decision to move out of traditional media, or whether this is something that—if you're just not finding the space in food media.Tunde: Yeah. So I'm not sure how it is for you. But I never pitched anything, just because that's not—I didn't grow up. I mean, I wasn't a journalist or anything so I didn't understand pitching. And the way I got my writing gig with the Chronicle was through a relationship. All that to say is if I want to publish something, I don't know who to contact. And I also don't like rejection. And then also, I'm not necessarily interested—because this has happened a couple of times, when people will reach out to me and then I’ll propose something and they have a different idea of what I should do, which is fine. But I just tend to want to write what I want to write. So I think that the medium of posting on Instagram or using my newsletter just seems to make more sense. And I have been recently fortunate where I'm not reliant on my writing to bring in an income. So it's fine to just release it on Instagram.I remember when I put it out, when I put out—when I started putting out my essays on Instagram, a friend told me, she was like, ‘This is very difficult to read.’ [Laughter.] I think it was this awkward, ‘I can't read your 75-post essay on food.’ And I was like, ‘All right, f**k it.’ And I kept doing it.But I think there's something about, interesting about playing with the medium, at least, on the ‘Gram, which making the posts be these essays that nobody wants to read. Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]Well, I mean, you've been written about a lot, interviewed a lot . People kind of set you up one way as sort of a provocateur in food. Do you feel that that gets your work right? It's funny to ask you this while interviewing you, but when you're—when people interview you and write about you, do you—How does that feel? Do you see yourself when someone actually is writing about you?Tunde: I mean, I guess it depends on what was written or, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I think sometimes I step into—and I think you get this too—people writing about you, too, right?Alicia: Not really. [Laughs.]Tunde: Then you do more of the writing?Alicia: I mean, I do want to understand this because it is—I have a book coming out and everything. And I know it's going to be a weird position to be in.Tunde: Oh, right. To be quizzed. Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]Tunde: Yeah.I guess it just depends on who was writing and what they’re writing about. I think this is not because of anything that I've done but just just who I am, that when I read something about me, I'm interested. So I separate myself from whoever—from the person who's reading it, me, from the person who is being portrayed in whatever the piece. And I'm just looking at it interestingly. So if it's interesting, I'm interested. If it's not interesting, then I'm not interested. But then all these labels too, they all find it—they all find use for me in context. If somebody is calling me provacautour, depending on the context, that's true. Other times, that's not true. Depending on how I feel, too, that's true. So yeah, it's just all those things. How would you describe me to yourself?Alicia: I think of you as a writer and an artist. And I don't think of you necessarily as a provocateur. I think of you as someone who bends the narrative in different ways than we are accustomed to seeing in food especially, which is a very, very boring cultural field. [Laughs.] It's a young cultural field, I suppose, in terms of cultural criticism. And so, I do think that anyone who says anything somewhat outside the norm of the narratives we get gets labeled an activist. A provocateur. Tunde: Yeah. I imagine that, depending on who is talking about your work, they are saying the same thing. So again, the context is everything. To a lot of folks, I am—people have told me this to my face—I'm not radical at all.Alicia: Yeah, no, I feel that way, too. Just by doing anything for money, I am ultimately a bad person and not radical enough. And that's fine with me. I've really made peace with that. I think in the last year or so, it's like, ‘I'm sorry, I have to live.’ [Laughs.]Tunde: Did you make more peace as you made more money? Is that how it happened? Alicia: Exactly. Yeah. [Laughter.] I was like, ‘You know what, there's no use for—I'm of better use to people this way. [Laughs.] I'm of better use to people when I'm not broke and worried and have to go work in a bar, or do whatever the f**k to to keep myself going. I'm a better writer when I don't have to worry about those things.’Tunde: Yeah.I think having resources, whether you want to call them money or whatever, that is pretty pertinent to survival. Alicia: Yeah. No, you can't do good work if you're not—if you're worried about survival, and so it is what it is.Tunde: Some people don't worry about money, and so their resources are different. But most of us need it.Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]Well, I wanted to ask you about last year’s ‘Let It Die’ essay was a big hit. Was it the first time we wrote an essay on Instagram? Or maybe it was just it really took off. People were obsessed with it. Tunde: Right. I don't know if it was the first time. I don't remember. Oh, sorry. Was that a question?Alicia: Yeah. Tell me about ‘Let It Die,’ yeah. [Laughs.]unde: Oh. Yeah, well, I do want to correct one thing, but transgression is just part of how I see the media landscape, which is I don't know how much it took off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. I'm pretty sure it didn't take off until Helen Rosner wrote about it. [Laughs.] So yeah, so that was it. It just happens to be the essay that Helen Rosner decided to write about. Not to say that the essay is not strong. But to say that for it to get to a certain critical mass of people, it needs a lever, and the New Yorker was the lever.Alicia: Right. And around that time, though, you did tell WBUR ‘What is important to us is not necessarily how it tastes. It's more about the theater around the thing.’ And I think this is what I was talking about when I was saying you've been bending narratives that we're not used to seeing. And that most people take things very literally, I think, ’cause I wrote something about the death of the chef and people were totally up in arms about, I want to put the guillotine on chefs or something. And it's like, ‘No, that's not the idea. The idea is like, ‘What does this idea mean to us? What does this narrative mean to us? How can we change that narrative so that we create different systems that are better for people?’ But food media at large, I think, is extremely literal in its thinking.And so, I wanted to ask you what do you expect as a result of your work? Do you have an expectation around anything concrete, or do you have an expectation more around changing ideas and changing narratives?Tunde: Yeah, so I think that I'm interested in really big things. To be very specific, I'm interested in changing the material conditions of people who are disenfranchised, specifically people in Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa. That is my interest. So, do I think writing is gonna do that? No. Do I even think that any of the work that I do affects the material conditions of folks in such a way as to change them permanently, or even temporarily? No. But then maybe people impacted by some of the work to think differently, to act differently on an individual scale, and depending on their sphere of influence, have that different action influence other people? I think, possibly. Yeah, that's what I think.Alicia: Yeah.No, and in your recent essay about returning to your home of Nigeria, you write, ‘All these convoluted numbers to say that Nigeria is fucked, and it is this ‘fuckedness’ that is termed underdevelopment.’ And I love this essay. It was such an immediate—it was just really good. The writing was really good. And so, there are so many types of food system futures that are discussed from the global north perspective. And I saw connections between this piece and your piece, ‘what is profit, and how is it made,’ where you wrote, ‘for capitalist food production to flourish it has to eliminate indigenous food production, and one important way this dismantling occurs is through displacement.’ And these are connected by the idea that Indigenous food production, the ‘underdeveloped country’ , requires change by colonialist entities by capitalist production, which we already know is unsustainable. And so much of what I get stuck on right now in my writing is that one of the only ways we've created concrete responses to these problems and to these structures developed by colonialism is that we have fair-trade food. And we have these other food projects working in the global south. You've worked with Burlap & Barrel. And it's kind of just a re-tinkering of the old systems where the capital is still concentrated somewhere else. It's just through these sort of really pined means that we are kind of trying to make more equity there. And so, you know, I guess I wanted to ask you what do you think of these kinds of food projects? What are the limits of working with them, and what are the possibilities of working with them?Tunde: Yeah, wow. Yeah, I think the problem is big, obvious. Ok, the problem that I'm talking about, which is a racist problem, talking about Nigeria, which is kind of getting to West Africa and the continent as a whole, because Nigeria is the biggest country on the continent in terms of population size, and GDP. Fair trade doesn't solve that problem. By fair trade, I mean this—engaging in global capitalist trade, we're trying to do it with sort of fair, more ‘fair terms.’ That doesn't solve our problem. Yeah, that problem is historic. It’s contemporary. So I don't know, I know that that is its own problem. I know that. What solves the problem? I don't quite know yet. I'm still thinking about it. And I also know that there’s a solution. So it's not the end of my thoughts, and after it’s going to emerge. I think that whatever people are terming radical, whoever is talking about that, that sort of radical progress happens in stages. We're not going to end capitalism tomorrow, or in 10 years. At least, the people who I f**k with who think about this kind of stuff think about it in in terms of transitions and long periods of time and a continuum. I don't think of our economic system or capitalism as this system that holds everything that is bad. I think that what is true to all the different economic systems possible is—as humans, we are the constant. What is inherent in us is to a certain extent to be selfish and to—not selfish, but to have differences in wants and needs and perspectives.Anyway, all that to say is we can move from a capitalist mode of production to, I don't know, socialist or communist, and we could still experience the same, or some of the same things that are happening with the degradation of the planet with exploitation and other things. So, fair trade is not the answer. That's what I’m saying. [Laughter.] Alicia: Yeah, no.I was writing a piece about sugar, and I just had this moment of being like, ‘Everything—there is no way to fix this at all.’ I mean, there are ways to fix it, but it's so historically rotten at its core that it is—the whole world would have to change for our relationship to sugar to not be something completely extractive and completely—Just to take one thing, one foodstuff and look at it. The whole system would have to change for this to not be an absolutely terrible product for us to use every single day. When we think about equitable trade, it's just such a limited idea. Tunde: Well, just to be just to be specific, when we talk—I'm assuming that when we're talking about fair trade, we're talking about the stickers they put on products. Not talking about global trade, which is a completely different thing, which—that will change everything if it was actually fair trade between countries.I'm reading this book, and the writer talks about—or at least so far has referenced this idea of comparative advantage, which, when I was in school, in primary school in Nigeria, so—or secondary school—I learned that comparative advantage is how you grow your economy. It’s you find out what you're really good at, and then you develop that and you sell it to other people and people buy them. Then you have this trade. But the way the global system is what happens to be what, say, Nigeria is good at is what Nigeria has been shaped to be good at to benefit the West. So Nigeria happens to be good at having mineral resources in the ground. Then it has a, an overdeveloped extractive sector to the detriment of everything else. So all of that to say is that real fair trade doesn't happen on a product by product basis.To your point about sugar, the whole ship needs to change.Alicia: Change. Yeah, exactly. No, and as you mentioned before, your project is about getting resources to those who have historically lacked access to resources. And whether that's you charge white people more for food, or you price an issue of Sandwich that you get started at $100, or the salt that was $100. And I think about these things constantly. There's a literal law where Americans from the U.S. get, can pay 4% in their taxes. But Puerto Ricans aren't able to get that same break. And then now, there's this problem with the bitcoin people buying up all the property. The tourists have made where I live, Old San Juan, so unlivable that basically anyone who owns property is looking to sell it to the highest bidder, which is going to basically just mean displacement by bitcoin bros ‘cause they have the capital In cash to buy it. And I think, of course, in terms of food about everything. So I'm like, ‘All right, how if we-’ I think we just talked about this, but if you—if we saw those real changes on a fundamental global level, what would the food world look like? What would change in the way we have a relationship to food? Tunde: Yeah.Full disclosure, I'm invested in Bitcoin. Not on that scale. Ok, so maybe I’ll say something controversial. I think that there's a difference between fault and responsibility. So we're all responsible, but—and responsibility has their degrees of responsibility. So I think as long as you're born and you participate in the system, you're responsible. But depending on your power and your sort of subjective position, that responsibility either grows or shrinks. But then there's sort of people at fault, but even that is a very complicated thing, too. So I feel it’s maybe a little disingenuous to complain about the effects of the economic system if you are actively participating in the economic system. And by that I mean that what—the sort of speculative nature of Bitcoin is the same, is not the exact same thing, but it's connected to, say, the continuous production of vehicles every year. Last year, Ford produced 1.5 million vehicles. Tesla produced 500, or manufactured 500,000 vehicles. That sort of investment in consumption goods, and the proliferation of credit and debt and all that s**t. That s**t is connected to Bitcoin. That s**t is connected to the housing market soaring. That s**t is connected to everything. So we can pick and choose. We can pick and choose if we want to, but the truth is that it's all connected. So, of course, that's what's gonna happen in certain communities, because that's what money does in this economic system. That is not to say that it's right, or it's going. I'm just saying that. And I feel if maybe a lot more people were talking about the, were actively trying in little ways and big ways to address the economic reality, in general, as opposed to specifically when it makes them uncomfortable, then things would be—I don't know about better, but things would maybe be different. I'm also just not very interested in the food system as a lens to experience transformation, just because it's connected to everything else. I don't necessarily think that it is the lever that could change things. I’m sure it’s one of the many levers, but I think that it's probably not the first lever, if that makes sense. Did that make sense or not? Alicia: That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. [Laughs.]Tunde: Just be more specific. I think that monetary policy, fiscal policy, reining in, say, the financial industry, financial services. That drives the economy. And addressing that probably has a greater impact than working on, working directly on food policy. But they're all connected.Alicia: Well, do you feel that you're getting away from food as a lens then to look at the world and politics?Tunde: No, I don't think so. Food is a lens to appreciate all the politics. I think that when you're talking about policy and changing things on a global scale—if you're talking about sugar, for example. Changing how sugar is produced is just a, maybe a really difficult way to change the system if the whole system needs to change. But focusing on, say, the global mechanics of fair trade is a better way to do that. But if you look at sugar production and consumption, then you see the global mechanics of trade, and these other aspects of the system that are kind of fucked up. But when it comes to actualizing change, I'm not sure that food is the place that we start from.Alicia: No, that makes complete sense. Yeah. [Laughs.] We don't maybe acknowledge that enough. When I say we, I say food writers, that we're not enough engaged with all the other aspects of the world and the reasons these problems ultimately exist. It’s all about—Yeah, these small things that maybe allow you to see the bigger picture, but don't give you the tools to necessarily engage on a deep intellectual level with those issues. If that makes sense. [Laughs.]Tunde: Yeah, that makes sense. Alicia: But well, actually, to get back to food, because you have—I know that you worked with the Beard Foundation. And then also on the Sandwich Magazine you worked with—I think, Sir Kensington's owns that, which is owned by Unilever. So you've worked with these big organizations that have a lot of kind of power. But you also have written that ‘And in all spaces, food and society, we see the faithful and continuous reproduction of this social control, which reinforces the idea that white domination is the natural order of things.’Tunde: I’ve said some s**t, huh?Alicia: I'm sorry, I read, re-read everything you've written, obviously, to talk to you. I know, it's weird to have your stuff read back to you. What do you see the role of interacting with these kinds of—the Beard Foundation with, a magazine owned by a company, what is the purpose of this engagement? Tunde: I do want to shout out my partner Ruth on the magazine. So, I guess it just depends. So, what did I work with the Beard Foundation on? I don’t remember.Alicia: Did you edit some pieces, I think, for the blog? I know Mayukh wrote a piece for you. Tunde: Yeah, I wrote a piece. Yes. I just wrote a piece about the work that I was doing. At the time, Mitchell was the VP. Yeah, he reached out and I wrote a piece. Yeah, it just depends. But if we're talking about money and capitalism. This is how I feel about money. Nobody owns money. That s**t is for everybody. Like they say, money belongs to the game. I don't care. I don't have a problem taking money. I think there's certain monies that I wouldn't take, not because I think the money is ‘bad.’ It’s just that it’d make me look crazy. Yeah. And I don't want to look crazy. Money’s so not real. And it has such real consequences. And nobody owns it in my mind. It belongs to everybody, or it should. So I'll take money. All that to say, organizations and just the way our economy or the global system is structured is that capital accumulates in certain places. It accumulates in the states and accumulates in corporations and organizations and individuals. It is unevenly distributed. So I don't care who you are. If you're looking for some sort of sustenance, you're not printing dollars or mining gold by yourself. You have to go to the deposits where they are. And huge corporations—they have the money. The state has the money. By the state, I mean, the nation state’s structure. Sir Kensington, specifically, and Unilever, the kind of work that we were trying to do at the time, Ruth and I, was to talk about certain global systems. It was fantastic that it was Unilever, because Unilever is an antagonist in our story. And we had conversations with them about that. Ruth and I were interested in the possibility of extracting just something so small from them, something tiny relative to how much they've taken from Africa, from Nigeria, in particular for me. So to me, that made sense to work with them on that. So, yeah, it depends on the opportunity. But I think when we're talking about money and resources, the folks who have that money are the ones who are distributing that money. And so if you want it, whether you get it directly or indirectly from them, you're getting it from the same source. So, that’s how I think about that.Alicia: No, it's a really useful way of thinking about things. [Laughs.] ’Cause I think if you're very online, and you're sort of on the left, all of this becomes a very, very personal responsibility issue rather than an issue of taking the money from who has it when you need it. And every move you make is sort of either an endorsement or a rejection of massive things, when actually it's really none of that. It's a useful way of thinking about things that I think isn't—it doesn't get enough attention, to talk about it in that way.Tunde: Yeah.There's obviously money that comes with caveats. And most money does, soif  the caveat sort of infringes on certain things for me, then I won’t take that money. But if it's relatively chill—for example, with the magazine, I think they told us that we couldn't specifically—we couldn't make the whole magazine about Unilever as an evil corporation. That would be a little too much, right? And then we're like, ‘Sure.’ It doesn't mean that we didn't critique what Unilever's stands for? Whatever. So there's that. But I think more about now, more about how—I just think about how I'm hoarding money, as opposed to where I'm getting money? So, if I get money, I think about like, ‘Okay, this money that I have now, what am I going to do with this money? How can I use money to further my mission?’ And then I think in that way, I think of my stewardship of resources as opposed to wondering about the optics, which is like, ‘How do I get it?’ Which is I do, but I'm less interested in the optics and more interested in how the money that I have can maybe do something different. But it's such a small number that—Alicia: [Laughs.] That's extremely useful. Thank you for that. —film projects. Tunde: I'm sorry, I lost the first part of that question. Alicia: Are you working more in film now?Tunde: Yeah. So my production partner and I, Ruth and I, we got a grant. And we're working on a docu—series on food, using food to explore the sort of larger questions. So yeah, that's sort of what we're doing. Alicia: That's exciting. Yeah. Tunde: And speaking of money, and—sorry, just one thing and the grant. We got money from a couple of foundations. So you have people who maybe take money from foundations, but then criticize how other people make their money off foundations. A lot of them are invested in the stock market. I don't care if you're invested in ESG or whatever. You're invested in a very speculative medium. And that sort of speculation, that sort of idle capital that is sitting in bank accounts, or what do you call them? In ledgers? That is money that is, or that is a system that is deeply exploitative. So, we don't get to pick and choose. I try not to, especially, even with money. And I just think about how the money that I have, again, to what I say, can be used differently. Alicia: Right. And for you, is cooking a political act? Tunde: Just at home, just chilling and cooking?Alicia: Cooking in general. I ask this question to everyone. It's usually just a kind of a Rorschach test of what they think of the word ‘cooking’ and the word ‘political.’ [Laughs.]Tunde: I don't know. I mean, if I'm just cooking by myself, no. If I'm doing a dinner series, or something, then possibly. I could be wrong, but I don't think of cooking—I think identity is political. So, sometimes just being is political. But all of this is contextual. Your identity in a particular place is political. But I don't think of cooking as an identity. I think of cooking as—yeah, it's an act. I don't think of necessarily actions as inherently political. Most things are contextual. I think it’s not everything. So, just depends on the context. Alicia: Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today. Tunde: Yeah, I have a question for you, actually.Alicia: Ok. [Laughs.]Do you want to ask me while we're recording, or–Tunde: Yeah, yeah, yeah.Alicia: Ok.Tunde: So something that is just fascinating about—to me—about your work is, and I could be wrong, because I get your newsletter, but I don't read it every week. But I read enough to know that you talk about the same things. By that I mean, your perspective is the same, which is anti-capitalist. I want to say anti-racist, but I'm not sure how you describe yourself.But you have this perspective. And you keep writing like every week, right? Every week you’re writing, every week. And just, how haven't you exhausted? No, really, I'm so serious, ’cause I feel I—when I wrote for the Chronicle, I wrote four essays. And I'm like, ‘The next four are going to be about the same thing. And the next eight after that.’ And so I'm just curious about how you keep the s**t fresh.Alicia: Right.No, I mean, I think a lot of people would say I don't keep it fresh, that I have a shtick, that I’m just always saying, ‘Capitalism is bad. Climate change is bad. We have to stop climate change. We have to eat less meat,’ like that. I just bang the same drums over and over again, which is valid. I think I have a beat, so to speak, as a writer. These are the things I cover, is how our cultural relationships to food are part of these larger systems—of economy, policy, white supremacy, all a part of larger systems that control our everyday ways of being and thinking. And that is my beat. That is what I write about. But I do think, obviously, within that there is so much to write about. There is so much to think about. I don't know. I think during the more peak of the pandemic, I really exhausted everything that I had to say for years, but no one ever let me say as a food writer. And then I think now, I'm interacting more with the world again and finding more ways into the things I have always written about and thought about, but they're more rooted in my interactions with other people. I don't know. I've always been a compulsive writer. So it's not hard for me. This is the natural way in which I communicate. It's easier for me to write something down then it is to say it. Yeah, just to communicate in writing. That's my way of communicating. Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you, but I find it is—I'm going to feel tired after I do this, because I—it's a less natural way for me to communicate, you know?Tunde: Yeah, no, I dig it. I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, if that's easier for you, then it makes sense that you do that. Because most people say the same thing, anyway, over and over again with their mouth. But you’re just writing it. Another thing that I want to tell you is I met a man through you. Mr. Byrne.Alicia: Mark Byrne. Tunde: Yeah, from Good Vodka. I was in Lagos. So this is a super short story. We're filming for the docu series in Lagos in Kogi State, which is central Nigeria. And we had this really delicious local drink. I was blown away by it. And I just kept thinking, ‘F**k, this is so delicious. I need to f*****g bottle this and sell it or something.’And then I was in Lagos a couple of—a month after.I had read the interview that you did with him. And then I'm like, ‘I need to call this man or email this man and see if he'll work with me.’ So I emailed him, and he agreed to work with me. So I don't know, sometime in some soon future we will be releasing a Nigerian palm spirit. Alicia: Oh, that's amazing!Tunde: Yeah. It's not a commercially viable product. I guess it's a project about exploitation again. Alicia: Yeah. [Laughs.]Well, Good Vodka is basically that as well. I mean, it's a product and it's a commercial product. But it's also more about how spirits exist and are made. The history of spirits is, it's usually made from waste rather than growing things to make spirits, which is a bad way of doing it. [Laughs.]But that's amazing. I love that. I love talking about—and maybe when it comes out, we'll talk again, but I love talking about spirits. [Laughs.] I love talking about alcohol. Because I do think people have a really weird and complicated relationship to it, obviously. But it's nice to talk about it on a level of appreciation rather than the very, very American perspective on alcohol, which is wildly problematic. [Laughs.]Tunde: I don't know much about spirits. I just know to the point, earlier point about seeing all the systems and everything, I just know that just a really small thing, the Indigenous production of alcohol at scale. That s**t is happening. Folks in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria servicing half the country with this s**t. And you're doing it from these small, small camps, all these different small camps by the water. And so just thinking about thinking about what that means, and thinking about how the disparities that exist between, say, African production and European production is what inspires me to do this kind of thing as opposed to like the actual food product or beverage product. So yeah, I’m excited about it. Alicia: That's awesome. Yeah. [Laughs.]Well, thank you again, I'm so excited about that, and everything else. Tunde: Absolutely. Thank you.Alicia: Thank you. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.aliciakennedy.news/subscribe

The Kogi State government has threatened to take legal action against the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Commissioner of Information and Communication in the state, Kingsley Fanwo, gave a warning on Thursday while briefing reporters at the Kogi Liaison Office in Abuja.He accused the EFCC of a deliberate attempt to malign the integrity of the state governor, Yahaya Bello, over an alleged N20 billion salary bailout funds said to be in fixed deposit at a commercial bank. The commissioner described as false and malicious the claims by the anti-graft agency that the governor did not disburse the said bailout funds released by the Federal Government in 2019 for payment of salary arrears owed civil servants in the state.Rather, he informed reporters at the briefing that the state government disbursed the said funds since October 2019. Fanwo's briefing comes two days after the Lagos Division of the Federal High Court issued an order freezing the Kogi State Salary Bailout Account domiciled in Sterling Bank over a N20 billion loan obtained from the bank.The presiding judge, Justice Tijjani Ringim, held that the order would subsist pending the conclusion of an investigation or possible prosecution by the EFCC.

 In- Person Interview Questions I walked into an ice cream shoppe in Cincinnati to enjoy two scoops of Cotton Candy ice cream in a waffle cone with sprinkles on top.  Yes, I am a grown man, and yes cotton candy with sprinkles is my preference. Waiting in line I noticed the manager of the shop come around from behind the counter and sit with a lady who had just walked in wearing workout gear.  My first assumption is that it was a friend or family member coming into say hello.  As the two sat down the manager pulled out a piece of paper and began awkwardly asking questions… “What experience do you have working with customers?” “What jobs have you had before?” “What do you think you would like about working here?” I did not time their conversation, however, there is no way it lasted longer than 2 minutes.  It was noticeably brief and the conversation was vanilla (sorry, the dad joke just came out!). The interaction will be remembered as a waste of time for all involved. In-person interviews tend to either be too robotic and templated, or too meandering and wasteful. There is a better way.   The business owners that tend to experience less chaos are the owners who have a mapped out, purposeful, sustained hiring process that walks potential candidates through the various attributes of the business. The exposure creates either desire or lack of desire.  Imagine being guided personally throughout the various worlds of the Magic Kingdom at Disney.  You don't ride the rides, but you take in the sights and the movement.   At the end of your tour, you either love Disney... or not. Most in-person interviews are akin to showing someone a billboard about Disney and then asking them if they are ready to commit their lives to the cause based on a crafted, pass-by advertisement. In order to earn the right to have a great live, in-person interview, you must first have gone through the hard work of the first sections of your hiring process: Understanding the gap in your business and writing a role to fill that gap Budgeting for a new role Writing out your vision, mission, and values Drafting your organizational layout or chart Initiating a phone call with the candidate before bringing them in If you skip those steps, you are setting yourself, and your candidate up for a billboard-style job interview. Once it is time to bring the person in face to face (or via video conference if remote), you will resist the urge to talk about the actual job role. YES!  You will resist discussing the job role. Instead, you will focus on sharing the things that matter most: a) where you are headed as a business (your vision), b) WHY you do what you do (your mission), and c) how your business makes decisions every day (your unique core values). You sit down with your candidate and hand them a written copy of your vision, mission, and values, and you will start to walk through each one pausing periodically to see what questions or thoughts they may have. In the first in-person interview you will discuss ONLY the culture of your business. Why? It is of no value to discuss the role or compensation if you come to find out that this candidate has no desire to head in the direction that you are going. Why would we share the details of their involvement in our trip to Kogi State, Nigeria, if we come to determine that our candidate would actually prefer to travel to Sarasota, Florida? At Business On Purpose we do things a certain way with certain elements and it can feel invasive even though our entire team is remote.  We are in each other's business and are obsessed with predictability and consistency through the tools we have built and expect each other to use. Many businesses have the mindset of “get the work done however you get it done.”  We do not.  For some that does not sit well... For others, they thrive with it.   A client of ours, a mid-level Architecture firm in the Southern United States came with this idea of only discussing culture in the first sit-down interview.  Once complete, the candidate looked across the table shocked, and simply said, “wow, that helps so much”. As the employer, YOU lead the way.  YOU set the tone.  This is the culture that YOU and your team are building and it must be both protected and shared with thoughtfulness and preparation. During the phone conversation, it will be best to let the candidate know the entire flow of your hiring process by simply saying,  “This is a six-step (or whatever) hiring process that will likely take 3 to 6 weeks (name your duration) to complete.  After a casual phone interview where we start to learn your background, we will then invite you to an in-person live interview where we will focus our time on the vision, mission, values, and culture of our business.  To be clear, we will not be discussing the specific job role or compensation details until the 2nd in-person interview (or whatever step that is for you)...” The more structured you are in the hiring process the more confidence you will breed into your candidate as to what they are signing up for (or not).   You will constantly fight the urge to want to “move fast” to hire someone because you need their help.   Relationships rarely benefit from HASTY starts. Your first in-person interview is about sharing culture, and then evaluating if that person matches the right ingredient profile of the culture you are growing.

