Despite poor road infrastructure and massive traffic congestion, water transportation across the abundant waterways of Lagos, Nigeria is underutilised.

Now, a renewed push to develop the region’s waterways has ushered a rise in passenger ferries and a partnership with the international boat racing franchise E1, which is looking to grow its presence on the continent.

At Ikorodu, a major hub in the state, private ferry operators say despite some challenges, increased government involvement has been a game changer.

Atinuke Oyenuga, CEO of GT Waterline Ferry Services explains, “In 2018, when this particular terminal where we are was still under construction, we were moving about say 10,15 boats per day. Now as of today we move nothing less than 50 boats in a day. On an average of 1000 passengers on a daily basis, around about 7 destinations from our major hub.”

Charles Asenime, Professor of Transport & Mobility at Lagos State University believes the area is well-suited for increased water transportation, “If you look at the structure of Lagos State, about 16% of the land mass is made up of water. And then we have the water network that is capable of taking you almost anywhere in Lagos. Despite this, the usage was very, very low, less than 1%.”

Lagos is betting big on its waterways and big sports leagues like E1 have bought in. A recent partnership with the electric boat racing franchise brought its first ever race on the African continent to Lagos.

Rodi Basso, CEO and co-founder of E1 talks about the impact, “E1 goes beyond the sport, and I think the sport needs to play this kind of role which is inspirational. This comes with thought leadership, some concrete action on the coastal area.”

Basso hopes that having the race in Lagos will leave a lasting legacy.

He tells CNN,

“We want to show that a different water mobility is possible for the future. This will bring developments, this will bring jobs, innovation, and will put Lagos potentially on the map as the place to go if you want to learn about the water mobility of the future.”

With the growing success of private operators and a big event like the E1 race the tide seems to be turning. Damilola Emmanuel, General Manager for Lagos State Waterways Authority, talks about the impact the E1 race had, “It was where sustainability met innovation because what we saw happening with that boat race was a dynamic way of looking at water transport and a lot of the local operators could see the future. So, we saw them as well getting involved, loving the race and being able to plan for themselves, saying this is where we want to eventually be in the future.”

With the UNDP saying Africa’s blue economy will generate over $400 billion by 2030, experts say that the time to tap in is now. Asenime stresses the need to focus foremost on sustainability, “We must have waterways that are clean and clear. Then it will help the economy to come up, the bottom line is that it must be sustainable, so we don’t want to use it now and cause problems in the future. We want it to grow to the extent that those in the future will partake, they will benefit from what we are doing now.”

Watch more here.

The Nigerian economist and World Trade Organization (WTO) director-general called the ripple effect of Trump administration tariffs “the greatest disruption in trade in 80 years.”

She also said that she agreed with some of the criticisms leveled at the organization by the US.

“The crisis is an opportunity to reform (the WTO),” she said, calling from greater transparency and conceding that decision-making “sometimes … does result in paralysis.”

“In this modern world with AI, we need to find a way to be flexible, faster,” she added.

Okonjo-Iweala noted that the US isn’t the only nation critiquing the WTO, and developing nations also have legitimate gripes. “I think they are coming to the fore because of the crisis we’re in,” she said.

Beyond the bureaucracy, the director-general was bullish about the continent’s prospects, pointing to an IMF projection of 4% growth in Africa in 2025 and 2026.

“Most of Africa’s mineral resources are yet to be discovered,” she said, while pointing to the continent containing “67% of the world’s arable land,” and 22% of the world’s working population.

“But how do we make this work for us?” she added.

Okonjo-Iweala called for “careful thinking” on tensions in Nigeria, after US President Donald Trump suggested the United States may take military action there to protect the nation’s Christians.

Okonjo-Iweala, who previously served as Nigeria’s finance minister, said “This is an incredibly complex question. The situation is very difficult and needs careful thought.

“It has religious issues involved in it, it has resource issues involved in it, it has different complexities. So, I just think we need careful thinking through.”

With a goal to separate the high-growth digital business from the weight of traditional TV, one company will handle streaming and studios; the other, legacy television. 

The restructuring will see Warner Bros. Television, DC Studios, HBO, HBO Max, and the company’s extensive film and TV archives form a new entity focused on streaming and content production. 

Meanwhile, CNN, TNT Sports, Discovery Channel, and the rest of the company’s linear television brands, across the U.S. and Europe, will sit under a second company called Global Networks.

The announcement comes as WBD tries to turn around years of financial stress. Since its 2022 merger with WarnerMedia, the company has faced the dual challenge of high costs of streaming and falling cable revenues. 

CEO David Zaslav, who will lead the new Streaming and Studios company, stated in an internal memo: “While the work has been challenging at times, we’ve made strong progress in returning our film and television studios to industry leadership.”

