A few months ago, I had a meeting with Tomiwa Aladekomo, the CEO of Big Cabal Media. During our conversation, he asked me what I thought of some existing media platforms. As I am known to do when I let my tongue run away from me, I launched into a monologue that was scathing at best and bitter at worst. He stopped me, saying, "You must never forget that these platforms are pioneers. They're filling a space that needs filling and doing a job that needs doing. Flawed they may be, it's a fact that we can't ignore. You must also remember that many are new, and they're modelled on platforms that have existed for centuries. They'll get there eventually. They're more worthy of praise than scorn." I'll never forget these words, and I was reminded of them when I watched the first episode of Supo Shashore's The Journey of an African Colony. 

There are two questions every Nigerian asks: What happened to us, and why are we the way we are. History as it's taught in Nigerian schools is a farce - an abortion of a thing. That it is possible to leave education without knowing any answers to the above two questions is a travesty. This is why Shashore's documentary which airs on Nigeria's most watched news network, Channels Television, isn't just highly recommended but part of every Nigerian's civic duty. It is the history lesson we should have had in school.

What the script lacks in tightness, Shashore more than makes up for in his narration. His confident delivery and his syrupy baritone make the story easy to follow and more importantly easy to remember. His pieces to camera are world class. This is marred by the sound editing which bizarrely bad and the camera work which definitely needs work. I have heard that quality was lost in transmission but the criticism stands. I can only review what I saw. The production may also have been better served by more creative thinking. I would have loved for Shashore to visit some of the slave towns he spoke of in the series first episode.

However, for all of its flaws, The Journey of an African Colony is a must see.

If you're in Lagos and in need of both a haircut and a drink then there's only one hot spot for you, Bar Bar. Yes, it's a bar that's also a barbershop. It sounds unsanitary but it isn't. The barbing salon and the bar are mutually exclusive.

Located in what can only be called the Lagosian idea of a strip mall, this place has everything. Manic Pixie DJs that go by Aye, tall men, short men, questionable men, posh men and feminists. You're also quite likely to see me, Afam, half man, half myth, and recovering alcoholic.

With free shots available depending on who you know, it's the place to go if you're drinking on a budget.

At Barbar you can dance like a dervish without fear that anyone's watching because no one is. The people that go here are almost uniformly selfish in that they care only about their good time. They mind their business and wind their waists, which is always and everywhere a good thing.

PS: Beware of the fantastic beast and madman Faratu for he's been known to hang about there. If he takes control of your night be aware that you have entered one chance. You'll wake up at 4pm the following afternoon with no memory of what happened the night before.

Happy Days,
Afam

The human imagination is a thing of wonder. I'm not sure that it would beat the speed of light, but it's definitely quicker than the speed of sound. You see, in all the time it takes to say hello, it is quite possible for a person to have gone from thinking, "Oh! This person seems alright." To, "We will have a big wedding with no fewer than 5000 guests and Burna Boy's On The Low, will be the song we use to enter the wedding reception." This is why matrimony is just as lovely as it is terrible. When a thing has been imagined and analysed with such frequency, it is quite frankly impossible for reality to match it.

This is the problem one nameless user of Beyonce's internet finds herself faced with. After spending 8 years dating the same man, and the last 3 years talking about marriage, her big day arrived. He proposed. But to put it mildly, even by my basic standards, the proposal was sub par.


The thing might as well be a piece of string. And the worst thing isn't the fact that the diamond is essentially diamond dust it's that it looks hideous on her finger. But be that as it may, I think the pairing will be successful. He gave her an insulting ring, and she trashed him all the way from Seattle to Sydney. It's a match made in heaven.

Happy Days,
Afam.

I was on summer holiday when I got a text on my phone. I'd won a million naira. Now, these were the days before the great devaluation. A million Naira was not chicken change. A million Naira was four thousand pounds. This was in 2006, 2 years before the great recession. I thought it might have been a scam for about five minutes, but I quickly convinced myself that it wasn't. Those only happened on the internet, this came straight to my Nokia. The number the prize came from looked like one of the ones my mobile network provider would use to tell me to subscribe to love advice or sports news. I bit the bait. I was 16.