 In- Person Interview Questions I walked into an ice cream shoppe in Cincinnati to enjoy two scoops of Cotton Candy ice cream in a waffle cone with sprinkles on top.  Yes, I am a grown man, and yes cotton candy with sprinkles is my preference. Waiting in line I noticed the manager of the shop come around from behind the counter and sit with a lady who had just walked in wearing workout gear.  My first assumption is that it was a friend or family member coming into say hello.  As the two sat down the manager pulled out a piece of paper and began awkwardly asking questions… “What experience do you have working with customers?” “What jobs have you had before?” “What do you think you would like about working here?” I did not time their conversation, however, there is no way it lasted longer than 2 minutes.  It was noticeably brief and the conversation was vanilla (sorry, the dad joke just came out!). The interaction will be remembered as a waste of time for all involved. In-person interviews tend to either be too robotic and templated, or too meandering and wasteful. There is a better way.   The business owners that tend to experience less chaos are the owners who have a mapped out, purposeful, sustained hiring process that walks potential candidates through the various attributes of the business. The exposure creates either desire or lack of desire.  Imagine being guided personally throughout the various worlds of the Magic Kingdom at Disney.  You don't ride the rides, but you take in the sights and the movement.   At the end of your tour, you either love Disney... or not. Most in-person interviews are akin to showing someone a billboard about Disney and then asking them if they are ready to commit their lives to the cause based on a crafted, pass-by advertisement. In order to earn the right to have a great live, in-person interview, you must first have gone through the hard work of the first sections of your hiring process: Understanding the gap in your business and writing a role to fill that gap Budgeting for a new role Writing out your vision, mission, and values Drafting your organizational layout or chart Initiating a phone call with the candidate before bringing them in If you skip those steps, you are setting yourself, and your candidate up for a billboard-style job interview. Once it is time to bring the person in face to face (or via video conference if remote), you will resist the urge to talk about the actual job role. YES!  You will resist discussing the job role. Instead, you will focus on sharing the things that matter most: a) where you are headed as a business (your vision), b) WHY you do what you do (your mission), and c) how your business makes decisions every day (your unique core values). You sit down with your candidate and hand them a written copy of your vision, mission, and values, and you will start to walk through each one pausing periodically to see what questions or thoughts they may have. In the first in-person interview you will discuss ONLY the culture of your business. Why? It is of no value to discuss the role or compensation if you come to find out that this candidate has no desire to head in the direction that you are going. Why would we share the details of their involvement in our trip to Kogi State, Nigeria, if we come to determine that our candidate would actually prefer to travel to Sarasota, Florida? At Business On Purpose we do things a certain way with certain elements and it can feel invasive even though our entire team is remote.  We are in each other's business and are obsessed with predictability and consistency through the tools we have built and expect each other to use. Many businesses have the mindset of “get the work done however you get it done.”  We do not.  For some that does not sit well... For others, they thrive with it.   A client of ours, a mid-level Architecture firm in the Southern United States came with this idea of only discussing culture in the first sit-down interview.  Once complete, the candidate looked across the table shocked, and simply said, “wow, that helps so much”. As the employer, YOU lead the way.  YOU set the tone.  This is the culture that YOU and your team are building and it must be both protected and shared with thoughtfulness and preparation. During the phone conversation, it will be best to let the candidate know the entire flow of your hiring process by simply saying,  “This is a six-step (or whatever) hiring process that will likely take 3 to 6 weeks (name your duration) to complete.  After a casual phone interview where we start to learn your background, we will then invite you to an in-person live interview where we will focus our time on the vision, mission, values, and culture of our business.  To be clear, we will not be discussing the specific job role or compensation details until the 2nd in-person interview (or whatever step that is for you)...” The more structured you are in the hiring process the more confidence you will breed into your candidate as to what they are signing up for (or not).   You will constantly fight the urge to want to “move fast” to hire someone because you need their help.   Relationships rarely benefit from HASTY starts. Your first in-person interview is about sharing culture, and then evaluating if that person matches the right ingredient profile of the culture you are growing.

The Governor of Kogi State has gain media attention again for his recent act. Could this political move or a legit move? --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/latest247/message

The Nigerian exceptional and young female disc jockey, DJ Nana was born as Nanayat Abedoh on 14 May 1990 in Kogi State, Nigeria. She broke into the limelight when she won the first-ever Airtel/Barcaddi Cool FM DJ Competition.Dj Nana joins @mikkyjaga to discuss how she thrives as a disc jockey in Africa.

The Nigerian exceptional and young female disc jockey, DJ Nana was born as Nanayat Abedoh on 14 May 1990 in Kogi State, Nigeria. She broke into the limelight when she won the first-ever Airtel/Barcaddi Cool FM DJ Competition.Dj Nana joins @mikkyjaga to discuss how she thrives as a disc jockey in Africa.

The Nigerian exceptional and young female disc jockey, DJ Nana was born as Nanayat Abedoh on 14 May 1990 in Kogi State, Nigeria. She broke into the limelight when she won the first-ever Airtel/Barcaddi Cool FM DJ Competition.Dj Nana joins @mikkyjaga to discuss how she thrives as a disc jockey in Africa.

The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammed Sa’ad Abubakar III charged Nigerians to embrace inter-religious harmony to ensure peace in the country.He has also directed Muslims to look out for the crescent of Ramadan from today.Abubakar prayed that the excellent relationship between Muslims and Christians in the state would continue to be strengthened to ensure peace not only in Kogi but the entire country.He thanked the people of Kogi State for the inter-religious harmony in the state and urged other Nigerians to emulate it.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://osazuwaakonedo.com/2021/04/07/more-197/ --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/osazuwaakonedo/message

The National Primary Health Care Development Agency says a total of 638,291 eligible people have taken their first dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in Nigeria.The NPHCDA says more people have continued to receive the vaccine jabs across all states of the country and the Federal Capital Territory except in Kogi State where authorities have yet to commence vaccination.The latest figure indicates that 124,665 more eligible people took the vaccine jabs in the last two days, following the 513,626 total figure that was reported on Sunday.It also shows an increase of 6.2 per cent of the proportion vaccinated, compared with the 25.5 per cent earlier reported.A further breakdown of the figure reveals that Lagos has the highest number of eligible people who have taken the vaccine jabs with a total of 122,714.

Chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum, Governor Kayode Fayemi, has urged the governor of Kogi State, Yahaya Bello to tread with care, following his recent statement suggesting that the COVID-19 vaccines are being introduced to kill the masses.

How To Find A Professional Mentor On my first trip to Nigeria back in 2006 I met a man who was unpretentious, slow, deliberate, and available.   Abraham Dada, known simply as Pa Dada, would eventually become for me a standard-bearer of life and leadership. He was a sage.  He was a man who lived out the challenging invitation to have “eyes to see, and ears to hear”. Imagine if Yoda were a Nigerian man.  That's Pa Dada. His words were few, each one cutting consciously like a razor-sharp blade, causing little pain while exposing the inside. Mr. Dada was never the loudest person in the room, but his presence alive, known, and decisions always traveled through his unspoken filter.  His life was spent serving... at times with words and actions, at other times with simple presence. Each time I visited Mr. Dada at his unpretentious home in Egbe, Kogi State, he would be sitting thoughtfully in a blue plastic yard chair on the aft side of a small plastic table.  Rarely was he wearing something other than a simple linen set of shirt and trousers.  He would usually have his crooked reading glasses on while reading or writing. Within five minutes of arrival, we would always be welcomed with a warm bitter lemon and a soft “e'kaabo” and “e'dupe”. If I was visiting without Ashley and the kids, Mr. Dada would kindly ask, “How is Mommy?”, and of the kids, “How are my little friends?” One of my favorite images that Ashley captured was Mr. Dada thumbing through my book.  The teacher humbly offering a generous moment for the student.   In 2014 and 2015 Mr. Dada and I spoke often by phone when I was not in town due to some strain that was taking place within an initiative for which both he and I were committed to.  I remained in a state of foggy confusion and did not hesitate to verbalize bewilderment, and I believe Mr. Dada did as well, although he never spoke a crossword or thought to any person or scenario.   It was a real-life, in the moment lesson in “considering others better than yourself.” It was a moment of transparent grace. On Wednesday night October 28th my phone rang with Mr. Dada's number.  Answering, his daughter called and said simply, “Pa Dada passed in the midnight and he wanted me to let you know.”   “He wanted to let me know.” Of all the conversations I remember, these may very well be the words that stick. “He wanted to let me know.” Two significant mentors have passed on from this life in the past decade.  The first is the man who invited me to look through the telescope of the nations and see God's creation beyond my own borders.  Dr. Mike Barnett summoned me to embrace the nations.   Mr. Dada invited me to enjoy the wisdom and grace God has placed among the nations and to do it slowly and methodically. With Mr. Dada, I did not sign up for a global mentor program, and I did not ask that he formally “mentor” me.  I just went with a blurry, poorly planned vision to “work in Nigeria” and over time a friendship developed that provided me with a 5 foot 2-inch man in his nineties who just “wanted to let me know” with limited words and maximum presence.   What is that place, or those people, or that thing that you have an unreasonable, blurry desire for?  What if you just set up lunch or booked a ticket and just went regularly so you too can look up fourteen years later and realize that you too found a true gift whose ambition was to “let me know”? How do you find a professional mentor?   Many times is by not signing up for the professional mentoring program and instead of being bold, proactive, courageous, and a bit unreasonable to make friends with some unlikely people who are older and more experienced than you. Who do you need to go see today?  I wish I could go see my friend and just sit for a while. Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters.  Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.  

