Afrobeat singer Mayorkun has hinted at marriage, revealing he’s off the singles market.

In a recent interview on Arise TV, he disclosed that he’s committed to someone special, although he prefers to keep their identity private for now.

Mayorkun said: “I am off the market. There is no chance for any other girl. I am not going to mention my partner’s name or give any details about her now. My fingers are crossed on that. But eventually, everyone will know her.”

This isn’t the first time Mayorkun has been linked to someone. He made his relationship public with UK-based Nigerian choreographer Cocainna, sharing photos and videos on Snapchat.

However, it seems that relationship has ended, as Mayorkun confirmed they’re no longer together but maintain a good relationship.

A video surfaced of him being close to Dorathy Bachor at a birthday party in 2023 surface online. 

However, neither party has confirmed or denied the rumoured relationship.

[TheNation]

For a sermon that urges people to “understand their terrain”, it is ironic how many things Pastor Poju Oyemade got wrong in his message that compares realities between Nigeria and the USA. Most of the blowback to the respected pastor focuses on the controversial claim that Nigerian doctors are trained with a mere N500,000, but his sermon contains the same fallacious claims Nigerian leaders make when they relativise their country with advanced economies. It is one thing for the average talker on social media to construe subsidised medical education as a government charity to doctors, but it is another thing when a cleric repeats it. How come those who mouth these things never stop to ask why the government at the state and federal levels chooses to subsidise rather than demand full monetary value?

Nigerian universities, public or private, cannot come anywhere close to medical training in US schools simply because of affordability. For an under-producing economy, there is a practical limit to what can be charged if you want people to be able to afford medical training. Already, we are a society short of doctors; erecting any more financial barriers in their training system will be hugely detrimental. It is in the interest of the government and society to keep the costs of doctor training low enough. Can the existing arrangement be better structured to enhance value for the parties involved? Absolutely! But we cannot progress by making misleading arguments that fail to weigh the current calibration of interests by the parties involved.

In addition to the affordability, countries where they charge far more for medical training are incomparable to Nigeria in terms of training facilities and amenities. Do we want to compare Johns Hopkins Medical School with even our UCH, where their electricity supply was cut off for 100 days plus? It was just in January that medical students at UCH protested the prolonged power outage. When you listen to the heartbreaking accounts of how they coped during that dark period, you will be amused that someone thought comparing us with a country where no one worries over something as basic as electricity makes for a logical argument. Doctors at Johns Hopkins pay more, but their training also returns value for money. Can the same be said of Nigerian doctors? How many times has Pastor Poju heard of doctors in the USA going on strike over salaries, like they frequently do in Nigeria? Even our leaders know the difference, and that is why successive presidents opt for foreign hospitals rather than local ones staffed with N500,000 trained doctors!

Some of the arguments that Pastor Poju made in that video reprise what you read on social media by netizens, given to blindly defending Nigeria. One of them is that Nigerians work harder abroad while those at home are shiftless. He specifically said, “If you ask a Nigerian to do two jobs, he will curse your life out.” Really? Does the opportunity to take multiple jobs exist for Nigerians as it does for their counterparts elsewhere? To have a society where people can take multiple jobs, you must also have a productive economy that rewards. When the pastor looks around in his Lagos abode and sees the thousands of people who leave their homes at 4am to return at night, does he think they remain poor because they do not do enough?

Since the pastor’s data on Nigerians’ work culture is anecdotal, let me offer him one too. The other day, a well-meaning activist shared a video of herself scolding a mother who had brought her underage daughter to assist her in her sweeping job at 5am. We later learned from that poor mother that she leaves her home in Oworo by 3am to resume at the job at Ikoyin by 5am, and for a salary of N19,800! Will Pastor Poju agree that such a woman’s poverty is a consequence of her not taking a second job or driving for Uber? I can offer him more examples of how Nigeria’s problem of undervaluing labour contributes to the poor work culture. Once, I wrote a column on the poor remuneration of labour in Nigeria and I was shocked when several readers got back to me with figures of what they earn across sectors. The details were so ridiculous; I do not know how possible it is to survive on those salaries. For people to raise families on those amounts, they must already work on multiple fronts.