I don't think I was greedy then. I certainly didn't need the money, but I understood the value of a windfall. I understood the ease of saving money you didn't need. My mouth went dry as serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline flooded my brain. How Fatima, Maryann, Faridah, Foluso and Ebube would tremble when they discovered I was Afam 2.0. Millionaire without counting his parent's largesse. I also made a note of how I would ruin Chibuikem, who'd thought it prudent to share my adolescent journal complete with passages of my adventures in masturbation with my year. I think some people called me Bursts of Pleasure for one full term.

I followed the instructions on the text. First they asked that I buy them credit. I did. Not a lot, about N 5,000. Enough that my brain started sending me hot signals. N 5,000 at that time was probably all the cash I had. I decided to abort mission millionaire, Maryanne and Chibuikem be damned. But those were the beginnings of my troubles. They called me incessantly for 2 days. I was traumatised. They wouldn't stop. I begged. I pleaded. But they'd found their mark and they were refusing to release me. So I went to my brother cap in hand. "Brother Gbaddy, save me!" He did.

There's some magic that happens when a deep voiced Nigerian with the poshest British accent uses the full weight of his education to deal with another human being. Women fall at their feet and the gods weep. The men never called again and I learned a lesson. In this life, it is not your destiny to win any lotteries but the one of birth. I didn't even know then that I'd been the victim of Advance Fee Fraud, and I didn't need to be told about a Nigerian Prince to fall hook, line and sinker.
___________________________________
For Obinwanne Okeke, life's been a storm. He basked in the sunlight for a moment only to be shattered on the rocks the next. Forbes Africa launched his reputation as a wunderkind, a vanquisher of poverty. TEDX and the BBC cemented it. For a time he shuttled between his houses in South Africa and Nigeria. To look at him, as I once did in person, was to see a younger better Aliko Dangote. Obi's story fit the rags to riches trope more neatly and we loved him for it.

Now, his globe trotting business days are behind him, bound as he is by the FBI awaiting his day in court. It will be his second trial. The first trial ended the day news of his $12 million scam hit his native country. The detailed report of the investigation by the FBI left no room for doubt. The verdict was guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. In the blink of an eye Obinwanne Okeke, the young African entrepreneur, became InvictusObi, fraud par excellence. I do not think that this will be the last we hear of him. At the very least, when all of this is over, should he want it, there'll be a book deal attached to his freedom.

Before Obi became a foster child of the U.S.A, like most of us, he had another father. He was born to a household that was as large as it was humble. He was the 17th child and his mother was the 4th wife. His mother was a teacher who traded to make ends meet. When he talks about her, you can see his eyes light up. His love for her is no lie. Her main dream for him was that he get an education.

Obi's father died when he was 15. He misses him. Fathers are very often a strong resource that sons rely on. He says had his father been alive he'd have been able to seek his advice and prevent some mistakes. At 16, Obi was out of secondary school. A young entrepreneur with big dreams, he started his first business. He called it an IT company. He made business cards and this allowed him to do two things. The first was buy bicycle so grand he was the talk of his village in Anambra, the second was earn enough to fund a Computer Science degree at Monash University South Africa. The degree currently costs around $6,000 per year and I suppose takes at least 3 years to complete. It's here that the first suspicion of fraud sneaks in. How successful would a business have to be to yield profits sufficient enough to pay for an international education, and buy a bicycle?

With bills to pay, a degree to fund, and himself to rely on, Obi's entrepreneurial spirit couldn't die in South Africa. He started 2 businesses that he's spoken of, an entertainment outfit for students and a taxi company. By the time he was leaving he had 13 cars. He has never spoken of loans as a source of capital. He's only spoken of scrimping, saving, a bitter climb from rung to rung and partnerships formed with friends. All of this is now suspect. Bachelor's degree completed he flew his mother in for graduation.

