How a series of catastrophes I witnessed have shaped my choices as a journalist, up to and including making an enemy out of the U.S. Goverment, and why Anthony Blinken is a supreme wanker.
David Hundeyin
Flat 2, 58 Jagunmolu Street, Bariga, Lagos.
That was my address back in 2018, when I was a fresh-faced 28 year-old finally making a name for myself in the media and journalism and journalism spaces I had always dreamed of breaking into. At the time, I was a writer on Channels TV’s hit political satire show The Other News, and I was apparently quite good at it. So good in fact that, the US State Department had just nominated me for a spot on the Edward Murrow Program for Journalists under the 2019 International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). My work had even been featured in the New Yorker magazine, and despite still being almost completely anonymous in Nigeria, I could tell that my big career break was coming.
At the time, I had what I considered to be a decent middle-class lifestyle in Lagos. I drove a 2009 Kia Rio that was my university graduation gift, and my missus and I – while hardly millionaires – pulled in enough monthly income to do pretty much everything a couple of 20-somethings in Lagos could aspire to do on a modest budget. In our apartment building at No 58, we were by far the youngest of 5 married couples, and we were the subjects of many an envious glance when we would regularly pull in to the house and offload multiple yellow Shoprite bags from the car, back in the halcyon days when N30,000 could fill a multitude of those bags.
The occupants of the other 4 apartments largely kept to themselves, but there was a particular guy that lived with his family in the BQ downstairs, who became something of a problem neighbour. The whole building shared one postpaid meter, and when the NEPA/PHCN/WhateverTheHeckTheyCallIt bill came, he would always pay his share late or sometimes not at all. When the water pump broke, which was often, he would not pay his share to fix it.
He would not pay his share for the weekly garbage disposal. Almost invariably, my missus and I – the only childless couple in the building – were expected to cover for him, after all we had no kids and we spent all our money on Saturday evening jaunts to Spur Restaurant and yellow Shoprite bags filled with groceries, because we were too good to shop at Bariga market like normal people.
He and his wife had 3 children of their own, plus a child from his wife’s extended family living with them. One of his 3 kids was a little boy named Korede. Korede was about 8 years old, but he had developmental problems and was very sickly. I never had the courage to ask what his specific learning difficulties were, but I did know that he could not use words and he was rarely seen without his mom lurking nearby, ready to give him a new dose of medicine or change his diaper.
On at least one occasion, I came home to find a suspiciously child-sized turd at the bottom of the staircase to my apartment. The kid was clearly in pain a lot of the time, and it wasn’t hard to tell how much of an emotional toll it took on his two siblings and his parents – an electrician and a petty trader – who were clearly just getting by. Because of Korede and the obvious struggle his parents were going through, I would often quietly cover the unpaid portion of the electricity and household bills. It’s not that I was such a good person – I just felt really, really sorry for this kid.
Sometimes when he was less sickly and in something approaching normal childlike health, you could sometimes see him make his way up our staircase, stretching his lean frame and trying unsuccessfully to peek into our house through the living room window. The world he was familiar with must have made us seem like aliens from outer space to him, and he would sometimes be found sitting for hours at the bottom of our staircase, staring longingly at our living room window like it was a portal to another universe.
Until one day…
“KOREDE OOOO!!!!!”
It was a late night in February when I heard a loud, frantic knock on the door. It was the neighbour in the flat directly beneath ours asking me to help rush the kid to the hospital with my car. Korede’s mom had apparently come back from running an errand to find him lying in an unresposive, non-breathing state. His siblings had apparently thought he was merely sleeping. Wearing only a jalabia and a pair of slippers, I grabbed my keys and ran to the car. Korede’s dad went in the front seat, and 2 of the other male neighbours squeezed into the back seat sandwiching Korede’s mom who was holding his limp frame and wailing piteously:
KOREDE!!! KOREDE EJOOO!!! KOREDE OOOO!!! KOREDE OOOOO!!!!
