Mavin first lady, Tiwa Savage is heavily pregnant and she stepped out with her bump to D'banj's 10th-Year-Anniversary concert. She stepped out to the venue of the event in a lovely black sheer dress looking beautiful. We think she looks hot, even without shoes... do you agree?
Mercy Aigbe-Gentry is a fashionista and times without number she continues to dazzle in different lovely outfits that we can’t ignore but share with you. She stepped out over the weekend in this fashion print outfit and we’re totally loving it. We think she looks gorgeous.. do you agree or nah?
Nigerians were devastated earlier this week when APC snubbed the BON organised Presidential debate which was based on allegations that BON was being biased.
Nigerian voters will have an opportunity to assess those seeking their mandate to administer the affairs of the country as presidential debate has been scheduled for Tuesday, February 3 as part of the build-up to the February 14 elections.
The debate, initiated by and ARISE Television and Channels, THISDAY and Guardian Newspapers Limited on behalf the Newspapers Proprietors’ Association of Nigeria (NPAN), is scheduled to hold at the Congress Hall of the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, Abuja.
According to ThisDay, February 3 debate is coming on the heels of an earlier attempt by the Nigeria Election Debate Group to host a presidential debate, which is currently mired in controversy following the rejection of the invite to participate by the presidential flag-bearer of the All Progressives Congress (APC), General Muhammadu Buhari, alleging unhidden bias and campaign of calumny by its key organisers against the party’s corporate interest.
An indication that Tuesday’s debate will not suffer the fate of the BON-organised version has been bolstered by the acceptance of the invite through a letter by Jonathan/Sambo 2015 Presidential Campaign Organisation, while General Buhari Campaign Organisation has indicated his intention to participate in principle.
In a letter dated January 14, 2015, to the organisers of the debate, Senator Ahmadu Ali, Director General of the Jonathan/Sambo 2015 Presidential Campaign Organisation, said the President “has accepted to participate in the debate.”
No official letter has been received from the General Buhari Campaign Organisation as at press time, but it has indicated its intention to participate in this debate in principle.
In the letter dated January 11, 2015 to both candidates and delivered the same day, the organisers had noted that “too many of the troubles we now face stem from governance: decisions made behind closed doors, regulations removed when no one was looking, or reckless actions and impunity across the polity.”
The letter also reads: “Our nation is strongest when our elected leaders are accessible and accountable to its citizens, explaining decisions and answering tough questions. That standard of openness and transparency must start long before Election Day on February 14, 2015.”
The footage of the debate, which is expected to be watched by civil society groups and youth groups among other stakeholders, will be made available live to all broadcast stations and will also be available on the social media: Twitter, Facebook and Google. Attendance at the debate will be strictly by invitation.
Amber Rose was the host of D’Banj’s 10 year anniversary celebration which took place last night in Lagos.
At the concert the Kokomaster was spotted staring at Amber Rose’ famous a** at the party and she was unaware of the fact that Eja Nla was staring at her asset.
Meanwhile D’Banj has thanked his fans for coming out to show support last night
oh what a night!!!! thanks to everyone that came to party and kick start my 10th year anniversary celebration luv u all and god bless . let the fun continue private beach things!!! ooossshhheee
He shared on Instagram
D’banj’s 10th-year anniversary concert held yesterday and we’ve been bringing you photos and highlights from the event which was hosted by Amber Rose. Spotted at the event were former arch enemies, Davido and Wizkid. It can be recalled that these two settled their difference and Wizkid supported Davido’s recently released single The Sound, HERE. Good to have know these two are finally back as friends.
An unidentified suicide bomber allegedly entered a residence of a PDP politician and detonated an explosive devise. No fewer than six lives have been taken by an explosion in Potiskum, Yobe State, North East Nigeria, the Channels Television reports.
According to witnesses, the explosions occurred around 1:20 Sunday afternoon in front of Sabo Garbu’s residence, located opposite the Federal Government College, Potiskum.
Sabo Garbu is the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate for the Potiskum/Nangere federal constituency in Yobe state for the 2015 general elections.
According to Premium Times, a resident of Potiskum, Adamu Mohammed, said Mr. Garbu, a former member of the House of Representatives, was holding a meeting with his associates when the bomb blast occurred.
“The house was full with PDP members holding meeting there. It just happened and it’s not far away from our house,” he said.
According to Mr. Mohammed, those who survived the blast ran away from the area in fear of the second blast.
Reportedly, residents saw the explosion shortly after the bomber entered the building.
It was learned that six people were killed on the spot and several others sustained injuries.
Authorities haven’t confirmed the incident yet, however, the hospital source who pleaded anonymity said six corpses were brought to the hospital and they were still receiving victims from the scene of the blast.