For his Masters degree he set his sights on International Relations in Australia. His love for Nigeria and his quest to understand Boko Haram, the country's terrorism pest, led him to add Counter Terrorism to his degree. In hind sight his knowledge of Counter Terrorism could only have proven useful for the scams he'd one day run. In Australia he says he did all kinds of jobs to survive. As of February 2018, you would have needed to show evidence of about $14,000 separate from tuition and travel to get an Australian student visa; no small feat.

When he finished that he moved back to Nigeria and started the Invictus group in 2009. In the beginning it's said that his company had only one computer. He says his first project in Nigeria was low income housing. He doesn't say where the project was, but as with most of his independent moves, you have to ask where the capital for this came from. From there he expanded and grew his interests. By the time he made it into the Forbes Africa 30 under 30 list in 2016, he had 128 members of staff across 9 companies, and fingers in construction, oil, gas, renewable energy and agriculture. He had 2 houses, one in Nigeria and another in South Africa. He'd built a house for his mother. He scrubbed his story of any illicit under tones and took to the media to inspire a generation.

For me, April 2018 was Obi's most interesting month. Between April 11th and April 19th, Obi, posing as Unatrac's CFO authorised $11 million in payments from the company to a number of foreign accounts. On the 25th of April he walked into the BBC's headquarters in Oxford Circus, London and gave an interview so great that they called him a rising star. The only time he faltered was when the interviewer Veronique Edwards asked if he paid himself a salary. Washed by his charisma, she didn't press for the details of his excess which once led him to shower himself with champagne in a South African nightclub.
___________________________________

For Nigerians, it's been a hot fraud summer. Obinwanne's collapse from grace was the beginning. The news of 80 Nigerian indictments by the FBI for scamming was the sequel. The $17.5 million fraud by Jumia's sales agents and the confusion around its listing rounds out the trilogy. And all this happened in the space of 2 weeks.

None of this is new. Nigeria's culture prizes wealth over everything. The country's super wealthy are uniformly strange in that most, at one time or the other, have had to deal with allegations of financial impropriety from Nigeria's law enforcement agencies. If we were to point fingers we should look no further than our celebration of wealth independent of legitimacy.

With a fifth of the country's labour force unemployed and a fleet of 419 success stories, fraud has become a line of work that the young aspire to. It is perhaps even more attractive than banking, law, or even drug dealing. Nigerians in the diaspora will face even more scrutiny when they try to send money home. Nigerians in foreign schools will endure jokes about Nigerian princes and corruption. Visas, already a challenge, will become even more challenging. Stories of rejections will flood social media. Nigerians running legitimate businesses will find it even more difficult to build partnerships beyond our shores.

But be that as it may, the wealthy will continue to go unscrutinised. The fraudsters who make afrobeats hits and create unsavoury dance moves will continue to do so. Soon enough, we'll forget that this was the summer of hot fraud. And the worst outcome? 419 is not just the bit of the constitution that deals with these things, it's a career path more popular than banker or dealing drugs.

I have a contract with the universe. It's that my life will be many things but it will never be dull. And that I'll respond to the abundance of interesting events like a crazy person. People tell me I'm dramatic, but you'd be dramatic too if dramatic things kept happening to you. Like, that one time that I got kidnapped. But this one isn't about that. It's about my living arrangements.

As an unmarried young man under 30, I'm delighted to tell you that my dogs and I live with my parents. Everybody is equally unhappy with the arrangement. I eat Papa Afam's Guinea Fowl, I break Mama Afam's dishes, and I occasionally borrow her skin care products and make up.

