Yorubas who have made us proud

Olufunmilola F. Obe Becomes As First African Inspector In New York Police Department


The New York Police Department has announced the promotion of Deputy Inspector Olufunmilola F. Obe to the rank of Inspector.


When her promotion was announced at a ceremony at Police headquarters in Manhattan on Friday, December 18, 2015, there was a tumultuous roar of approval from the audience of many Nigerians and other African leaders in the New York region, who had been invited to witness the ceremony, including Imam Souleymane Konate.

Inspector Obe began her career with the New York City Police Department in June, 1992 as a Police
Cadet assigned to the 24 Precinct. In February 1994, she was sworn in as a New York City police officer and assigned to the 17 Precinct. She has also served at the 19 and 50 Precincts, as well as the Property Clerk Division. Inspector was promoted to Sergeant in December 2000, Lieutenant in July 2005, Captain in September 2008, and Deputy Inspector in June 2012.

Currently the Commanding Officer at the 28 Precinct, Inspector Obe has also commanded Police Service Area B. She also served as Executive Officer of the 19, 25 and 34 Precincts.
Inspector Obe holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from The City College of New York and a Master of Public Administration from Marist College. Inspector Obe is 2014 graduate of the Police Management Institute at Columbia University.

Inspector Obe has been married to her husband, Peter, for 19 years, and they have three children, Ayodele, Tola and Timi.







Honorebu

Keep representing Ma'am.

John Boyega Lands Prestigious BAFTA Rising Star Nomination



STAR WARS actor John Boyega has been nominated alongside a host of critically acclaimed talent for the 2016 BAFTA EE Rising Star Award.

The 23-year-old British actor, who plays the lead role of a Stormtrooper called Finn in the hit franchise, has been nominated for the prestigious gong alongside Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson, 26, and Taron Egerton, Brie Larson and Bel Powley.

The five young rising stars, all under the age of 30, have been nominated for the coveted award for their exceptional performances on both the big screen and small screen.

After the nominations were announced, Boyega, from Peckham, south London, said: “Thank you to BAFTA and the jury. I'm honoured to be considered for the EE Rising Star Award in this company. What a great way to start the new year.”

This year's nominees have been picked by a panel of judges, which includes the likes of award-winning actress Olivia Coleman, broadcaster and critic Jonathan Ross and a host of revered professionals from across the film world.

The awards are often a tipping point in the career of rising stars, with former recipients including James McAvoy, Kristen Stewart, Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Will Poulter and Jack O’Connell.

2016 BAFTA EE RISING STAR AWARD NOMINATIONS
John Boyega, Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Dakota Johnson, Fifty Shades of Grey
Taron Egerton, Kingsman: The Secret Service/Legend
Brie Larson, Room
Bel Powley, The Diary of a Teenage Girl

www.voice-online.co.uk/article/john-boyega-lands-prestigious-bafta-rising-star-nomination?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Nigerian University Dropout Becomes A Stockbroker After Using His Student Loan To Start Trading & Now Earns £30,000 On A Bad Month

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Elijah Oyefeso, 21, trades on the stock market for just one hour a day to earn his income. Elijah, from Camberwell, south London, who likes to show his wealth on Instagram (inset) now lives in a £5,000 flat, buys expensive cars like the £150,000 Lamborghini he had sprayed gold (left), and likes to buy watches including a £21,000 Cartier watch that he’s worn twice. Read full story after the cut…


He said: ‘If you work hard you don’t need to look at the price tag, you just get it.’
Elijah claims he bought his first Mercedes aged 18 but soon faced jealousy from his peers in the south London neighbourhood after his success.


He said: ‘They’ve come from the same area and they’re still in the same area and went to school in the same area.
‘My mum came from west Africa and came with probably £100 in her pocket.’
Elijah went to the University of Buckingham to study business management but put his student loan to good use.
He said: ‘I used my student loan during university and I thought “I could actually do this”.
Elijah dropped out of university and started investing in the stock market with the cash sum. Within nine months, he claimed he was making tens of thousands of pounds.