WBD is borrowing $17.5 billion through a short-term loan, aiming to buy back a portion of its $37 billion debt before the breakup. The precise allocation of debt between the two new companies remains unclear, but WBD has indicated the majority will be assigned to Global Networks.

This financial reshuffle has implications well beyond Warner Bros. Analysts are already speculating about possible mergers or partnerships. 

With Global Networks keeping a 20% stake in the Streaming and Studios business, and no final names announced for the spin-offs, it’s not out of the question that WBD could become a player in the next big media consolidation wave.

If Zaslav’s strategy succeeds, the split could shield the fast-growing streaming business from the financial drag of traditional cable TV. But if it doesn’t, WBD could find itself with one company weighed down by debt and another struggling to find direction in the competitive streaming market.

Zaslav said, “By operating as two distinct and optimised companies in the future, we are empowering these iconic brands with the sharper focus and strategic flexibility they need to compete most effectively in today’s evolving media landscape.”

There’s still no word on whether either of the new companies will keep the “Warner Bros.” name. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels is set to lead Global Networks after the split, while both Zaslav and Wiedenfels will remain in their current roles until the separation is finalised.

Soyinka recently turned 90, and he reflects on his childhood and how he became politically aware, “I was a great eavesdropper on my parents, on the conversation going on, especially my father’s colleagues.

He was the head nurse, head teacher, and he had sort of coterie of argumentative people. And I was sitting there, I remember, behind an armchair. I was listening.”

Listening, Soyinka says, was his method of becoming politically alert. His involvement then progressed to “passing messages” as he recalls, “When all the rioting was taking place, I became a courier between the various women’s camps.”

The playwright speaks about how his mother’s participation in the Abeokuta riots planted the seed for his life’s work, “Being actually within the environment, that struggle of militancy against an unacceptable situation. That these women coming in, for instance, in the Kuti house, to report their encounters, they were called an Accord, the native police quote, and how their goods were being seized in the marketplaces if they didn’t pay taxes, some of them beaten up, roughed up and so on. And I took this side of the women in the most natural way. So that, yes, that reflected in my writing. No question at all.”

It was the “stress and struggle” life under colonisation that allowed Soyinka to dream of, “What things could be like if society evolved along the kind of discussions which we listened to from the adults.”

He continues that contrastingly, now, life is, “Full of such complexities, such contradictions, such nuances, which involve unfortunately life and death decisions. We didn’t have all those in my childhood. So, there was a sense of greater leisure room for contemplation, and for even dreaming. These days, things happen so fast that I wonder if this young generation even has time to dream.”

Soyinka’s political actions often proved a problem for the Nigerian government. He recalls the time he broke into a radio station as he, “Felt compelled to stop the further broadcast of false results. I was part and parcel of the voting processes I witnessed at firsthand the destruction of polling booths, even the tearing up of results.”

He explains that this was due to the reinstatement of, “The most cynical regime, which went so far as to declare on radio at the time and television had begun to say that we don’t give a damn. If you vote for us, the angels in heaven are already here So, it was part of an ongoing struggle on so many levels.”

While he was tried and acquitted for breaking into the radio station, he later spent 27 months in prison, including 22 months in solitary confinement.

He recounts his time there, saying, “It was a very testing period for me. The prisoner has to survive. I began recollecting those formulae in geometry, trigonometry, which I had hated. I began pulling them back and making calculations on the ground

Soyinka tells Madowo that he wrote the notes for his memoir, The Man Died, in isolation using meat bones, handmade ink, and toilet paper.

It recounts his political activism and imprisonment for an alleged link to the Biafran army at the height of the Nigerian civil war.

His collection of successful writing earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, the first African to receive this prize. Soyinka describes his experience of this time as “isolated.”

He elaborates, “I was most relieved when the next African came because so much was demanded of you. It was like, overnight, your constituency expanded simply because you are an African, you come from the African continent.”

But more than this, it exposed Soyinka to great dangers, “I always remind people that the most brutal dictators were had here, Sani Abacha would’ve gone to his grave a happy man if he’d hanged a Nobel Laureate, if he may able to put on his CV that I hanged a Nobel Laureate.”

This year, for his 90^th birthday, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu renamed Nigeria’s national theatre after him, honouring Soyinka’s legacy.

Similarly, his hometown of Abeokuta celebrated him through ‘The Whole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange’ project. Not only is Soyinka recognised for his support of young critical thinkers, but he also helps “promote a number of my student’s work.”

Soyinka ends the interview with a dark-humoured look into his future, “I don’t want to be morbid, but you know that’s the future. But I made an arrangement for that within this estate.”

More optimistically, he says retirement from his vocation means he can, “resume certain activities that will give me pleasure” and “for about a week or two weeks go anywhere in the world and just be a tourist.”