Before we accuse Nigerians of laziness compared to their immigrant counterparts, let us be sure that we have provided them with similar opportunities, but they failed to take them. Each time I think of the Oworo-to-Ikoyi woman’s 11-year-old daughter who joins her mother to do a menial task for a pittance, I wonder how exhausted she must be by a life that has not even started! If she grows up to despise work, some privileged person who does not know where she has been will compare her to her mate in the USA and conclude she is “lazy”. I am admittedly sensitive to an unnuanced comparison between Nigerians at home and abroad.

Pastor Poju made an important point about “employment data”, which he says does not capture the reality of Nigeria’s underground economy. I agree with him on that score. Truly, we can make a legitimate argument that the mathematics of “less than a dollar per day”, which international organisations use to count the number of poor people in the third world, focuses too much on what we lack at the expense of what we have. Those measurement scales are designed to be universal and can therefore elide the complexities of people’s lives in their respective countries. Yet, that should not becloud the reality of the harshness of our economic situation. If we decide to calibrate our own barometer for calculating poverty in the country, it should be to more accurately pinpoint where the problem lies and how it might be addressed, rather than being merely defensive against external agents.

We are a society so invested in faux patriotism that when we challenge poverty figures, we do so simply to contend with the international organisations that calculated them and not necessarily because we have developed a better understanding of the problem. You will hear economic advisors share spurious examples, such as the price of a bottle of Coke in the USA or how much a plate of food in Lekki Phase One costs. Those are unsophisticated understandings of what constitutes poverty in the world and its realistic effects in a modern world. Even Pastor Poju had yet another anecdote of a woman who bought wigs to prove that Nigeria might not be as poor. If a person can invest enough capital to sell wigs at N250,000 each, can she really be classified as part of the country’s informal economy system?

The people who feel the effects of these issues keenly and express their angst on social media are not, contrary to Pastor Oyemade’s wild assertion, being “programmed to hate their country”. That claim misunderstands the social terrain that precipitates these discussions and the issues that will not disappear simply because people engage in some syrupy positive speak. It is not self-hatred, expressing frustrations with your country. Those who act otherwise are not necessarily patriotic; they are just partisan. Many of them will turn coat the day the government they dislike comes to power.

It is also a part of the expression of our citizenship to stand up to a country that diminishes us. James Baldwin once said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticise her perpetually.” As a cleric, Pastor Oyemade must also know that not every prophet in the Bible spoke peace to Israel at its crucial moments. Some denounced their homeland with curses. Was that (self-)hate or exhortation to righteousness? Those who still criticise Nigeria do so because they care and do not want to see it drown in injustices. I will take that over their indifference any day.

I met Quadri Alabi, the child of destiny, on Tuesday, at the News Central TV in Ogba, Ikeja. They – Quadri, his lawyer, Inibehe Effiong and Ms. Hassana Nurudeen, co-founder of Ray of Hope Prisoner Outreach – were coming out of the studios after an interview as I was stepping in for the newspaper review segment of the same breakfast programme.

I held the young lad’s hand, looked into his eyes and wished him well and shook hands with Inibehe, who I thanked for his labour of love.

I didn’t watch the interview live but the breakfast crew of Olive Emodi, Joe Hanson and Gbenga Aborowa, told me it is a must watch. And having watched the video clip, I concur. It is one interview every well-meaning Nigerian should watch because it speaks to the real issues of our law enforcement’s ruination – the fact that the police, the country’s primary law enforcement agency is not fit for purpose.

I referred to Quadri as a child of destiny because right from the day he intuitively jumped in front of Mr. Peter Obi’s campaign convoy in 2023, he came across as someone destined for a divine purpose. If you ask him, as I did last Tuesday, why he did what he did on that fateful day, you will not get an answer just as I didn’t.

