Arinze

To reading at least one book every month for the rest of the year. This January, I started with The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives. Here's what I thought about the book by Lola Shoneyin: taliusdike.medium.com/i-uncovered-th…

@MrMekzy_ All a slave ever want is freedom. So when freedom comes, purpose is gone. He feels unmoored. Now all he does is chase status, excess, and visibility as proof that he is free.

B29 😅

@TaliusDike_ Abeg oo, I need to see Diana conclusion.

Can we wrap this up ASAP?

The cast of my forthcoming feature film - A BLUE BUTTERFLY 🦋 set in London & Rwanda. - Steve Toussaint (House of the Dragon) - Sanaa Lathan (Love & Basketball) - Lucien Msamati (Conclave) - Anton Lesser (Andor) Cont’d

My dog has been roaming freely around our compound for almost 8 years. To him, that space is his natural home. Anytime we put him in his cage, which is honestly big enough to be rented out for 700k Naira in today’s Lagos, he barks non-stop until he is released. He is used to freedom, and the moment you try to take it away, he resists. I’ve come to realize that a lot of things in Nigeria are the way they are because many of us don't know any better. We’ve accepted dysfunction as normal. No constant electricity? That’s just life. Insecurity? It depends on the context. Election rigging? Na part of politics. Stealing public funds? That's the game. And the moment you point these things out, some people push back because you’re challenging the version of normal they’ve grown used to. Changing this won't be easy, but we can start from our own little spaces. Keep showing people what a better life can look like. Be the light.

Do you remember LAST BURIAL, the iconic 2000 Nollywood classic starring Clem Ohameze as Ogbuefi Ozor Nnamani? We revisit the movie here 👉🏼 youtu.be/cse_h99LJjw?si…

My baby was 5 months old when I started noticing build up of white substance on her tongue. I was told to clean her tongue with cotton wool and warm water which I did daily but it kept getting worse. Shortly, the white substance started turning black and two days later, my daughter’s tongue was completely black. I was so scared my husband and I rushed her to the hospital. We saw a doctor who prescribed Nystatin drops for us to drop on her tongue 4 times daily. I started using it and there was slight improvement but we kept going back and forth, one day, it seems like it’s working and the next, it’s like nothing is happening. I got so worried and started crying which prompted my husband to call his mum. Mama came, met me crying and just laughed. She said the solution is the sap of a tree and we can only get the sap early in the morning before sunrise. I was so uncomfortable with the whole thing but I needed a solution. The next morning, she came with the sap and cleaned the tongue herself, and by afternoon of same day, the black lining was beginning to peel off as she sucks. I was the one that woke my husband the next day to go get the sap and by the 3rd day, my baby’s tongue was back to normal. There are traditional ways to some things, you just have to find a balance.

I sometimes wonder how the meals in boarding schools are now. Back then, when things were still “good”, the meals almost always tasted like wet sand, I can only imagine what it’s like today that the economy has gone to deep shit.

A reminder that there's still a whole lot out there to experience.

Staff room froze when an NYSC corper challenged a school principal over ₦18k. Principal: “You NYSC people come here with entitlement. This is a school, not your father’s company.” Corper: “Ma, I handled 60 students per class, bought chalk with my own money… and you’re still owing me ₦18k.” Principal: “If you were posted to a better school, you’d understand structure.” Corper: “If people were paid on time, they’d understand respect.” Principal: “Mind how you speak to authority.” Corper: “Respect isn’t position, ma… it’s practice.” The staff room went silent for 5 minutes. In Nigeria, is silence maturity or fear? Who crossed the line here?

