Chief Chocolate

A drunk policeman shot me at a checkpoint in 2011. The bullet tore through my car, through my right hand. I lost my career as an animator. My marriage cracked. My mind still bleeds. The twist? I sued the Nigeria Police. Won in 2015. Judge said: "Pay his medical bills." 10 years later. Zero naira. I face permanent disability without help. @PoliceNG_CRU @TunjiDisu1 @UNDP @NhrcNigeria #NigeriaPoliceNotYourFriend

The problem started when I said "e choke" in a meeting. My colleague Linda from accounting paused mid-slide. She said, Is everything okay with your throat? I said, No, Linda, it means the numbers are impressive. She wrote that down. She literally wrote it down. Three days later she told our boss the quarterly projections were choking her. HR got involved. I work in Toronto, in a glass office where the only other Nigerian is a man named Tunde who has completely assimilated. The kind who pronounces "schedule" like he invented the language. He avoids me in the breakroom because I remind him of jollof rice and his mother's expectations. So I suffer alone. Last month I told a project manager that the deadline was giving me wahala. He emailed my supervisor asking if wahala was a vendor we needed to loop in. I now have a meeting on Friday about clarifying communication styles. The worst was when I said "abeg" to an intern. She thought it was a new productivity tool. She searched the internal software catalogue. By Tuesday, IT had opened a ticket. I tried explaining slangs to my coworkers once. Big mistake. Now every Monday morning, Kevin from sales greets me with "How far?" but he says it like "How far, my good man?" and waits for a response as if I am a foreign exchange student he is sponsoring. Linda has started saying "e choke" whenever she completes a spreadsheet. She does finger quotes around it. She has made a PowerPoint slide titled "Nigerian Business Expressions for Cross-Cultural Synergy." I sat Tunde down last week. I said, Tunde, you need to help me. They've weaponized our entire lexicon. He adjusted his cardigan. He said, I'm sorry, I don't really speak it anymore. I said, You were born in Owerri. He said, That was a long time ago. He stirred his green tea. No sugar. No milk. Just assimilation and regret. Yesterday I overheard my boss on a client call. She said the deal was giving her gbe body. I had told her "gbe body" means being alert. She now uses it to mean proactive. The client loved it. They want it in the brochure. I have created a monster. The office Christmas party is next week and Kevin told me he is planning to say "shey you dey whine me" during his toast. He has been practising pronunciation with a YouTube video titled "Speak Nigerian in 5 Minutes." I will not be attending. Every diaspora office has one person fighting for their slangs and one Tunde drinking green tea pretending he cannot remember the taste of chin chin.

I'll also say this as someone who grew up on the nice side of the barbed wire fences and high gates in the very nice part of town where the Nigerian 0.1% live - learn to touch grass and worry about yourself because rich people really do not care about you. Like, at all. The Nigerian rich don't even like each other. They barely tolerate one another and make practical alliances to preserve wealth and influence. And now that the economy is too small to support all the children of the Nigerian 0.1%, nearly everyone I grew up with in the nice, leafy part of town now lives in Toronto or London or wherever. You, Mr N250k/month Union Bank contract staff are not part of rich people's thinking at all. At. All. The rich have no plans for you. They have no plans to create opportunities for you. They have no plans to fix the things they broke on their way to building that N1bn townhouse in Parkview Estate. They have no plans to contribute towards making society better. If Satan came from Hell with a tail and horns growing out of his head and he ran for political office, the rich would all go make deals with him - because in the world of the rich, the only thing that matters is their own interests, and making sure that they never, EVER have to live like you or next to you. So all this simping and vicarious fawning over wealth and fame that you people do everyday is the most redundant thing in the world - the rich have no intention of expanding their circle to let you in, and they have no intention of enabling the conditions for you to create your own independent circle of wealth. The only thing the rich need from you is to be poor and obedient, so that your labour can be cheap, plentiful and replaceable. Statistically as a Nigerian, you will NEVER be rich or close to it. You will NEVER live in Maitama. 99.99% of Nigerians who have existed since 1960 have prayed and fantasised about becoming rich, and 99.99% of those prayers and fantasies never came true. That's just math. You will never be a rich and famous celebrity. You will never be a successful content creator. You will never make millions shilling crypto, trading Forex, sports betting, or whatever the fuck is the latest quick wealth fantasy in town. It's just not going to happen. That being the case, a much more constructive use of your time would be to fight for the material elevation of what you actually have, where you actually have it. Instead of daydreaming about the N300m house in Lekki that 3 generations of your family cannot buy, get involved in a local effort to give your own immediate neighbourhood a facelift, or a political campaign to pressure the state to build high quality social housing. If you hate being harassed without consequence online, instead of vicariously enjoying how a celebrity has used their wealth and influence to jail someone for making a horrid tweet, fight for a judiciary and legal system that is transparent and accessible to all, so that a singer living in the UK on a global talent visa doesn't get to have more access to your Nigerian justice system than you who lives in Nigeria 24/7. Instead of building your mental architecture around the false idea of being a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" who will someday take your rightful place on Banana Island, touch grass tonight and accept that it will never happen, and what you need to do instead is fight for where you are to become a better, more liveable place that you no longer wish to escape from. Stop cosplaying as rich folk. Stop cooing and fawning over rich folk. Stop daydreaming about someday "blowing up" and buying a house next to Burna Boy. Rich people have no intention of sharing their world with you. Free yourself from the tyranny of living vicariously through people who don't care that you exist. Them no really send any part of your papa at all.