It sounded like something out of a Mount Zion movie, and it was one of the most terrifying sounds I had ever heard. I floored it to R. Jolad Hospital a few hundred metres away, with Korede’s screaming mom entreating the limp 8 year-old in her arms to wake up. When we got there. his parents went into the ER with the doctor while the remaining 3 of us waited in the reception. The other 2 men began praying to God to save Korede’s life. Atheist that I am, I was not much use and I just sort of stood around clearing my throat and feeling very uncomfortable. Over the course of the prior 9 months, I had witnessed my dad, then my father-in-law die in front of me. But nothing compared to the unique experience of witnessing a child facing death. It felt as if the air had a bitter taste.
Then came a sound that rent the air in the waiting room.
“KOREDE!!! KOREDE!!!!! KINI MO ṢE FUN Ẹ!!!! KOREDE!!!!! KOREDE OOOOO!!!!”
There was no solemn-lipped doctor walking out to tell us the terrible news, nor did we need one. Instead, the terrifying wailing got progressively louder, and the hospital reception got progressively quieter as Korede’s distraught mom emerged from the ER with her husband, cradling the dead 8 year-old boy in her arms. I looked around briefly and realised that nobody in the reception had the courage to look at the tiny corpse. Everyone else was making the sign of the Cross or going “Astaghfirullah!” All I could offer was a silent expletive under my breath as I gawked at the horrible spectacle.
“Fuck!”
A doctor who had followed them out of the ER broke our horrible silence with the world’s most uncomfortable “Ahem-hem.” He began quietly murmuring something about how the hospital couldn’t accept the body after confirming the boy was dead because they did not know the cause of death, and for legal reasons they’d need to do an autopsy, because the police bla bla bla. Honestly, it was an academic point – Korede’s parents couldn’t possibly afford to pay the mortuary fees at a private hospital anyway. We found ourselves walking back to the car because apparently, we were going home so the boy’s parents could decide what to do with his body.
And thus proceeded the most unpleasant 2-minute drive of my life – an impossibly grim journey back to No. 58 with a dead child in the arms of his wailing mother in the back seat. Being Muslims, Korede’s parents decided to bury him at sunrise at Yaba Cemetery, and they got back to the house shortly before 8AM. I had a day off work at Channels TV, so I decided to drop in around 9AM to offer some words of condolence. Amid the grimness, I kept an eye out for Korede’s dad hoping to offer a few words of encouragement to him in private but I did not see him there. I asked where he was and I had to stifle the shocked gasp that nearly escaped when they told me.
Korede’s dad had gone to work!
The Banality Of Disaster – My Introduction To The Wild
This was of course, not my first time encountering the ugliness that comes with disaster in Nigeria. I could vividly remember the ambulance driver telling me “We don’t carry dead bodies” and leaving my dad’s corpse on the living room floor at my family home just 8 months before this.
A few months after that, I would get to witness my father-in-law’s dead body stuck in the ambulance at Island General Hospital for over an hour with his uncovered legs sticking out of the back of the ambulance like 2 hefty matchsticks, either because there was not enough morgue space, or because nobody could simply be arsed to process the new entrant. It was Nigeria so nobody knew why, and nobody offered any explanation. If you didn’t like it, well, so what?
Korede’s death however, really got to me. It got to me because I realised that in Nigeria – the real Nigeria I now lived in, not the cossetted, Ogudu GRA version of it I once called home – not even the death of your learning-impaired lastborn child was enough reason to take even one day off from your desperate struggle to survive and provide for your family.
Korede might be dead, but his siblings and their mother still needed to be fed, clothed and housed. Korede’s dad was a carpenter and he had to work whenever work was available – which was not all the time – or else the rest of the family would join Korede. To my eyes, it was a life-changing disaster. To him, it was Thursday.
When I eventually ran into him early in the morning a few days later and I launched into the heartfelt condolences I had rehearsed, he cut me off rather matter-of-factly with a response in Yoruba that roughly translated to “That boy suffered too much. God called him to rest finally,” and then he continued on his way.
