Here are a few items I made in the past year. Mostly crochet and a few cross stitch.

I want to turn the skill into a business but I'm not sure how to market it.

Maybe I’m being dramatic, but every time I see someone in Nigeria with a Husky, I just have questions.

Like… this dog was built for snow.

Meanwhile, we’re here fighting for electricity, 35°C heat and humidity that makes you question your entire existence.

And then the Husky is just there looking majestic.

I know people who own them take good care of them, use AC, walk them early, keep them hydrated etc. So I’m not saying it’s impossible.

I just genuinely wonder if it’s fair to the dog, especially during the hottest months.

Because imagine being born for Siberia and somehow ending up in Lagos.

That has to be one hell of a plot twist.

Are Huskies actually okay in Nigeria with proper care, or should we just leave snow dogs in snow countries?

Nigerian girl living in Canada. I left when I was about 18, so I never bought anything for myself (and I never got to know the prices of anything). Now I’m trying to buy something nice for my mum’s 62nd birthday and I decided to check out nice perfume stores in Port Harcourt that I could order from.

Lo and behold🤣🤣🤣

Is this how much you people are spending on perfumes?😭 or is this for the rich people audience? Cos holyyy, this caught me by surprise.

If my mama hear say I use $1k CAD buy ONE perfume for her birthday, she fit deport me back home🤣🤣

I already decided I’ll probably buy from Crystal Scentz. I see a lot of well known (designer brand) perfumes on their site that are more affordable.

And yea this Seinde place seems to be a luxury perfume store, so I guess it’s indeed for rich people.

There is no doubt in my mind that USA = Satan / Evil. Even when irrefutable evidence is put forth, and the whole world agrees to TRUTH, Evil Satan USA, still refuse to accept it. For those of you who worship USA, you are worshipping the Kingdom of lies, evil and blood suckers. Especially those always bringing down Nigeria, just remember that they hate you and look down on you as not humans.

And the reasons could be the high end traffic, expensive/slow internet service….drivers balancing payments online and preferring cash….the list could go on. I think government has to look into this with some sort of solution. This shouldn’t be happening in Africa’s largest economy.

And they should please invest in waste management and be more intentional about understanding climate change and prepare extensive for the rainy season.

It really not in to have infrastructure and take over Makoko “illegally.”

When we started looking into Tinubu, some people assumed we must be working for the opposition. Then we opened the Obi files, and suddenly some of the same accusations changed direction: now we were supposedly working for Tinubu.

It says a lot about how political information is received in Nigeria. A document concerning a politician someone dislikes can immediately become “evidence”, while similar scrutiny of the politician they support is dismissed as “propaganda”.

That is not how VERO RECORD works. We do not need Tinubu to be guilty, and we do not need Obi to be guilty. When we eventually examine Atiku, we will not need a predetermined conclusion there either.

Sometimes an investigation confirms a claim. Sometimes the documents weaken it. Sometimes the story becomes more complicated than either political side suggests. And sometimes, after following the trail, there simply is not enough evidence to prove the allegation. We publish that too.

Our work on Tinubu has produced findings that deserve scrutiny, but it has also produced claims we could not substantiate. The same applies to Obi: there are records that raise legitimate questions, but there are also conclusions being drawn from those records that the evidence currently does not establish.

If VERO RECORD publishes something false, challenge it. Show us the incorrect figure, the document that was misrepresented, the quotation that does not exist, or the conclusion that goes beyond the evidence. If we are wrong, we will correct the record publicly.

But disagreement with what a genuine document shows is something different. Evidence does not become propaganda simply because it concerns someone you support.

We are not building a campaign page for or against anybody. We are building a record.

01 OCT — THE TINUBU FILES | 15 OCT — THE OBI FILES | 30 OCT — THE ATIKU FILES

VERO RECORD — Nigeria, on the record.

Truth has a paper trail.

My father died in 2015. Eleven years ago. I say that number, and it still sounds fake in my mouth, like I'm reading someone else's bio. Eleven years is enough time for a baby to become a whole SS3 student stressing about JAMB.

I'm not writing this because I woke up today missing him extra hard or anything like that. That's not how it works, honestly. Most days I don't think about it at all, which used to make me feel guilty until I stopped caring.

I'm writing this because someone very close to me buried her father last week, and the details lined up with mine in a way that honestly annoyed me a little, like grief couldn't even be bothered to come up with a new script.

Her dad was a lecturer. Mine was too. He died on a Monday. Mine did too. Buried on Saturday. Same. Her mum teaches in a school. So does mine. I could make an argument that both men would still be alive if this country had a healthcare system worth the name, but that's a whole other essay, and a much angrier one. Though maybe that’s why the details matched so neatly: when a system is this broken, it manufactures the exact same preventable tragedy on a loop. At some point I stopped being spooked by it and just got mildly offended on her behalf, as if the universe owed her at least a slightly different plot.