Shōgun won 18 Emmys in 2024, the most any show has ever won in one season. Hiroyuki Sanada has been acting since 1966. Shōgun was the first time any studio ever gave him a producer credit. That single word in the credits is why. The tweet you're seeing makes it sound like Sanada walked into a room, slammed his fist on a table, and refused to sign until the studio respected Japan. The full story is quieter and explains a lot about how Hollywood actually decides what to make. Sanada was first asked to play Toranaga around 2016. He asked the studio one question: would they hire Japanese actors and crew specialists for each department. They said yes. He signed on. The show then sat in limbo for years. In 2020, the new showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks took over and asked Sanada to come on as a producer. It was the first producer credit anyone had ever given him in nearly 60 years of acting. His words to USA Today: "It means I can say anything, anytime." Sanada moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s and got his first big role in The Last Samurai in 2003, opposite Tom Cruise. The two became friends after a moment on set where Cruise insisted Sanada use a real samurai sword in their fight scene. Sanada swung the blade up to Cruise's neck and stopped just short of drawing blood. Cruise didn't blink. After that film, almost every time Hollywood made a project set in Japan, they called Sanada. He consulted on 47 Ronin, The Wolverine, Mortal Kombat, Westworld and others as the actor. On set he would adjust how a sword was being held or fix armor that had been put on backwards, then walk young cast members through how someone in 17th-century Japan would have moved. He kept hitting the same wall. He told Backstage magazine: "I started feeling the limit of saying something just as an actor. It was a hesitation, I don't want to break their pride, the crews." When you are only the actor, you can suggest things to the director and the costume team but you cannot make them happen. You cannot fire someone who keeps getting it wrong, and you cannot bring in the specialists you know in Tokyo. You are a guest in someone else's house, and there is only so much you can rearrange before being rude. A producer can. The minute they put the title next to his name, Sanada brought in Japanese specialists for every department, from a master of gestures and period movement advisers to a Kabuki-style stage movement coach and obi-tying experts. Co-creator Rachel Kondo told Rolling Stone it was as if Sanada had been waiting 20 years to make those phone calls. The show came out in February 2024 and swept the Emmys seven months later. Eighteen wins, beating a record HBO's John Adams had held since 2008. First non-English show to ever win Best Drama at the Emmys. Sanada became the first Japanese actor in history to win a Primetime Emmy. His co-star Anna Sawai became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress in a Drama. The first episode racked up 9 million views in its first six days, beating the premiere of The Bear season 2. The clip you are watching is the visible top of a very deep iceberg. Underneath is a 63-year-old who had been pushing for the same thing for 20 years, in the small ways an actor is allowed to push, until someone finally handed him the title that let him push out loud.

Cooper pocketed an estimated $25 million for Maestro. His Oscar loss pushed him to 0-for-12 in his career. Those 12 losses have built a personal fortune of around $120 million. Netflix reportedly spent close to $80 million just making the film. Cooper directed it, wrote it, produced it, and starred in it. On top of his paycheck, Netflix poured another fortune into the Oscar ad campaign, the kind studios run every year to win Academy votes. Netflix's previous Oscar pushes have been reported in the $25 to $60 million range. Stack it all together and Netflix probably spent over $100 million chasing a single trophy it never won. Cillian Murphy won Best Actor for Oppenheimer. That film cost $100 million to make and earned $975 million at the box office. Murphy is in nearly every scene of a three hour drama about building the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer took home 7 Oscars including Best Picture and became the third highest earning R-rated movie ever. The contrast is odd to me. Cooper's last passion project, A Star Is Born, earned $436 million worldwide and 8 Oscar nominations. He won nothing for it himself. On that film he skipped his upfront paycheck, took a cut of the profits, and reportedly walked away with around $40 million. A big chunk of Cooper's fortune came from making movies that chase awards he never wins. He spent six years learning how to conduct one six-minute piece of music for Maestro. Then came another full year of interviews and panels, including tearful on-camera sessions with the Bernstein children. The work paid him millions. Cooper has lost 12 Oscar races over his career. His net worth during that stretch has grown to around $120 million. For him, losing has been very profitable.

A Nigeria medical doctor governed Rivers State and stole N100 billion or $75 million from state funds. He wasn't arrested because the wife was a Supreme Court Justice. He served two terms. 1999 to 2007. Oil-rich state. Theoretically one of the wealthiest in Nigeria. In January 2007, three months before his tenure ended, the EFCC released an interim report. Fraud. Money laundering. Conversion of public funds. Abuse of oath of office. The number they put on it was over N100 billion stole from Rivers State. Odili did not wait for the charges. He went to a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt. On March 23, 2007, Justice Ibrahim Buba granted him a perpetual injunction. The EFCC was barred from investigating him. Arresting him. Prosecuting him. They could not even look at Rivers State finances during his eight years in power. Odili walked out of office untouchable. His wife is Mary Odili. She was appointed to the Supreme Court of Nigeria in 2011. She sat on that bench until she retired in 2022. For 11 of those years she was one of the most powerful judicial officers in Nigeria. During the same years the EFCC was trying to appeal her husband's injunction. The EFCC filed the appeal in 2008. It went nowhere. Justice Ibrahim Buba, the judge who signed the original injunction, was later removed from the bench for issuing similar orders shielding other powerful people. In 2018 the Court of Appeal finally granted the EFCC leave to challenge the 2007 ruling. Rivers State fought back. The state Attorney General and the Speaker of the House of Assembly took it to the Supreme Court to block the EFCC. The Supreme Court dismissed their appeal on March 10, 2025. 18 years. That is how long the injunction held. 18 years the EFCC could not ask Peter Odili one question about N100 billion. He is 77 years old now. He has never been tried. Never been charged. Never spent a day in a cell. The draft criminal charges prepared by Festus Keyamo in 2007 are still sitting in a file. Nobody has read them in court. Meanwhile Nuhu Ribadu, the EFCC chairman who first investigated Odili in 2007, is now Nigeria's National Security Adviser under Tinubu. The man who tried to prosecute him is now the second most powerful security official in the country. And Odili is still free. 😂💀🇳🇬

@AniebietChrist3 The beef will be to the grave. There’ll never be room for reconciliation. Not in this life or the next, if I’ve got a say over there. Fuck him till eternity!