He was going to work again.
Even worse, I began to notice a similar pattern of casual ugliness everywhere around me. Sometime later that year during the rainy season, a terrible story emerged of a young graduate trainee who got caught in a flash flood on her way back from work during a rainstorm in Lagos. Her drowned corpse was later discovered half-buried under debris inside a blocked drainage channel.
That’s it. That’s the end of the story.
Somebody’s daughter, sister, cousin, girlfriend, and colleague had done all the things she was supposed to do in life – gone to school, got good grades, graduated, done her NYSC year, got a good job – and how her story ended was that some rain fell one day and she randomly died. That was it. Gone. Forgotten. Except for this random guy on Substack writing about her in 2024 and her family, she was completely forgotten. That was it.
That was it?
In hindsight, it is no coincidence that 2018 turned out to be the year of my complete radicalisation. After 20-something years cocooned away in the comfort of Ogudu GRA and the UK, I had finally emerged into the country that I had returned to in 2013 convinced of the inevitability of ‘Africa Rising’ and consumed with the pursuit of my urban Nigerian middle class dream. I had reached what some would consider to be the zenith of the profession I was in. When you’re getting featured in the New Yorker, collecting IVLP nominations and appearing in Netflix documentaries, the next available step for a creative was to apply for a scholarship somewhere across the Atlantic and develop your career somewhere you actually had a chance to grow.
For me however, this crossroads in my personal and profesisonal life was where I chose to turn left instead of right. I looked at the country and society around me and felt 2 overriding feelings – bitterness and dissatisfaction. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Nigeria wasn’t supposed to implode in front of my eyes. Right in front of me, every dream and expectation I had once had of the Nigeria that would exist in my best years was going up in smoke. The military modernisation and Chinese-funded infrastructure megaprojects around the country that I once breathlessly followed on Beegeagles Blog and the SkyscraperCity Nigeria country forum were all severely slowed down or halted. Most of my friends from school whom I had attended university abroad and returned to Nigeria with had started moving to Canada, Australia, Germany and the UK. The word ‘Jakpa’ had become a thing.
Just 3 years before, the country I lived in was considered part of a new development bloc known as MINT – Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey. The burgeoning $510 billion economy – by far Africa’s largest at the time – was expanding at 7 percent annually and was forecasted to become the continent’s first trillion dollar economy by 2024. This wasn’t just airy-fairy talk either – the green shoots of technical transfer and actual industrialisation were starting to manifest. The Dangote Group had announced that it was building a 650,000 bpd oil refinery – the world’s largest single-train refinery – in Lagos.
A comprehensive nationwide rail masterplan had been drawn up and track-laying on the Abuja – Kaduna segment of the new national Standard Gauge network had already concluded. Lagos and Abuja had both kicked off construction on metro rail projects, and even though it appeared wrongheaded and doomed for failure, Port Harcourt appeared to be at least trying to do something roughly similar. China had kicked off its Belt-and-Road Initiative with Nigeria front-and-centre of its African infrastructure investment strategy, and it looked for all the world, like Nigeria was on its way to becoming an African economic behemoth. ‘Africa Rising’ wasn’t just a story – it was a manifest and obvious reality.
There was an indigenous vehicle manufacturer that had opened in Nnewi and begun pushing out more than 7,000 units annually using Chinese technology and IP. An estimated 65 percent of the value adding process happened in-country, with the electronics, plastic components, rubber components, frames, and batteries manufactured within a 100KM radius of the Nnewi factory. The Nigerian Air Force was preparing an order of 40 JF-17 Thunder jet fighters from Pakistan, with a local assembly facility for the aircraft included in the deal. Nigeria in 2015 was not quite on the cusp of a China-1979-type economic breakout, but an economic breakout was happening.
In fact I had come within a hair’s breath of personally benefitting from this economic updraft. Back then, I had applied for a helicopter cadet pilot program and after finding my way past 6,000 applicants and 4 gruelling stages of recruitment including an incredibly difficult WOMBAT test, I had earned a spot among the chosen 12. We were invited for a psychometric evaluation and the statutory NCAA medical examination at Kupa Medical Centre, then we waited for our trip to Bristow Academy in Titusville, Florida.
