The reason rotten meat sells every market day is that fools will always come to the market. - Igbo Proverb.

These guys should take information, hang some conspiracy around it, and push it to the internet. Perhaps, the YouTube channel which they use is also part of the conspiracy. Throughout history, humanity has been confronted with these characters. The Jewish leadership also accused Jesus of being possessed by the devil.


In 1903, the president of Michigan Savings Bank warned Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, to protect his money. “The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty, a fad,” he advised. If you’ve ever been stuck trying to get out of a parking lot after a sporting event, you may have wished he’d gotten this one right.


In 1904, the New York Times reported on a debate in Paris between a brain specialist and a physician about the dangers of driving automobiles at high speeds, because the brain can’t keep up. “It remains to be proved how fast the brain is capable of traveling,” reads the article. “If it cannot acquire an eight-mile per hour speed, then an auto running at the rate of 80 miles per hour is running without the guidance of the brain, and the many disastrous results are not to be marveled at.”

Electricity will flicker out of fashion: So said Junius Morgan to his son J.P. Morgan. J.P. had hired Thomas Edison to wire up his mansion, making it the first private residence in New York to have electric lighting. Luckily for his bank account, J.P. Morgan didn’t listen to his dad and invested heavily in Edison, eventually financing General Electric.

In 1876, the president of Western Union, William Orton, dismissed phones as a “toy” when Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell him the patent for $100,000. According to True West magazine, Orton wrote an internal memo stating: “The idea is idiotic on the face of it. Furthermore, why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?”

Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.

The Difference Between Complaint and Commitment.

In emerging economies, corporate leaders often make a familiar complaint; there is no talent. Far fewer, however, are willing to ask the more uncomfortable question, what have we done to cultivate it? That is why Moniepoint’s recent decision to commit ₦3 billion towards innovation hubs across three Nigerian federal universities deserves serious commendation, not merely as philanthropy, but as strategic economic intelligence.

The announcement is especially notable because it follows public lamentations by the company’s leadership over the scarcity of high-level technology talent in Nigeria. Many observers criticised those earlier remarks as overly harsh on Nigerian youths and insufficiently attentive to the structural weaknesses of the country’s educational system. Yet, what distinguishes mature institutions from reactionary ones is their willingness to move from diagnosis to participation. In this instance, Moniepoint have done precisely that.

The global technology economy was not built by universities alone. Google, Microsoft and Amazon all understood early that talent ecosystems require deliberate cultivation. Silicon Valley itself emerged not because California possessed magical intelligence, but because firms, universities and venture capital jointly constructed a pipeline where research, experimentation and commercialisation could reinforce one another. Human capital is rarely discovered fully formed; it is developed through repeated investment.

Nigeria’s challenge has never been a lack of intelligence, it has been the absence of sustained institutional scaffolding. Across much of the country, universities still teach for an analogue economy while employers recruit for a digital one. Students graduate with theoretical exposure but little access to cloud infrastructure, AI tooling, product development laboratories or enterprise-grade software engineering practices. In such an environment, the “skills gap” is less a mystery than a predictable outcome.

This is why Moniepoint’s intervention matters. Innovation hubs within federal universities can serve as bridges between academic abstraction and market relevance. Designed properly, they become spaces where students encounter not merely coding tutorials, but the disciplines of enterprise creation itself; systems thinking, product design, cyber-security, data governance, regulatory technology and scalable problem-solving.

Crucially, the symbolism also matters. Nigeria’s private sector has too often behaved as an extractive actor; harvesting talent while investing little in the soil from which that talent emerges. The result has been a perpetual cycle of complaint. Firms lament unemployability; universities lament underfunding; graduates lament exclusion. Meanwhile, the economy loses.

Moniepoint’s initiative signals a healthier philosophy; if the pipeline is weak, strengthen the pipeline.
The economic implications extend beyond technology recruitment. Innovation hubs, when properly governed, become centres of entrepreneurial spillover. Students who may never work directly for Moniepoint could nonetheless build logistics firms, payment solutions, agricultural platforms or creative-tech ventures that generate entirely new employment ecosystems. Enterprise incubation is not about producing workers for existing companies only; it is about producing future builders of companies themselves.