Potiskum has of recent become prone to suicide bomb attacks as several lives have been lost by bombers believed to be members of the radical sect, Boko Haram.
Award winning novelist Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie in a new article
published by The Guardian UK pens
down her struggle with depression and we’re quite touched. Read below and don’t forget to leave your comments below.
Sometimes it begins with a pimple. A large shiny spot appears on my
forehead. Or it begins with a feeling
of heaviness, and I long to wear only
loose-fitting clothes. Then my mood
plunges, my lower back aches, my
insides turn liquid. Stomach cramps
come in spasms so painful I sometimes cry out. I lose interest in
the things I care about. My family
become unbearable, my friends
become strangers with dark intentions, and cashiers and waiters
seem unforgivably rude. A furious, righteous paranoia shrouds me: every human being with whom I interact is wrong, either insensitive or ill-willed. I eat mounds of food – I crave greasy stews and fried yams and dense chocolate truffles – or I have no appetite at all, both unusual for a careful, picky eater. My breasts
are swollen and taut. Because they
hurt, I wear my softest bras – “tender” seems a wrong word for the
sharp discomfort. Sometimes they
horrify me, so suddenly round, as
though from science fiction, and
sometimes their round perkiness
pleases my vanity. At night, I lie
sleepless, drenched in strange sweat; I can touch the wetness on my skin. I am sitting in a doctor’s office in Maryland and reciting these
symptoms. On the wall of the bright
room, there is a diagram of a lean
female, her ovaries and uterus
illustrated in curling lines; it reminds
me of old pictures of Eve in the
garden with Adam. The doctor is a
kind and blunt woman,bespectacled, but reading over her lenses the forms I have filled out. When she first asks why I have come to see her, I say,
“Because my family thinks I need
help.” Her reply is, “You must agree
with them or you wouldn’t be here.”
Later, it will strike me that this is a
quality I admire most in women: a
blunt kindness, a kind bluntness.
When she asks questions, I embellish my answers with careful detail – the bigger-sized bra I wear for a few days, the old frost-bitten ice cream I eat because I will eat anything. I make sure to link everything to my monthly cycle, to repeat that I always feel better when my period starts. I make fun of my irritability: everyone I meet is annoying until I suddenly realise that I am the only constant and the problem has to be me! It is, I tell her, as though a strangeness swoops down on me every month, better on some and worse on others. Nothing I say is untrue. But there are things I leave out. I am silent about
the other strangeness that comes
when it will and flattens my soul.
“It sounds like you have premenstrual dysphoric disorder,” she says. It is what I want to hear. I am grateful because she has given me a name I find tolerable, an explanation I can hide behind: my body is a vat of capricious hormones and I am at their
mercy. But the doctor is not done. Her eyes are still and certain as she says, “But the more important thing is that you have underlying depression .” She speaks quietly, and I feel the room hold its breath. She speaks as if she knows that I already know this. In truth, I am sitting opposite her in this examining room because my family is worried about the days and weeks when I am, as they say, “not myself”. For a long time, I have told them that I just happen to have
hormonal issues, victim to those
incomplete tortures that Nature saves for femaleness. “It can’t be just hormonal,” they say. “It just can’t.” Mine is a family full of sensible scientists – a statistician father, an engineer brother, a doctor sister. I am the different one, the one for whom books always were magical things. I have been writing stories since I was a child; I left medical school because I was writing poems in biology class. When my family says it is “not just hormonal”, I suspect they are saying that this malaise that makes me “not myself” has something to do with my being a writer. Now, the doctor asks me, “What kind of writing do you do?” I tell her I write fiction.
“There is a high incidence of
depression in creative people,” she
says. I remember a writers’ conference I attended in Maine one summer years ago, before my first novel was published. I liked the other writers, and we sat in the sun and drank cranberry juice and talked about stories. But a few days in, I felt that other strangeness creeping up on me, almost suffocating me. I drew away from my new circle of friends. One of them finally cornered me in the dormitory and asked, “You’re depressive, aren’t you?” In his eyes and his voice was something like admiration, because he believed that there is, in a twisted way, a certain Literary glamour in depression . He tells me that Ernest Hemingway had depression . Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill had depression . Graham Greene had depression . Oh, and it wasn’t just writers. Did I know Van Gogh had wandered into the field he was painting and shot himself? I remember feeling enraged, wanting to tell him that depression has no grandeur, it is opaque, it wastes too much and nurtures too little. But to
say so would be to agree that I indeed had depression . I said nothing. I did not have depression . I did not want to have depression .
