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My new paintings. The Three Yoruba Brothers.

The difference between humans and animals is that animals won’t let the dumbest ones lead the pack.

"Rich enough to show my children the world, not pictures of it. Rich enough to take my friends to dinner and say,"I got this", Rich enough that God uses me to help the people who are in need."

The hardest part of being young and ambitious is being surrounded by people who’ve already made peace with ordinary.

Leave room for surprises, because sometimes the people you trust most are capable of the unexpected.

Ambitious people are my type. I can’t even hide it, once you start talking about doing impossible work, the kind of talk that inspires greatness, you have my allegiance till the wheels fall off. We may fail (woefully) but we will never be guilty of not trying.

Let’s start with 1967 Here’s the documented record. 1967–1970: Britain and Shell-BP chose who won the Civil War, for oil When Biafra declared independence in 1967, Britain had £200 million invested in Shell-BP oil operations in the Eastern region. Declassified British government documents show their Foreign Office stated explicitly: “Our direct interests are trade and investment, including an important stake by Shell/BP in the eastern region.” Shell-BP refused to pay oil royalties to Biafra. Britain secretly supplied arms — jets, armoured vehicles, ammunition, patrol boats — to the Federal Military Government. Prime Minister Harold Wilson lied to parliament, claiming arms were supplied at pre-war levels when they had been massively increased. Up to 3 million people died. Britain and Shell won. Oil kept flowing. 🔗 declassifieduk.org/how-britains-l… 🔗 cambridge.org/core/journals/… 🔗 durham.ac.uk/departments/ac… The US angle on Biafra Declassified US State Department documents show Washington’s Nigeria policy was explicitly shaped around protecting American oil company investments in the Eastern region. US officials debated whether their oil interests were better protected by a united Nigeria or an independent Biafra, not by what was right for Nigerians. CIA documents were actively used to monitor and shape Biafran public relations strategy in the US. 🔗 academic.oup.com/jah/article/99… (Oxford Academic — US Oil Companies and the Nigerian Civil War) 🔗 history.state.gov/historicaldocu… (Declassified US State Dept documents) The complicity that continues today: Where do they hide the money? Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Nigerian politicians loot Nigeria. That part is 100% on them. But where does the money go? Into British Virgin Islands shell companies. Into London properties. Into Jersey bank accounts. Into Panama foundations. Into Monaco-registered secrecy firms. The Pandora Papers revealed 10 Nigerian politicians hiding wealth in offshore jurisdictions, including serving governors, a former Chief Justice, and port authority officials. 137 wealthy Nigerians were found to have secretly purchased London properties through offshore vehicles. Between 1960 and 1999, an estimated $582 billion was stolen from Nigeria. That money didn’t disappear. It went into Western financial systems that profit from receiving it. 🔗 financeuncovered.org/stories/pandor… 🔗 premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines… 🔗 punchng.com/10-nigerian-po… My honest view Are Nigerian politicians CIA puppets? That’s unprovable and too simple. Are Nigerian politicians enabled, protected, and financially serviced by Western governments and institutions that know exactly what they’re doing? That is documented, that is ongoing, and that is the more precise and more damning truth. Britain armed the side that controlled the oil. Western banks receive the stolen money. Western law firms set up the shell companies. Western real estate markets launder the proceeds. The looting is local. The infrastructure that makes the looting permanent is Western. Both things are true. Both deserve accountability. And again this is. It a biafran tweet to support or sympathize with anybody

Talk is always cheap. I have been gritting my teeth and refraining from saying very unpleasant things to the lazy logic behind all the attacks. @Tunde_OD plays Chess at global championship levels. If you understand Chess at all, you will give him credit for having more agency and foresight than most humans alive. He has his life strategy and doesn't have to explain each move; otherwise, he wouldn't be one of the best at what he does. I have learned so much from the way he sold those custom chessboards. It was brilliant and masterful. That move alone has raised more money for the causes he supports than waiting for handouts ever would. People who should be learning are criticizing aimlessly. Yes, he would likely become a billionaire because he understands products and branding on a level most people can only dream about. Becoming one will make him a philanthropist rather than a recipient of philanthropy. We are watching his opening gambit. Watch him and learn instead of jumping up and down like a pack of... let me calm down. This thing has really upset me. I am disappointed in many.