I spent 3 months chasing a contract to supply laptops to a private school. I did the research, got quotes, even used my own money to design a proposal with mock-ups. My cousin was jobless at the time, so I asked him to follow me to the meeting for moral support. I introduced him to the proprietor as “my brother.” After the presentation, the proprietor said he’d get back to me. Two weeks of silence. I called, he said “we’re still reviewing.” A month later I drove past the school and saw a van offloading laptops. My cousin’s company name was on the side. I thought it was a coincidence. That evening I checked CAC. He’d registered a business 3 days after our meeting, using my exact proposal format. Same specs, same pricing, just his letterhead. I called him. He didn’t deny it. He said “you were too slow. Business is not family. If I didn’t take it, someone else would.” He even told me the proprietor said I looked “too young to handle 8 million.” The worst part? My aunt called to beg me not to “spoil his chance.” Said I should be happy one of us got it.

This is how my mom used to buy meat when we were kids living in Bauchi💔 We had a big deep freezer dedicated to just proteins , she’d buy a full cow, goat and chickens, and store them in the freezer. We never knew what it meant to lack meat, it was not a concept we could understand. A few days ago I had a conversation with my mom on the issue of cost of feeding and I legit dropped a tear, we need to evict Tinubu from Aso rock and I’m being fr !

This is exactly the same thing I’ve been thinking about for a while. It appears like we’ve confused good policy design with good policy outcomes. Subsidy removal, FX liberalisation, tax reforms and those “hard economic policies” sound good and they appear correct on paper. But these policies assume a functioning safety net, productive capacity that can absorb the shock, and a state that reinvests the savings into the people. Strip those away and you’re not implementing any reform, you’re just transferring pain downward which is what this administration has been doing. Three years in and the people have not benefited from these policies. Commodity prices up 3–4x, school fees unaffordable but ofc, there is NELFUND lol, real wages destroyed. The “savings” from subsidy removal haven’t visibly returned to citizens in any form. Good policies without structural follow-through aren’t good policies. They’re just austerity disguised as improvements and we all would be used as collateral damages for the perceived improvement.

@its__prachi027 What about those of us who see Trump? 🤭

If you're right brained, you will see a Whale. If you're left brained you'll see a Giraffe

Following the film’s preview at #CinemaCon, which gave exhibitors an early look ahead of its theatrical release, Paramount Pictures and Nile Entertainment have entered a West African distribution partnership for #ChildrenofBloodandBone ⚔️🖤 The deal covers a wide theatrical rollout across key markets including Nigeria and Ghana.

AMC spent almost $100 million making Season 3 of this show. Two full film crews. 300 people on set every day. Then they cancelled it. The show is Into the Badlands. It ran on AMC (the network that made Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead) from 2015 to 2019. It's a martial arts show set in a post-apocalyptic America 500 years from now, where swords have replaced guns and warlords rule the land. Daniel Wu, an American-born martial arts champion, starred in it and produced it. Wu told Den of Geek the show ran two separate film units at the same time. One for action, one for dialogue. 150 people on each. Each episode cost $6 to $7 million to make, which is roughly Game of Thrones money for a cable show almost nobody ended up watching. The fight choreographer was Master Dee Dee Ku. His teacher was Yuen Woo-ping, the man who did the fights in The Matrix and Kill Bill. Ku himself worked on Kill Bill, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Iron Monkey. He put the cast through a six-week boot camp, six hours a day, learning kung fu, weapons, and wire work. Stephen Fung, who directed the Chinese film Tai Chi Zero, ran the whole action unit. They used real wires for the flying scenes instead of computer effects, which is how old Hong Kong movies did it. The premiere pulled 8.2 million viewers in November 2015, the third-biggest cable show launch ever at that time. AMC had it airing right after The Walking Dead, which at its peak was drawing 14 million people a week. When The Walking Dead went off the air between seasons, Badlands lost half its audience. By the Season 3 finale, it was under 1 million viewers per episode. AMC had also stopped promoting the show after Season 1. Cable TV runs on ad money, and that needs big regular audiences. At $6 million per episode, the numbers just weren't adding up. The creators, Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, moved on. A few years later they created Wednesday for Netflix, with Tim Burton directing. It's now the most-watched English-language series in Netflix's history, at 252 million views. Same writers making the same kind of dark genre TV, but on a platform that could actually find the audience without needing a Walking Dead to drag people in.