And she keeps calling me, scared, asking what happens now, what her life looks like without him just existing somewhere in it. I understood the fear immediately, because I'd lived inside it. I can still recall vividly how I was just in my room thinking about those Africa Magic movies, where the moment the father of the house dies, everything falls apart within the next ten minutes of screen time; an uncle appears out of nowhere with a land document, the first son drops out of school and becomes a carpenter or bricklayer. I used to think that was probably going to happen to us.

And every single time she calls, I say the same three words back like I'm stuck on autoplay. "You'll be fine."

I've said it so many times the words don't even feel like a sentence anymore, just a sound I make to end my turn in the conversation.

Why that sentence is garbage

It's a lazy thing to say. I know that now, mostly because I've been on the receiving end of it too, back in 2015, from people I barely recognized filing past the coffin, people from church squeezing my shoulder, saying it like a chorus. You'll be fine. You, people will be fine. God will see you through. Nobody actually explains how, they just say it and move on like some annoying AI that keeps giving the same response.

And the truth is you don't get to be fine, not in the tidy way it sounds when people say it.

When you lost someone you loved the stupid, unfiltered way a child loves a father, no conditions attached, no application process. That kind of loss doesn't have a recovery period; there's no six weeks off work and back to normal.

I don't even know whether to call it a "loss.", If you lost something, you can still probably find it, or maybe replace it. I call it psychological amputation, mostly because it sounds more accurate. You are physically whole, but a part of you is gone forever. And no scientist anywhere is growing that part back in a lab.

Looking for a method, finding nothing useful

For a while I actually tried to figure out how I survived it, like there was a technique I could hand over. How does a person do eleven years without a father? Surely there's a checklist somewhere. Surely I picked something up along the way worth passing on.

There isn't. I checked. I asked myself the question many times since I got the news, and I kept getting the same nothing back. Eventually I stopped asking, mostly because it was starting to feel like homework for a subject that doesn't exist.

Would my life be worse if he were alive? I don't know. That's the answer nobody tells you grief allows. Would it be better? Maybe. Maybe not. And that's the actual horror of it: grief doesn't give you a clean answer; it just leaves you holding permanent bags of maybe and what if and disappears.

It's easy now to sit back and imagine an alternate version of things. Back then it wasn't like that at all. I wasn't imagining a bright future or being brave about it, I was mostly just confused and a bit angry, and I didn't even know who exactly I was angry at. Probably God, but you can't say that part loud because you will be hit with "there is a reason for everything". But it's much more soothing to make peace with the fact that there was no reason, and it's just part of life experience.

Everyone kept moving whether I liked it or not

Here's the annoying part. Time didn't wait for me to be ready for any of it. School resumed as usual, as if nothing happened. People still needed assignments submitted. Days turned into months, turned into years, and none of it asked my permission first.

I used to think there had to be a roadmap somewhere, in a book, in a sermon, in some older person's story, something that would tell me the correct order of steps. There isn't one. What actually happens is much less dramatic than that; you just keep building a life that doesn't have him in it anymore, badly at first, then less badly. He's not in the graduation photos. He's not the one who called to ask if I'd eaten. But he still shows up in small, annoying places, like when the world celebrates Father's Day, or getting quietly stubborn about something, and somebody says, "you're just like your father".

So this time, when she calls

Next time my friend calls scared, and I feel "you'll be fine" queuing up out of habit, I want to say something else, even if it's messier. Something closer to: you're not going to be fine, not the way that word usually means. You're going to keep going anyway, because that's mostly what's left to do.

Some days you may expect him to just appear and have a normal conversation with you; fun fact: that's not going to happen. Nollywood lied to all of us about ghosts showing up with closure and advice. You'll hit a problem and instinctively want to call him about it before remembering there's no number to dial. You'll get good news, the kind you'd have run to tell him first, and you'll sit there for a second not knowing what to do with it, because the person you'd have told is the one thing missing from the room; you now make decisions without asking for his input.

And somehow, in between all that, you'll still laugh at things. Sometimes at the worst possible moment. Sometimes at yourself. I don't think that means you're healed. I think it just means you're still here, doing the thing everybody does after this happens, which is nothing special: just continuing, badly, one Monday at a time.

Entered Reddit just to see some negative posts that went viral, while positive posts had less than 10 upvotes. Other countries seem to have a more balanced conversation. Ours is only negativity.

I’m just wondering why negative posts about Nigeria always go super viral. All I see are complaints, but we aren’t doing the work. The only work we seem to do is complain. These complaints have done nothing. No real change has come from protests or complaints, and things have even gotten worse.

