 Masked gunmen walk freely on the streets of Imo-State Capital Ulverie after attacking Ipili's station. Some residents praise them, while others express fear and worry. And politician Ned Moko denies allegations of land grabbing by his kinsmen in Dumuje town in Delta State. We'll continue our conversation this morning about what truly happened. We'll also be having another conversation about girl child education and how it can lead to the uplifting of Nigerian women. We're glad to have you once again join us on a breakfast from Plosive, Africa. Good morning, I am Annetta Felix. And I am Osaugi Ogbaon. Thank you very much for joining us. Middle of the week edition of the breakfast, it looked like it was going to be a rainy morning here in Lagos, but I think it changed its mind. But anyway, thanks for joining us. Thanks for waking up with us. Don't mention hump day, please. It is hump day. Tell me! Officially hump day. And you know, from here, of course, we slide all the way down to the weekend once again. How are you? I shouldn't have reminded you. I'm fine, how are you? I actually remembered, but you know, I was just going to maybe let it slide today, exactly. It's all right. So our top trending stories today, frightening, frightening, frightening. First of all, a young guy with so much potentials cost us so much pride, now causing us so much embarrassment. And then the security situation. Where do you want to start? So, I think I'll start with security situation. Okay. You know, there's been reactions to this, you know, and a lot of them I agree with. I think I saw Juliet Kegel mention, you know, how it was entirely wrong, you know, that we are seeing people chairing these, you know, someone said, on gone known men. I heard that's what they called in the south. On gone known men. So, you know, if we're taking this very seriously, it should be something that, you know, should be condemned outrightly. But what's the issue though? So I saw videos, I saw some of those clips, you know, there's one clip where someone was scared, you know, so they were walking, you know, by her house, and she was making a video. She was really, really frightened. And then there's another video where there's people who were chairing them on, you know, and then some other guy was making a video, you know, showing, you know, these guys walking along the street. And there's a third video, you know, where it is, I'm the first to I can confirm where they were. There's a third one, you know, where they were on a vehicle about, you know, driving off, you know, and then there's people also, you know, around them, chairing them on, you know, exactly. Which is frightening. It's frightening because I don't think those people are chairing them on understand what exactly they are doing. I think that they have gotten lost, you know, in some, you know, type of euphoria or some just completely lost. And need to realize that at the end, when these people are done with police stations and air neck offices, there's, you know, nothing else to do. They're not going to hang their guns in their living rooms and take pictures. They're going to come for them. But at the same time, it's a reminder that, you know, the security architecture in the southeast is currently, maybe not just in the south, it's all over the country. It's currently very, very weak. We have continued to ask, who are these people? You know, are they, you know, faceless? Are they invincible? Do they appear, you know, right in front of the gates of these police stations and air neck offices, wreck havoc and then disappear? No, they don't. They live in these communities. They maybe live in the outskirts. They come in, you know, do whatever dirty work that it came to do. And then they, you know, go back into hiding. Why is it so difficult for the security agencies to find these people if it is so easy for them to drive around, you know, drive around anywhere in the southeast, you know, holding their weapons? Then why is it so hard for the police to, you know, arrest them or to, you know, find them? Why is it so difficult, you know, after all these weeks, months, really, of us hearing these attacks every day? You know, sadly, you know, you might wake up tomorrow morning and hear of another one, you know, which has been attacked again. I think I saw reports of Inugu, you know, yesterday. You might wake up tomorrow morning and hear of another one again that has happened. So why is it so hard? You know, and what is wrong with the people of the southeast, chairing these people on? I'm not going to say, you know, general. I'm not going to generalize this. Not everybody in the southeast. A lot of people in the southeast who find this disgusting and also think that we should be arrested and should be prosecuted, should be in jail. But, you know, seeing those video clips just really, really makes me sad. What exactly are you chairing? You know, what are you excited about? The criminals walking around the streets, attacking your security, your institutions, attacking your INEC offices. What exactly