Creative Producer | Showrunner | IP Lawyer & Strategist AbOriginal Productions • Okhai Akhigbe & Co Story. Structure. Ownership.
Lagos, Nigeria
Joined May 2009
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Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
A few months ago, my grammar was not particularly great, especially here on X.
Then, one beautiful morning, I received a call from Dr. Oby Ezekwesili ( @obyezeks ) that changed that aspect of my life forever.
She advised me to go back to Primary 3 and rebuild my foundation in English.
She said something profound: Once you fix the foundation, everything else begins to fall into place.
I took her advice wholeheartedly. I went back to study Primary 3 Grammar and Comprehension, and that simple decision transformed my command of English.
I remain deeply grateful to @obyezeks for that invaluable piece of advice. Its impact on my life has been remarkable.
But this experience taught me something much bigger about education.
Many of us are struggling today, not because we lack intelligence, but because we are building on weak educational foundations.
We keep trying to fix problems at the top when the real problems are at the bottom.
Sometimes, the greatest form of progress is having the humility to go back to the basics and rebuild properly.
You cannot build excellence on a foundation you have refused to repair.
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Nia Long, Regina Hall, and Sanaa Lathan—all over 50—go viral after linking up with immaculate face cards! 👑😍 ✨
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Not long after joining Chelsea, Vinnie Jones went back to Watford, with a couple of football mates kipping at his place. One of them looked out of the window one day and spotted a woman on roller skates.
“Wahey, look at this!”
Jones went over to the window.
“Oh my God! I can’t believe it!”
It was Tanya. They'd met aged 12, had a brief teenage romance and lost touch. Years later he was back in his old house and she was living two doors away, going through a divorce.
“Do I believe in fate? It’s all very spooky.”
By that point he was known as one of the hardest men in English football. Tanya's path had been very different. At 21, after giving birth to her daughter Kaley, her heart failed and she needed an emergency transplant. She survived, but it left her with medication and health problems for the rest of her life.
When Jones decided he wanted to marry her, he spoke to her dad first.
“You know what you’re taking on?”
“Yeah, I do know and I’m going to take care of her and look after her.”
He never thought of himself as her rescuer. If anything, he reckoned it was the other way round.
“I feel she was saved to save me, and I was meant to look after her.”
They got married in Watford in 1994. Tanya brought Kaley, whom Jones went on to adopt, and he brought his son Aaron. Over the years she fought off cervical cancer twice and lived with the aftermath of her transplant, while he moved from football into acting and the family ended up in Los Angeles. Illness was never allowed to call the shots.
“We haven’t got time to think about ‘what if’ and ‘what about’. We make the most of life.”
“We’ve been through a lot, so I just want her to enjoy life and for us to grow old together.”
In 2013 they were both diagnosed with melanoma. Jones had a malignant growth taken from under his eye and was eventually cleared. Tanya wasn't as fortunate. The cancer kept coming back, and for six years he was at every appointment and every treatment, exactly as he'd promised her dad.
On Christmas Eve 2018, already in a great deal of pain, Tanya found out the cancer had spread to her brain.
“That was the first time we broke down together.”
Even so, she wouldn't let it ruin Christmas for anyone else. Doctors put her on steroids and she kept celebrating through the pain.
“She wanted to get through the Christmas.”
Jones later thought she probably knew what was coming before the rest of them were ready to accept it.
“I think she knew she wasn’t going to make next Christmas.”
In July 2019, doctors told him they'd run out of treatments.
“In that last week of her life when the doctors said there were no more treatments, I never told her she was dying.”
“We never spoke of that, I didn’t want her to know.”
He spent every night beside her in hospital, and Kaley came in every morning.
“In the hospital I slept there every night and Kaley would come every morning.”
“She has never ever slept one night in hospital without me there. I have always been by her side.”
In the end his only request to the doctors was that she wouldn't be in pain, so they let her go home. The family stayed by her over the next few days, still chatting to her as she slept because she could probably hear them.
On the morning of July 6th, Jones heard her cough and ran in. Her breathing had changed. Kaley, Tanya's parents, her brother and the rest of the family gathered at her bedside.
“We knew it was the end, we were cuddling her.”
