Romance Meets Life |
- Secret Admiration Gone Public - Peeshaun Of Skuki Declares Love for Musician Chidinma
- Funmi Iyanda - Why She Risked Her Career to Interview Openly Gay Nigerian Man, Bisi Alimi, on National Television
- A Lagos Housewife Gets 10 years in Prison For Flogging 14-year-old Houseboy to Death
- Tragic Joke! Friends Dress Up As Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman For Halloween Party?
- Omoni Oboli Speaks Out on The Recent Plane Crash and General Mediocrity in Nigeria
- Maternity Style - Annie Macaulay-Idibia Glows in Pink
- Tomi Odunsi - I Wan Blow (Music Video Romance)
- Kerry Washington Pregnant - Friend Confirms She's Expecting First Child With Husband Nnamdi Asomugha
- #SavetheDate - Africa's Next Top Model By Oluchi Starts Nov 10
- Ciara's Boyfriend, Future, Proposes on Her Birthday
- Covers - Dolapo Oni on Wow! Magazine
- Couple Love - Dakore and Olumide Akande at The Saro Musical
| Secret Admiration Gone Public - Peeshaun Of Skuki Declares Love for Musician Chidinma Posted: 30 Oct 2013 05:05 PM PDT  Peeshaun is one half of singing group Skuki, and in a bid to attract the attention of the lady of his dreams, he decided to be brave on the pages of the magazine. When asked if he was romantically involved, and specifically in the music industry, he opened up to the Encomium magazine reporter that he really fancied fellow singer, Chidinma, and would marry her if he had a choice. But, there are some you also admire that you don't mind spending the rest of your life with? Talking marriage before even knowing someone smacks of immaturity, but hey, that has been some people's love story, so what can I say. Well, some will say the ball is in her court, but in my opinion big moves like this in romance still need the personal touch. If he has met her back stage in the past, what stops him from asking for her contact or just 5 minutes to say what's on his mind?        |
| Posted: 30 Oct 2013 04:02 PM PDT  Nigeria does not have a lot of whistle blowers, most have imbibed the suffering and smiling attitude that gets them through the day. But things are changing, and perhaps, corruption, mediocrity and all the hidden vices that drag the country down will become less brazen. TV talk show host, Funmi Iyanda in an article talks about how Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) stopped her from having live shows after she interviewed openly gay Nigerian man, Bisi Alimi, back in 2004. See her tweets and the article below... After I interviewed @bisialimi in 2004, NTA cancelled my Friday show, I was never allowed live shows again so l redesigned the mon/wed shows I've never really spoken about it as l understood the difficulties d regional managers had to deal with and appreciated those their support For those asking. I didn't speak about it to protect the great people at NTA who supported me and ensured we kept a censored version going. Here's the article. How Nigeria's top straight TV star risked and lost everything for gay visibility http://t.co/pgzbIqSCSd via @gaystarnews How Nigeria's top straight TV star risked and lost everything for gay visibility BY FUNMI IYANDA It's a good thing my meddling mum took Musibau off his alcoholic dad just before that wretch of a father was sent to jail for raping a minor. My mother went missing a year later so I never saw Musibau again but that's another story. He was 15 but he looked 12, l was seven but l looked 10. People generally looked weird in my neighbourhood, but nobody thought anyone one weird – odd maybe but life was odd wasn't it? Musibau was the first to run into Miss John who spoke Queen's English and walked like a girl. Everybody called him Miss John, I have no idea why. But we were interested in him because we needed to walk through his garden to climb into Baba Olugbo's compound for the agbalumo tree. Nobody dared walked through Baba Olugbo's compound to get to that tree. He was a wealthy molue bus entrepreneur with seven wives, a distended, shirtless stomach, marijuana thickened growl and a fast horsewhip for clueless kids. I had four older sisters and two younger brothers but I felt closest to Musibau perhaps because we had a shared tendency to get into trouble and a common dislike of Nureni. Nureni was crippled by childhood polio and so dragged himself around on his muscular torso except when he went to school wearing his leg braces and crutches, which made him vulnerable. We did not like Nureni; he had a caustic tongue, a reptilian ability to wrestle you down then strangle you and was genius at maths. He was faster moving dragging himself than he was on his crutches. He hated those crutches but he really liked Mulika. Mulika was one of the two daughters of Alhaji Abara whose two wives wore hijabs so you couldn't tell one from the other. I of course could; Mulika's mother was the one with the two Pelé on her cheeks, right above her haughty cheekbones. A stunning woman. I knew because I saw them in the women's quarters every time I went to play with Mulika, who had inherited her mother's looks. We all loved Alhaji Abara because he had the best spread for breaking fasts at Ramadan. It didn't matter whether you were Christian, Animist or Muslim. You could come break the fast on divine akara, even if you didn't fast. He used to say only Allah sees the good heart. We all attended Koran classes because it was fun and