Author: damazah@gmail.com

By Adeola Akinremi In August 2018, when I arrived at Johns Hopkins University–SAIS for my graduate to study Public Policy, I did not anticipate that President Bola Tinubu would become a case study for one of my classes. But he showed up. The course was Energy and Environment, and the case study was titled Remaking a Neglected Megacity: A Civic Transformation in Lagos State, 1999–2012. It was not only Johns Hopkins University. Harvard University studied it. Princeton University studied it. Cornell University and many other institutions in their league studied it. The subject was Lagos, and the man at the…

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arraigned Ali Bala and Yusuf Umar Anka before the Lagos State High Court in Ikeja over alleged fraud involving £110,000 and N500 million. The defendants were brought before trial judge Olukayode Ogunjobi on 10ncounte of money laundering, stealing and retention of stolen property. EFCC spokesperson Dele Oyewale stated this in a statement on Friday.  One of the counts alleged that the defendants, sometime in 2025 in Lagos, conducted financial transactions involving proceeds of unlawful activity in an attempt to conceal the source of £110,000 allegedly stolen. One of the counts alleged that…

Italian GP: Mercedes and Ferrari renew battle for supremacy in final practice LIVE!

Werner Herzog has a bit of a wild reputation. He’d like to set the record straight. “I’m the most organized, the most focused, the most friendly person you will ever see on a set,” the German director says. “Period.” Everything else, he adds, is “the craze of media who want to create a Werner Herzog that is a fiction.” This is, of course, the man who hauled a 320-ton steamship over a hill in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo (1982), and, on the shoot of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), also in the jungle, threatened to kill his star…

Assam AI Education: Samagra Shiksha, Assam, signed MoUs with six entities Google AI, IIT Madras-Bodhan AI, LEHS-Wadhwani AI, EkStep-AXL, Canva Education, and Educate Girls to integrate AI, digital tech, and modern pedagogy into school education. The initiative focuses on training 1 lakh teachers, evaluating student reading fluency, offering personalized learning, and retaining out-of-school girls.Assam AI Education: Samagra Shiksha, Assam, led by the Education Minister Ranoj Pegu, has signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with six prominent organisations for incorporating AI, digital technology, and new pedagogical approaches in the schooling education system of the state. The multi-stakeholder programme endeavours to improve public…

President Tinubu …a leader’s true test is not only what he does with power. It is what he leaves standing after he has gone: institutions that can survive him, people who can outperform him, systems that do not require his intervention and a political culture that does not confuse loyalty with competence… That is the test of the long game. In September 2018, when I arrived at Johns Hopkins University–SAIS to study Public Policy, I did not anticipate that President Bola Tinubu would become a case study for one of my classes. But he showed up. The course was Energy,…

Social media activist Martins Vincent Otse, otherwise known as VeryDarkMan, has apologised to all Nigeria’s security and enforcement agencies over his controversial remarks at the 66th Annual General Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. Mr Otse, in a video uploaded on his Facebook page on Friday, said he had reflected on his speech and realised that he was unfair to security personnel who were genuinely risking their lives to protect Nigerians. “To the families of these heroes that might have also felt offended by this speech, knowing fully well that their brother, their sister,…

I can’t stop thinking about Gloria Steinem’s living room. For years, Steinem gathered people in her New York City brownstone and asked them to sit together, without a head of the table, without hierarchy. She called them “Talking Circles.” She said the practice was inspired in part by Indigenous traditions of gathering in a circle, something Steinem wrote about in her 2015 memoir “My Life on the Road.” As a journalist and author focused on human connection and social health, that part of the book always stayed with me. “I was struck by how open and accessible she was,” Ann Shoket, CEO…

Less than three months after emerging from stealth, XDOF, a startup that collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots, is in late-stage talks to raise a Series B at a valuation of about $1.2 billion valuation led by 8VC, several people with knowledge of the deal said. XDOF was co-founded by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu (CEO) and Fred Shentu (CTO) in 2024. TechCrunch reported on the startup’s $70 million Series A in June, with participation from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital. XDOF wasn’t planning to raise again so soon after that round. But the company’s…

Sweden has confirmed 458 British citizens have been deported or forcibly removed by police since Brexit.It is the first time the scale of the deportations of citizens who failed to secure residency in Sweden post-Brexit has been made public and comes amid mounting criticism of a cruel and hardline approach to Britons who had chosen to make the country their home before Brexit.Some have been told to go after more than 25 years in the country and even vulnerable elderly people with dementia have been affected. One man was deported even though he had lived in the country since he…