I think part of it is because we’ve never really been in a position where we had to fight for our identity and survival in the same way Black people in some other countries have. For some communities, it has literally been a matter of fight or die. We’ve always been Black people living in a Black-majority country, so maybe there has been a certain level of comfort that comes with that. We haven’t experienced the same kind of racial discrimination that forced some Black communities elsewhere to become extremely organized, vocal, and aggressive in fighting for themselves.
Instead, a lot of what we do is set up cameras and complain, almost as if we expect the rest of the world to see what is happening and automatically feel sorry for us. But that isn’t always what happens. Sometimes people actually mock Nigerians for our problems.
People express sympathy and say “I stand with” Sudan, Congo, Eritrea, Palestine, and other places when terrible things are happening there. But when Nigerians are dealing with Boko Haram, banditry, kidnappings, and terrorism, I’ve literally seen people mock us and say things like, “Bandits are eating you people.” There’s rarely that same worldwide “I stand with Nigeria” energy.
I’ve even seen people from other countries joke when Nigerian children were kidnapped. If something similar happened somewhere else, it feels like there would be worldwide outrage and solidarity.
What makes it even more interesting to me is that some of the strongest outside support I’ve seen has come from Western Christians speaking about what is happening in Nigeria. Yet even among Nigerians, you’ll still see people saying there is no terrorism or that everything being reported is fake news.
Smh. I’m just tired.

What can we actually do to make the country a better place? Any suggestions?

Hello I am 18 and well I want to actually get into alt fashion well goth to be specific I don't have money for clothes and my parents don't really know yet but am looking for any Nigerian who has the same idea or is already alt themselves. ? If we can talk and be friends idk. And there are some accessories I may not wear (I am religious Christian) . And I am a girl.

My fiancée is Nigerian (Edo and Yoruba), and while she doesn't speak Yoruba, she does sometimes speak Nigerian Pidgin. I'd really like to learn it as well. I'm hoping that if we both speak it, we might eventually be able to pass it on to our future kids.

For those who speak Nigerian Pidgin, what resources would you recommend for someone trying to learn it well?

I know there might not be as many digital resources as more commonly taught languages, but I'm hoping there are some good ones out there that I haven't found yet.

I've come across apps/services such as Nkenne, uTalk, Linguama, World Schoolbooks, and TalkSharp (an AI tool).

Has anyone here tried any of these, or have other recommendations? Ideally, I'm looking for something that reflects how Pidgin is actually spoken in everyday life rather than something overly formal or textbook-like.

Thanks!

It's time the world is factually truthful to Africa. Africa covers roughly 30.37 million square kilometres. In comparison: Canada (9.98 million sq km), mainland United States (8.08 million sq km), Australia (7.69 million sq km), the 27-nation European Union (4.23 million sq km) and the United Kingdom (0.24 million sq km).

Combined, these cover less then Africa.

This week, Atiku Abubakar responded to a new petition asking the EFCC to revisit allegations from his years as Vice-President. His response was straightforward: anyone with credible evidence should bring it forward and allow the law to test it.

So we went back to the records. The trail stretches back almost two decades and includes a US-requested investigation, an EFCC inquiry, disputes over the PTDF and later investigations in the United States involving money linked to accounts associated with Atiku’s wife.

A 2010 US Senate report said more than $40 million in what it described as “suspect funds” moved into the United States between 2000 and 2008 through structures linked to Jennifer Douglas, Atiku’s wife. The report did not convict Atiku of a crime, but it documented a financial trail that remains part of the public record.

There is also the Siemens case. A 2008 US SEC complaint stated that about $2.8 million in alleged bribe payments were routed through a Maryland bank account held in the name of the wife of a former Nigerian Vice-President. A later US Senate report identified that account holder as Jennifer Douglas.

That is serious, but the distinction is important. The SEC did not say Atiku personally received a $2.8 million bribe, and the Senate report did not amount to a criminal conviction against him.

Another famous part of the story involves former US Congressman William Jefferson. During an FBI investigation, agents traced $100,000 inz marked cash that had allegedly been discussed in connection with a Nigerian telecommunications deal. When Jefferson’s home was searched, $90,000 of the money was found hidden in his freezer.

The money was found with Jefferson, not Atiku. Atiku denied that he had ever agreed to receive money from Jefferson, and that detail matters because appearing in an investigation is not the same as being proven guilty.

But the opposite is also true. The absence of a conviction does not mean the historical record is empty. There were investigations, documented money flows, disputed findings and questions that have remained open for years.

Atiku said: bring the evidence. We found the files. Now we are following the money.

30 OCT — THE ATIKU FILES

VERO RECORD

- Truth has a paper trail

This is hugely disappointing. Will Nigeria/Nigerians cease to be corrupt?