then went to church on Sunday because of the music and dancing. My mother didn't mind us going to church and Koran classes, in fact she supplemented all that with occasional visits to seers and herbalists who read our signs and cleansed our aura. Everyone did that, even that nasty priggish Catholic Mama Uche who acted like she was the pope's first cousin. Miss John always pretended not to see us sneaking through his garden and jumping over Baba Olugbo's fence to pluck some agbalumo. A few times, Baba Olugbo would see us and come running belly first, whip flaying but we always out ran him, Nureni in front and Mulika, scarf flapping, at the back. We never got caught until the day Nureni came on those damn crutches that made him slow. Baba Olugbo caught Mulika by her scarf and I tripped over Nureni's crutches. We knew we were in hot soup because once Baba Olugbo finished whipping us, he'd hand us over to our respective parents each of whom would apply equal supplementary punishment. That meant my tough mother's hour-long frog jumps, Alhaji's half day Koran writing and Nureni's aunty's numbing, monotonous curses. We didn't mind the whipping so much, a few lashes, a couple of pain killers and we'd be back trying to get more agbalumo's off that tree. Once you've been whipped, you don't get whipped again on the same day for the same offence – even the adults had some sense. So it was I laid on my back staring at Baba Olugbo's protruding belly button, Nureni's fast breathing in my ear, dreading the inevitable – when suddenly Miss John walked up. Perhaps it was his Queen's English or our lucky day but he gently took the whip off Baba Olugbo's clenched wrist and laughingly told him he had asked us to get some of the ripe agablumo for him seeing as it was abundant. Baba Olugbo did not want to look like a mingy old fart; he was after all a rich man with political ambition. He grudgingly let us go, and I swore to Nureni and Musibau later that I saw Miss John wink out of a kohl-lined eye. I remembered this story recently when I was asked why I, as a straight celebrity, a word I dislike, I support Bisi Alimi and LGBT rights. Nigeria of today seems completely homophobic, xenophobic and religiously polarized as though that is the way we always were. This would be an incomplete narrative. The way we are today is a result of the political and economic breakdown of our country, a topic for another day. However the ensuing widening income gaps, extreme poverty, illiteracy and crime has encouraged distrust and exclusion at every level. My sense of justice, fairness and rationality supersede any latent sense of social propriety. Gay rights, civil rights, religious rights, gender rights, child rights are human rights. Justice, equity and fairness are my idea of morality. I was a little girl who grew up in the same neighbourhood as gay Miss John, Muslim cleric Alhaji Abara, disabled Nureni, Mulika in her headscarves and pious Catholic Igbo Mama Uche. I saw differences in ethnicity; religion, gender, class and sexuality but these differences did not carry judgement. We lived together mostly harmoniously; any lack of harmony was on account of individual bad behaviour not genetic differences or lifestyle choices. I miss that Nigeria. I guess in a way l still live in that Nigeria in my head. And that was why in 2004 I risked my career to put Bisi on my sofa and conduct Nigeria's first interview of an openly gay man on national television. Bisi and I did pay a hefty price for that action, he more than myself. Was it worth it? I'm afraid l have never had the luxury of absolute self-congratulations or flagellation. What I do know is, at that moment, it felt right. And every moment since then, it has felt right. I do what feels right by a conscience conditioned by my justice-minded, meddling mother, a childhood experiencing the beauty of diversity and a belief in our common humanity. Perhaps the childhood I speak about was a dream. If that is the case then that dream is my vision of the future to come for Nigeria. __________ Funmi Iyanda is award-winning broadcaster, journalist, columnist and blogger. She produced and hosted Nigeria's most popular and authoritative talk show New Dawn with Funmi, which aired on the national network for over eight years. She is the CEO of Ignite Media, a content-driven media organization operating out of Lagos. In 2011, she was honoured as a Young Global Leader (YGL) by the World Economic Forum and was recently named one of Forbes 20 Youngest Power Women in Africa. Bisi Alimi left Nigeria after the TV show and was granted asylum in the UK. Iyanda has just hosted an event co-organized by Alimi and backed by GSN called Rainbow Intersection which looked at the complex relationships between race, religion and sexuality in Britain. - Via: Gaystar News     |
| A Lagos Housewife Gets 10 years in Prison For Flogging 14-year-old Houseboy to Death Posted: 30 Oct 2013 04:31 PM PDT  One of the dreams of not a few Nigerian women is to get married, and more than that have their own homes, with the high possiblity of having househelps. The unfortunate reality is that most of those women, housewives or working women, have never managed people before, and before long, start to transfer the agression from their stressful relationships or careers unto their domestic staff. This is a lesson for women in the habit of mistreating their help to take it easy and learn new diplomatic skills of managing their underaged househelps rather than violent punishment for unnecessary reasons. An Ikeja High Court, yesterday, sentenced a 27-year-old woman, Chiamaka Nnajiofor, to 10 years imprisonment for her culpability in the death of her housekeeper, Oliver Arakwe.     |