There is also a strategic national dimension to this investment. Nigeria is entering an era in which demographic advantage alone will no longer guarantee competitiveness, a youthful population without productive capability can become a source of instability rather than prosperity. The countries that will dominate the next phase of global economic growth are not necessarily those with the largest populations, but those most capable of converting population into innovation density.

That conversion requires partnerships between universities and industry. Government alone cannot carry the burden, nor can universities remain isolated citadels disconnected from commercial realities. The future belongs to ecosystems.

Of course, the success of this initiative will depend on execution. Innovation hubs are not magic buildings. Too many African technology centres have become ceremonial ribbon-cutting exercises filled with outdated equipment and little strategic direction. For Moniepoint’s investment to achieve transformational value, it must prioritise continuity over publicity. The hubs should be staffed by practitioners, linked to real-world enterprise challenges, and integrated into long-term internship and mentorship pipelines. Metrics should focus not merely on attendance figures, but on startups created, patents filed, products launched and graduates employed.

Equally important is accessibility. Nigeria’s next generation of innovators will not come exclusively from elite urban backgrounds. Some of the country’s brightest minds are students navigating erratic electricity, shared devices and economic hardship. A truly visionary initiative must ensure that opportunity is not restricted to those already advantaged.
Still, the broader significance should not be overlooked. It is easy for corporate executives to complain about missing talent, it is harder, and far more consequential, to invest in creating it.

In that sense, Moniepoint deserves credit not because it identified a problem, but because it chose to become part of the solution. The most productive response to institutional weakness is not perpetual lamentation, but institutional participation.

Nigeria does not need another generation raised merely to search for jobs, it needs a generation equipped to build industries. If these innovation hubs are pursued with seriousness, discipline and scale, they will help move the country a small but meaningful distance in that direction.

Happy birthday to our dear Ken Ezekwu. Many happy returns.

The Silence Between the Pages.

When a man who once held the nation in his hands writes memoir, he does not merely publish a books. He publishes a version of memory, asking history to lean in his direction.

So the question before Nigeria is not whether General Yakubu Gowon has the right to tell his story. He does. Every participant in history possesses that right. The deeper question is; if his memoir discusses the Aburi Accord without reproducing the full transcript or documentary record, then upon what foundation are readers expected to rest their belief?

For decades, Aburi has lived less as settled history and more as competing memory. One Nigeria remembers it as a failed attempt at confederation and another remembers it as a solemn agreement later diluted by political calculation. Between those positions lies the graveyard of over a million dead people.

That is why documents matter.

A memoir without the transcript of Aburi risks becoming less an archive and more an argument. The reader is subtly invited to trust the Gowon’s interpretation of conversations whose exact wording altered the destiny of a nation. Yet history is rarely kind to memory unaccompanied by evidence. Memory edits, protects and seeks coherence where events themselves were chaotic.

The tragedy of Nigeria’s civil war has endured partly because too much of its history survives through personalities instead of records. Men recount intentions; nations require proof.

If General Gowon wished to settle historical disputes surrounding Aburi, then the inclusion of the complete documentary exchanges, the exact words, pauses, commitments, and objections, would have elevated the memoir from recollection to national archive. Without such material, readers remain trapped in the oldest dilemma of post-war history; choosing not between facts, but between narrators.

And perhaps that is Nigeria’s enduring burden.

The country still inherits a republic where documentation is weak, institutional memory is fragile, and history often depends on who speaks loudest or dies last. In such an environment, memoirs become instruments of influence rather than merely instruments of remembrance.

The Aburi question was never simply about constitutional structure. It was about trust. Who said what? Who reneged? Who interpreted in bad faith? A transcript cannot heal those wounds entirely, but it can at least restrain mythology.

Without it, the reader is left holding not history itself, but an appeal to authority.

And history, if it is to deserve its name, must demand more than that.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Gowon family on the big PayDay.

Dr. EK Gwuru writes from Nkolo Ikembe.

Monica & Monica 2 - The Film.