During the interview, Hassana Nurudeen said the NGO, which she co-founded with Stephen Oguyinka, together with one Oyiga Michael, a social media influencer, organised a football match at the Kirikiri Correctional Centre between Twitter Influencers and Kirikiri inmates.

It was at that event, part of the group’s prison outreach, that she met a guy called Jonathan, who had been in detention for about four months because he was owing someone N1.2 million. After the match, the NGO did crowd funding to raise the money and secured Jonathan’s freedom.

It was in the course of a thank-you-visit that Jonathan told Hassana that the boy who stood in front of Peter Ob’s convoy was actually his prison mate. She called Quadri’s mother on phone and the distraught woman confirmed his son’s ordeal. She took the case to the court of public opinion by escalating it in the social media, which, by the way, the Sultan of Sokoto recently described as a tool worse than a terrorist organisation. A pity!

When the story went viral on Twitter, many Nigerians, including Peter Obi, called Inibehe to intervene. And he did. After interfacing with Hassana and convincing himself that it was a case of persecution, he took remedial steps to ensure that Quadri regained freedom.

First, he escalated the matter by bringing it to the attention of the appropriate authorities, before proceeding to the court to find out the status of the case, after which he applied for the necessary documentations and then made an application to the Apapa Magistrate Court where the Magistrate who had earlier scheduled the case for April 28 agreed to hear it on April 17. Then the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecution, DPP, Babajide Martins, reviewed the case file and found out “for a fact that truly Quadri had no case to answer.” There was no evidence to support his arrest or the effort to prosecute him for armed robbery. With the DPP’s advisory, Inibehe and his team went back to the court and the Magistrate implemented the advice and Quadri was accordingly discharged.

Inibehe didn’t just jump on the case to chase clout. “I carried out my own personal investigation. I don’t jump on cases because they have gone viral or become sensational. Before I get on any matter, I must have personal conviction and I must have done due diligence. I met with Quadri at the Kirikiri Correctional Centre and had an interview with him for over two hours and thereafter spoke with his mother. I did everything as a lawyer to have them contradict themselves but they were consistent and the sequence of events supported their position. I was convinced thereafter that this was another case of abuse of power by the police,” Inibehe told his interviewers.

What did the police do to investigate the case? Nothing! And if not for providence, Quadri would still be in prison today just as there are hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people languishing in jail for crimes they knew nothing about. Hassana said the NGO secured the release of about 22 inmates who were wrongfully accused and jailed since 2022. In 2024, they secured the release of two minors, one of them a 15-year-old lad who had spent about 10 years in prison unjustifiably.

And what was Quadri’s crime? The touts in his neck of the woods thought he must have made a heck of a fortune after his day in the sun in 2023 and wanted their share. The baale of the Amukoko community where they lived not only joined in the conspiracy but summoned Quadri’s mother, threatening that if the money that had allegedly been given to her son was not split in two, she wouldn’t see him again. What did the police do to investigate this? Nothing!

On the day Quadri was arrested, he was coming back from work and didn’t know that there had been a fight earlier in the day in the neighbourhood. The touts stole his phone and money before handing him over to the police who locked him up in a cell with four strangers. In the morning when the complainants – a man and his wife – came to the police station, the suspects were paraded and they couldn’t identify him. Yet, the police at Amukoko Police Station detained him for a week before charging him to court in January. In Kirikiri prison, because he couldn’t afford to pay the marshall, he was subjected to the indignity of cleaning up faeces from morning until 6pm.

Inibehe, who insists that Quadri’s case is a painful example of the putrefying corruption, monstrous impunity, and pervasive injustice in the Nigeria Police Force, demanded that the Lagos State Police Commissioner, Jimoh Moshood, and Inspector General of Police should, as a matter of urgency, remove the DPO of Amukoko Divisional Headquarters, CSP Ismaila Olaniyi and subject him to orderly room trial along with the Investigating Police Officer, IPO, Inspector Odigbe Samuel, and other officers who participated in what he called the “evil, sinister, oppressive, and corrupt scheme of framing-up a teenager for armed robbery at the behest of rogue Area Boys.” He also demanded a N100 million compensation and public apology from the police.