Let's talk about the tanker explosion in Kogi State, then let's talk about the CBN cutting interests rate after MPC and, let's talk about the NLC embarking on industrial action from 28th of September. The #Big3 with @aghoghooboh

I spoke to Ayisha Osori about our political structures and the various ways it is unaccountable to the electorates. She is the current Executive Director of the non-profit Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). She also contested for a seat on the House of Representatives for Abuja in 2015 and has documented her experience in an eloquently written book. I enjoyed this conversation, and it was a pleasure to learn from Ayisha’s experience and knowledge.You can listen and download on any of your preferred platform here or the player above. You can also rate us here. This helps other people find the show.TranscriptTL: Welcome to Ideas Untrapped and today I am speaking with Ayisha Osori. Ayisha is a lawyer and she is the former CEO of [the] Nigerian Women's Trust Fund. She has consulted for various international development organisations, and she is currently the Executive Director of Open Society Initiative for West Africa. You're welcome, Ayisha.AO: Thank you, Tobi. It's a pleasure to be here.TL: I read your book... very very fascinating. And one thing that jumped at me straight away is the tension or the balance between political agents and systemic governance in Nigeria. In your experience, and of course from your analytical perspective in observation, where do you think the true power lies in our system? Is it with individual actors or with the structure that they've built around them via the party or their various networks?AO: That's a very fascinating question. And it will be hard to say that it's one or the other. It's both. It's the individuals and it is the structures and I can explain. When I say structures I would be referring to something including the culture of what politics means and what political parties are designed to do or have been doing in Nigeria, some might say, from the 60s. So that DNA, the hard wiring of what a political party should be, the understanding of how it should be structured, how it should work, how it should be manipulated, all those things are part of the structures. The structures are beyond the internal mechanisms of the party, whether it's the National Working Committee or the National Executive Council, it's beyond those structures. So, when I refer to structures, I will be referring to, as I said, the DNA, the history, the hard wiring in our consciousness (both the public and the politicians) of our political parties should behave, what's expected of political parties...all those things help determine how power is obtained and our power is used in Nigeria. And then the individuals come in in that they are the ones who know how to manipulate and manage (depending on how you want to look at it manipulate is one way, manage is another) these structures for their benefit largely, the benefit of their close associates and a handful of hangers-on. And then maybe, you would argue, their communities where there's a trickle-down effect. I'll explain why the individuals are important. We don't have to go too far, we can just start with 1999. In a way you would actually even argue that our parties have deteriorated in terms of structure - AOIf you look at some of the most powerful individuals in any of the parties whether it was PDP, whether it was ANPP, whether it was AC or AD, you'll find a pattern in the names and faces and where they go, who they align with and how the party sort of evolves. So AD moved to ACN, ACN did a merger with CPC to become the ruling party now, APC. So you find the individuals who are powerful within these structures. They're the ones who understand this hardwiring of how political parties should be. They're the ones who have been in the system for a long time and understand it. That's why I'd say it's both of them. And when these individuals decide to leave parties, they typically go home with almost everyone and the party doesn't survive after they leave which shows how powerful they are. It's also a reason why you see the same actors in the different parties because the individuals who know how to, let's just say, be politicians have the same ethos. Regardless of what the name of the party is, they have the same outlook toward how political parties should be run, how power should be gained and how power should be used.TL: One thing you talked about quite early in the book is the role of ideology in politics and how it is missing (it's almost non-existent). One good example is a case of Kogi State where you have two senators, running against each other, four years apart, in different parties. There's the case of Edo where the upcoming elections would actually have, basically, the same people on the ticket of the two main parties, but now they've more or less switched sides. Cross-carpeting is the colloquial word we use for it, would ideology really help bring some stability and, hopefully, sanity to our politics? Because it feels like our politicians do not stand for anything.AO: They would argue with you that they do stand for something and I'm sure many of the politicians that are in APC today will tell you that they consider themselves progressives (maybe left-of-center). I don't think PDP as described itself as center or right-of-center. Right being more conservative, Left being more progressive, but I've heard APC politicians describe themselves as more progressives anyway. Some of them would argue with you that they do have ideologies, but of course we know that it doesn't seem that way because of how easy it is for them to move between parties which I mentioned earlier. So if, as you point out, once upon a time, Ize-Iyamu didn't have the characteristics and values of what an APC person should be, you would have to ask what has changed in four years that suddenly he's able to be the ideal candidate for the APC despite everything they had said about him four years ago. You would like to think that as they present Ize-Iyamu now as a brand for APC that there will be some sense of how he has been rehabilitated from his prior point of views, his prior values that make him now aligned to APC. But there's no pretence in doing that because they know that, in a way, nobody cares, so to speak. And it could be that, is it that nobody cares (that us the public)? Or are we apathetic? Do we no longer care, did we care once upon a time? Did we never care? For me, those are the more interesting questions, because this idea that you have parties where you don't know who your members are, that's been something that's been going on for years and years. It wasn't this bad in the run-up to the 60s when we had the old parties that were led Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamdi Azikiwe NCNC or [the] inheritors of those parties, the National People's Congress (NPC) that started as the Northern People's Congress...so, in a way, you would actually even argue that our parties have deteriorated in terms of structure, but those parties had some modicum of membership, they had some modicum of order. But as time went on where the lines between public and private or the lines between, let's say, governance and the treasury (public officials and the treasury) became more blurred, the more being in government became a route to access to fantastic riches... the more important it was to be in politics, the more important it became to capture power because that was your route to fantastic riches.So, the point I'm trying to make in a roundabout way is that the parties right now have no incentive to change their DNA or to change the way they've always done things. The formula has worked for them so far they would say. They win power, they might be out of it for one or two election cycles. PDP had said they would rule for 60 years, thankfully, they were out in 16. Now, APC probably has the same feeling that they will rule for 60 years but it's quite likely that they will not. The faces don't change, and even when the faces change, the behaviour and the values don't change. The culture of what politics is doesn't change. So would it not be up to Nigerians to say why do we keep voting for these parties that have no ideology? My point is, the parties will not change until we, the people, say they should change, and how many Nigerians care whether the parties have ideologies or not? So the truth is there's a disconnect - one, the people in the parties have been winning elections this way, nobody has challenged them, they're doing fine, they have no reason to change the formula. And two, Nigerians are not demanding that they should have ideologies or that they should speak on those ideologies.I remember when in the run-up to the 2015 elections and even 2019 elections, there was this conversation about a debate (presidential debate) and Buhari, of course, wouldn't want to debate. He didn't want to debate in 2019, in fact, he had zero incentive to because he was the incumbent. He had nothing to prove, so to speak. But Nigerians still voted for him knowing that. Lately, people are saying things like: this is a man who has never written a book. This is a man that doesn't have even a pamphlet to show what his ideas are, what his thoughts are, what he even thinks about anything. Literally, people have just spent decades projecting their own feelings onto this man. He's never said anything. He's never put anything on paper, which is why it was also easy for him to deny some of the election campaign promises that supposedly he now says his party has made on his behalf [which] he didn't make himself in 2015. But Nigerians still voted for him in 2019. So, if I was a Buhari, why would I care about having an ideology if I can win elections without having any? if I can get millions of votes without having any?TL: Let's unpack the history here a bit. Do you think that the stunting of our political evolution, particularly, by the number of coups we've had and military intervention played a role in this particular problem? Because we know that order than the rule by force and fear which is the method of the military, they also spent quite a lot of time and money buying allegiances from civilian elites which gave them some form of legitimacy, and which I think is now being replicated in civilian rule. What do you think of that?AO: I would think it's valid, in a way - half and half. There definitely was a truncation of our political evolution and political growth and development. And not even only a truncation, a poisoning - there was a poisoning of our sense of what it means to be a citizen, a poisoning of our sense of responsibility and accountability. Some people would argue that we are all even suffering from PTSD because there was a lot of violence as well and it's hard for ideology to thrive where there is high poverty and where there is violence as well. So I would agree that, yes, to a certain extent the coups, the military rule definitely, in my mind, as impacted on our political development.But we cannot blame them entirely because you know that we did have intellectuals. We had the radical ABU academics, we had [them] thriving even in Ibadan, Ife... there was a culture of resistance even during the military rule. But oddly enough, somehow this radicalism, this pushback on authority, it doesn't seem to have survived going back to a democracy in 1999. And some would argue that we are not even in a democracy right now, we're just practising civil rule but we're not quite democratic in the sense of our structures and the accountability between government and citizens. So I'll say, again, like, a lot of my answers will be that 'it's half and half.' I don't like us to shirk responsibility completely. Has there not been enough time between 1999 and today, that's 20 years, we celebrated 20 years of democracy last year of uninterrupted democracy which is the longest we've ever had Democracy in Nigeria uninterrupted. We celebrated 20 years. Is 20 years is not long enough to have developed this culture - if there was a deliberate sense not only from the politicians but also from the academics and the think tanks and civil society that it was important to develop our political culture and political theory? What you find though is that everybody seems extremely comfortable with the way our parties have evolved since 1999, built on some of the interference of the Babangida transition program which took a long time. So that's what I talk about in the poisoning of the well. The years of military rule had helped us to compromise our academics, compromise our sense of values almost entirely and that's still lingering. The damage that was done to our unions, the damage that was done to student associations which could have also helped develop this thriving political culture, all those things were decimated during the military era and nobody has deliberately rebuilt it. You go to our universities today, you find that many student unions are not actually even democratic either. You find that in many cases the vice-chancellor or the ruling council of the university, if there's going to be [an] election, they want to want to be able to determine who wins those elections. That culture of manipulating who gets into a position has poisoned everything - the Nigerian Bar Association, I'm sure it's the same with the Nigerian Medical Association, I'm sure it's the same with either on the women's side. So, it's poisoned everything but as I said, where is the deliberate effort? You know, we're having a conversation where would you say over the last twenty years you have seen deliberate effort from politicians, one; two, academics; three, civil societies; four, even just concerned citizens to build an alternative model for what a political party should be?TL: Why do you think that is? I'm curious. Is it ignorance, is it education, is it apathy? Why? Why has there not been that, at