He claims his income on a ‘bad month’ will be between £20,000 and £30,000 but added: ‘On a good month, I don’t think I can tell you that.’
Elijah, who featured in Channel 4’s Rich Kids Go Shopping on Channel 4, was filmed as he traded online, making £1,000 in just 15 minutes.
‘I’ve been trading for three years, I know when to stop,’ he said.
The most he’s lost in one go is nearly £10,000. ‘When you lose it, you get back up. If you lose 12 times, you get back up 12 times.

‘You want to leave a name when you’re gone. Think about JP Morgan, the assets are worth 2.6 trillion. So that’s a lot.’
Elijah, who listens to classical music while trading, said: ‘There’s a saying, you are who you chill with. I chill with people who have half a million in the bank.
‘Earning £20 to £30,000 a month, in my world that’s not good. It motivates you to do more.’
Elijah pays £5,000 a month on his flat in Kensington, a stone’s throw from department store Harrods.
His main expense is cars and when he was aged 20, he made sure he, literally, had one of London’s flashiest cars by paying £150,000 on a Lambourghini and painting it gold.
He said: ‘When you’re little you’ve got your ideal car, you’ve got your dream car. Some kids are like “I want to get a Bugatti, I want to get a Ferrari”.
‘Some people are like “yeah yeah.” But I got it.’ That was my dream, I worked for it, I got it.’
But Elijah made headlines in July when his Lamborghini crashed into his own £60,000 Bentley, with the repair work costing £55,000 on the Lamborghini.
He was left unfazed by it: ‘But that’s life, money comes and goes regardless.’
Elijah also has a collection of expensive watches, ranging from a Rolex to a Cartier watch costing £21,000 which he has only worn a couple of times.
But he loves his watch collection, he said: ‘You’ve got to treat them like princesses.’
He’s even given them names, calling one watch Michelle and another Aaliyah after the singer.
Now that he is comfortably wealthy, Elijah has decided to do something for someone else – he’s building a house in Africa for his mother.
He said: ‘It’s a surprise I haven’t told her yet.’

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I can sense the "jealousy" emanating from the writer of this article. "He claimed" etc etc....

Poetry Slam 2015 Winner: Caleb Oluwafemi – "Children of The 'Narm" (Narm means Peckham)



Earlier this week Nigerian poet Caleb Femi reached out to us with his spoken word account of a young African generation in London’s Peckham district. A teacher as well as a member of the UK-based SXWKS creative collective, Femi says his work deals with the ineffability of the British-Nigerian experience. Children of the ‘Narm, he wrote, “tells a personal story of the African residents of Peckham, London touching on issues involving assimilation, memory, displacement, education, gang culture and its treatment in the British Media.” The poet recently set the spoken word piece to jazzy beats and scenes around Peckham in a video shot by Jolade Olusanya and Siobhan Banful. In the email Q&A below, Femi tells us more about his poetry and the “children of the ‘narm.”

Okayafrica: Who are the “Children of the ‘Narm”?
Caleb Femi: The children of the ‘Narm are children and young people who grew up in Peckham during the 90s, 00s and even today. They are children who come from Africa and the Caribbean, who live or lived in the estates or houses in and around Peckham.

‘Narm derives from the word Peckham. During the early 2000s, children that lived in the estates decided to give Peckham the name ‘Vietnam’ to draw parallels between the high knife and gun crime culture they experienced and the warlike environment of the Vietnam War. The name soon transformed into ‘Pecknarm’ which is a merging of Peckham and Vietnam. Eventually, that was cut down to ‘Narm.

OKA: What inspired you to write this poem?
CF: This poem, like all my poems, is inspired by my personal experiences. For me, this poem was a form of self-healing and growth. It brought me to a point where I had to examine and confront my childhood experiences by looking at the things that I long convinced myself was ‘normal’ or ‘not a big deal’; things to do with culture, belonging, crime, standard of living (to name a few).

Ultimately, I decided to release the poem as I believe that I have a duty to represent a generation of people that grew up in Peckham (and by extension other areas of the UK that is similar). Our experiences should not be forgotten or marginalised instead it should be used as a point of reference in order to draw strength and wisdom from.