“There are many Quadris languishing in detention centres across Nigeria because of the unbridled criminality, lawlessness, and lack of accountability in the Police institution and the weakness of the justice system. History will vindicate the just,” he said.

But CP Jimoh Moshood, would have none of that. Insisting that Quadri’s statement after arrest indicated that he was 18 years and not 17, he emphasized that no one was above the law, regardless of age. “I personally checked the record at Amukoko Police Station. He wrote down his age as 18, and that is the basis on which we proceeded with the investigation.”

Pooh-poohing Quadri’s birth certificate presented by Inibehe, Moshood said the documents must be verified. “The best person to confirm someone’s age is their parent. A birth certificate or affidavit of age declaration must be thoroughly investigated. These days, with AI and digital tools, anything can be fabricated.”

The irony is that the police neither verified the documents nor sought clarification from Quadri’s mother.

But his argument sounded hollow, as always. Anyone who knows Moshood right from his days as the Force Public Relations Officer will not be surprised because he is one officer with whom every conversation sooner than later runs off the rails. With him, well-reasoned arguments might as well be whispers in the wind and no matter how compelling the points are, they won’t get through. So, Nigerians need not bother with his defence of the indefensible.

But it is sad that even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, CP Moshood is still lying about the facts of the matter. First, his claim that the DPO personally arrested Quadri after receiving a distress call is a lie. It is also not true that Quadri made a confessional statement as claimed by Moshood who should know that by law, as ruled by the Supreme Court, if someone is to make a statement that may implicate him, it must either be on video or in the presence of a counsel.

But what I found most bizarre is Moshood’s rage that Inibehe took Quadri to a “presidential candidate after his discharge.”

Warning that politics should not be mixed with criminal investigations, he said: “If someone commits a crime, it doesn’t matter if they are close to a presidential candidate or a media personality—they should face the law… When the boy was asked to go, the lawyer took him to that presidential candidate first.”

That got me thinking. Could it be that the reason the police framed a 17-year-old minor for armed robbery was because of his presumed association with Peter Obi, the political establishment’s bête noire? That, indeed, is the tragedy of Nigeria under President Bola Tinubu’s watch.

“A viable polity is not a committee of vultures, hungry for the blood of all, except their own, nor is it a choir of praise singers and boot lickers who criticise corruption but sit expectantly in the corruption lounge begging for an invitation to the dining table. The hallmark of a viable polity is a civil service that understands the difference between national service and personal service and loyalty to the nation as against loyalty to individuals.”

The Pan Atlantic University’s 18^th Inaugural Lecture was recently delivered by Professor Emeka Osuji of its School of Management and Social Sciences. Nduka Nwosu who has been following Osuji’s  trends over the years till date, reminisces on the high points.

How time flies. The 18^th inaugural lecture of Pan Atlantic University which held at the Lagos Business School, Lekki, was one auspicious moment of reunion and reminiscences by old friends after many years apart. For Pan Atlantic University, it was a coming of age, an 18-year track record of academic excellence and very solid on the ground.

The inaugural lecture was marked by the pomp and pageantry of academic procession in the serene LBS environment and delivered by one of its eminent scholars, Professor Emeka Osuji, distinguished Professor of Economics, who while introducing himself  reminded the audience he had been in this business of postulation of theories bordering on the subject for over a quarter of a century.

Osuji has come of age for those who know him. He is many personalities rolled into one, each personality struggling to over power the other. However the Osuji dominant persona realised mid-stream the  direction of the wind, adjusted his compass and made a good sail.

Osuji defined the basis for his lecture with an invocation: “An inaugural lecture is more than a milestone. It is a declaration of purpose, a commitment to continue to push the boundaries of thought and a challenge to embrace the unknown. Beyond that, an inaugural lecture is an Initiation Rite that welcomes an academic as a High Priest of his chosen Temple of Learning, authorised by his academic ancestors to break kola nuts, pour libation(s) and preach the Sacred Words of his ancestors in the Temple of Knowledge.”