makes you happy about that? Okay, so I think this particular situation, you know, would need to do more digging to find out exactly what the motives of these guys are. And I ask, I say this because I'm going to lead to what's made me make that statement. But the fact that people can take guns and walk freely on the streets and we're seeing two sides of a coin, some people chairing them, people who are holding guns and just walking on the streets. Some people chairing them and say, oh, this is giving me some sort of protection. And on the other side of the coin, people are saying, oh, I'm scared. How have we gotten this bad? That we don't even have police stations or police officers who can protect us. We're now having people roam the streets for whatever reason. So there's a fear part and there's a chairing part. The reason why I won't jump into conclusion is because of this. During the NSAS protests, right, there were what you call lockdown robberies. There were people who were robbing people's homes. You know, I had neighbors share a couple of those experiences. And then around midnight at around, you know, Easter Sunday, 2020, I heard I began to hear, you know, shots of, you know, basically people knocking on doors, you know, brandishing cutlery on the floor. It was just a lot of chaos. And I came out of my house that night and began to do videos. Those videos eventually went viral. I was viewed by millions of people around Nigeria, right? So those videos basically showed lots of people holding cutleries and patrolling the streets. I was scared at first, but I found out that these are my neighbors, the people that I know and greet and chat on WhatsApp. These are my neighbors who came out with cutleries saying, we hear that people are robbing, so let's come out to protect ourselves. I saw my neighbors' fathers holding cutleries as well. Guess what? I mentioned to you that those videos went viral. And later I saw a blog captioning it to say one million boys patrolling streets. No, that's dire. That's, you know, I know these people. These are my neighbors. So that's why I say from that experience I had, I would not jump into conclusion to say, oh, those are criminals. If you see, they were walking calmly, right? And people were also walking calmly on the streets. They were not shooting at anybody. So just to be objective based on my experience, I would say let's do our digging and see why are those guys holding weapons? I don't hold weapons to say, oh, people are attacking people in the southeast. People are burning police stations. Even though they have no excuse to ever put their hands on a gun. That is just extra. Putting their hands on a gun is extra. But if, you know, they're saying, let's come out and protect our people because of this insecurity, that's one thing. If they are un-gun known men, as they are called in the southeast, if there are people who are there to attack people, that's another issue. And as far as my experience, I will not jump into conclusion and condemn them, but there are two possibilities to the story. Yes. And I will give that. But first of all, one of the videos where the guy was saying un-gun known men, I could also see people walking freely around these same people. Not the one where people were cheering on. Yeah, people were walking freely with them. Some other guys just walking around. They were not harassing anybody. They were not shooting at anybody. But they've also never been attacking people. You know, the one that we've heard about these are un-gun men in the southeast. They've not been attacking people. They've been attacking police facilities and INEC offices. So, you know, I'm sure the people of the southeast already also know that they're not there for them, you know, and they don't really, you know, they're not a threat to the people in the southeast. And that's why they can easily walk around them and ignore them. But of course, which society finds it normal, you know, that people just walk around carrying AK-47s. Terrible. That is very, very abnormal. I would never want to step out of the streets with somebody like that. Excuse that you want to have. That, oh, you know, we're here to protect you. You are not Mamutekun. You are not Ebuweago. And even those who don't carry AK-47s and just walk around the streets. So these somehow somewhere are criminals. You know, you call them un-gun men or not. Whether they're the ones who are attacking the police stations or not, they are still criminals. Why are these persons cheering them on? And so, once again, it's not going to be my role to go and ask these people questions. Who are you, really? It's the responsibility of security agencies in the state who let people walk around the streets of over here where they don't carry AK-47s. It's their responsibility. It all goes back to the failure of security in Nigeria. You know why? Remember when, what is his name? Sunday of Goho came up. You know, he went to Fulani settlement. He cost havoc and all of that. And people were hailing him to say, yeah, you're doing well. And