Adults just don’t seem to understand that if you treat someone poorly then they’re not gonna talk to you anymore

Nobody talks about the stage of grief where you can't even talk about it to anyone anymore because everyone expects you to be getting over it but it still runs through your mind everyday.

Fiction, Yes. Academic, not likely.

Africa's democratic systems often prioritize Western interests.

The way life continues after people die is one of the most humbling things ever.

Niger. One of the poorest countries on earth. Also one of the largest uranium producers on earth. The uranium that powers French nuclear reactors, which provide seventy percent of France's electricity, has come from Niger for decades. The price France paid for that uranium was set by AREVA, the French state nuclear company. Below market rate. For decades. Niger sat on one of the most valuable energy resources in the world and could not afford to keep its lights on. The irony is not ironic. It is structural. It was designed. When Niger's new government after the 2023 coup demanded renegotiation of the uranium contracts, France called it instability. Called it a threat to regional security. Called for international pressure to restore the previous order. The previous order in which French reactors ran on Nigerien uranium at prices set in Paris. That order was called stability.

Every time the West calls an African country "unstable" they mean the resources stopped flowing. I made a glossary of 100 diplomatic words they use and what they actually mean. orange-anselma-35.tiiny.site Bookmark this before your next history book. 🧵

@nnamdiobiii They either don’t read or are deliberately obtuse.

Olodo In the 1980s, Nigeria was pushed into Structural Adjustment Programs by the IMF/World Bank. SAPs forced government to slash spending on public infrastructure such as power, water, health, education. Who designed those conditions? Washington consensus institutions with US Treasury fingerprints all over them. NEPA didn’t fail by accident. It was defunded by policy. Now zoom out to Nepal. Nepal sits on some of the most powerful river systems on earth. Hydroelectric potential that could power the entire subcontinent. Yet they remain one of the poorest countries in Asia,dependent on foreign aid, foreign expertise, foreign approval. Why? Because energy independence is geopolitical power. And powerful neighbors (with US backing) don’t want a self-sufficient Nepal. Two countries. Two continents. Zero electricity sovereignty. The CIA doesn’t need to cut your light. They just need to make sure you never build the switch. But because you can’t read not think objectively, you make careless tweets without realizing how hopeless you are.

“No intelligent person is interested in dominating others. His first intrest is to know himself.” — Osho

Yesterday I was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Award (PhD) for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. I also emerged the Overall Winner for the Outstanding PhD Award for the University of Texas at Dallas. 🥇🎉

Admission: I'm a time traveler from 2020. Enjoy 2016 - it's as good as it gets for awhile

The hardest thing to explain to someone inside the imperial consensus is the concept of structural violence. They understand individual violence. One person harms another person. There is a perpetrator and a victim and a clear causal chain. What they cannot see, what the entire educational and media apparatus has been carefully designed to prevent them from seeing, is the violence that happens when a system is arranged so that certain people predictably die, predictably suffer, predictably lose, not because any individual decided to harm them specifically but because the overall arrangement of power requires their subordination. The people of the Global South do not die of poverty because individual Americans wish them dead. They die because the international economic architecture, the terms of trade, the debt structures, the conditions attached to IMF loans, the intellectual property regimes that prevent technology transfer, the agricultural subsidies that undercut developing world farmers, is arranged, in aggregate, in a way that concentrates wealth in already wealthy countries and extracts it from already poor ones. And that architecture was designed. It was negotiated. It was implemented by specific people in specific rooms making specific decisions about who would benefit and who would not. This is violence. It does not look like violence because no one is pulling a trigger. But the deaths it produces are just as dead. And when you try to explain this to someone whose entire identity rests on the belief that what they have they earned, and what others lack they failed to achieve, you are not making a political argument. You are dismantling the story that makes their life make sense. They will not thank you for it. They will defend against it with everything they have. Because the alternative, accepting that their comfort is downstream of other people's dispossession, is not a policy position. It is an identity catastrophe.