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How Airtel, MTN smoke lives out of Nigerians

By Faruk Ahmed You can imagine how you would feel if your nose and mouth were shut forcefully with a pillow by an attacker. Your soul would feel like it was departing—from your legs, to your stomach, through your neck, out of your head, and up to heaven. This is exactly what telecommunications companies like Airtel and MTN are doing to Nigerians. Slowly. Systematically. With impunity.   The collapse Starting from Sunday, March 15, 2026, my Airtel line began to stutter. It would connect intermittently—a message here, a notification there—then fade into silence. I assumed it was a temporary glitch. By Monday, it was gone completely. No WhatsApp. No email. No access to the websites I rely on for work. By Wednesday, March 18, it became clear that this was not a glitch. It was a collapse. I borrowed my wife's MTN line to get back online. It worked—but not perfectly. Calls dropped. Data fluctuated. I tried to port my Airtel line back to MTN. The local operator told me I would have to vis...
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How almajirci could become the next banditry

By Faruk Ahmed On December 24, 2016, I climbed into an Audi 4x4 at Kwanar Dawaki motor park in Kano. The driver was a soldier returning from the Sambisa battleground. The seats were cushy. Music blared. Cool air hit my face. I thought I was riding to heaven. I was heading to my hometown, Jattu in Edo State, for a cousin's wedding. The park was chaotic with Christmas travellers, and fares had skyrocketed. Then this soldier appeared, heading to Akwa Ibom, offering rideshare. He would pass close to my destination. I did my due diligence, paid, and hopped in. There were already four passengers. I became the fifth. Three days later, I was still on the road. The car broke down constantly. We spent hours fixing it. The soldier could barely drive. Somewhere past Abuja, I took the wheel and drove us most of the way to Akwa Ibom. (How I ended up in Akwa Ibom instead of Edo is a story for another day.) But the worst nightmare came somewhere past Lokoja. Night had fallen. We approached a check...
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The bowl, the fear, and the future we keep ignoring

By Faruk Ahmed   Aisha Salihi saw a photograph that shattered her. A young boy sat on a dusty street. In his hands, an injury festered—raw, infected, neglected. In his lap, a plastic bowl. The universal symbol of Almajiri existence. A plea for alms. For food. For survival. She learned why he was injured. He had been sent to beg. When he returned without enough, he was beaten. "This picture,"  Aisha wrote,  "will haunt me forever." It should haunt us all.   The twisted tradition The Almajiri system began with noble intentions. Children leaving home to seek Quranic knowledge. Parents entrusting them to Malams. A tradition of scholarship and discipline stretching back centuries. The very name comes from  Al-Muhajirun —those who left Mecca with the Prophet (peace be upon him) in search of knowledge and faith. But somewhere along the line, the tradition broke. "It is a name that speaks of a noble, ancient tradition,"  Aisha writes.  ...
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The Nation Builders Initiative (TNBI): Core identity documents

Our Origin The Nation Builders Initiative was born from the embers of the # FixNaijaTop3 Movement —a citizen-led outcry for accountability in Nigeria's most critical sectors. We evolved because we realised that pointing out what is broken is only the first step. The essential work is in  building the builders : equipping citizens, especially the youth, with the civic consciousness, practical skills, and moral clarity to reconstruct their nation from the ground up. Our Vision A Nigeria where every citizen is an empowered nation builder—conscious of their rights, equipped with practical skills, and committed to the common good; a nation that can feed itself, secure itself, and offer every child a future of dignity and potential. Our Mission To cultivate a generation of informed, skilled, and responsible citizens through grassroots civic education, community empowerment programs, and the promotion of accountable leadership, thereby transforming passive observers into ac...
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I passed through the almajiri system three times, but would not send my child

By Faruk Ahmed While growing up, I wasn't a conformist child. So, some members of my family felt I was stubborn and offered to take me to Almajiri schools in order to instil discipline in me. While my family thought these places would clip my wings, I felt the experiences were actually winds to my sails. I passed through the system on three occasions. I loved the experiences because they opened my eyes to the world. The first time was while I was still in primary school, and the other was immediately after I sat for my first leaving school certificate, all in Kano. Normally, I would go to the Islamic schools during holidays, and once schools were about to resume, I would come back home. Throughout the first two occasions, I was provided for by my father. But on the third occasion, I was already a grown-up. I had sat for my SSCE and gone through a two-year IJMB program. It was during the interregnum, waiting for admission into the university, that I attended another Almaji...
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Birds of a feather: Abba Yusuf, Ganduje, and the rot we reward

By Faruk Ahmed Do birds of a feather not flock together? Kano State Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf's defection back to the All Progressives Congress (APC) from the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP) has left me reeling in pain. This is not because I am a diehard Kwankwasiyya fan. No. I had even predicted this happening almost a year ago. What breaks my heart is that Nigerian politics, as usual, is now bereft of any discourse on policies, ideologies or economics. Rather, the politicians—who behave like prostitutes—are more concerned about people. They worry, "How many bigwigs can I attract to myself or to my party?" No matter what baggage that individual might possess.
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The registration firewall: How TNBI spent months trapped in CAC's maze

By Faruk Ahmed It began with optimism, as these things always do. We had gathered a team of passionate young Nigerians committed to something larger than ourselves—civic renewal, youth empowerment, the slow and difficult work of nation building. We called ourselves  The Nation Builders Initiative (TNBI) , a name that captured our mission: to equip citizens with the skills and awareness to rebuild their country from the ground up. Before we could do any of that work in a formal capacity, we needed to register with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). It was a box to check, a formality. Or so we thought. What followed was a six-month ordeal that would test our patience, drain our resources, and teach us more about Nigeria's bureaucratic maze than any policy paper ever could.   The First Rejection In late 2025, we submitted our first application. The name:  The Nation Builders Initiative . The objectives: civic education, youth empowerment, advocacy for good governance, c...
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