I, Afam, the wondrously mediocre, would like to tell you that if you're a man, and you don't have concealer, mascara, an eyebrow pencil, or foundation, you are playing with your destiny. God did not put you on this good earth to torture the masses with your hangover eye bags, or your pimple scars. In any case I was on television. On days when I needed it, I'd get my face beat and take that face to drinks. I'm single but nobody calls me ugly and everybody thinks I have great skin. These two things keep me warm at night.

I also make my dad buy dog food for Plato and Zeus, who I now call my children. They're adorable. One of them has rickets, and the other has an unusually high marginal propensity for diarrhoea, but I suppose I love them in my own way.

I'm not very happy about living at home because Papa Afam has made it his job to make me as unhappy as I make him when I steal his Guinea Fowl. Guinea Fowl is the poultry equivalent of Eid Ram - food for the gods.

On a Sunday morning not too long ago, Papa Afam Barged into my room at the crack of dawn. There was a tub of vaseline on the floor right by the top of the bed. He proceeded to yell the following things.

"Why are you still in bed! It's 7 in the morning, your mates are in the gym but you are here sleeping!"

"What is that by your bed? Vaseline? You have been masturbating!"

"Don't you feel ashamed? You can't even afford a bloody prostitute!"

I suppose I'll go steal more of his Guinea Fowl now.

Happy Days,
Afam

There's nothing I like better than a man who presents himself as a bastion of morality and an arbiter of good taste, because men like that are very nearly always full of shit.

In Nigeria, there's a man called Otunba Olusegun Runsewe...


I have to change the line of attack here because I spoke to Mama Afam about what I was about to do and she wasn't too pleased. Every crazy person has someone they hate offending.

Dear Mr. Runsewe,

I hope this letter or blog finds you well. When I first thought to write it, I thought it would be funny and quite frankly, brilliant. However, as I have run out of time, it will end up being rather mediocre. This is fair to you, I think. The quality will be on par with the interview you gave in the Vanguard. 

I did not understand why you spoke about culture like some dead thing trapped in a gele and bound with coral beads. It lives. It breathes. Nigeria's cultural identity was never meant to be static. It could never be static. While politicians debated this and that, culture happened. Some of us became fraudulent, finding opportunity in an under regulated internet space and a police force that was as bribeable as it was clueless. Some of us took the idea that we should discipline our children and used that as an excuse to abuse our children. Some of us developed what we call the art of getting by. We stay employed, mind our business, drink water, don't let Nigeria kill us.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but our culture is a great reaper of lives. If you let it, it will make you unhappy and then it will kill you. And when it has killed you it will bury you standing up, in an unmarked grave. People talk about the transgender crisis, the scourge of immorality, the drugs, the sex on television and all sorts of nonsense but I don't care about these things. I want to know what we're going to do about the culture of mediocrity that killed my aunt. She died during an appendicectomy. I want to know about the culture of maintenance, the absence of which has killed more friends than I can count on my fingers and toes. I want to know about the culture of poverty,  because I was kidnapped earlier this year by some hungry looking low level criminals and now I find it very difficult to be driven by anyone.

What is Big Brother in the face of this? Who is Bobrisky? What are drugs? Sometimes there's a vice around my throat and all I can think is, "God don't let these people let me die here." Because if I fail to take care of myself for one minute you will let me die and you won't come to my funeral. Then you'll give an interview in support of all the archaic values and things you say are my culture; the things that killed me. You, a public official, a product of my taxes, my employee, will speak to the press and hope that they deal with Bobrisky ruthlessly. You, a public official, a product of my taxes, my employee, will list all the things in the press you think are problems but will refrain from giving me, your employer, viable solutions. Do you think you have the luxury of complaining?

I suppose the main problem is that I blame your generation for everything, so when you say anything like cultural restoration I say burn it to the ground.

