Retweets, non fattening food for thought....
Africa
Joined July 2011
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LT-Bot retweeted
Omo we don get another TG Omori o but this one Dey movie Industry! I no fit believe sey na GenZ produce this kind movie! He must have spent a lot making this!🤯
Nice work Isaac Arogundade!👏🎬
LT-Bot retweeted
Meet the Nigerian Scientific Power Couple: Professor Pius Nwankwo Okeke and Professor Francisca Nneka Okeke from UNN.
Professor Pius Nwankwo Okeke is a distinguished Nigerian astronomer and educator widely known as the Father of Astronomy in Nigeria. His work helped advance astronomy education and space research in Nigeria and Africa.
He co-authored Senior Secondary Physics with M. W. Anyakoha, a textbook that has helped generations of Nigerian students study physics.
His wife, Professor Francisca Nneka Okeke, is an accomplished Nigerian physicist in her own right.
In August 2025, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially named asteroid (149831) Okeke in her honour, recognising her scientific contributions. The asteroid's name stands as a lasting tribute to her work.
Her other notable achievements include:
2013 L’Oréal–UNESCO For Women in Science Laureate, recognised for her research in the physical sciences.
A trailblazer in physics: She has been recognised as the first woman professor of physics in eastern Nigeria.
Their legacy is written not only in textbooks and scientific research, but also in the stars. 🌟
LT-Bot retweeted
ColdHubs is one of the most beautiful Nigerian business stories out there, because it solves a painfully simple problem: good food rotting in the sun before anyone can sell it.
— Founded by Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu who was an agricultural radio host travelling to meet farmers. In 2013 at Farin Gada Market, he saw mountains of cabbages turning to trash, and the farmers there pleaded for storage so they could sell later. He launched ColdHubs in 2015, based in Owerri.
— These are walk-in cold rooms placed right inside markets and farm clusters. Rooftop solar panels of about 5.5kW power them off-grid, around the clock.
— Farmers stack their produce in plastic crates inside, and the room holds a steady 5 °C, stretching shelf life from about 2 days to as long as 21.
— The genius part is the pricing, a trader pays roughly 100 Naira per 20kg crate per day, so even a small tomato seller can afford it.
— ColdHubs learned it worked better to own and maintain the rooms themselves, guaranteeing farmers reliable cooling, which is basically "cooling as a service."
— It cuts spoilage by up to 80% and reportedly doubles vendor income, from about $60 to $120 a month
— They recruit and train local women as hub operators and market promoters
— It won the $2 million Food Planet Prize in 2022, the world's largest award in the food and environment space
— The newer ColdHubs 2.0 swapped batteries for ice-based cooling, and their app Coldtivate helps with inventory and market price prediction
— As of 2025, it ran over 50 hubs across more than 20 states, serving over 11,000 users.
LT-Bot retweeted
A friend of mine @EromoEgbejule recently linked me up with an African-American lady who traced her ancestry and discovered that she is Nupe. This piqued her curiosity about her origins, and I have been helping her learn more about them.
This has taken me down a rabbit hole of research, trying to excavate historical documents about enslaved people from our part of the world. It has been quite haunting to follow some of these stories, especially those involving our own people who participated in slave raids and those who ended up being sold to slave merchants. I have also come across records of my own ancestors who were involved in slave raids across the Niger.
This has been a journey of fascinating discoveries for me, too. The young woman’s Nupe ancestors may well have been among the people whose stories I have encountered in the literature, scattered across the United States and Brazil. One such person was Arzuma, identified as a “Nupe Muslim woman” who was captured in an unstated place in Africa and transported to Alabama in 1860. This was particularly stirring because my great-grandmother, whom I was fortunate enough to meet, was born just a few years later.
That last detail has stayed with me. We tend to imagine the transatlantic slave trade as belonging to some distant, almost inaccessible past. Yet, when I think of Arzuma, whose name may well be a corruption of the Nupe name Dzuma or Azumi, traditionally associated with a Muslim girl born during Ramadan, and my great-grandmother, whose lifetime overlapped with hers, I am reminded that history is sometimes much closer to us than we imagine.
LT-Bot retweeted
In 1952, a 27-year-old psychiatrist from Martinique published a book arguing that colonialism wasn't just a political system, it was a documented form of collective mental injury, and he had the clinical training to prove it.
Frantz Fanon trained as a psychiatrist in France before working in colonial Algeria, and Black Skin, White Masks was his first major work, written while he was still finishing his residency. In it, he argued that colonized Black people are pushed to internalize whiteness as the standard of worth, then measured permanently against a standard they're never allowed to fully reach, producing real psychological damage he treated directly in his own patients.
He wasn't writing as an outside observer theorizing about race. He was a clinician diagnosing a condition he watched colonialism actually produce in people.
