Essays & thinking
Ideas worth arguing, things worth saying, and whatever else I have a genuine point of view on.
Why I Think Research Will Be the Most Valuable Layer of African AI
Everyone is building AI models and apps. The layer that will actually be scarce and defensible in African markets is culturally grounded data — and almost nobody is building it properly.
Read post →The Achebe Conversation Nobody Is Having Before the Idris Elba Film
The most important Nigerian novel is being adapted by the culture it was written against, and that fact deserves more than a press release.
Read post →What African Football Coaches Are Getting Wrong About Tactics
African football's collective underperformance is not an infrastructure problem alone — a significant part of it is tactical, and it starts with what is being coached at the foundational level.
Read post →The Real Cost of Training Nobody Takes Seriously
Compliance training that exists only to generate a certificate is not training — it is documentation of the decision not to train.
Read post →On the Nigerian Relationship With Visibility
The "forming" accusation is not about humility — it is a social weapon used to keep people small, and it has cost Nigeria more talent than we can measure.
Read post →We Were Never Taught to Want the Right Things
Nigeria gave us a success template designed for a different era. The problem is not that we want too much. The problem is that we were handed a definition of success that was never designed to produce what we actually need.
Read post →The Influencer Economy Has an Accountability Problem
Brands are spending serious money on influencer marketing and cannot tell you what it produced — because the metrics the industry runs on measure attention, not revenue.
Read post →Prosperity Gospel and Startup Culture Have the Same Problem
Prosperity gospel and hustle-culture startup content are selling the same product — certainty in an uncertain world — and both cost you the analytical thinking that would actually improve your odds.
Read post →The Myth of the Perfect Signing
One player does not fix a broken system — they get absorbed by it or they leave, and the club is back to square one with a lighter wallet and a longer rebuild ahead of them.
Read post →Why African Businesses Are Making Decisions Without Knowing Their Customers
The real problem is not a lack of data — it is that most African businesses do not even recognise what they do not know, and are confidently making decisions on that basis.
Read post →Stop Explaining Yourself
There is a version of over-explaining that feels like communication but is actually anxiety management. Stop outsourcing your conviction to people who cannot evaluate the thing you are building.
Read post →Why Every Struggling Club Thinks a New Manager Is the Answer
Boards sack managers to signal action without doing the harder work of examining the squad, the recruitment dysfunction, and the ownership model that created the problem in the first place.
Read post →What Building a Pet Insurance Company in Nigeria Taught Me About Timing
Most Nigerian market failures are timing failures, not idea failures — and the hardest part is that timing requires the kind of patience our culture actively punishes.
Read post →Your Mates Are Not Your Benchmark
The cultural pressure to measure your life against your mates assumes you all started from the same place, want the same things, and are running the same race — none of which is true.
Read post →Theatre of Dreams Quick Fixes
The stat that should end the argument - Manchester United has won 5 consecutive Premier League matches only 5 times in 13 years, and Amorim wasn't the problem people said he was.
Read post →Ferguson's "Boys" Are Ruining Man United
Five stories of how Ferguson protected his players and club from the media - and why it's so jarring that the same ex-players he went to war for now do exactly what he fought against.
Read post →Too Impatient for Systems?
Manchester United's bad season has three camps of opinion - and if you watch the actual matches rather than listening to the media, you know which camp is right.
Read post →SEO is Dead, Init?
When people can no longer get something to work, they declare it dead. SEO hasn't died - but if your content strategy hasn't changed since ChatGPT, you might as well have buried it yourself.
Read post →Customers Will Shock You
A story about installment payments, Lux Soap, and why building on assumptions about what customers want is a fast route to wasted resources.
Read post →The Price of Progress
Nigeria's telecom sector is getting its first major tariff increase in 12 years. A breakdown of why the increase is overdue, what it will cost consumers, and what regulators must do to make it worth paying.
Read post →Time for Pep Guardiola to Bow Out
Pep Guardiola's Manchester City crisis is not about Rodri's injury - it's a generational transition failure that £994m couldn't fix, and that only two managers in history have ever truly solved.
Read post →Viewing Achebe's Okonkwo Through 21st Century Lenses?
A defence of Okonkwo from Things Fall Apart - why judging him through 21st century lenses misreads Achebe entirely, and why the upcoming Idris Elba film will only truly fail if it makes Okonkwo the villain.
Read post →Saka, Sancho, Southgate and the Curse of Hindsight
On Gareth Southgate's Saka decision after EURO 2020 - and how hindsight bias makes us judge every hard decision by its outcome rather than the courage it took to make it.
Read post →"No Means No" in Marketing Too
On the fine line between trying to sell to people and becoming the kind of marketer who chases leads across platforms, floods inboxes, and turns every comment section into a hunting ground.
Read post →Why You Gotta Go and Fuck With The Program?
A scene from The Wire explains what happens when you assume you know what your customers want - and why asking is never optional.
Read post →Social Media, Ageism, and the Many Versions of Truth
Five things the Wole Soyinka social media storm revealed about Nigerian ageism, self-serving interpretations of African culture, and why the older generation should be quietly grateful the youth haven't read Fanon.
Read post →The Psychology of Settling
Why Nigerians keep voting for lesser evils even when better alternatives exist - and the psychological war that makes us write off good candidates before they even get started.
Read post →A Very Important Death
When Nigeria's First Lady dies after eating from a local eatery, a DSS investigation pursues the obvious suspects - but the real killers have been sneaking into kitchens to play with what they call Sweet Salt.
Read post →Confronting Demons
After a rousing sermon about confronting your fears, Laja decides to put his faith to the test by using a folk remedy to see what his dog has been barking at every night since his father died.
Read post →The Set-Up
Thirteen years of diligence, a sudden promotion, documents you signed too fast, and three DSS agents waiting outside your house. A second-person Lagos office noir.
Read post →A Promise Kept
A man's cruelty to a helpless old woman on a Lagos road unravels in the worst possible way when sleep finally comes.
Read post →Ignorance is Bliss
A man who swore off weed to win back his girlfriend forgets to throw away the last wrap before she shows up - and somehow gets away with it entirely.
Read post →Not Yet Uhuru!
A guerrilla freedom fighter uncovers his commander's betrayal and leads his men to execute him - but the story turns on a final revelation about who the real traitor has been all along.
Read post →Routine
Every Sunday, Thomas wakes up early and gets ready for church with one purpose - catching the eye of Sister Veronica, the angelic presence who has completely reformed his behaviour, until an announcement destroys everything.
Read post →Gone Too Late
The irreverent life and death of Alani - the town rebel who refused to cry at birth, got thrown out of both church and mosque, fathered over 200 children, and died exactly as he had lived.
Read post →The Engagement
A Warri bride arrives at her Ijebu engagement ceremony with a quiet plan to disrupt the tradition of picking the Bible from the engagement table - and these Ijebu people are about to learn.
Read post →Change!
A satirical short story about a man who dreams Buhari's 2015 inauguration unleashes a swift anti-corruption crackdown that arrests every political heavyweight in the country, then wakes up to reality.
Read post →Conformity!
A political allegory tracking the slow corruption of Muma Buri, a principled security chief who compromises his values step by step until he finds himself in alliance with the very men he swore to bring down.
Read post →Valentine's Day at Aso Rock
A satirical script imagining the morning of February 14, 2015 inside the Presidential residence, as GEJ and Dame Peace navigate Valentine's Day with an election ten days away.
Read post →My Name is Abdullahi
The story of Abdullahi, a northern Nigerian boy who loses everyone he loves to the violence tearing through his state, told in his own words as he sets out alone with his father's cattle.
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