The astonishing success of Monica reveals something deeper than cinematic taste. It exposes an ancient moral architecture embedded within the Nigerian family: the quiet coronation of the firstborn child.

In much of Nigeria, the first child is not merely born; they are appointed.

Long before adulthood arrives, the firstborn is initiated into an invisible office. They learn, often without explicit instruction, that their life no longer belongs entirely to them. They are expected to become a shield against chaos, an insurer against poverty, a negotiator of family disputes, a sponsor of education, a substitute parent, and eventually a custodian of familial continuity itself. The burden is so culturally normalized that many firstborns mistake it for personality rather than conditioning.

One suspects that had Bertrand Russell examined this phenomenon, he would have approached it with both admiration and alarm. Russell possessed a profound distrust of traditions that converted accident into obligation. To him, the mere fact of being born first could not rationally justify a lifelong sentence of sacrificial responsibility. He would likely ask: by what logic does chronology become destiny?

Yet Russell was too intellectually honest to dismiss the system entirely. He understood that societies construct moral expectations to survive instability. In environments where state welfare is weak, pensions unreliable, and institutions fragile, the family becomes the primary insurance mechanism. The firstborn thus emerges as a kind of social technology. They are trained to carry collective anxieties so that the family unit may endure economic uncertainty.

Nigeria, perhaps more than many societies, perfected this arrangement because necessity demanded it.

The firstborn learns early that failure is not private. Their unemployment is interpreted as a family crisis. Their success is communal property. Their salary acquires many invisible signatures before they even spend it. Younger siblings may speak of “our eldest” with a tone usually reserved for ministries or development agencies. Weddings, hospital bills, school fees, rent, funerals, and business ventures all gravitate toward them with the inevitability of planets toward gravity.

And the remarkable thing is this: many firstborns accept the arrangement willingly.

Not because it is easy, but because duty, once moralized, becomes emotionally seductive. To provide is to matter. To sacrifice is to earn reverence. The firstborn often derives identity from usefulness. If they cease to rescue others, they fear becoming spiritually irrelevant. Thus, exhaustion is romanticized. Burnout becomes evidence of love.

Russell would have regarded this with caution. He spent much of his philosophical life warning humanity about the danger of inherited moral systems that glorify suffering. He argued repeatedly that guilt is one of civilization’s most efficient instruments of control. Nigerian firstborn culture frequently operates through precisely this mechanism. The child is praised not for discovering themselves, but for dissolving themselves into obligation.

This is why stories like Monica strike such a powerful nerve. Nigerians do not merely watch these narratives; they recognize themselves in them. The audience sees the eldest daughter who abandons her dreams to train siblings through university. They also see the eldest son whose private ambitions are postponed indefinitely because “home needs them.” They see the silent arithmetic of African responsibility: one child becomes the bridge over which the rest of the family crosses into stability.

There is nobility in this ethic. But there is also tragedy.

For every successful firstborn celebrated at family gatherings, there are thousands quietly carrying resentment, depression, emotional fatigue, or arrested selfhood. Some become authoritarian because burden hardens them. Others become emotionally unavailable because responsibility consumed the years in which personality should have developed freely. Many cannot distinguish love from obligation. They enter marriages already exhausted by decades of unpaid emotional labour.

Russell might ultimately conclude that the problem is not responsibility itself, but absolutism. A society may reasonably honour duty without transforming children into instruments of collective survival. The moral beauty of sacrifice disappears when sacrifice ceases to be voluntary.

And yet, despite the philosophical objections, the Nigerian family persists because it achieves something modern individualism often fails to provide: continuity. In the West, the individual is liberated but frequently isolated. In Nigeria, the individual is burdened but rarely abandoned. The firstborn suffers under expectation, but also inhabits a dense network of meaning. They belong to something larger than themselves.

This tension, between freedom and duty, selfhood and kinship, is precisely why the cultural psychology behind Monica resonates so profoundly. Nigerians are not simply applauding a film, they are witnessing the dramatization of an unwritten constitution that governs millions of homes.

The firstborn child, whether daughter or son, is often raised not merely as a person, but as a future institution.