The book became foundational to postcolonial theory and influenced the thinking of civil rights leaders well beyond Africa and the Caribbean. More than 70 years later, people are still assigning it in university courses because the psychological pattern Fanon described never fully went away, it just changed its packaging.
LT-Bot retweeted
Why Is It So Hard for Louis Vuitton to Say "Nigerian Leather"?
For over 35 years, Kano-based Winston Leather has supplied leather to some of the world's biggest luxury fashion houses, including Louis Vuitton.
Here is the irony.
The leather is Nigerian. Yet when Louis Vuitton turns that leather into luxury bags, shoes, and other products, the label has reportedly described it as "Genuine Italian Leather."
Winston challenged this and asked a simple question:
If you buy genuine Nigerian leather from us, why call it Italian?
The "Italian" reference subsequently disappeared. Instead of acknowledging its Nigerian origin, Louis Vuitton reportedly started putting "Genuine Leather" so they wouldn't further offend the sensibilities of the Nigerian supplier.
Why?
Why is it apparently so difficult to say "Nigerian Leather"?
Nobody is disputing Italian craftsmanship. If a product is manufactured in Italy, say so. "Made in Italy" can proudly coexist with "Made with Nigerian leather."
That would be honest, and it would recognise everyone who contributed to the final product.
But Kano-based Winston Leather is no longer content to remain an invisible supplier in somebody else's luxury story.
The company has now taken the next step by producing its own finished leather products and preparing to open a store in London, taking Nigerian leather and craftsmanship directly to one of the world's most important luxury markets.
And that may be the most powerful response of all.
Instead of asking others to acknowledge Nigerian leather, Winston is building a brand that makes it impossible to ignore.
This is how Nigeria must begin to think about its natural resources and craftsmanship. We should not merely supply the raw material. We should own the value chain.
So here is the question Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands should answer:
If Nigerian leather is good enough for your luxury products, why isn't it good enough to be called Nigerian leather?
Nigeria is not asking for a favour.
We are asking for recognition.
Nigerian leather does not suddenly become “Italian” simply because it crosses the Mediterranean.
And now, increasingly, Nigerian leather will be sold under a Nigerian name in London.
©Kay Lord, 08102026
LT-Bot retweeted
When you see rattan on a chair, remember: someone wove it. That weaving is a skill. That skill is a job. That job is an entire industry.
Cameroon has over 20 species of rattan growing naturally in our forests.
Yet we import rattan furniture and brag about it. There is nothing to brag about in buying what already grows in our own backyard.
Who is training the weavers?
Who is investing in the value chain?
LT-Bot retweeted
It is funny that so many kitchen utensils in African homes are imported from China.
We have clay. We have bamboo. We have wood. We have everything it takes to make them.
China supplied about 83% of South Africa's imported porcelain tableware in 2023, and about 85% of Zimbabwe's. Africa imported over $360M of it in 2024. Cameroon is one of the nine biggest buyers.
Someone will say it's cheaper. But every imported pot is a potter without a customer, and a skill that stops being passed on.
That is a big industry, and Africa is only buying from it.
Teach the crafts. Build the industries. Invest in them. These are basic things, and basic things are where big industries start.
Why can't we do it?
Sources: UN Comtrade via WITS (2023), IndexBox (2024).
LT-Bot retweeted
Hi, I’m Fatima Yusuf @mfatimayusuf_ , a Nigerian wildlife and documentary photographer.
Through my work, I document Nigeria’s wildlife, the people protecting it, and the communities living alongside our natural environments.
For me, climate change isn’t just a global conversation. It is something we see in the places we live and work. In our forests, our water, our wildlife, and in the lives of communities that depend on these ecosystems.
I’ve had the opportunity to spend time in places like Yankari, Gashaka Gumti National Park documenting wildlife and the rangers working on the frontlines to protect it. And those experiences have shown me that conservation cannot happen without supporting the people who are doing this work every day.
My message to global leaders is simple: listen to people on the ground, invest in climate adaptation and conservation, and support the communities and conservationists protecting our natural world.
Because protecting our planet also means protecting the people and wildlife who call it home.
CREDIT: @mfatimayusuf_
#FundOurFuture #FixTheFinance #UrgentAction #COP31 #GlobalStocktake
LT-Bot retweeted
The only time many of you have mentioned "TARABA" was when you're reciting your estate and Capital.
If you've ever sipped a cup of Nigerian-grown tea, bought kilishi from a mallam or enjoyed a smoky plate of pepper soup with beef so tender it fell off the bone, there's a very high chance it traces back to this land.
Taraba is home to Chappal Waddi, the highest mountain peak in Nigeria, Taraba has over 80 different languages due to different ethnic groups in the state.