This reporter once sat beside Osuji, Ben Akabueze and Ifueko Omoigui-Okauru (MFR) in the Statistics and Accounting classes of Dr. Ikechukwu Nwobodo, then a staff of NNPC and a part time lecturer at the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Lagos, and Mr. R.S. Wallace,   an Economics First Class graduate from the London School of Economics who lectured in Accounting and did not hesitate to educate you he was ICAN and ICAN was Wallace. He set the ICAN examinations off head and if you wanted to pass his papers, it was in your interest to listen to him, not any other lecturer who would hide behind a PhD and could not set questions off curve.

Wallace resolved all the complex equations and balanced his accounts to produce a perfect balance sheet. If there were students who could not follow Wallace and Nwobodo at first instance, three people stood out as their possible assistants who could help out. Their brains raced sharply ahead of everyone else. Their commentaries were suggestive they had known these figures and calculations earlier before now. Where were they coming from? Everyone asked. Osuji rattled his way through each lesson discussion and Ifueko always predicted where these lecturers were headed; she buried herself in the Science Department complex totally disconnected from humanity especially on weekends.

I was not sure if Osuji had time to read for too long but he had time for every issue that was of national significance and he made his relevant contributions with his commonsensical take on the solution to every problem. He picked the issues that mattered as the lecture proceeded and with a little extra research, he was done. He loved books and much later after graduation, wrote profusely as a journalist who had a column in the Vanguard as well as being  Deputy Business Editor.

In the end Ben Akabueze made a First Class, Ifueko also made a First Class and was the Valedictorian and best all round student of her set. She went ahead to study at the Imperial College London and the Harvard Kennedy School Cambridge while Akabueze went to the LBS and the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

Emeka Osuji emerged with a Second Class Upper, surprisingly though because he was in that troika of the most brilliant of their time in the faculty.

While Ifueko chaired the FIRS distinguishing herself with her Restral Consult, board chairmanships and memberships,  Akabueze made it through Price Waterhouse, Citibank, Fidelity Bank, UBA, stepping out successfully as the driver of the top lofty seat of Sterling Bank then NAL Merchant Bank to become a commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget in Lagos State and later Nigeria’s Director of Budget.

Osuji on the other hand was several things at different times working as a Special Assistant and adviser to three distinguished men of banking and finance. Otunba Balogun, Pascal Dozie and Chu SP Okongwu definitely found Osuji’s academic brilliance something to rely on. Even after leaving FCMB, Balogun found him useful for regular contacts, mentioning his name as one of his reliable foot soldiers. He did not disappoint.

As Okongwu’s special assistant, Osuji, at the instance of his principal Okongwu, who was the Honourable Minister of Finance, organised the powerful delegation of Nigerian businessmen and women, corporate chieftains and industry leaders as well as government officials whom President Ibrahim Babangida mandated to visit the Asian Tiger countries, see what they could learn from them, return home to implement same and move the economy to the next destination. Chief MKO Abiola was the head of that delegation with Chief Sonny Odogwu as his deputy. Okongwu was the anchor head of the delegation reprsenting Mr. President. It was one moment of a historical turn around when Babangida welcomed the travelers of about fifty men and women to Dodan Barracks. Osuji also had the additional task of inviting bank CEOs for weekly dialogues with the honourable minister.

Osuji, a man whose compass reminds him its time to unhook his moors and set sail for his next destination, disengaged from Okongwu’s office to start a finance company at a time new banks were emerging in the banking and finance sector. We all taught he was going to start a new bank using what he had learnt at the then International Merchant Bank (IMB) and the First City Merchant Bank (FCMB) and his vast contacts in the banking industry and government circles.