“I kissed her a lot and told her I loved her. I kept saying, ‘I love you, I love you’.”
Her breathing slowed, then stopped. After 25 years of marriage, Tanya passed away with Jones and her family around her. She was just 53.
Later, tucked among her diaries, Jones came across a card. On the front:
“Always believe something wonderful is about to happen.”
And inside, her final message to him.
“To my love Vin, something wonderful happens to me every day. It’s being with you.”
“You are my morning sunshine the moment I wake. All my love, Tanya.”
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
The Spinners - It's a Shame (1970)
Referred to as The Detroit Spinners in the UK to avoid confusion with the British folk group of the same name. Written by Stevie Wonder, Syreeta Wright & Lee Garrett, the song was both a UK & US Top 20 hit + #3 on the Soul Chart.❤️
#Legends
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
One of the most powerful videos I’ve ever seen as a United supporter. The shift in atmosphere as soon as Carrick goes down the tunnel is exactly what the players need to hear. 👏
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
On the night of October 18, 1974, Al Green was at home in Memphis when Mary Woodson, a woman he had been involved with, walked into the bathroom and threw a pot of boiling grits across his back.
The burns were severe. He would spend weeks in the hospital. Moments later she took his handgun and shot herself. She left a note.
He was twenty-eight and already one of the most magnetic voices in American music.
Between 1971 and 1974 he had done something few singers manage: he made desire feel both urgent and easy. “Let’s Stay Together” reached number one. “Tired of Being Alone,” “I’m Still in Love with You,” “Call Me,” and “Love and Happiness” followed in quick succession.
The voice was soft and insistent at once—close, almost conversational, yet capable of sudden gospel-sized leaps. Records sold in the tens of millions. Crowds treated him like a living ideal of romantic possibility. He was, by almost every commercial measure, exactly where most artists hope to stay.
The night with the grits did not create his turn toward the church; he had already begun calling himself a born-again Christian. What it did was sharpen the choice.
The distance between the man who sang those songs and the man he wanted to be had become hard to ignore. In 1976 he was ordained and bought the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis, a short drive from Graceland. Industry people called it a waste of a career.
Some fans felt abandoned. Green treated the decision as the only coherent response to having been left alive. For years he largely set the secular catalog aside. He preached, raised children, and recorded gospel albums that never matched the old sales but carried the same voice into a different room.
He returned when he was ready rather than when the market asked. Lay It Down in 2008, made with younger collaborators, earned two Grammy Awards and reminded listeners that the instrument had not gone missing.
He holds a stack of Grammys overall, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and the continued respect of anyone who still measures soul singing by intimacy rather than volume. The numbers were never the point he was protecting.
Most people in his position would have stayed on the commercial path. The money was reliable, the adoration was loud, and the public identity was already built. Green heard a different requirement.
He stepped away from the version of himself the industry preferred and rebuilt around the one he could live with. When “Let’s Stay Together” still appears in a store or on a playlist decades later, it carries that choice underneath the melody.
The voice that once made surrender feel inevitable is the same voice that later decided what it would and would not serve. That alignment is what still distinguishes the records. He could have remained the untroubled symbol the moment offered.
Instead he became a pastor who still sings with the old heat, only now from a place that belongs fully to him. In a culture that treats remaining on top as the only respectable outcome, the quieter decision to leave at the height still reads as the rarer form of nerve.
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Believed to be Nigeria's first millionaire, Candido Da Rocha (1860–1959) was so wealthy that he often sent his dirty clothes from Lagos to the United Kingdom to be washed by a laundryman.
Da Rocha was a rich entrepreneur, businessman, landowner and creditor who owned Water House or Casa d’Agua on Kakawa Street, Lagos Island, Lagos. It was named Water House because it was the first and only house in Lagos in those days to have a borehole and, in turn, sell water to the residents.
Candido Da Rocha, a native of Ilesha, present-day Osun State, was born to the family of Joao Esan Da Rocha, who was captured as a slave when he was 10 years old on his way to school in Ilesha. Candido was born in the Bahia region of Brazil. His mother was Angelica Josephina Da Rocha. His father returned to Lagos, Nigeria, in the 1870s, where he built his wealth and passed it to his son, Candido.