It never came.
A pestilence by the name of Muhamadu Buhari had become president, and – for some reason – that meant that the helicopter transport company responsible for the cadet program lost its transport contracts and soon went out of business altogether. The JF-17 deal vanished into thin air. The 650,000 bpd refinery was still struggling to make it off the drawing board. The rail construction projects had all stalled and Nigeria no longer seemed to be in any particular hurry to make use of the gigantic opportunity that was the Chinese BRI.
Back in 2015, even though I had worked in the Marketing industry and I had a front row seat where I witnessed the shenanigans involved in Mr. Buhari’s electoral campaign, I did not yet grasp the full ugliness of what was happening to Nigeria, nor did I completely understand how it would play out over the coming years. By 2018 however, the intervening years had provided a 3-year crash course in the Basic Fundamentals of Buharism and it was more than enough for me.
Something just had to give.
I had watched death after death after death. I had seen off friend after friend after friend. Kelechi went off to London. Desola went off to Toronto. Funmi went off to Montreal, then Chiboy went off to Toronto, then Chidiebere went off to Hamburg, then Harriet went off to Ottawa, then Mary went off to Texas, then Wura went off to Atlanta, then Timi went off to New Jersey, then Ella went off to Brisbane. And then my dad died.
The news had stopped being about anything I remotely wanted to hear about. Instead, I would regularly see headlines announcing that 500 people had been murdered by “unknown assailants” somewhere in Benue State. Actually the headlines wouldn’t even describe them as “500 people,”as in 500 electricians, farmers, housewives, children, plumbers, wheelbarrow pushers and shopkeepers. No, I would see something like “500 Dead In Fresh Agatu Attack.”
“500 Dead.”
It was as if 500 business cards accidentally fell into a puddle, or maybe 500 cupcakes got burnt in an oven. Five hundred human beings were murdered at leisure by heavily-armed, systematic, and organised non-state actors. It seemed like every other week, both in my personal life and in the country around me, there was a new event to suggest that I was witnessing the rapid, real-time implosion of the country I called home. The most intense feelings of bitterness and disappointment welled up as I slowly realised that the real-time degradation of my career aspirations, my family, my social life and my general lived experience in Nigeria was not a temporary blip, but a new long-term trend that had obliterated ‘Africa Rising.’
On the anniversary of my dad’s death in 2018, I visited his grave and spent hours thinking about what I wanted to do about this giant emotional weight I carried about with me. I thought about what he would do if he were in my shoes. He would probably offer a prayer for strength, and then deal with life like a Zen philosopher as he always did.
After all, that is exactly what he did during the 1980s when Nigeria last went through a similar period of total upheaval and mass emigration. As his friends and colleagues took their families and fled to London, Atlanta and Washington DC, David Snr. stayed in Lagos, prayed to his God, drank his black coffee, faced his government work squarely, and produced 3 additional children during what was at the time, the most tumultuous decade in Nigeria’s history. The man absolutely raw-dogged the 80s and came out on the other side with a wife, 4 children, 5 promotions, type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. He even had another child in ‘94 just for the craic.
An absolute legend.
But was his son like him?
Nope.
He was not.
Dad was the type to accept what he could not change. I was the type to change what I could not accept. He was cool and passive. I was broody and intense. He believed that there was a ‘Jehovah’ somewhere maintaining a grand cosmic ledger of human fuckery in preparation for the day he would decide to do something about the world he apparently created. I had no use for gods and deities, and his ‘Jehovah’ meant as much to me as did Ọyá the Yoruba goddess of storms and lightning.