His finance company Leverage suffered the set backs of the time but he was not one to give up, picking a number of lessons in buying and selling, in lending and borrowing and in real estate while going back to run a degree programme in law at his  alma mater and a bachelor of law at the Nigerian Law School. Of course with the prompting of his elder brother, Osuji had enrolled for a Master’s degree programme in Economics shortly after his first degree and went ahead to write his  doctorate in the same department. Osuji is also an alumnus of the Lagos Business School (LBS), the Wharton School of Business, the University of Pennsylvania, to strengthen his negotiation skills, and the Harvard Business School (HBS). It was also not too surprising he disengaged from his finance company at the prodding of Dr. Pascal Dozie, to join him at the headquarters of Diamond Bank where he was working in the chairman’s office as the special assistant. He later moved into the Diamond Pension Fund Custodian Limited as chief executive and has had the privilege of being called to board chairmanships and membership.

Again, before long, Osuji moved into academia, having explored the corporate world and seen it all, convinced academic excellence was what he needed to distinguish himself while churning out his books as his evidence of scholarship.

Osuji reminds me of Dr.Pius Okigbo whose sibling was the famous poet Christopher Okigbo,  seamlessly used his literary prowess to support his knowledge of world history and how economics determined the evolution of civilisation and the building of wealth among nations. He did this interplay between literati and economics to the joy of listeners at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Victoria Island.

Osuji’s perfection of the enigmatic persona in the delivery of his economic sermon of the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog, quickly takes you to the Achebean literary epistles on colonial rule and its effect on the native people, the fairy tales of The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Fagunwa’s foray into fantasy, reality and religious didacticism where men walk down the streets with their heads and drink palm wine through their noses, a parallel universe of magic and the occult. Here familiar characters such as are portrayed in the historical fiction work of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, live a double life because they have the magical powers of disguise or deception used to short change the less fortunate of mankind.

In Osuji’s dialogue with his audience he summarises the two universes he is familiar with , one where men do not speak in the tongue of demons but angels, and the second where the characters create a voodoo universe simply to confuse the rest of us if only to loot our collective commonwealth. It is a scenario comparable to the deceptive characters in government and how colonial rule and independence have failed to resolve the formal and informal phenomenon of governance.

This is how he summarised the awkward situation in the proverbial zoo Republic of Animal Farm: “A viable polity is not a committee of vultures, hungry for the blood of all, except their own, nor is it a choir of praise singers and boot lickers who criticise corruption but sit expectantly in the corruption lounge begging for an invitation to the dining table. The hallmark of a viable polity is a civil service that understands the difference between national service and personal service and loyalty to the nation as against loyalty to individuals.”

One could  hear from his student the echoes of an Okongwu philosophy and ethics of governance for while in government he believed it was demeaning for him to be discussing oil blocks or how to inflate contracts. You could also feel in Osuji’s character the Catholicism that moulded Dozie’s character in his dealings with the wider world.

In his microcosmic paradise, Osuji could not have done what he did with efficiency and best results without having behind him a wife and partner whose devotion and love remain a constant till date. Emile Osuji, an executive director at the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) is a non-pareil in Professor Osuji’s life.

You would think the Osuji persona probably equates with that of his favourite philosopher Aristotle or Isaac Newton who would forget to take care of their well being for the sake of knowledge. Osuji is a town crier in corporate Nigeria but also understands and responds to the needs of his grassroots constituency. Last December he and his wife donated a hospital to his Obiangwu community. Unfortunately he is not your everyday politician and does not crave for visibility for its sake. The vibrant Mezie Owerri he belongs to is a  cultural institution that is a moving spirit of development in his geographical location. Among the members are Nick Oparandudu, a former banker at Diamond and Commissioner for Finance and later Works under Governor Rochas Okorocha, and Dr. Reginald Ihebuzor who was also a Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning under Governor Emeka Ihedioha and currently the Coordinating consultant of the Niger Delta Development Bank, as well as Chijioke Eke, an Abuja based IT guru.

Professor Osuji is a man of lofty ideas and landmark achievements, not waiting for history to define him but stoops to gather what he needs to make history. Therefore, while hollering three hearty cheers to him for the moment, let us not be caught unawares for what lies ahead in the ecosystem of accomplishments he designs for himself.