I'm sorry. I'm upset. You've got your work cut out for you and you're a recent hire, but just in case you were confused, Bobrisky is not your work. You are the Director of Nigeria's National Council for Arts and Culture. I want to hear about scholarships to acting programs, writing programs, music programs. I want to hear about opportunity. I want to hear about musicals, I want to hear about festivals, I want to hear about plans for infrastructure. I want you to travel around Nigeria so much that you become dizzy. I want you to write an open letter to Dbanj thanking him for his contributions to music. I want to hear you praise Burna Boy, I want you to ask Jidenna if his passport needs renewing, I want you to send Bobrisky to New York pride because she's made being a beautiful trans-woman her business, and she's world class at it. I want you to apologise to tekno because he's done more for the country than some of your peers. I want you to throw a festival for Nollywood, I want you to go to Lagos Comic con or Abuja Comic Con. I want you to succeed.

I don't want you to be the policeman of anybody's morality. The moment you start that you start sliding down a slippery slope. You'll start to think that the crux of your job is to appear to be holier than thou and it isn't. If you do your work properly, you could marry a tree and no one would care but your wife and maybe your children, but I'll say it one more time, if you think fighting with Bobrisky and Big Brother is your work, you've got another thing coming.

Happy Days, All the Best, I hope that auntie that had a stroke recovers, I hope nobody commits suicide because their child is gay, I hope parents also doin't commit suicide when they find out it was naked booty shaking that built the house in the village, I hope we get our shit together, I hope you get your shit together, much love,
Afam.

Polyamory is really much ado about absolutely nothing. Back in the day, my mum, Mama Afam would sit me down and say, "Afam! Let me tell you! There's absolutely nothing new under the sun! Human beings have been freaky since the time of Sodom and Gomorrah." She was right. Polyamory is old fashioned freakiness with a millennial name. 

For those of you who don't know what it actually means, it's what happens when people have more than one partner and everyone is cool with it. This means that A can date B and C and D while B dates E and F and G. And that all 7 of them know about each other, and are fine with whatever's going on. 

Normally the legs of my content don't stretch this far. I wouldn't have had any cause to think about polyamory today if Jidenna, a popular musician, who's also part Nigerian hadn't mentioned it. 

He tweeted the following.

"I believe in monogamy. I believe in polyamory. I believe in marriage. I believe in non-traditional union. There are agreements & compromises to be made in every relationship. Most of all, I believe in Love & Honesty as the foundation. I’m looking for wifey..."

I have many thoughts. The first is, STOP LYING. You can only realistically believe in all these things apart if you have several people living in your body. The moment you say you're looking for wifey, you've cast your lot with monogamy.

Monogamy isn't actually as inflexible as it sounds. It simply means that in the event that someone dies and someone asks, "Who is the husband/ Who is the wife/ Who is the boyfriend/ Who is the girlfriend" only one person stands up.

I suppose my main problem with polyamory is that people are generally terrible at talking about love, sex and everything else in between. If honesty is difficult enough when there are two, then it will be impossible with 4. Someone is going to be unhappy in this confection of modernity, and when it unravels it won't be a shouting match it'll be a battle royale between however many people are engaging in your love cult at any given time. 

And then, what do you do if the minor bae is trying to take your place as the main bae? Who gets the largest share of the property if someone dies without a will? How do you coordinate everything? Do you have a group chat for all the people in your relationship? When you fight does everyone join in? Do people take sides? What do you do if the circle keeps expanding and at the end you've entered into a polyamorous relationship with your sibling?

 All of these questions are incredibly stressful. It's things like this that make me feel rather conservative. I would rather you cheated on me with full confidence than tried to talk me into anything quite so modern as polyamory. I will be thirty soon. You should save that stuff for my children. 

I think I have hyperventilated myself to a conclusion. 

If polyamory works for you then that's fantastic. For me, it'll be a really quick way to a nervous breakdown. Breaking up with one person is a near fatal event, doing it with three is tying yourself to your own funeral pyre and flinging your ashes into a volcano. 

ps...

I reviewed the lyrics of Bambi and if the song is to be believed his grandfather had 7 wives and he refers to his love life as a spiderweb. So I suppose that explains everything.