Cool stories, but meh
If there was one thing I had learned from my post-university years in the UK, it was that the world was a terrible place and you had to either accept being stepped on like bug, or fight for your place in it. Nobody was coming to help you, nobody was coming to rescue you, and nobody cared whether you achieved all your dreams or you fell in the shower, hit your head and died. You either took charge of your own destiny and survived, or you crawled into a sewer and waited for death – either way, the world was not losing anything of much value. Life was entirely what you made of it, and you were your only hope, saviour or messiah.
Lying there on my dad’s grave that day in June 2018 was when I made the decision that would define the next 5 years of my life. I decided that I would dedicate the ensuing few years of my life to aggressively attacking the things that I could not accept about the country around me. The system had become complacent and calcified in its malevolence to the extent that the basic human value of Nigerian life was being questioned. Pushback was desperately needed. The system needed an external correction.
The country’s public space needed an insurgent presence. A vigilante. A 1-man operation that would create the Nigerian equivalent of a Bat Signal. A well-connected member of the country’s elite who could also transform as needed into a complete and utter nutjob with a method to his madness. Nigeria was far too comfortable lying in its faeces with its eyes covered and nose plugged so that it could deny its own reality. Someone needed to rip off the nose plugs and take off the eye coverings so that Nigeria could once again know the most visceral discomfort and shame.
I decided that I would be that someone. Nobody asked me or thrust such an assignment on me. I simply decided that I had to choose whether to become a protagonist or accept the fate of an NPC standing in line to experience one of Nigeria’s endless catalogue of infuriatingly disrespectful and pointless deaths. I was going to make my stand and to that end, I would need a powerful weapon with which to wage my 1-man Jihad.
I already knew what my weapon would be.
2019 – 2024: The Gloves Come Off
It started with opinion columns and editorials in early 2019. TheScoop. CCN.com. BusinessDay. CNN Africa. The Africa Report. If anyone would give me a byline on their platform, I would sign whatever contract they put in front of me. Heck, even Opera News.
Yes, this happened.
Then came Mercy Abang and the opportunity to start contributing investigative pieces to NewswireNGR in September 2019. During this time, I also found myself taking part in a research and documentation project for an NGO called PSJ Nigeria. That project ended up becoming the comprehensive report ‘Silent Slaughter: Genocide In Nigeria And Implications For The International Community.’ My most notable memory on this project was documenting a massacre in Kajuru, Southern Kaduna, and discovering – to my utmost disgust and very much against my will – what charred human flesh smells like.
Eventually, the report was completed and presented to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice-President Mike Pence. As a direct result of this report, one of Pompeo’s last actions in office was to designate Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern for violation of religious freedom. It was not what we asked for, or anything close to it, but at least it was something. So naturally, as soon as Anthony Blinken took office as Joe Biden’s Secretary of State, one of his first major foreign policy decisions was to mysteriously take Nigeria off the list. To date, nobody can explain the rationale behind that decision.
At this point, I think I don’t need to go into a detailed description of how my subsequent investigative work became the journalistic equivalent of a blunt force instrument in the Nigerian public space, especially from 2021 onwards. This is because the very Substack you are reading is where most of this work was originally worked on and hosted. In the launch post, I was very unsubtle about what I want to do with this publication, which was then known as West Africa Weekly.
The gloves were off and nobody was off limits. Everybody could catch these journalistic hands, and everybody often did. the list of powerful people that I offended on these pages reads like a list of who one should probably not offend in Nigeria. Allen Onyema. Isa Pantami. Muhammadu Buhari. Ahmed Idris Nasreddin. The entire Nigeria Immigration Service. Amnesty International Nigeria. The Nigeria Police Force. The DSS. Flutterwave. Loan sharks linked to the Chinese triads. BBC Africa. The serving president. A bank chairman. Multiple airlines and aerospace regulators.
At the peak of my troublemaking in August 2023, I was invited to speak on George Galloway’s Mother Of All Talk Shows about you know what. You know, that thing and that person. Yes. The most-read thing on this entire Substack publication. It was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about, and with good reason. I was newly settled in Nairobi at the time, fresh off the plane from West Africa after a security situation had forced me to leave, but I suppose I’m getting ahead of the story a bit.
