Please note that this is just me stating that these are some of the articles I have written and published. Many of the reports here are not recent and should not be interpreted as such. The links to the original publications are provided at the bottom.
The Deradicalised is a five-part series. In 2016, the Nigerian government launched a multi-sectoral programme tagged “Operation Safe Corridor” to deradicalise and rehabilitate “low-risk” Boko Haram members and encourage insurgents to embrace peace. But years into its operation and after about a thousand people were graduated in different batches, extraordinarily little was really known about …
The deadly combination of a rigid lockdown, health workers’ industrial actions, and economic hardship occasioned by the pandemic led to a wave of unwanted pregnancies and unsafe abortions across Nigeria. Omolara* had an unsafe abortion this year and it nearly killed her. Since she gave birth to her first child last year, she has been …
Read more “How COVID-19 Upset Family Planning Services, Threatened Women’s Lives”
Behind the institution’s ranking as the best state polytechnic in Nigeria are a hardworking workforce and multiple stories of grief, depression, and regrets. Funmilayo* was 28 when she started working at The Polytechnic, Ibadan, as a youth corps member. In 2015, she was formally employed on a part-time basis as a teaching assistant. According to …
Read more “‘Slavery’ At The Polytechnic, Ibadan, Where Lecturers Are Paid N19,800 Monthly”
Have you been following the official Facebook page of that reputable media outlet or rather one of its many lookalikes? Telling the difference is increasingly getting difficult as scammers have now extended their duplication game beyond just the brand name and symbols. But while some of these pages share publications from the original news platforms, …
Read more “How Fake Facebook Pages Push Misinformation Using Famous News Brands”
Claim: A Facebook group shared 10 photographs, which it said were about the killing and brutalising of civilians in Obigbo, a community in Rivers State. Verdict: False. The claim is not true as the pictures have been traced to incidents in other states as well as in a different country. Full text Biafra Today, a group on …
Read more “10 Photos Used To Depict Obigbo Victims Are From Osun, Lagos, Others”
About three in 10 almajiri children in Nigeria are girls, but the world has hardly paid attention to how the controversial system of Islamic education affects them. In 2012, when she was only seven, Maymunah* left her home in Dandinshe, a small community in Kofar Ruwa, Kano State, for Makafin Dala. The only reason her …
Read more “The Almajiri Girl’s Long Distance Race To Relevance”
There are 33 million active monthly users of Facebook in Nigeria. There are also many millions of people exchanging information on Twitter, 280 characters at a time. But just like the country’s population of phone subscribers cannot be determined using only the number of SIM cards in circulation, it is also hard to say for sure because …
Read more “#EndSARS: The Trend And Threat Of Fake Social Media Accounts”
Insecurity has, for many years, occupied a central position among an array of dire problems Nigerians face. For people in the northeast, it manifests mainly as the Boko Haram insurgency. For those in other regions of the north and middle-belt, we have banditry, inter-communal conflicts, and clashes between herders and farming communities. In the south, …
Read more “Why Local Conflict-Reporting Lacks Depth And What Journalists Can Do Differently”
Thousands of women in Borno have had to raise their children alone because their husbands, arbitrarily accused of being members of Boko Haram, are jailed by the Nigerian Army. But they are not planning to give up hope. Hauwa has not heard from her husband in many years. In 2015, her town, Bama, Borno State, …
Read more “Knifar: Women Facing Forced Family Separation By Soldiers Cry Out”
Realising that the Nigeria Police cannot curb crime alone, vigilante groups in a southwest state have stuck to ancient practices of reducing insecurity and seem to be succeeding. When Olajide finally joined the Supreme Eiye Confraternity as a sophomore at the Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State, it was not because he wanted to stand out. He …
Read more “Insecurity Forcing Ogun Communities To Use Traditional Safeguards In Combatting Crime”