I missed the last train in Seoul once. Phone at 3%. Didn’t speak Korean. It was raining, freezing, and I had no idea where I was supposed to go. I tried calling an Uber but my card kept failing because of my bank fraud protection. Perfect timing. I was standing outside the station looking completely defeated when this older woman walked up to me and started speaking Korean. I told her I didn’t understand. She pulled out her phone translator and typed:“You are lost?” I nodded. She asked where I was staying, looked at the address, then motioned for me to follow her. This woman walked me almost 15 minutes through side streets, holding her umbrella over both of us while I apologized every thirty seconds. When we got to my hotel, I tried offering her cash for helping me. She looked genuinely offended. Typed into the translator again:“If my son was lost somewhere, I hope someone helps him too.” Then she bowed and walked away in the rain before I could even process what happened. Some places still treat strangers like human beings first.

If we finally get an empathetic and sincere leader after these locusts, it’s then you’ll realize Nigerians are not adaptive as we assume. They’ll demand for things they didn’t demand under the leaders that hate them.

Hall of Fame - 2026 Take your flowers @1meajay

You people already have 1,000 other apps to farm your TikTok dances and low-IQ, sexually suggestive "content". Why must you have this one too? So people who just want to have ONE app for serious, high-register conversation cannot have it? Twitter was already by far the smallest of all the major social media apps - why did you have to ruin it just so you could turn into a bot-ridden, AI slop-filled Snap-Book-Tok-Gram?

Tweet of the decade

I remember back in 2006 when my older brother was a 5th year medical student at Korle Bu and he caused a big family quarrel during a brief holiday in Lagos where he mentioned casually that he regularly administered blood transfusions to his patients. My dad believed that as a Jehovah Witness, my brother should decline to take part in any medical procedure involving blood transfusion on religious grounds. He didn't even want to know whether such a refusal was even possible under the terms of medical practise (it isn't) - all he knew was that 12 white men in Brooklyn who regularly spoke to "Jehovah" had decreed it so, and how dare us children from a JW family not prioritise those instructions over everything else. And because he convinced himself that his placenta was tied to these stupid Jehovah's Witnesses, he went on to lose his whole family that he spent decades building an empire for, and he died rich, miserable and alone. His first child got married and didn't even inform him because she knew he wouldn't approve. His 2nd child (my brother) invited him to his wedding and he declined because the bride was Catholic. His 4th child (me) got married and he was also absent, and he never met any of the 2 grandchildren he had before he died confused and heartbroken. And after thoroughly fucking up his life, the cult just wakes up one day and changes the entire fundamental doctrine that made him go to war with his own children. There is no way to quantify the damage that has been caused here, and even if there were, oyibo man is definitely never going to pay. As in my dad's case and in the case of every other brainwashed, spiritually lost black person, African wey no gree get sense, na oyibo go kill am. All we can do is cry over spilled milk now.

The reason we know dinosaurs existed, and were wiped out by an asteroid, is that no matter where you dig in the world, you’ll find a distinct layer of clay. All dinosaur fossils are found below this layer, and never above it! This layer has iridium that is very rare on earth but found in asteroids. It is called K-T (Short for Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary

I hope the people who come here to say things like this actually realise that "supporting" a government does not entitle you to more or less services as a citizen of a country? Because as I read this multiparagraph hunk of Nigerian nonsense, I realised that this guy seems to genuinely think that "supporters" of a government are entitled to some sort of preferential treatment where public services are concerned. He seems to think that because this lady voted or supported a government, that entitled her to either jump the kidney transplant queue or obtain special financial assistance ahead of others with the same problem. Where did he get this idea from? To people like this, "Democracy" means that their "side" won the football match and so the players and supporters on the "winning side" are entitled to some sort of reward. He doesn't seem to understand that even if the lady in question had been a nonvoting IPOB member who believed that Trump and Bibi would give her Biafra, she would STILL be entitled to everything that anyone who voted for Tinubu was entitled to. These people do not seem to know the difference between being a citizen of a country and engaging in partisan politics within that country. They think having "voted" for the "winner" should give them more rights than other citizens. So she supported Tinubu vocally - that should entitle her to assistance for a kidney transplant ahead of others or what exactly? Is she more Nigerian than others who needed the same kidney transplant but did not vote for Tinubu?🤷🏿‍♀️ What an utterly weird and asinine idea. I can't wait till we wake up to martial music on the radio one morning and this entire "Democracy" trashfire is left forgotten on history's rubbish heap. Because "Democracy" is making some of you legitimately insane.

For the last year, my dad had become completely unrecognizable. He was cold, irritable, and suddenly obsessed with liquidating everything we owned. He abruptly sold the beautiful childhood home I grew up in, moved my mom into a downsized townhouse, and started quietly selling off the vintage cars he had spent a decade restoring. He was always taking secret phone calls and disappearing to his lawyer's office for hours. I was furious. I was absolutely convinced he was having a midlife crisis, quietly hoarding cash so he could divorce my mom and start a new life without us. Finally, I snapped. I marched into his home office, slammed the door, and yelled, "Just tell me when you're leaving! Stop stripping our family's life down to nothing and just go!" He froze. His shoulders collapsed, and for the first time in my life, my invincible dad looked incredibly small. With shaking hands, he opened his desk drawer and handed me a thick folder. They weren't divorce papers. It was a fully funded irrevocable trust, pre-paid long-term care directives, and a clinical chart from a neurologist. Early-Onset Alzheimer's. "The doctors told me I have about eight months before I stop remembering who you are," he whispered, staring at his trembling hands. "The memory care facility will completely bankrupt this family. I sold the house and the cars to fund a trust so you and your mother will never lose a single penny to my sickness. I'm not leaving to start a new life... I am just trying to make sure you both survive my decline." The "selfishness" I had resented for a year was actually the most agonizing sacrifice a father could make. He was quietly dismantling his own empire to build an absolute fortress around us before his mind faded away. I dropped the folder, fell to my knees next to his chair, and buried my face in his chest, sobbing uncontrollably. "You are not doing this alone," I wept. Sometimes a parent's most confusing, frustrating actions are actually them fighting a terrifying, silent war to protect you. Don't assume the worst. Give the people you love grace.

Just in case people are not aware, the removal of electricity subsidies in Nigeria, which has caused the astronomical rise in electricity prices, was directly dictated by the World Bank's to both the previous and the present Nigerian government. Whether you think electricity should even be subsidised or not (I personally think it should be, because there is literally no serious country in the world where it isn't), what should worry you more than the removal alone is the fact that a small group of unelected, anonymous white men in Washington DC acting on behalf of a foreign state interest (the US govt is the World Bank's biggest shareholder) have the power to determine how much you should pay for your electricity in Nigeria. The electricity is generated in Nigeria, using Nigerian energy sources and Nigerian labour, and is distributed and transmitted using Nigerian infrastructure, but one group of oyibos you have never heard of who are sitting on another continent somehow have the power to instruct your government to raise your energy bills and complicate your life. They even offer your government loans that it doesn't need and isn't qualified for, then they make disbursement conditional on increasing your electricity bill by removing the same electricity subsidy that they have in their own country, because Africa's largest population and industrial cluster must not be allowed to have sustained and reliable access to cheap power. If it gets that, the only possible result is industrialisation - which means no more free natural resources and cheap labour to support the existing unipolar economic order. This is why geopolitics concerns you in Agege. It literally determines the price of your Ikeja Electric units.

Actually the UK approach is how it should be. Please indulge me and let me explain. The logic is simple. You get paid every month. So you should only pay rent monthly. Or let me ask this simple question: Does your employer pay you 1year salary ahead of time? IF your employer does not pay you 1year salary ahead, why should a landlord ask you to pay 1year rent ahead? If you think about this in this manner, you will see that it is only logical, rational and humane for a landlord to only collect rent on a monthly basis (since you also only get salary on a monthly basis). This is why sane countries like the UK only collect monthly rent. In countries like Nigeria, What we are practising is a terribly exploitative, unfair and unjust policy where landlords can demand 1-2years rent in full even though no employer pays you 2years salary ahead. Of course the excuse/reason the landlords also give for this is the lack of trust in the system, the lack of accountability if the tenant fails to pay and the desire to safeguard against defaulting tenants. In a country like Uk if you fail to pay your rent, it damages your credit score and you can be taken to court- this is absent in a country like Nigeria. But putting all of that aside, The fact remains that a system where you are made to pay 2years rent ahead is a dysfunctional, inhumane and unjust system. Living and growing up in a dysfunctional country like Nigeria has done collectively damage to us as a society that normalcy looks unimaginable.