| Tragic Joke! Friends Dress Up As Trayvon Martin and Zimmerman For Halloween Party? Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:07 PM PDT  I'm yet to buy into the American halloween custom, and recently asked no one in particular what made a costume relevant for Halloween? Is it meant to be funny, is it meant to be scary, it it meant to honor something/someone you like, or maybe the TV show/movie you're a fan of?I asked that question when a costume ad on TV showed someone painted silver in a Gandhi costume, I found that disrespectful. This news takes the cake! As reported by The Smoking Gun A pair of Florida men decided to celebrate Halloween this year by dressing up as George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin, complete with blackface and blood-stained hoodie. This is a tragic idea of a joke! Forgetting about the offensive nature of Blackface to most African Americans, it is so unfeeling that these people did not even consider the personal loss of Trayvon Martin's parents when they chose this look for their "hilarious" costumes. The worst part is that on Smoking Gun and Gawker where the pictures have been reported, thousands of comments are in support of these people and what they have done. And some say racism is dead in America?     |
| Omoni Oboli Speaks Out on The Recent Plane Crash and General Mediocrity in Nigeria Posted: 30 Oct 2013 01:03 PM PDT  The Pain of Our Negligence By Omoni Oboli I haven't been this sad for a long time, owing to the passing away of a friend, Deji Falae. I can't imagine that we still lose people in that manner. We have passed through this road of plane crashes and I thought it was a thing of the past, but here we are again. What's wrong with us? Where did we begin to operate in this spirit of hatred for our own such that we end up killing ourselves. Our negligence is not just an irresponsible act that we need to change but something that could cause the death of another human being. I'm just so saddened by this incident, because it could have happened to anyone. No one in his right mind would get on a plane if there was the least shadow of doubt to its airworthiness. That is why the passengers got on board. There's a process that an airplane must go through before it is cleared for take-off. Various experts, who have been paid to carry out several checks on the plane, put their expertise to work to ascertain the flight worthiness of the aircraft before it is given the all clear to fly. This process has been done by the same airline or airport staff on ground (not the minister, President or governor) trained in this duty for years, so that they can ensure the safety of the passengers, who have paid, and put their trust and their lives on the line, in the hands of the "able" experts to get on board the aircraft. The unsuspecting passengers get on board without the slightest idea that some personal issues, incompetence or any other depraved excuses by the workers in charge that they may be able to concoct under the sun have made the aircraft their final coffin. I'm trying to paint a graphic picture of the senselessness, insensitivity to the conscience and wickedness of many people, who find time to blame the government, anyone or anything else for their irresponsible acts that have caused the death of the very people their competence was supposed to protect. We should weep for our many acts of wickedness, which stem from our lacklustre attitude to work. The most appalling thing of all is that they also have the audacity to blame God for all their actions, calling it "an act of God." Why would anyone call it that, when there was nothing that even remotely suggests that the plane crashed due to errors beyond human control. True to our Adamic nature, we blame God and every other thing but ourselves. If we all spoke with one voice against our neighbours who consistently displayed incompetence in their duties at work, knowing that the blind eye we turn today could lay the foundation for an unforeseen disaster tomorrow, we would begin to see the fruits of that attitude in our nation. This culture of "manage" has caused many of us to settle for the mediocre instead of demanding the excellence we deserve. A workman delivers a job that is distasteful to the eye and less functional for the purpose the job was made to achieve and asks you (the one who pays with his hard earned money) to "manage" it, because he doesn't want to be made to pay for his mistakes with his own money. This is a tragedy because the workman will never grow beyond that level of competence to achieve excellence in his chosen field. The pilot of a plane has the duty to check his plane before he gives it the clearance to fly. He should not rely on his "super skills" to fly a plane that he thinks may be less flight worthy than it should. He shouldn't use the lives of his passengers to test his skills. There are rules and regulations, and the people at the helm of affairs should ensure that they are strictly adhered to for the safety of the passengers. Today, there