It is the 3rd largest state in Nigeria by land mass. Taraba is blessed with something farmers can’t manufacture - Land, Water and a remarkably diverse Climate.
• Taraba is the only state in Nigeria where they grow every crop in the country. There's no crop you find anywhere in Nigeria that's not growing in Taraba.
• Gembu town in Taraba is the coldest place in Nigeria, reason why Taraba climate grows Apples and other cold weather dependent vegetables
• Taraba is home to one of Nigeria’s most important tea-growing areas. The cool highlands of Mambilla provide the perfect environment for tea cultivation.
Taraba Highland tea is the best tea in West Africa and 2nd best in Africa.
• The state is also known for coffee production, particularly around the Mambilla Plateau, where the high altitude and cool climate create favourable conditions for coffee farming.
• Taraba has 10 major rivers and their tributaries provide water that supports fishing, irrigation and farming.
• Taraba’s fertile plains are major producers of rice, maize, yam, cassava and other food crops, feeding markets within the state and beyond.
• One of the biggest Crocodile 🐊 farm is in Wukari in Taraba state
Taraba is estimated to hold around 5 million cattle, making it 3rd largest largest livestock-producing states in Nigeria, alongside millions of goats, sheep, and pigs.
Because of this, fura da nunu (fermented milk and millet) and kilishi (sun-dried spiced beef) from Taraba's herds end up feeding tables far beyond the state's borders.
• Taraba is one of those places where you can move from tropical lowlands to cool mountain terrain without leaving the state. Chappal Waddi is the highest peak in West Africa.
And then there is the food in Taraba state!!!.
From pounded yam and tuwo to locally produced rice, vegetables, fresh fish and traditional dishes prepared with ingredients grown right there, Taraba’s agriculture is deeply connected to its food culture.
The state is also home to diverse peoples and cultures, including the Jukun, Mambilla, Kuteb, Chamba, Tiv and many others.
There's no way we discuss Agriculture in Nigeria and Taraba name won't be mentioned.
Shout out to Taraba farmers may the nature continue to bless y'all.
Lanre NaijaFarmer
1st Pix - Apples grown in Taraba
2nd Pix - Highland Tea farm in Taraba
LT-Bot retweeted
Just finished reading all three parts of Fisayo’s recent exposé and here are my reflections:
Firstly, Fisayo is astounding. Imo, the best investigative journalist in Nigeria. Bro is brave asl, using “brave” cos if he had died, the word would have been “stupid”. Often times the difference between “bravery” & “stupidity” is outcome.
Secondly, privilege is blinding. For all our despair, we really do not know how “good”we have it until we learn about the immense sufferings of others. We like to compare “privileges” & that’s fine but sometimes we need to compare “sufferings” so we can learn gratitude.
Thirdly, ignorance is expensive and ultimately dangerous, because those lads spent as much, if not more, trying to access Europe illegally than they would have spent doing it legally.
Fourthly, human beings are incredibly wicked. The traffickers, especially the Arab ones & the soldiers: treating humans worse than stray dogs, viciously raping young girls who are already broken in mind, body and soul, shit is beyond my comprehension.
Finally, it’s such a fantastic piece of work, albeit sad & haunting. Well done Fisayo.
LT-Bot retweeted
Sometimes, as a leader, you can be one of the most supportive and developmental bosses you could have. But when the occasion demands it, you can be the most brutal too.
Sometimes you are emotionally intelligent and compassionate. At other times, you set your face like a flint. What it takes is what you give. Leadership is not a tea party.
Sometimes, you don’t have a choice but to do damage and hurt feelings for the overall good. It is a role you must play well, just like any actor. Nothing personal. Just a role.
I am Ezemmuo. I know things.
LT-Bot retweeted
Brick can be sculpted. Iranian architects have been proving it for years.
Not laid flat and plastered over. Rotated, folded, cast into diamonds, twisted into curtains, shaped into deep shading screens that block sun and hold privacy at the same time. Every building here is using the same material we already have, brick, just handled by hands that spent years mastering it.
That is the missing piece. Not the material. The mastery.
We need labor that does more than follow instruction. We need craftsmen who understand material well enough to push it, the way these builders did. Skill like that takes years, patience, and real investment, and it is the only way we start building with what we already have in abundance.
LT-Bot retweeted
If you got a First or Second Class Upper and see a funded opportunity for a Master's at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard or MIT, apply o. But do it with diligence. Do some research about people who have been accepted and what else they offered beyond academics.
Don’t forget that working in your mum’s shop is useful experience, as is volunteering for a community-based organisation. Your only claim to fame cannot be “I made a First.” So, you made a First. What now happened? First Class na water in these schools. You need to show that there is something special about you. What is it?