The programme meets Aminadab Allen Adegboro, CEO of Pitstop Lagos, a group created in 2019 in which dozens of cyclists gather to ride all around the Lagos region to stay active and fit.

“We’re building a family in Pitstop Lagos itself. And I believe there’s still many people out there that would love to be part of our family, and we’re still waiting for those people. We’re still planning. We are planning to expand, you know, growth. So I think growth for Pitstop Lagos will be a continuous thing,” says Adegboro.

Dominic Mudabai, a personal trainer and fitness instructor, tells CNN he believes that people care about exercise now more than ever. “What we now have is a fitness consciousness. People want to now engage themselves in fitness to be healthier to look good, to feel good because of the benefits they get mentally, physically and even emotionally. In Nigeria, it’s grown exponentially over the years, and I believe it will grow even more,” he says.

In Nigeria, an increasing interest in playing sports, exercising and staying active and fit has the country on the verge of what some describe as a fitness revolution. 

Inside Africa explores the rise of cycling and martial arts, such as Taekwondo, as growing fitness activities in the country.

The CNN’s interview with  Aminadab Allen Adegboro and other activities of Pitstop Lagos:

I actually thought it was just a non-coding tool until I settled down to consult experts in the field and found I was wrong all along.

In a chat with Chukwuemeka Orjiani M., Founder and CEO of iDot Creations Ent., he said: “WordPress may seem like a non-coding tool for beginners, but at the end of the day, if you do not understand CSS, HTML and PHP very well, you may find it difficult to use WordPress at professional level.”

Explaining further, Adeyinka Adenaike, a Website and Tech-Savvy Expert, said: “WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) publishing tool that can be used to develop different types of websites such as blog, magazine, eCommerce, corporate, forum and social media websites.

It started in 2002 as a blog publishing tool but grew over time and it is open-source which means you can use it to create any type of website for FREE.”

Interesting Statistics About WordPress

1. Roughly every two minutes, another top 10 million sites start using WordPress. (W3Techs, 2021)
2. Its usage has increased at an average of 12% per year since 2011. (W3Techs, 2022)
3. Wordfence blocked 18.5 billion password attack requests on WordPress websites in the first half of 2021. (Wordfence, 2021)
4. Approximately 90% of WordPress vulnerabilities are plugin vulnerabilities. 6% are theme vulnerabilities and 4% are core software vulnerabilities
5. This tool powers 36.28% of the top 1 million websites. (BuiltWith, 2022)
6. It has been the fastest growing content management system for 12 years in a row. (W3Techs, 2022)

I never knew that there were different types of WordPress, but Adenaike enlightened on this. WordPress.com and WordPress.org are the two types that exist.

WordPress.com is more of a hosting platform which powers your website and it is limited but WordPress.org is a self-hosted software which allows you to download, customize and make it yours.

Orjiani made us understand that generally, WordPress can be used by everyone, professionals and non-professionals, to create beautiful websites within minutes, but it still requires vast knowledge of graphic design, imaging and certain other skills to get the website together. 

Why do most publishing companies leverage this tool?

Did you know that WordPress is leveraged by BBC, CNN, Microsoft, several Banks, and others? The tool powers about 43% of online websites and has a huge database of free and premium themes and plugins (extensions) to extend the functionality of any website.

This makes WordPress unique.

Adenaike asserted that this tool is user-friendly – both the backend, frontend and also developer friendly, unlike other CMS platforms. “It is secure and also has some security extension plugins to tighten the security.”

Orjiani agreed that: “It is open-source, free to use, can be navigated and modified seamlessly, and has so many themes to suit your design needs.”

But he said it can have security issues, and also, the lack of programming knowledge can make it very difficult for you in terms of the use of certain plugins and code-breaking.

Asides from publishing and building websites, what else can WordPress be used for?

Adenaike said this globally used innovation can be used as a headless interface for Apps. “When using WordPress in its headless state, you are free to display your content when and where you want it in any technology platform. An example of this in practice would be authoring a blog in WordPress that will then be made available to your iOS and Android app to read.”

On reasons why WordPress is one of the most preferred non-coding tools, Adenaike highlights:

• It has the highest database of free plugins and themes compared to other CMS
• It has well-informed documentation online
• It is open-source and there is room for contribution and a large number of online community
• It is flexible, dynamic and can be used to create any type of website like membership website, eCommerce website, job and recruitment portal, education websites, etc

Conclusively, I couldn’t help but wonder; Would this tool still be a big thing and still be widely used as it is today in the next 10 to 20 years?

Adenaike’s response was simple: “Change is one constant thing. New technologies and coding languages keep coming out always, but with the way WordPress keeps evolving with technology, I believe they will still be widely used in 10 to 20 years.”