are very few airlines operating in Nigeria, thank God! When are we going to wake up from our slumber and see that there should be few instead of many because safety should not be compromised and if only the few can deliver, then so be it. Many businesses do not see the light of day solely because many complacent workers are there. They are quick to gather themselves into small groups within the office to talk about the one who has positioned himself to provide the very job that gives them the food they eat so that their mouths can curse them. How very sad! We talk behind our bosses instead of talking for our bosses. We spend their money to pretend that we follow their vision, all the while trying to see ways that we can do our own business, using their time, which they are paid for. There's nothing wrong with doing your own business, but do it in your spare time. I can't imagine going on set of a movie, after being paid, and then make up an excuse to go on another movie production because I want to make more money. That is stealing! We should be more diligent and learn to cherish our jobs. Look around you and see that many others are praying to have the job that you are showing contempt for. You will be dearly missed, Deji Falae, and my condolence to the other passengers and crew on board the ill-fated aircraft. May this serve as a wake up call for Nigerians to begin the change towards a better future. Via Daily Independent     |
| Maternity Style - Annie Macaulay-Idibia Glows in Pink Posted: 30 Oct 2013 12:01 PM PDT  Annie Macaulay-Idibia has been missing her husband, Tuface Idibia who is currently on tour in the US, but she also continues to enjoy her pregnancy. Earlier today for an outing, the actress wore a pink top and matching handbag with black tights and heels. She looks positively glowing!     |
| Tomi Odunsi - I Wan Blow (Music Video Romance) Posted: 30 Oct 2013 12:01 PM PDT  Tomi Odunsi, who's day job is as the funny Tinsel character Salewa, moonlights as a singer and musician in her free time. This is the video for her first single "I wan blow", the story of a young lady who wants to make it in her entertainment career by all means, recognition by Obama, collabos with JayZ and Cosmo covers, the whole works!     |
| Kerry Washington Pregnant - Friend Confirms She's Expecting First Child With Husband Nnamdi Asomugha Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:17 PM PDT  Kerry Washington's close friend has confirmed to US Weekly that she is pregnant. We all suspected, or some of us have [see initial post here] and if you've been following the current season of Scandal, you may have seen the bump under those her smart pant suits in one or two scenes. Now, I've been wondering how the show will work her pregnancy into the story line, or if they will :) As the new issue of Us Weekly exclusively reveals, "She's about four months along," a pal tells Us of Washington. (Thus far, the mom-to-be has kept any hint of a baby bump concealed under roomy dresses.) Congrats once again to the couple!     |
| #SavetheDate - Africa's Next Top Model By Oluchi Starts Nov 10 Posted: 30 Oct 2013 09:42 AM PDT |
| Ciara's Boyfriend, Future, Proposes on Her Birthday Posted: 30 Oct 2013 04:31 PM PDT  Ciara and Future have been dating for almost a year now and he proposed to her with a surprise 15 Carat Diamond ring during her 28th birthday in NewYork last weekend. Ciara shared the news via twitter as shown below. Congrats to the couple, and all the best as they plan their wedding. See the rings on Ciara after the break.        |
| Covers - Dolapo Oni on Wow! Magazine Posted: 30 Oct 2013 08:01 AM PDT  Dolapo Oni, co-anchor on the Moments With Mo Talk Show shown Africa wide on EbonyLife TV, lights of the current issue of Wow! Magazine. Dolapo is also the former anchor of Mnet's Studio 53 Extra where she started her TV career. See more pictures and Dolapo's biography below...   A graduate of Chemistry from the University of Bristol in England, Dolapo eventually pursued her passion for the arts. In September 2005, she graduated with an MA in Drama from the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts in London. She had her primary education from the Lebanese Community School in Lagos, and received her secondary education at Headington Girls Independent School in Oxford in the UK where she became the first black head girl. In 2010, she was involved in Vexed, a miniseries that aired on the BBC in England. She played multiple roles in the play 'Iya-Ile' (The First wife), written by Oladipo Agboluaje; the play was nominated for a prestigious Lawrence Olivier Award. She has also played roles in numerous plays, including: William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream; Walking Waterfall by Nii Ayikwei Parkes; In Time by Bola Agbaje; God is a DJ by Oladipo Agboluaje. Also of prominence was her role as Moremi in the critically acclaimed TV Series, Jacob's Cross. Even though she has achieved so much, Dolapo is not relenting on taking her career to even greater heights. She is currently a brand ambassador for the soft drink SNAPP. Her new gig as co-host on Moments with Mo is definitely the continuation of a wonderful career in TV. Source - WOW!     |
| Couple Love - Dakore and Olumide Akande at The Saro Musical Posted: 30 Oct 2013 07:20 AM PDT |
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