To whom it may concern: I am a ‘very’ Ijebu man. Rest the DMs.

My chart of the week 🇳🇬 - Foreign investments into Nigeria almost doubled in Q1 2026, from $4.7bn to $10.4bn. - Most of the growth came from portfolios. And in this case, it’s mainly foreigners buying government bonds, treasury bills. What’s the attraction? High interest rate and stable naira. - If interest rate falls and naira weakens significantly, the portfolio investments can go away as quickly as they came. That’s how it works globally. - FDI is the real deal, because that’s the money that goes into building real businesses that create jobs for people and tax revenues for government. - FDI has grown too, by $9m, and it’s really small altogether. $135m FDI can’t do much. My personal rule of thumb - you need around $20k capital investment to create one job in Nigeria; that’s 7,000 jobs at most, if AI doesn’t take them away. 😊 Key takeaway: FPI growth is a good sign. The job now is to convert that market confidence into more direct investments in real businesss - foreign and local.

Running 3-4 separate elections nationally every 4 years is too expensive for Nigeria. I think we need a cheaper way to get representation without cutting people out. My pretty rough idea of what I expect it to look like: - One national election. Nigerians vote once for councillors in their ward. Those councillors form the LGA parliament and elect the LGA chairman from among themselves. No need for separate candidates for LGA Chairman. - The state House of Assembly is elected by the full pool of councillors in that state. Once elected, the state HoA members choose the governor from among themselves. The National Assembly and President are elected the same way by HoA members across all states. - Once you move up, you resign your lower seat. Either the party fills the vacancy, or we hold a by-election for that ward/LGA. One person can’t hold seats in more than one tier of government. - If you want to be a LG chairman, governor, or president, member of state or national house of assembly, you must first win as a councillor. That ensures only people who’ve proven themselves locally get a shot at higher office. - The trade-off is that the public only votes directly for councillors. After that, it’s indirect election. Some will call that “less democratic”, and I think that’s a fair point. It probably means godfatherism will become a bigger problem. P.S. Purely academic exercise. I thought of Nigerian politics. First in a while.

If you’re going to compensate everyone who suffered losses from every policy change, the country would see become bankrupt. Because you’re then going to open the floodgate for all manners of compensation. Even electric vehicle owners could ask for refund of their road taxes, because when many of them bought their EVs, it was nil tax. Of course, government should give enough notice for every policy change but you can’t insure everyone against all policy risks. £10bn compensation on top of £152bn deficit doesn’t add up. Feels like a well-deserved backlash for Mr. Burnham.

Reform UK want to raise the VAT threshold from £90k to £150k. Sounds good for small businesses in that bracket. No VAT means cheaper prices. Plus, businesses stuck at £89k right now because they don’t want to charge VAT can then grow to £149k before being stuck again. On one hand, that extra growth is a plus for the economy. But on the other hand, you create a bigger problem for businesses near £150k who didn’t have to slow down before. And that downside outweighs the upside. On top of that, you lose billions of VAT revenue with this policy. How are you going to find the money to fill the hole you plan to dig? Cut waste in government as usual? What I would do? I’d remove the VAT threshold and charge VAT on everything at a single rate. No exemptions. Right now government give 0% VAT on things like food because they think it benefits the poor. But rich people buy more food so they benefit more. If you put VAT on everything at a single rate, it makes administration easier and raises a lot more revenue. Then you can spend the extra cash to support those that truly need it. Put your fiscal advisers to work and let them draft a proper policy. This one doesn’t work.

Of course, I can finally tweet that Arsenal are the EPL champions. COYG.

I have a lot of football sense. I know that from PlayStation. But I went get to the pitch to play, everything just goes away. 😀

First draft of my Awo-anchored speech is ready. 😉

That many middle class people enroll their kids into private schools, because public school education isn’t great, suggests two things: - We can raise the money from people to fund quality public education so we all don’t have to individually worry about school fees. - The competence to deliver quality education exists among us. Quality public education is essentially private education with the benefit of economies of scale. But it looks like we have a fundamental ‘incentive’ problem. When people don’t have personal interest in a venture, they tend not to give their best. It partly explains why private schools and other private ventures outshine their government-owned counterparts.