A man brought his 8-year-old son into my barbershop yesterday. The boy had headphones on and was staring at the floor. The dad leaned in and whispered, "He’s autistic. He hates the sound of the clippers. Last time, we had to leave halfway through." The shop was full. Usually, it’s all loud music and "shop talk." I didn't say a word. I just walked over to the volume knob and turned off the music. I looked at the other four barbers. Without me saying a thing, they stopped talking. They put down their electric clippers and picked up their shears. For thirty minutes, the entire shop went silent. The only sound was the snip-snip-snip of scissors. The little boy sat perfectly still. He felt safe. When I was done, he looked in the mirror, gave a tiny smile, and high-fived me. The dad tried to pay me double. I wouldn't take it. "We’re a community," I told him. "And today, the community decided to be quiet." You don't need a loud voice to make a difference. Sometimes, you just need to know when to be still. Anonymous

*In 1951 a politician bought a horse for a race at £50,000. The seller agreed to deliver the horse the next day.* In the morning of the next day, he drove up and said: "Sorry son, but I have some bad news. The horse is dead." The politician replied: "Well, just give me my money back then." The seller said: "Can’t do that. I’ve already spent it." The politician said: "OK, then, just bring me the dead horse." The farmer asked: "What are you going to do with it?" The politician said: "I’m going to raffle it off to the people as a speed horse that can win a race" The seller responded: "You can’t raffle a dead horse." Politician replied: "Sure, I can. Just watch me. You don't know the people, l will post wonderful pictures of a horse, I just won’t tell anybody it's dead. I will market it with propaganda and present it as capable of chasing criminals away" A month later, the seller met up with the politician and asked: "What happened with that dead horse?" Politician replied: "I raffled it off. I sold 1million tickets at £2 each and made a profit of £2m. *The seller was dazed and asked: "Didn’t anyone complain?"* *Politician said: "Just the guy who won. I told him the horse died on our way to deliver. So, I gave him back his £2 with apology. I told him l have refunded everyone. He consoled me and told me to keep it up that I am a good man.’ That, after all, I have suffered (a lot of loss). He prayed for me and called on God to bless me. Telling me that the country needs honest people like me to come and run for office".* LESSON *Dem don dey arrange demselves. The political raffle ticket will soon be back to sell to people another dead horse in 2027* I trust say our mumu don beleful us. Or else, sorry go be our name. Mumu too much.

The week Yemi Osinbajo assumed power as Acting President, we felt it. That’s how powerful the office is. If a President is truly working, it doesn’t take four years to see it. Give it 100 days & you’d feel it like mad. Heck, Bola Tinubu triggered a nationwide fuel shock with just one speech on inauguration day. One speech. That’s how powerful the Presidency is. So if anyone tells you to calm down after four years, Believe them if you want. But for the sake of your family, I hope you’re building your own defense.

APC: We now have 30 governors. Nigerians: Wow. APC: We also have 75 senators. Nigerians: Omo. APC: Over 230 HOR members o. Nigerians: Na you dey hot. APC: Not to brag but we now have over 10m registered members. Nigerians: That’s very nice. Oya approve Real time transmission of electoral results, so that the world can see you are winning because people love you. APC: Haaa, that’s too risky ooo. 😭😭😭😭🤦

One last tweet before I go and enjoy my weekend: The fact that an "older Nigerian" claims to have "witnessed" something and drawn their conclusions from their lived experience means extremely little, verging on nothing to me. Reason being that these exact same "older Nigerians" who apparently "witnessed" Muhammadu Buhari version 1984, came to this very app 11 years ago - in the middle of the biggest economic and cultural breakout Nigeria has had since the 1970s oil boom - under a president who had achieved 7% annual growth, largest economy in Africa, and had signed the first Freedom Of Information Act in Nigeria's history, and they told us that based on what they "witnessed" in 1983, Muhammadu NEPA Bill was the leader Nigeria needed, and would be an upgrade on the one we had. Older Nigerians are very stupid people. I do not take their opinions and thoughts seriously.

Hi, I painted grapes. 🍇