Due to his wealth, his friend, Herbert Macaulay (1864–1946), nominated him as a candidate in one of the elections of the time. And when Da Rocha met the electorate, he told them:
“I am Candido Da Rocha, your candidate for the House. Vote for me if you like. And if you don’t, all well and good.”
That statement ended his sojourn in politics as he lost the election by acquiring just 20 votes.
Indeed, Da Rocha was a very modest and generous capitalist.
During the Second World War (1939–1945), when the authorities of Kings College were looking for a place to relocate the students in the boarding house (among whom were Tiamiyu Bello-Osagie, who would become one of Nigeria’s most celebrated gynaecologists; Adenekan Ademola, son of Nigeria’s first indigenous Chief Justice, Adetokunbo Ademola; Dapo Aderemi, son of Sir Adesoji Aderemi, the legendary Ooni of Ile-Ife) Da Rocha volunteered his Bonanza Hotel on Customs Street, Lagos, and did not collect a dime for the period it was used.
Even after the war, when the colonial government asked influential Nigerians to contribute to the rehabilitation fund, Da Rocha made substantial donations, and he instructed that the amount should not be disclosed to the public. He was also famously known for tossing coins from his balcony to little children.
Despite his wealth and vast contributions, no monument in Lagos bears his name, although his legacy endures in the Water House, his philanthropic spirit, and the parlance “Do you think I’m Da Rocha?”, a saying still used among the Yoruba to reference wasteful spending.
Candido Da Rocha died in 1959 and was buried at the Ikoyi Cemetery. He was 98. #HistoryVille
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
THE MOST TERRIFYING MICHAEL JACKSON MOMENT
THE LAWYER HANDED HIM HIS OWN NOTES...
march 1, 1996. michael jackson is 37. he's under oath in a lawsuit, and a camera is rolling.
the lawyer slides two handwritten pages across the table. michael reads them and says it's his handwriting.
deposition = you answer a lawyer's questions under oath, on camera, before the trial. anything you say can be played to a jury.
what's on his list:
→ 0:09 "yes, it's mine"
→ 0:26 things he wanted to set straight in a tv interview
→ 0:35 the interview was with diane sawyer
→ 0:43 "people have lied on me"
→ 0:48 the bleached skin rumor
→ 1:01 a rumor about president clinton's inauguration
→ 1:07 "don't judge a person unless you walk a mile in their shoes"
→ 1:26 "jesus said to love the children"
→ 2:04 "people completely lie on me"
what actually got me is that he wrote it down. the most famous man on earth sat at home and made a list of what people said about him.
i rewatched 1:26 three times. he's quoting the bible to a lawyer. he looks like he means every word.
he was never convicted of anything. in 2005 a jury found him not guilty on all 10 counts.
but the list didn't get shorter. it got longer every year until 2009.
the scariest part isn't the rumors. it's a man who had to keep a written list of them.
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Michael Jackson said he didn't write Billie Jean, he just got out of its way, and Thriller still sold about 70,000,000 copies.
The claim sounds mystical, but it describes a real working method. He set 1 clear target, a song with a great bass hook, then stopped forcing it and let it arrive days later. That is deliberate preparation followed by deliberate absence, and it is how many creative people actually work. The goal is fixed in advance, and the solution is allowed to show up on its own.
His advice on dancing carries the same idea. Thinking is the mistake, so you drop the mind and become the sound. Skilled performers know that conscious control slows them down once the skill is trained. Practice is where you think, and the stage is where you stop.
Notice the shyness as well. When the interviewer pushed him to demonstrate, he deflected, called himself shy, and only then showed it. That fits the pattern: he is at ease inside the work and uneasy about explaining it, because explaining is a thinking task and the work is not.
There is a caution here. Saying the music wrote itself also removes the credit from the person and the years behind it. A hook found in a car on Ventura Boulevard came after a lifetime of training that made the idea recognizable when it appeared. Inspiration only lands on a prepared mind.
The skill is knowing when to stop trying.