It’s been more than 100 days into 2026, and there are still Tier 1 companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange that are yet to release their 2025 audited financials. Investor confidence? Maybe regulators like CBN for banks, are partly to blame? Kudos to those that have already. Some of them could publish their Q1 results in a week or two.

Nigeria currently produces less than 2 million tonnes of steel annually. I’ve read on your website about an overly ambitious plan to produce 10 Mt per annum in 2030. God help you. Even if the goal is achieved and all the 10 Mt steel are exported, it doesn’t put Nigeria in the top 10 steel exporters in 2030 let alone in 2027. Iran is currently number 10; they produce 30 Mt and export 10 Mt annually. Wake up from your slumber. PS: Data is primarily based on 2024.

Everyone is eventually going to become a manager in some way, and I say this quite loosely. You may not have a big team of real humans to manage, but you’ll probably have a team of AI agents you direct to help get stuff done.

Europeans didn’t introduce the slave trade to Africa. Our ancestors were already selling each other long before Europeans arrived. It simply became far more lucrative when they showed up. It was business. Europeans benefited, and African slave traders benefited as well. Many descendants of those prominent traders are still wealthy today. If an African state is going to ask the UK for reparations because they benefited from the slave trade, maybe we should first ask the families of wealthy African slave traders to pay reparations to their own countries or to the communities their ancestors raided. Of course, the issues are a lot more complex.

Working in an environment where you’re appraised highly for using AI responsibly is bliss. Shaming people for using AI in makes no sense to me. If AI helps you do to your job better and faster, there’s no point ignoring it just to prove you’re smart.

AI text detectors are almost useless. I tried it with an article I wrote it 2017; long before AI was born. Now the detector claims 69% of the text is AI-generated. Osalobua!

Human beings are interesting. Some rate AI above fellow humans. Same way they elevate humans above the Almighty creator, or even completely deny his existence. All because of some fancy innovations. Nkan kekere lo ma n jọ atheist loju. 😀

AI writes well because people have been writing well for so long. AI tools are trained on actual writings by real people. To now assume every good piece of writing is enabled by AI is so unfair to those who have crafted the art well before AI.

I am reminded that Nigeria has a national space agency and policy. Let’s put space ambitions to one side and focus on achieving 100% literacy and other priorities.

Generally, the political class have a higher proportion of smart and competent people than the rest of the population.

The printing press was revolutionary. Before it, ‘publishing’ a book took a very long time because every copy had to be written by hand. A scribe could spend 1 to 3 years copying a single Bible. When the printing press arrived in the 1400s, printers could make hundreds of copies of a book within months. Instead of one book every few years that the world was used to. That must have felt like astonishing progress. So when an AI tool completes in minutes what would have taken you a whole day, it’s not completely new. The world has seen something like this before. Many scribes probably lost their jobs when printing arrived, but the world didn’t end.

I don’t like it when people say Yorubas ‘corrupt’ foreign names, especially Arabic and English ones. We don’t corrupt them; we simply pronounce them in a way that fits the Yoruba sound system. That’s why Misbah becomes Musibau, or Peter becomes Peteru. It’s just a Yoruba thing. English does it too; many foreign names are often Anglicised. Arabic does the same; many non-Arab names in the Qur’an appear in Arabised forms. If ou prefer to retain the original pronunciation when speaking Yoruba, that’s perfectly fine. But we shouldn’t chastise people for Yorubanising foreign names. It’s a normal linguistic process. When I was much younger, I used to be upset when people called me ‘Nọjimu’, but not anymore, because I now agree that’s the Yorubanised version of my Arabic name.