least on a scale that is enough to push the boundaries a little bit from the status quo, why has there been stasis in that regard?AO: Ah... that one, eh. To be honest, I would say that [it's] beyond my pay grade or my understanding grade, to be honest. Because I am as baffled as anyone else about why this hasn't happened and the truth [is] I'm not a student of politics or political science, it's just interest that has made me do a bit of reading over the last couple of years. But, as you pointed out, I studied Law in school, maybe did political science for one or two electives before I entered year two in UNILAG. So I don't know but I would say, picking up from just observing, that it is a mix of apathy, which is odd. We didn't think that being under military rule was inevitable, but somehow we think that how things are done now are inevitable. As time went on where the lines between public and private or the lines between, let's say, governance and the treasury (of public officials and the treasury) became more blurred, the more being in government became a route to access to fantastic riches - AOI don't know what has happened to our sense of struggle and maybe that's it. Maybe there was no collective 'our.' I'm saying 'our' but the truth is it was a handful of people who pushed out the military. It was a handful of people who won independence from the British, and of course, that winning of independence from the British was not unrelated to what was happening across the rest of the world. The world war had ended about 15 years before, the idea of colonialism was sort of dying, so the time was right. Some people would argue that in the way that South Africans struggled to end apartheid, we as a nation, Nigeria... we've actually never struggled collectively for anything. Maybe the biggest struggle we've had was to get rid of the military but as I said even then, you'll be hard-pressed to feel that it was a collective effort as opposed to civil liberties organisations and a handful of people, the Beko Ransome-kutis and co. and co., when you hear those stories. And maybe the stories are not complete. So, framing an answer, why is it this way? It's a mix of ignorance, it's a mix of not being taught our history, the danger of the single-story that Chimamanda has warned us about. But we've only seen one side of our history, we're not sort of prepped to be citizens who are active, and I think this speaks to some element of decolonizing our education. Because when you're learning in school, whether it's primary school, secondary school, university... I did social studies, I did history for SSCE and I took some courses in university, you find that your history just raises you to be accepting of what there is as opposed to questioning. And I think a lot of the colonial countries, whether it's francophone West Africa or anglophone West Africa suffer from this educational system that was designed to just breed civil servants who would just do what they're told and protect the status quo. So, that's one. Two, I think we like quick fixes. And I am understanding of this. I have empathy for this feeling of wanting a quick fix, but,0 we need to invest long-term. Part of the reasons why we're not thinking about the investments that need to be made in changing political culture is because we want a quick fix. Over the last couple of, maybe, like the year-and-a-half, the last year-and-a-half, I would say, there's been this romanticization of the NURTW. I've seen people on Twitter say 'oh, we should go and copy their model,' and I laughed, I smiled. And I'm like, 'what is their model designed to do?' I'm not saying it's an unworthy exercise to study them, you study every model if you want to dismantle it. In fact, you should know even more than the people who follow the model what the model is based on if you want to replace it with something better. But the idea that "well-meaning people"... because these days when people say they are 'well-meaning,' when people say they want to change things, we've learnt from the APC that we should be suspicious and ask questions 'what does change mean?' Because it might mean that you just want to capture power. You don't necessarily want anything to change. So back to NURTW, you want to use NURTW's model to do what? Because their model is designed to be exploitative, is that a model that you want to copy and use? For what? I mean, you have to think about these processes and ideologies and structures almost like a factory, a sausage making factory. Anything you put in will come out looking like a sausage. But we don't want to take the long-term view, we are always looking for the quick fixes.TL: I mean, it's baffling. Maybe I should take a peek at your Twitter feed that anybody would even suggest NURTW as a viable model for political organisation.AO: Whoa! Are you saying you've not seen that?TL: No, I haven't, actually.AO: Ah. No o. In fact, if not that I'm bad with names, so I don't want to, sort of, pick names, but I'm quite sure people like maybe, Alabi, the guy who, I think, is like a business entrepreneur who's gone to the House of Reps in 2019, is that his name? Alabi?TL: Oh, Akin Alabi.AO: Alabi. As I said please, maybe not him, but I just feel somebody with that type of name or maybe it might be...umm, I'm trying to open my Twitter feed now as we're talking, so this is an interactive conversation.TL: Yeah.AO: So, I've seen that from more than one person (say 'oh, you know'... ) maybe even Rinsola Abiola. I think she might be a fan of that school of thought and to be honest it's framed in a way to say 'oh, you elite people, you're sneering at the NURTW because they don't speak English,' it's not that. At least it's not that for me. It is, what is the structure designed to do?TL: Exactly. If I may ask, sorry I'm interrupting. Do they have specifics, I mean, what about that model are we supposed to learn from?AO: It's funny you said that because I remember that some other people pushed back now sharing stories of the kind of havoc that NURTW members have wrecked on their communities, or in [the] markets, and things like that. So, people were like, 'look, stop romanticizing these people.' But you're right, you know. There's this whole thing of 'oh, but they have spread, they're all over the place.' Yeah, they didn't wake up in the morning and suddenly had spread. So you now want to adopt a model but you don't want to interrogate what the model was designed for? In fact, I talked about decolonizing education, we should actually even decolonise our government.Because the truth is our government was inherited from the British who were here to strictly exploit us for their benefit. It's not far-fetched to say that that's what our politicians are still doing today. And they're not alone. We keep pointing fingers at the politicians but the civil servants are also exploiting us on the structures that the British had left for us which we inherited and we haven't really changed since then. You see all sorts of things in our civil service like leave allowance - this was for the British who had to go home for the summer. We still have those things in our system. So when we even talk about decolonizing education, we even need to decolonise our governance and what governance is supposed to do.So it comes back to the thinking that needs to be done but to be honest there's this sense of 'no, no, no, no, we'll enter government and then we'll change it from there.' And my theory, from the little that I experienced, again, I admit that I only experienced a little because all I did was primaries. But even the primaries showed me that what it takes to win an election in Nigeria, I doubt if when you finish you'll still... even if when you were entering you had lofty ideas of what you wanted to do, what you wanted to achieve, I can bet that by the time you win, at least fifty percent of those ideals would have been sheltered. You will no longer be the person you were when you started that process for you to succeed. And in the first place, for you to succeed, there are some traits that the party owners would have seen in you that will make you a good candidate. So I guess that's part of the dilemma that we’re in [which] is that we romanticize things, we're not thorough, we're not detailed... it could be a whole national malaise. We don't have high standards, we don't want to be held to high standards so that we don't have to hold anybody else to high standards. So, yeah, largely, we're just a collective of people who just want quick wins, easy way, we don't seem to see that the suffering that we are going through doesn't have to be that way, that there could be a better way of living. Now, everybody's gaze is on Canada. It's like a joke now but within the jokes and the banter, it's just the sense that nobody wants to build Nigeria, you now want to move to Canada where they have struggled to build their own country and they're still struggling. I've had the privilege of being in Germany for the last year and I've been saying to people 'I'm like Germany, they have light, they have water.' In the one year that I've been here I have not had cause, even once, to even wonder that if I touch the switch, it's just... it's not even in me. Whereas in Nigeria, every single day, it's as dominating as breathing or as air for you to wonder whether there is light. TL: Yeah.AO: So but here where they have light and they have water, they are on the streets every day. I'm not saying the whole city is on the streets but pockets of people who care about one thing or the other are marching and complaining and lobbying... because Berlin is the capital for Germany, sometimes farmers would come from across the country in their trucks, you know how big tractors are?TL: Yeah. AO: You'll find tractors all over the city, blocking roads, constituting a nuisance, they are protesting something to do with agricultural policy. So these are people whose lives you would say are fairly okay, but they're not resting on their laurels. They are not saying 'ah, everything is good,' they're still fighting, demanding, pushing, lobbying. Whereas we that have so much that's wrong, we're not even doing anything. So, it comes back to the ideology question - the people in power, they're looking at us and they're like, it's hard to tell that we want more. If you're Buhari would you think that the nation wants more? I don't know the governor of your state but if you're in Lagos State, does Sanwoolu feel like Lagosians want more?We romanticize things, we're not thorough, we're not detailed... it could be a whole national malaise - AOTL: It's interesting you talk about this demand for good governance which we don't have. I'm just wondering if you are a civil society Czar which you are, in a way...AO: I am.TL: And you want to take a stab at this problem, where do you start? Is it bottom-up, is it top-down? if you want to triage resources, where should we focus on first?AO: I would say it's the middle. My argument is very simple, I say the middle because my knowledge of history, the limited knowledge I have of history and of struggles, is that it's the people in the middle. And I know that there is this argument that we don't have a middle class in Nigeria but I guess, for me, I will just say the middle is: me and you, who have enough to eat every day. We might not eat everything we want to eat every day but we have enough to eat every day. We have a steady income, whether it's every month or whether it's from a business that comes quarterly. We aspire, maybe some of us travel a couple of times a year [or] every couple of years; that class, that middle, the people who can afford data, the people that can afford the luxury of being on Twitter for a few hours every day, on Facebook every day, that's the middle. For me, most movements come from the middle. They would obviously trigger something with the lower class, the working-class people, the people who live on daily wages, at a point the struggle will tip over to them and they too will adopt it. But as you said the triage, my energy will go on the middle, my energy will go on the middle who are young if I'm also going to prioritize within that middle. Because those are the people who should have the luxury of thinking. Me and you, who are not bogged down by hunger... and poverty is real. Poverty is really real in Nigeria. Are we expecting the people who are struggling for a daily meal to be the ones who are going to do the thinking, the planning and heavy lifting? I don't think so. So I would focus on the middle and what would I be focusing on the middle for? I'll be saying to the middle, 'how do we organise?' And you see, when I say "organise", I'm using that word in a technical sense. When we heard that Barack Obama was a community organiser I don't know how many Nigerians understand what that means? There are schools of thought around organising - there is the snowflake model, there is [the] Alinsky model, there's the LCN (Leading Change Network) model. These are models that I know are used in America and I ask myself what are the models for organising that we use Nigeria? What are the models of organising that we use in West Africa? So far I have come up with very little. For me in civil society, the new opportunity that I see is teaching organising in a structured manner. Creating a model for organising. And the truth is we have things in our history that we could build that model of organising around. We've had the Aba women's movement, I will put that as a classic case of organising. How did those women do it? What triggered it? What happened? It's not a footnote in history 'oh, there was the Aba women's...' which was how we learnt about it...the Aba women's movement, they did this, this, this. They put a tax on their salt and they were not happy. No. It is to go beyond that to see how they did it. How did they organise? How did the women get other women to buy into this? In today's day and age where when to organise they're saying 'ah, how many people from Kogi State? How many people from Nasarawa?' Which is not, for me, the key thing. The key thing is, how many people who feel this pain? How many people who have this value? It's not about the geography. But even in terms of putting together movements in Nigeria you find that we're still looking at federal character. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing but I'm saying it cannot be the predominant thing because that's our politicians organise. We cannot keep using their models. There's a reason why they use their model. We cannot use their model when we want to organise to push them out. So that's where I would start - teasing out a framework for organising for us in Nigeria based on our own stories. What did them Beko do? How did they do it? What did they learn? What were the mistakes? What drove them [in] pushing out the military? Where did they go wrong, where did they go right? And then using our own 21st-century experiences from Sudan, from Egypt, from Algeria, Tunisia, from Black Lives Matter. People are looking like at Black Lives Matter as if... I don't know how to explain it, as if somebody just shoots a gun and out came Black Lives Matter. They've been doing Black Lives Matter for years. This is where preparation meets opportunity. The longest movement or, at least, advocacy campaign we've had is Bring Back Our Girls. Maybe also in terms of thinking about a model for organising we'd look at some of the things they did right, learn from some of the things they didn't do well. But, for me, that would be the start. So you'd have that organising model and then you'll now democratise that organising model so that everybody can use it if they want. Whether it's the hairdressers on a street or in a community [or] local government who are tired of being taxed, how do they use that model to organise? But on a larger scale, then it would be how do me, you and other people that think like me and you who want to use that model to build the power that is needed to demand for the structural changes we need. It will take time. It will take research, it will take knowledge, it will take mobilizing, it will take organising to get to that point. But what should sustain us is that in the last decade, decade and a half, most of the real fundamental changes that have happened around the world have happened not through elections and have also not happened because of coups, and have also not happened because people that were oppressing suddenly woke up and said we're tired of oppressing. They've happened because of nonviolent movement, which requires between 3.5 percent or 5 percent of your population to want that change bad enough. I think we can do that in Nigeria but nobody is doing it.TL: Listening to you, I tried to look at some of the potholes, so to speak, in this model. You talked about Bring Back Our Girls, I was at the Abuja sit-in in 2014 and I think... was it the second day or the third day and Dino Melaye came for whatever reason and said (I don't know how true that is) that 'oh, I hear that 150 million naira has been released by the NNPC to start a rival movement.' Now, that seems outrageous but by the very next day there was a rival gathering at Unity Fountain chanting 'Release Our Girls.'AO: [Laughs out loud]TL: Yeah. And by the next day of that rival organisation, it descended into violence. I believe so much in the middle class and changing the demand for good governance, but I keep looking at the threats, especially around poverty and how quickly the political class (the ruling class) can easily use money and influence to mobilize for violence. And I think that may drive apathy on its own. On the path of people that are willing and even able.The key thing is, how many people who feel this pain? How many people who have these values? It's not about the geography but even in terms of putting together movements in Nigeria you find that we're still looking at federal character - AOAO: I hear you completely. And to be honest, yes. In fact, it's now become a fad. As a member of civil society will know, for example, that Amnesty International is constantly picketed every time they come up with a report or a press statement that indicts the government and the military and soldiers for extrajudicial killings or overstepping their bounds especially in terms of loss of civilian lives, we find paid protesters coming out with their posters. To be honest we've seen this across board. We've seen people protesting for Diezani. The funny one was the 'leave Diezani' where it was spelt L I V E, "live our Diezani alone" which is like 'live'. It's now an industry, so we can expect it. But should that deter us? I don't think so. To me, it doesn't deter. And this is another mistake that we make. This is another mistake that "the people that want to change" always make that mistake because they want to keep following the models of the politicians. Now, the average politician thinks 'okay, he can outspend you.' He probably can. But you know these protesters, we find that at the end of the day, they'll be fighting in one corner, maybe they were promised 1000 [naira] but he can only give them 500 [naira], it's not sustainable on their part. Yes, they can bring out their 'release our girls' people, day one, day two, if we were still going for day hundred, who's going to be bringing that money? Who's the politician will keep saying 'let's keep giving these fake protesters money to come out?' They will now have to change track, that's maybe is where they will now try to use violence or the tactic of Abuja now is to seal off the area where the bring back our girls used to sit in the name of construction or they might try and start infiltrating the movement to pay people off to be disruptive. We can expect these things because these are tactics that we know will be used. How do we prepare against it? That's all part of what the organising and the struggle is about. I'm not going to tell you that it's not going to happen, but because we know it's going to happen, then we can mitigate against it. We can expect it and we can work around it. But the truth is, of course, anybody that benefits from the status quo is not going to let go of that status quo easily. We can, again, link this conversation to Black Lives Matter. What is so hard about saying 'stop killing innocent people?' Why is there such pushback? Why are we seeing such pushback from the police, about not arresting people indiscriminately, not shooting and killing people indiscriminately, not using indiscriminate force on people? Because, as I mentioned, the DNA of our political party, it's in the DNA of the United States police force. Because the United States police force is also tied to the legacy of slavery and dehumanizing black people. But does that mean we shouldn't struggle? TL: Absolutely not. AO: Exactly. So we see the pothole, we acknowledge the potholes and just as we do with our cars, we swerve and avoid the potholes. But the key thing that would help us avoid these potholes, Tobi, is the values that we used to organise. So as soon as me and you think that for our movement to a powerful, we need Dino Melaye, we need Adams Oshiomole we need Ghali Na'abba, that's our downfall.TL: Let's move away a bit from that. We'll come back to some of that issue. Let's talk about gender-based violence which is something I noticed you've written about recently. If Twitter is a reflection of reality, there's been an incredible surge in such violent incidents over the last couple of months and like everybody else, I wonder what's going on? Has it always been like this or there is an underlying psychological reason behind the current wave we are seeing?AO: Now, that's a fantastic question and I have the answer. One, this violence is worldwide. The violence against women and children that we're experiencing right now during covid is worldwide. It's been given a name - The Shadow Pandemic. As the covid pandemic is ravaging the world, there's a shadow pandemic that is also ravaging the world and the pandemic is waging war on women and children mostly. So is this a new thing? No, it's not a new thing. What covid has done more than anything is put a magnifying glass to problems we already had and two, it has sped up the rot. So, we already had rotten structures, rotten cultures, rotten response to social issues, deep injustices and inequalities in our system, what covid has done is exacerbate these things. They've made them worse overnight. Why? Because with covid we've also seen restrictions on movement, we've seen people's livelihoods being affected negatively, we know that more people are going through hardship. And when there's stress, and there's oppression, it's not to justify it but this is just the reality, when people are under pressure, they lash out. When I'm under pressure, I'm more likely to snap at my children than when I'm not for the same thing. So, if I'm just chilling, I'm not particularly stressed out at work or nobody has bashed my car or I'm not frustrated at the diesel bill or they've not just come to cut our line, and my child breaks something... my reaction at that moment depends on just how stressed I am. So, likewise, with people's livelihoods being affected, a sense of oppression, a sense of uncertainty, all these things are boiling over as a war against the most vulnerable which is women and children. People feel like they need to take out their stress on somebody else whether it's beating them or raping them, and this is how some of it's manifesting. I'm quite sure that also domestic violence is high, but we're not seeing the stories in the news same way we're seeing the stories of sexual gender-based violence. But in Sierra Leone, a five-year-old was just raped to death. We've seen stories in Nigeria of three-year-olds, four-year-olds. It's across the continent, it's across West Africa, it's across the world. Then come back to Nigeria on sexual gender-based violence, we ordinarily... we've had a really horrible culture of sexual gender-based violence against women. There was the report, I think 2012, called women in Nigeria report that was a joint research done by the British Council and I think the Ministry of Women Affairs and Ministry of Finance because I think we had Okonjo-Iweala then. Yeah, this is around 2012, yes. That was a time when we were making a lot of strides in terms of saying let's do gender budgeting and things like that. Anyway, the report showed that I think 1 is 6 or 1 in 5 women have experienced sexual gender-based violence, separate from domestic violence and just violence in general. So when you now look at the numbers in terms of prosecution, you'll see that very few people are prosecuted for it. We have patriarchy that sort of places men above women and children, then you have an ageist society where we believe older people over younger people, then you have a society where you have no law and order, where your police is ([for] lack of a better way of describing it) largely exploitative and designed to protect the regime as opposed to protecting the people, you have a judiciary that is weakened and not independent and likely doesn't care. Oh, let's not forget sex for grades...you saw the documentary that came out last year that the BBC did on UNILAG and in [the] other school in Ghana?TL: I did.AO: So it's in our culture. I hear that [the] National Assembly, when they do their budgeting for conferences and meetings, if you look at the items there is "conference materials." They say conference materials apparently include women. That conference material is a cover for women. I've heard stories of men in meetings (government meetings) where a good part of the government meeting is spent on whether they are going to travel with blankets, blankets being a code for women, so this is our culture. You have stories of people who are abused and then the whole family will be on the neck of the mother or the child who wants justice. The family. So, we have a real, real, deep societal issue. I agree that a state of emergency should be declared but the truth is a state of emergency was declared around sexual gender-based violence in Sierra Leone last year. Despite that, poor Khadijah was raped to death. A five-year-old. By her Uncle. With the knowledge of the Uncle's mother and the girl's Aunty.So, declaring a state of emergency for me is rhetoric. What is going to be done? What needs to be done? How do you have somebody who alleges that she was raped (we've seen it not once, we've seen it not twice) harassed by the police? The truth is, again, like demanding good governance, do we want to see an end to sexual gender-based violence in Nigeria? It's almost, in a way, also, up to us. Do we want to have zero tolerance? Because if as a society we excuse it, if even on a family level we can find it in our hearts to excuse the people we know who are molesting young girls, when we refuse to believe young girls, when we refuse to believe adults who come forward, then as a society we're saying this is not important to us and the government will take their cue from there.TL: I have a two-part question. And please indulge, maybe, some of my own ignorance here. Now, I look at history and there is some form of correlation, maybe not necessarily causal, that as societies get richer, they also improve in gender equality. So do you think some of these problems are economic? Is it so knotty as a problem right now because we are still largely a poor society?AO: Is that the two-part question [or] should I wait for the other one?TL: Yeah. Wait for the other one.AO: Well, it's a good question and the truth is I don't have the research to say yay or nay. I do know though that in a few countries (I know Brazil is definitely one) where this sense that 'let's empower women economically' (I said I want to stop using that word: empower)... where women have been given or are supported to be more economically independent, we've