And now, in the doctor’s office, I
want to resist. I want to say no thank you, I’ll take only premenstrual dysphoric disorder please. It fits elegantly in my arsenal of feminism after all, this severe form of premenstrual syndrome, suffered by only 3% of women, and with no known treatment, only different suggestions for management. It gives me a new language. I can help other
women who grew up as I did in
Nigeria, where nobody told us girls
why we sometimes felt bloated and
moody. If we ever talked about what
happened to our bodies, then it was
behind closed doors, away from the
boys and men, in tones muted with
abashment. Aunts and mothers and
sisters, a band of females surrounded in mystery, the older whispering to the younger about what periods meant: staying away from boys, washing yourself well. They spoke in stilted sentences, gestured vaguely, gave no details. Even then I felt resentful to have to feel shame about what was natural. And now here I was, burnished with a new language to prod and push at this damaging silence. But depression is different. To accept
that I have it is to be reduced to a
common cliche: I become yet another writer who has depression . To accept hat I have it is to give up the uniqueness of my own experience, the way I start, in the middle of breathing, to sense on the margins the threat of emptiness. Time blurs. Days pass in a fog. It is morning and then suddenly it is evening and there is nothing in between. I am frightened of contemplating tim Itself: the thought of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the endless emptiness of time. I long to sleep and forget. Yet I am afraid of waking up, in terror of a new day. Mornings are dark, and I lie in bed, wrapped in fatigue. I cry often. My crying puzzles me, surprises me, because there is no
cause. I open a book but the words
form no meaning. Writing is
impossible. My limbs are heavy, my
brain is slow. Everything requires
effort. To consider eating, showering,
talking brings to me a great and
listless fatigue. Why bother? What’s
the point of it all? And why, by the
way, are we here? What is it I know
of myself? I mourn the days that have passed, the wasted days, and yet more days are wasted.
The doctor calls these symptoms but they do not feel like symptoms. They feel like personal failures, like
defects. I am normally full of
mischievous humour, full of passion,
whether in joy or in rage, capable of
an active, crackling energy, quick to
respond and rebuke, but with this
strangeness, I do not even remember what it means to feel. My mind is in mute. I normally like people, I am deeply curious about the lives of others, but with this strangeness comes misanthropy. A cold misanthropy. I am normally the
nurturer, worrying about everyone I
love, but suddenly I am detached. It
frightens me, this sense of slipping
out of my normal self. It cannot be an illness. It feels like a metaphysical failure, which I cannot explain but for which I am still responsible. There is an overwhelming reluctance
to move. A stolidness of spirit. I want to stay, to be, and if I must then only small movements are bearable. I switch off my phone, draw the shades, burrow in the dim stillness. I shy away from light and from love, and I am ashamed of this. I feel guilty about what I feel. I am unworthy of the people who care about me. I stew in self-recrimination. I am alone. Stop
it, I say to myself. What is wrong with you? But I don’t know how to stop it. I feel as if I am asking myself to return a stolen good that I have not in fact stolen. In some of my family and friends, I sense confusion, and sometimes,
suspicion. I am known to nurse a
number of small eccentricities, and
perhaps this is one. I avoid them,
partly not to burden them with what
I do not understand, and partly to
shield myself from their
bewilderment, while all the time, a
terrible guilt chews me whole. I hear
their unasked question: Why can’t
she just snap out of it? There is, in
their reactions, an undertone of
“choice”. I might not choose to be this way, but I can choose not to be this way. I understand their thinking
because I, too, often think like them.
Is this self-indulgence? Surely it
cannot be so crippling if I am sentient enough to question it? Does the market woman in Nsukka have
depression ? When I cannot get out of bed in the morning, would she be
able to, since she earns her living day by day?
The doctor says, about the high
incidence of depression in creative
people, “we don’t know why that is”.
Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact, and I
am grateful that it is free of
fascination.
“Do you think anybody else in your
family might have depression ?” she
asks. Nobody else does. I tell her, a little defensively, about growing up in
Nsukka, the small university campus, the tree-lined streets where I rode my bicycle. It is as if I want to exculpate my past. My childhood was happy. My family was close-knit. I was voted most popular girl in secondary school. Yet I have memories of slow empty days, of melancholy silence, of perplexed people asking what was wrong, and of feeling guilty and
confused, because I had no reason.
Everything was wrong and yet
nothing was wrong.
I remember a gardener we had when
I was a child. A wiry ex-soldier called Jomo. A man full of stories for little children. My brother and I followed him around as he watered the plants, asking him questions about plants and life, basking in his patience. But sometimes, he changed, became blank, barely spoke to anybody. Perhaps he had depression . Later, I will wonder about African writers, how many could be listed as well in this Roll of Depression , and if perhaps they, too, refuse to accept the name. The doctor says, “I’d recommend therapy, and that you try anti-
depressants. I know a good therapist.”