I remember that we had lots of analysts on the breakfast discuss this issue and people talked about how when the people who are meant to protect you fail to do so, people begin to resort to self-help. That's what was so happened in Goho's period. That's what's happening now. So whether it's, no matter who you want to blame, the root cause is security. If you want to say, oh, but the security people have been attacked, the security agencies in Nigeria should be able to forestall such attacks on police stations. It's not weird to you that in the past few months, they've been attacking police stations and those attacks continue to happen. Are you trying to say we don't have police stations, we don't have policemen, we don't have enough intelligence, we don't have enough, I don't know, I just don't know what the excuse can be. Are you trying to say that our police force of an entire country, the most popular black nation in Africa, let's start from there, does not have enough firepower, intelligence to combat a few criminals who stole a few weapons. It just doesn't make sense to me. So you could say these guys are resorting to self-help, you could say whatever it is, it is the failure of the police stations, of the police and security architecture in Nigeria and that's where we're going to start from, really. Well, hopefully we speak about this, you know, with more time on the breakfast sometime this week. Let's talk about the investment fraud. A 21-year-old who, of course, is accused of stealing as much as $28 billion, after promising people as much as 60% to return on investment, has been arrested. Most of the people who also reacted to that story say, well, if you were foolish enough to put your money in a place that promises you 60% return on investment then you probably deserve to be scammed because that was almost a red flag immediately that showed up, promised that, you know, I think the whole setup was meant to be investing in forex and in oil and gas and some of all those other things. My only shock, you know, with all of this is a 21-year-old, a 21-year-old, a 21, I would not have those guts, you know, to take billions of Nair from Nigeria. They say kids these days, you know, kids before, you give them 15 Nair, I don't want to say thank you, send them when you send them Bitcoin. So, like, everything has changed, really. It is shocking for me, you know, that people can at that age already start thinking of fraud and ways to... I really have no idea, you know, how all of this started or where he, you know, got these ideas from, but it's once again, you know, damaging on the credibility of a lot of the proper investment setups and facilities that we have in Nigeria. And even outside the country, you know, we've been dealing with fraud and corruption and some of all these things for too long. We don't need more of this. Yeah, so just a quick update. His name is Dominic Joshua, and in October 2020, he had a feature on Business Day newspaper. He was starting to meet a disrupter in the investment banking industry. Very beautiful picture of him smiling. You can say, oh, wow, these are one of the guys who are taking over, you know, the financial technology space, and there's a picture of him holding, you know, this board by the EFC, the Nigerian police force, actually, not the EFCC. It's dated May 1st, 2021, but the picture just surfaced towards the end of May. It's a special fraud unit, Legos, Dominic Joshua, and Guine, Offences, Conspiracy, Investment Fraud, and Stealing. And this just reminds me of in Victor Sobi. You know, this guy was in Nigeria and that everybody celebrated. Do you know how big Forbes is? And then he was discovered later to have committed financial fraud, and it's just such a sad one for Nigeria. So it just makes us, you know, goes back to a message that we had a few weeks ago when people were saying we invested in this platform, now the lady has it appeared, now the guy has it appeared. He made contributions to Christ Embassy. Just be careful when making financial decisions. Even the best financial advice is to tell you, take this simply with a pinch of salt. You know, the rest is up to you. And it's also great that we start to do better background checks on certain people that we want to talk about. Yes, a newspaper feature on them is not guarantee that they're flawless. So he's named his own setup to be brisk, capital limited. You know, people asking questions back then saying, is this legit or is this scam? Lots of people obviously say, oh, I tried it four months ago. Again, I return an investment 30% every month. But, you know, you just have to be careful about these things and not just jump into it and, you know, you have referrals and people saying, you know, this is fantastic. I'll put my money in the Kalabash. Safer there. In the piggy bank. A little piggy bank. Yeah, a little actual piggy bank. My small money. All right. Stay with us to take a short break when we come back. We'll be joining us to have a quick review of the major stories making headlines across Nigeria today.