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐄𝐑𝐒
𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐱 𝐓𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐬 — 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟎
"He's a guy with a massive heart and immense quality. He is a great guy who is always willing to help everybody"
𝐉𝐮𝐚𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐚 — 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟒
"He's a top, top player, but he's even better as a person. So for me, the culture of the club should be built around him. He's always there with the right attitude."
𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐌𝐚𝐠𝐮𝐢𝐫𝐞 — 𝐀𝐮𝐠𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓
"Bruno’s a great leader. He cares about others, he cares about improving others, he cares about helping others."
𝐉𝐨ã𝐨 𝐍𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐬, 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓
"Bruno Fernandes was a very important person for me on this journey with the national team. He helped me settle in, helped me understand that I didn't need to be nervous at the beginning, and that I could be myself."
𝐃𝐚𝐧 𝐀𝐫𝐦𝐞𝐫, 𝐀𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐥 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
"Bruno is very good with the young lads."
𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐝 𝐃𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨, 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
"Bruno is the guy I like to talk to when I have a little bit [of a] problem or if I need advice from a player."
𝐂𝐎𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐒
𝐄𝐫𝐢𝐤 𝐓𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐚𝐠, 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑
"You saw how great a captain Bruno is. He could see, feel, assess that his team-mate needed that goal. You need such leadership and you back each other" (on giving Rashford the opportunity to take the penalty)
𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐳, 𝐎𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑
“For a coach, Bruno Fernandes is a dream”
𝐑𝐮𝐛𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐦, 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓
"What I can say is that we need more Brunos. That is clear. Not just the quality, the character, not some mistakes, but the character that he has"
𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐳, 𝐅𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐲 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
"And what I appreciate from him is he never hides. Never hides. He's a leader. He's a leader. And the way he's very emotional, but in a very respected way by his teammates."
𝐌𝐢𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐤, 𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟔
"He trains well, his attitude is spot-on, he's desperate to win, he's desperate to do well"
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Michelle Thomas’s last words to Malcolm-Jamal Warner were “elephant juice,” which looks like I love you when you mouth it. He was at her bedside when she died in 1998 at 30, and her mother called him the love of her life. Rest in peace to them both 🕊️
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Carrie Fisher was paid $850 a week to play Princess Leia.
George Lucas owned her face.
She was 19. She signed the contract, and with it the rights to her likeness.
Then came the dolls. The action figures. The shampoo bottles. The Pez dispensers. Star Wars merchandise went on to make billions, and none of it was hers.
Lucas later gave her a quarter of a percent of his own profits. By 1980, it was worth about $320,000.
Alec Guinness got 2.25% of the profits on the same film.
28 years later, at Lucas’s lifetime achievement tribute, she stood at the podium and settled the score in front of all of Hollywood.
She put it on the record:
“You have owned my likeness all these years, so that every time I look in the mirror, I have to send you a check for a couple of bucks.”
The room laughed. Lucas laughed.
The case for Lucas: he took the risk, Fox laughed at him, and nobody knew it would be Star Wars.
The case for Fisher: she was the face on the box, and the box made billions.
Here’s the lesson: if you don’t own your name, someone else will sell it.
In the video, she roasts him for four minutes. Watch her, then decide.
Was she joking, or finally saying it out loud?
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
50 years ago today, the Jacksons dropped “Enjoy Yourself” their first single after leaving Motown, co produced by Gamble & Huff, with Michael and Jackie on lead vocals and Randy officially in the lineup.
A Philly soul/funk that peaked at #6 on the hot 100 and #2 on the R&B charts, later certified platinum. The message is still airtight 50 years later: stop staring into space worrying about what you can’t control, let yourself go and enjoy the night while the music is running hot.
Some advice never expires 🕺🏽🔥
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
He drove his wife to one of the best hospitals in America for a planned caesarean. A routine one. Her second.
Charles Johnson watched her blood collect in a catheter bag for ten hours while he asked for help.
Kira Johnson died at 2:22am.
Cedars-Sinai, Los Angeles, 12th April 2016. Kira Johnson was 39. She spoke five languages, raced cars, ran marathons. The caesarean was scheduled. Everything about it was routine.
Her son Langston was delivered at midday.
By the afternoon her husband could see blood in her catheter. He told a nurse. He was told they would check.