actually seen violence rise in their homes. As the men find it extremely uncomfortable that the women are earning. Maybe not even earning more than they are, but just that the women are earning. They don't like the confidence it gives them and you see an increase in violence. That has been documented. When I think of women, let's just say like me, who are abused at home or who are abused in the workplace, we're not poor and the people abusing us are not poor either, so I would wonder where that comes in. Unless it is the entire society, even when you have pockets of wealth, there's some sort of mental impoverishment. I mean, that could be the only explanation. That's one explanation anyway, that you'll say that 'okay, so how do you account for sexual gender-based violence and domestic violence within rich or middle-class communities?' And this is not special to Nigeria either, it's something that happens everywhere. So I still bring it back to patriarchy and culture. I still think that it's not enough to say it's because we're poor. Because then the argument will be, but your state is not poor. Why does my police not care? How much is the police budget? I'm sorry I wish I had that number at my fingertips. When a mother comes in with a child and says that child has been raped, why is our police too poor to be able to treat them humanely, question them humanely, capture their stories humanely, instead of reporting the mother or brutalising the girl by asking stupid questions about how she caused what happened to her even if she's under five years old? So where does poverty fit in where our judges who get a huge chunk of money... You can even excuse the judges maybe you'd say because if cases are not prosecuted by the state, this is a crime. So ideally, in these types of cases, it's not supposed to be the mother of a child or me who is a rape victim who is prosecuting the case, the state should be prosecuting the case. Is the state too poor to prosecute these cases? When we vote for these people, what are we voting for? What do they do for us? What do they do for us that makes us have every four years go out and vote for these same people? - AOIs the state too poor to hire public defenders for people who are too poor to hire lawyers for themselves? Is that what we're saying? The state is the one that's going to determine what kind of society that we want to live in. I'm afraid I don't really buy the poverty one, I think that it is a cultural one. Our problem is cultural, it's not poverty. It's not economic. Because even rich people exploit women and girls. Even educated people do, so it's now a culture, this is our culture. Pastors do it, Imams do it, governors do it, ministers do it, people in civil society do it, bankers do it, teachers do it, policemen do it, everybody is doing it. It's not about poverty, it's about culture, it's about what we accept.TL: I love that answer, I wish we had hours to unpack all the various details and nuances. So the second part is, again, to be honest, I never tweet or speak publicly about this stuff because some of these platforms are not really optimized for a nuanced conversation and...AO: Yeah.TL: So I noticed that there is a pattern. I mean, when people pushback or advocate or complain or protest sexual violence against women and children, particularly against women now, there’s a pattern which is 'oh, stop raping women.' And, yeah, I have no problem with that message. But then, you have a certain group of people who say 'oh well, not all men are rapists' and then the conversation devolves into a lot of anger, name-calling. What are the nuances? I mean, in sexual violence there's biology, mental health and other things other than being a male or a female, do those other things not count or explain some of the cases?AO: Hmm. I’m not sure I understand this last part, you might have to unpack that part. I understood up to when you said 'does biology not play a role?' Until that point I was understanding where you're coming from and where you’re trying to go. But this last part...TL: Okay, for example, we know that, and when I say 'we know' I’m talking about, maybe, consensus in the psychological science that paedophiles, for example, have a certain psychological profile. They might not have a normal brain like an average person. And there is also some evidence that people who rape (there are serial rapists, of course, just like serial killers) they are also of a certain psychological profile. I take the cultural arguments. Absolutely. True. There's an ingrained problem with our culture with how we see women, how we treat women, how we talk about women and it reflects. But specifically about the violence which is quite troubling, which bothers me a great deal, which I would like to see a lot more movement in terms of change and not argument, and not controversy and all the things that poison that conversation. So should we start looking into mental illness and not just the gender of the accused or the perpetrator?AO: Okay, now I understand and it’s perfect. Wow! This is very loaded and I’m really not sure I can do justice to it. Maybe after our interview, you'll have another session with people who are psychologists but I’ll try and unpack them one by one and in the different issues that I’ve seen in this last question or comment or reflection. The ‘not all men are rapists,' of course, it’s understood where that is coming from. But if we compare it as someone has done recently to... when we say 'Black Lives Matter,' and then people say 'All Lives Matter, there's also a reaction because in saying Black Lives Matter, we're not saying All Lives don't matter. We're saying black lives are in danger because the numbers tell us that more Black people are being killed by the police. So nobody’s saying white people don’t get killed by the police but what is saying is that there's a systemic structural racism in the US police force that targets Black people. Some people would argue that there's, I know that's hard to think of, but they there are fate worse than death, what the African-Americans go through in terms of being used as a feeder for America's prison complex you could argue that, for some people, that fate is worse than death. It’s like a living death and it’s not unconnected to the fact that the thirteenth amendment they abolished slavery somehow left an exception for prisoners still be treated as slaves, creating an incentive to have slaves and to be able to capture a good part of your population as slaves.So going back to not all men, it angers women and men when some men say that because in saying men are rapists, we’re talking about the data. Nobody is saying women don't rape and it’s actually quite useful that many men are also now sharing very troubling stories of how their first sexual encounter was rape, literally. Which brings us now down to this mental issue - there’s evidence, non of it Nigerian based, but there's evidence to show that people who are abused go on to abuse. So if you were raped as a child, if you were molested as a child, some people would become molesters. If you were raised in a violent household where you were hit as a child, you watch your mother being hit (or let's just say, to be fair, your father being hit), you will most likely grow up into an adult will hit their child, who hit their spouse. This is documented. So you’re right. Sometimes when I hear these stories, I do think 'oh my god, we're a nation of [the] abused' and we're all going on to transfer our abuse to other people. You hear horrifying stories, [see] videos of women abusing househelp in very degrading, sadistic ways. And you’re like 'ah-ah.'So this comes to the trauma that, it will be fair to say, maybe a good section of Nigerians are going through but we don’t invest in mental health. We don’t recognize it. And literally mental health is tied to health where, as a country, we've not put health as a priority - that’s also one of the things that have become glaring from the pandemic. We’ve known that our healthcare is inadequate, I mean, constantly we're Go-Gunding people who need to travel abroad, it seems that there’s no serious illness that we can treat in Nigeria. We just don’t have the capacity. Where we have the capacity, it is very limited. So, if we can’t even do basic public health right and basic public health is literally maternal mortality, infant mortality, just making sure pregnant women don’t die, making sure babies don't die, toddlers below the age of five don’t die. If we can’t treat accidents, gunshot wounds, basic things, how will we get to mental health? Where will the investment come from but the truth is we need investment in public health. To be honest, we can actually tie sexual gender-based violence going on against young boys and young girls and women, we can make it an economic issue because we can say 'what is the impact of all these people who are emotionally stunted in one way or the other (I’m not saying everybody who is raped or who has been abused has mental issues)... but in one way or the other, how are these things affecting our productivity as a society? How many man-hours are lost in dealing with these issues? How many man-hours, women-hours are lost in terms of productivity for women who are running, hiding, trying to dodge abusive husband, abusive uncles who feel entitled to the bodies of your daughters? How many man-hours and women-hours are spent on avoiding all these? What will it take for 3.5 percent of Nigerians to say enough is enough? - AOIf we were really to treat all these cases the way we would, then you'd now be asking, what is the financial burden on our healthcare system? If we had a serious government, then the government will be saying 'this is a pandemic that we must stop because it is draining our people and draining our resources.' So I agree with you that the conversation could be expanded, I am hopeful that it will be because I think we’re getting there. I know that the conversations are quite painful, they can get quite heated, I personally welcome them as painful as they are. Because I think we're sort of undergoing the psychological therapy that we need to first to discuss these things. And you know they say there are stages to grief? I can't remember all the stages but anger is one of them. Maybe we're going through the anger stage. We will get through the anger stage and get to the solution part. Maybe the solutions will be home driven because we would now have had these conversations, had these revelations, had these stories told and told and retold. So people will get to where me and you are now, say, 'okay, how do we move forward?' Which is why in my first answer I said 'it's the lack of seriousness that the states treat this issue of sexual gender-based violence. It's in part a reflection of your society where women have been so objectified as sexual objects. There's a strong sense, in Nigeria, that any woman who has anything is because she's sleeping with somebody. So sex has been seen as a commodity which in a way is almost as if the women are the sellers and the buyers, which is madness. We cannot be the sellers and the buyers.TL: Men are the buyers, obviously. AO: Well, some of them are selling too, so I'm just saying this accusation that 'oh, sex, sex. Women use sex to get what they want. Women use sex to manipulate.' In fact, that narrative is now spilling down to small girls, innocent children. What are they trying to get? What do they want to get? So all these angry conversations should lead to us saying 'enough is enough.' I spend an in ordinate amount of time on WhatsApp platforms and groups where we’re constantly asking 'who can shelter one three-year-old? Who can shelter a four-year-old? There's a 16-year-old who is being by her stepfather, where can she go? And you're saying 'where is the state?' In the 21st-century, how is it impossible...I think only Lagos that I know of, forgive me if there are other states, Lagos is the only state I know that has a shelter for women as per it is a state shelter. And I'm quite sure that even what they can afford and what they can do and who they can cover is limited. But [in] most states, you do not have a place where a woman and her children who are being abused and being a terrorized can go to. Which makes it even harder for you to get the support that you need. So if, for example, your family is not with you in terms of trying to avoid the abuse of your daughter or your son in the hands of a relation, which is often the case. Where do you go? Do you now go under a bridge with these same children who are traumatized? Your state doesn't even provide for this, so again, it comes back to governance and politics.When we vote for these people, what are we voting for? What do they do for us? What do they do for us that makes us every four years go out and vote for these same people? Which one thing? Which one thing are Nigerians passionate about? Which one thing, Tobi, are you passionate about that you're saying this issue is so important to me that if it is not addressed, I want some serious reform? I'm sure every single Nigerian has one of those such issues, yet we do not make it campaign issues, yet we allowed these people to just tell us lies. We cannot hold them accountable. Then the next four years comes again and we all troop out? Are we all mad? TL: Pertinent questions. Thank you very much.AO: Thank you so much. It's been really interesting. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at www.ideasuntrapped.com/subscribe

Let's talk about the attack on the Federal Medical Center in Lokoja, Kogi State. The doctors say it was gunmen, the Government says it was angry patients, and the PDP says it was Government. - Then let's talk about the Edo APC guber candidate having an EFCC corruption case in court! - And THEN, let's talk about the new independent political movement that launched yesterday, and says it wants to reform the constitution. #HardFacts | Sandra Ezekwesili