Treat the application like a professional exam. Give it everything you can and turn every little attribute you have, every adversity you have survived, into a plus.
What’s the worst that could happen? Enh?
I am Ezemmuo. I know things.
LT-Bot retweeted
A school in rural India stopped building classrooms and started building a village instead.
Belgaon Dhaga School sits in Trimbakeshwar, Nashik, a rural area in Maharashtra. PK_iNCEPTiON extended an old, single row of classrooms, not by adding more of the same, but by scattering smaller blocks across the site, connected by courtyards, verandas, and shaded corridors. The layout copies the logic of the village around it, not a conventional school.
Circulation itself became part of the lesson. Corridors branch and reconnect instead of forcing one path, so children choose their own route through the day, lingering, gathering, playing along the way. A preserved tree anchors the main courtyard, functioning as the school's version of a village chowk. Brick plinths double as seating. Walls double as teaching surfaces. Nothing is purely decorative.
The material palette stays consistent throughout: terracotta-rendered walls, brick paving, exposed concrete, slender columns. Deep corridors buffer heat before it ever reaches a classroom. Louvered lower panels and perforated upper ones keep air moving without letting in glare or rain. The building was designed around the climate it sits in, not against it.
This is the same instinct behind the Kyabirwa Surgical Facility in Uganda, materials and layout pulled from what already surrounds the site, instead of imported from somewhere else. Rural African schools face the same conditions this campus was built to solve: heat, dispersed communities, limited budgets, and buildings that need to double as public space after hours. A campus like this would not just survive in that context. It would fit.
Trimbakeshwar, Nashik, Maharashtra, India. Architects: PK_iNCEPTiON. Completed 2025. Photography: Pranit Bora Studio.
LT-Bot retweeted
Francis Kéré built a hospital using bricks that never touched a kiln.
That matters more than it sounds. Firing brick properly means holding a kiln at extremely high temperatures for hours, heat usually generated by burning coal at industrial scale. Burkina Faso doesn't have that fuel infrastructure sitting nearby. So Kéré's team skipped kilns entirely. The bricks for the Léo Surgical Clinic were molded onsite with a portable machine and left to bake in the sun, using heat the site already had in unlimited supply, no coal, no kiln, no fuel cost at all.
Those sun-baked earth bricks do real work once the walls go up. Their thermal mass absorbs cool night air and slowly releases it through the day, in a region where temperatures regularly cross 45°C. Ten overlapping roofs shade the building and protect the clay walls from the region's short but brutal rainy season. Warm air rises and escapes through the gap between ceiling and roof, pulling fresh air in through the windows below it. No mechanical cooling anywhere in a 617 square meter medical facility.
Kéré hired and trained local workers for every phase, people who went on to find other construction jobs afterward because of the skills they picked up here. The clinic serves a town of 50,000 people and takes serious pressure off an overstretched district hospital. It even collects rainwater and treats greywater onsite, using solar power to run the system, because it rains only three months a year and every drop has to be reused.
This is how Africa should build. Start with what the land already gives you, sun, earth, local hands, exactly like Kéré did here. Then take it further. Build the kilns. Refine the coal and the minerals sitting under our own soil, including the rare earths the rest of the world is fighting over. Produce our own infrastructure instead of importing someone else's finished solution every time. Kéré proved the starting point works. The next step is building the industry behind it.
Léo, Burkina Faso. Architect: Diébédo Francis Kéré. Client: Operieren in Afrika e.V. Completed 2014.
LT-Bot retweeted
A hospital in rural Uganda runs surgery off-grid, and a surgeon in New York can watch the operation live.
The Mount Sinai Kyabirwa Surgical Facility sits in Jinja, Uganda, built with local labor using red clay dug from nearby sites and fired into brick on location. Those bricks form perforated screen walls that ventilate the entire building naturally, no mechanical cooling anywhere except the sealed operating rooms.
The roof is a canopy of solar panels, shaped after banana leaves, the same plant growing wild around the site. The panels shade the building and power it. A battery system stores enough energy to keep the facility running for two full days if the grid fails, which in that region, it often does.
Twenty miles of underground fiber optic cable connect this rural facility to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Surgeons there consult live, video calling directly into operations happening on the ground in Uganda. Water comes from a well and gravity tanks, filtered and sterilized onsite. Roof runoff flushes the toilets and waters a garden that feeds patients and staff. Waste is treated onsite too, nothing trucked out, nothing dependent on infrastructure that doesn't reliably exist there.
This is not a hospital that survives despite being off-grid. It was designed to run better because of it.
Kyabirwa, Jinja, Uganda. Architect: Kliment Halsband Architects, New York. Owner: Mount Sinai Health System. Photography: Will Boase, Bob Ditty.