He asked again. And again. A CT scan was ordered and then not performed. He has described being told, at one point, that his wife was simply not a priority right now.
He stood in a corridor for ten hours asking people to look at his wife.
They took her back to theatre just after midnight. There were three litres of blood in her abdomen. She died shortly after.
Her son Langston was twelve hours old.
Charles Johnson has spent the decade since as one of the most effective advocates in American maternal health. He founded 4Kira4Moms. He has testified before Congress. The federal Black maternal health legislation introduced in recent years carries work he pushed for.
He talks about one thing more than any other, and it is not the medicine.
It is the ten hours. He was standing right there, in the building, awake, articulate, asking. And it made no difference at all.
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
Tyler Perry is worth $1.4 billion and he fired his own aunt for not showing up to work.
When his mom died, he mailed the rest of the family letters. 60 days to get a job, or the money stops.
Now here's the thing. Back in the early '90s, that same guy was sleeping in his car.
He's 6'5" and the car was a Geo Metro, so picture that for a minute.
In 1992 he took every dollar he had, about $12,000 from selling used cars plus a tax refund, and put on his first play in Atlanta. He figured 1,200 people would show up that weekend. Thirty did. His rent and his car payment were riding on that show, so when it flopped, he lost the apartment too.
And he kept going. He put the play up again the next year, and the year after that, and lost money every single time until the seventh try finally sold out in 1998.
Seven years later Diary of a Mad Black Woman opened at #1 and made $22 million its first weekend. He kept ownership of what he made, and eventually turned 330 acres of an old Army base in Atlanta into his own studio. Forbes has him at $1.4 billion now.
His mom, Maxine, was the reason he kept pushing through all of it. He's said as much. She asked him to look after the family, so he did, for years, the whole time she was alive. She passed in December 2009, and that's when the letters went out.
If you've lived what he lived, you know which part actually made you. It was six years of failing with nobody coming to save him. A monthly check from a rich relative takes exactly that away from somebody.
So with his aunt, he tried a job first. She'd call asking for money, he'd send it, and finally he offered her a spot so she could build something with him. She kept calling in and not showing up, so she was out.
According to Perry, every relative who got that letter found a job. Some of those jobs didn't pay much, and he said he didn't care, he wanted them proud of a paycheck they earned themselves.
He told Derrick Hayes, the guy who started Big Dave's Cheesesteaks, to watch out for family "putting holes in the boat" while you're trying to get across. Sometimes, he said, you build the boat by yourself and have everybody wait on the shore.
He runs the same rules with his son Aman, who does chores to get paid.
Honestly, he gave them the best thing he had. Sixty days and nobody coming to save them, which is the exact deal he got in 1992, and it's the deal that made him a billionaire.
Billionaire Tyler Perry gave his own family 60 days to find jobs or lose his financial support. Despite being worth an estimated $1.4 billion, he refused to keep supporting relatives who weren't working.
In the video below, Perry explains why he fired his own aunt and later gave other family members an ultimatum after his mother's death.
He wanted them to become financially independent instead of relying on his fortune.
One aunt regularly called asking for money, and Perry kept sending it until he offered her a job. But she repeatedly called in and failed to show up for work, so he eventually fired her.
His mother had also asked him to support other relatives, and he continued helping them while she was alive. After she died in 2009, Perry sent them letters giving them 60 days to find employment or lose his financial support.
According to Perry, every relative eventually found a job. He didn't care whether the jobs paid well because he wanted them to earn their own money and have something to feel proud of.
Perry also recalled a relative getting angry when he refused to hand over $1 million. He believed that continually giving money to people who refused to work was making their dependence worse.
A billionaire who could afford to support his entire family chose to make them earn their own living.
If you had $1.4 billion, would you keep supporting unemployed relatives or give them the same 60-day ultimatum?
Ikhane Akhigbe retweeted
nigerian music is so interesting man, just found out nigeria had a thriving psychedelic rock scene in the 1970s & it’s crazy how nobody talks about it.
OFEGE were a band of secondary school students aged 15-17 from OBALENDE, LAGOS. combining traditional west african melodies with western sounds and its a gem. trust me you’ll love it if you give them a listen.