A therapist. I want to joke about it. I
want to say that I am a strong Igbo
woman, a strong Nigerian woman, a
strong African woman, and we don’t
do depression . We don’t tell strangers our personal business. But the joke lies still and stale on my tongue. I feel defensive about the suggestion of a therapist, because it suggests a cause that I do not know, a cause I need a stranger to reveal to me. I remember the first book I read about depression , how I clung to parts that I could use to convince
myself that I did not have depression . Depressives are terrified of being alone. But I enjoy being alone, so it cannot be depression . I don’t have drama, I have not ever felt the need to rant, to tear off clothes, to do something crazy. So it cannot be depression , this strangeness. It cannot be the same kind of thing that made Virginia Woolf fill her pockets with stones and walk into a river. I stopped reading books about
depression because their contradictions unsettled me. I was
comforted by them, but I was also
made anxious by them. I am in denial about having depression , and it is a denial that I am not in denial about.
“I don’t want to see a therapist,” I
say. She looks at me, as if she is not
surprised. “You won’t get better if
you do nothing. Depression is an
illness.”
It is impossible for me to think of this as I would any other illness. I want to impose it my own ideas of what an illness should be. In its lack of a complete explanation, it disappoints.
No ebb and flow of hormones.
“I don’t want to take medicine either.
I’m worried about what it will do to
my writing. I heard people turn into
zombies.”
“If you had diabetes would you resist taking medicine?”
Suddenly I am angry with her. My
prejudices about American healthcare system emerge: perhaps she just wants to bill more for my visit, or she has been bribed by a drug rep who markets antidepressants. Besides, American doctors over-diagnose.
“How can I possibly have PMDD and
depression ? So how am I supposed to know where one starts and the other stops?” I ask her, my tone heavy with blame. But even as I ask her, I feel dishonest, because I know. I know the difference between the mood swings that come with stomach cramps and the flatness that comes with nothing.
I am strong. Everyone who knows me thinks so. So why can’t I just brush that feeling aside? I can’t. And it is this, the “cantness”, the starkness of my inability to control it, that clarifies for me my own condition. I look at the doctor and I accept the name of a condition that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember.
Depression . Depression is not sadness. It is powerlessness. It is helplessness. It is both to suffer and to be unable to console yourself.
This is not the real you, my family
say. And I have found in that
sentiment, a source of denial. But
what if it is the real me? What if it is
as much a part of me as the other
with which they are more at ease? A
friend once told me, about
depression , that perhaps the
ancestors have given me what I need to do the work I am called to do. A lofty way of thinking of it, but
perhaps another way of saying: What if depression is an integral but
fleeting part of me?
A fellow writer, who himself has had
bouts of depression , once wrote me
to say: remember that it is the nature of depression to pass. A comforting thought. It is also the nature of depression to make it difficult to remember this. But it is no less true. That strangeness, when it comes,can lasts days, weeks, sometimes months. And then, one day, it lifts. I am again able to see clearly the people I love. I am again back to a self I do not question.
A few days after my doctor visit, I see a therapist, a woman who asks me if my depression sits in my stomach. I say little, watching her, imagining creating a character based on her. On the day of my second appointment, I call and cancel. I know I will not go again. The doctor tells me to try anti- depressants. She says in her kind and blunt way: “If they don’t work, they don’t work, and your body gets rid of them.” I agree. I will try antidepressants, but first, I want to finish my novel.
The first leg of D’banj’s 10th year anniversary kicked off yesterday and Amber Rose was host at the event. According to our sources, the show was a huge success and had a massive turnout and even the first photos we got from the event sure seem like the whole place was choked up. Amber Rose and D’banj stepped out in black matching outfits for the night and it sure raises some brows, but we’ll pass. Check out first photos from the event.
Speaking about the shoot of I-D's fashion Director Alastair Mckimm said (Rihanna) really is one of the most creative ,talented and inspiring women. I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Ri-Ri had been busy working on her icon status,and has been hitting the studio to create more music. Her last album unapolojetic was released back in 2012 and whilst " she promised fans that another one is on the way",the release date of R8 has been announced.
According to Ne-Yo, however, it will
definitely be worth the wait. After
revealing he’d helped write some
material for Rihanna he revealed, "I don’t know what’s going to be kept and I don’t know what’s going to happen with it, but we definitely did a few sessions together.She’s enjoying life, man! She deserves it.
The album will come out – it’ll be out soon enough. I personally feel like when it comes out, people will forget about how long the wait was. It’ll definitely be worth the wait. What I've heard so far sounds unlike anything else. It's coming!"
Lassana Bathily, the 24 year old Malian-born employee who saved the lives of several shoppers at Kosher supermarket during the Paris attack that left 4 dead on Jan. 9th was given a heroic welcome in Mali yesterday, 9 years after he left his birth country for France.
Lassana was welcomed by Malian government officials led by the Malian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Cheickkna Kamissoko. He and his father later had lunch with the Malian French Ambassador at the french embassy in Mali.