OKA: Who did the music for the “Children of the ‘Narm” video?
CF: The music is by a producer from Manchester U.K named Riddle.

OKA: Where did you shoot the video? Why did you pick these locations?
CF: I shot the video in three main locations in Peckham as well as a drive-around of the area in general.

Locations: Yellow Brick Estate, Damilola Taylor Center and Gloucester Grove estate. I picked these locations because they are the last remnants of the ‘old’ Peckham and I wanted to give viewers (especially those who are familiar with Peckham) a sense of the environment I grew up in. This is especially true with Gloucester Grove Estate as it almost identical looking to the old North Peckham Estate. I also heard that the Damilola Taylor Center, perhaps the only physical representation of my generation in Peckham, was financially in trouble and could face closure so I wanted to give it some exposure, don’t know it will make any difference. Since the gentrification of the area began many of the tower blocks and buildings have been knocked down (ironic because this is what should have been done decades ago).

OKA: What was your experience growing up in London?
CF: When I was 7 years old, I moved to London from Jos (Nigeria). A small one bedroom flat in the heart of the notorious North Peckham estate was where my parents, four other siblings and I lived. The area had a very high concentration of ethnic people and that was the main reason why my parents moved there; to draw solidarity from people facing the same issues in life. As a child I didn’t enjoy that same feeling of solidarity as there was a clear divide between the Black-Immigrant children and Black-British children. Our culture, accents and even the games we played were ridiculed to the point where became determined to shed ourselves of our ‘African-ness’.

North Peckham was notorious for its high crime rates, and as a child I didn’t fully grasp the severity of the situation until I was 10 years old when Damilola Taylor, a boy the same age as me and whose face I knew, was stabbed to death on our estate. I can still remember the morning we all found out, the journalist, the cameras, the silence amongst the children and the shaking of heads from the adult residents. Damilola was the first not the last. Even after the estate was knocked down, the violence remained especially during my teenage years as many of my friends were killed by knives or guns and ended up serving long stretches in prison. Even I, with my 12 GCSEs, wasn’t exempt from this violence as I was stabbed and shot (separate incidents) in my late teens. The media made it a whole thing about knife and gun related crime but the truth of the matter is it was deeper than that. It had systematic ties beyond the knowledge of the everyday Peckham resident.

Music was a big part of my life growing up. I was heavily involved in the rise of Grime music in the early 2000s. My friends are I formed a relatively well-known Grime crew that had a two hour slot on radio stations such as OnTop Fm and Real Fm.

OKA: How would you describe the British-Nigerian experience?
CF: For me, the British-Nigerian experience is a cocktailed experience where I interpret my environment and the events that occur from the scope of a Nigerian child, a Black British child and a Black British adult. These three perspectives have been moulded by distinguishable cultures, discourses and politics and together inform the nature of not only my poetry but my everyday life.

OKA: Who are SXWKS?
CF: SXWKS (Six Weeks) is a creative collective comprising of photographers, videographers, poets, writers, musicians, rappers, illustrators (the list goes on). There are around 15 members in the collective all from an African or Caribbean background and based in London, Bristol and Leicester. SXWKS was established with the aim of perpetuating the childlike freedom pursued in our youth. The name of the collective is inspired by the British 6 weeks summer holiday which, for us, represented a time of unadulterated and guilt-free freedom; it invoked the inceptions of ideas, the abandonment of convention, the emancipation of our minds. Our vision is bring creativity and passion back to the forefront of everyday life especially with the younger generation.

The collective has a variety of purposes that either serve the individual members and the society we live in. One purpose is collaboration; working together to develop and expand our creative disciplines (we usually have SXWKS events to showcase our work). Another purpose is to use our art to inspire and develop a creative drive among young people; we have put on a few poetry and illustration workshops in secondary schools around London.

OKA: Who are some of your favorite poets?
CF: A few of my favourite poets include:
Jodie Graham
Warsan Shire
Anthony Anaxagorou
Alysia Harris
T.S Eliot

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Wale!!!!

My nyggah!!!