Nigeria’s government is working to calm fears that the country’s current security challenges are religiously motivated. This follows the abduction of 163 Christians during coordinated attacks on two churches in the northwest earlier this month. The assaults drew global attention and reignited concerns about the safety of religious groups across the country.
Friday, January 30, 2026
Nigerian government acts to dispel religious targeting concerns
Nigeria’s government is working to calm fears that the country’s current security challenges are religiously motivated. This follows the abduction of 163 Christians during coordinated attacks on two churches in the northwest earlier this month. The assaults drew global attention and reignited concerns about the safety of religious groups across the country.
Music legend Fela Kuti becomes first African to get Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award
The Nigerian star will posthumously receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys - almost three decades after his death at the age of 58.
"Fela has been in the hearts of the people for such a long time. Now the Grammys have acknowledged it, and it's a double victory," his musician son Seun Kuti tells the BBC.
"It's bringing balance to a Fela story," he adds.
Rikki Stein, a long-time friend and manager of the late musician, says the recognition by the Grammys is "better late than never".
"Africa hasn't in the past rated very highly in their interests. I think that's changing quite a bit of late," Stein tells the BBC.
Following the global success of Afrobeats, a genre inspired by Fela's sound, the Grammys introduced the category of Best African Performance in 2024.
This year, Nigerian superstar Burna Boy also has a nomination in the Best Global Music Album category.
But Fela Kuti will be the first African to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, albeit posthumously. The award was first presented in 1963 to American singer and actor Bing Crosby.
Other musicians who will receive the award this year include Mexican-American guitarist Carlos Santana, Chaka Khan, the American singer known as the Queen of Funk, and Paul Simon.
Fela Kuti's family, as well friends and colleagues, will be attending the Grammys to receive his award.
"The global human tapestry needs this, not just because it's my father," Seun Kuti tells the BBC.
"So it would be impossible to ignore that aspect of Fela's legacy," he tells the BBC.
For Fela Anikulapo Kuti was not simply a musician, but also a cultural theorist, political agitator and the undisputed architect of Afrobeat - which is distinct from, but ultimately led to, the modern sound of Afrobeats.
He pioneered the Afrobeat genre alongside drummer Tony Allen, blending West African rhythms, jazz, funk, highlife, extended improvisation, call-and-response vocals and politically charged lyricism.
Across a career spanning roughly three decades until his death in 1997, Fela Kuti released more than 50 albums and built a body of work that fused music with ideology, rhythm with resistance, and performance with protest.
His music incurred the wrath of Nigeria's then-military regimes.
In 1977, after the release of the album Zombie, which satirised government soldiers as obedient, brainless enforcers, his compound in the main city, Lagos, was raided.
Rather than retreat, Fela Kuti responded through music and defiance. He took his mother's coffin to government offices and released the song Coffin for Head of State, turning grief into protest.
The musician's ideology was a blend of pan-Africanism, anti-imperialism, and African-rooted socialism.
Fela Kuti's mother was hugely influential in his life, helping shape his political consciousness, while the US-born singer and activist Sandra Izsadore helped sharpen his revolutionary outlook
He was born Olufela Olusegun Oludoton Ransome-Kuti, but dropped Ransome because of its Western roots.
In 1978, he married 27 women in a highly publicised ceremony, bringing together partners, performers, organisers and co-architects of the cultural and communal vision of Kalakuta Republic.
Fela Kuti endured repeated arrests, beatings, censorship and surveillance by the security forces. Yet repression only amplified his influence.
"He wasn't doing what he was doing to win awards. He was interested in liberation. Freeing the mind," Stein tells the BBC.
"He was fearless. He was determined."
Its melodic guitar lines, horn sections, dance rhythms, and cosmopolitan identity deeply influenced Fela Kuti's early musical direction.
He spent time in Ghana absorbing highlife's structure, horn phrasing, and dance-oriented arrangements before fusing it with jazz, funk, the rhythms of his own Yoruba people, and political storytelling.
The DNA of highlife can be heard in Afrobeat's melodic sensibility and its balance between groove and sophistication.
In this sense, Afrobeat is not only Nigerian. It is West African, pan-African, and diasporic in origin, carrying Ghana's musical imprint at its foundation.
On stage, Fela Kuti cut an unmistakable figure. Often bare-chested or draped in the wax-printed fabric popular across West Africa, hair shaped into a crisp Afro, saxophone in hand, eyes alert with intensity, he commanded a large band of more than 20 musicians.
His performances at the Afrika Shrine in Lagos were legendary, part concert, part political rally, part spiritual ceremony.
Stein recalls that performances at the Shrine were immersive rather than conventional.
"When Fela played, nobody applauded," he tells the BBC. "The audience wasn't separate. They were part of it."
Music was not spectacle. It was communion.
"Fela has been an ancestor for 28 years. His legacy is growing by the day. This is immortality," Ghariokwu tells the BBC, welcoming the posthumous award.
Today, Fela Kuti's music is still popular with millions around the world, and his influence is audible in modern artists such as Burna Boy, Kendrick Lamar and Sir Idris Elba.
Elba is a huge fan - the award-winning actor and DJ has curated an official vinyl box set, Fela Kuti Box Set 6, and has publicly compared him to icons such as Sade and Frank Sinatra to illustrate the point that Fela Kuti has his own unique sound.
Fela Kuti performed at major international festivals in Europe and North America, introducing global audiences to a bold and politically charged version of modern Africa.
"Fela never made me feel like I was a child," he recalls. "He didn't hide anything from me. He talked about everything openly."
There was no myth-building.
"I didn't even realise my dad was famous," he says. "That's credit to him. He kept me grounded."
What stayed with him most was not spectacle, but discipline, clarity and humanity.
"The human part of him, leadership, musicianship, fatherhood, that was the epitome of who he was."
One of Seun Kuti's most revealing reflections speaks to independence and identity.
"Fela was our dad, but you didn't own him. Fela belonged to himself. But we all belonged to him."
Fela Kuti insisted on being addressed by name, not by title, even by his children. Seun recalls having his pocket money docked after calling him "Pops", a moment that carried a lesson in respect.
"He always reminded us that he was in service to others more than himself."
That ethic shaped Seun's evolution from youthful ambition toward cultural responsibility.
"I used to make music to make money. But as I've grown, I lean more toward working for my people as well as my art."
Fela Kuti led multiple ensembles, most famously Africa 70 and later Egypt 80, the latter now carried forward by his son.
These were not conventional backing bands. They were musical militias, trained in discipline, endurance, and ideological purpose.
Stein recalls Fela Kuti's obsessive attention to detail.
"He tuned every instrument personally. Music wasn't entertainment to him. It was his mission."
Emotional Anthony Joshua speaks for the first time since Nigeria crash
British heavyweight and two-time champion of the world Anthony Joshua speaks for the first time since the car crash that killed two of his close friends in Nigeria.
Related story: Police arrest Joshua’s driver after boxer discharged
Deadly jihadist attack kills dozens in northeast Nigeria, including soldiers
A jihadist attack blamed on Islamic State-aligned militants killed dozens of people in northeast Nigeria on Thursday, including soldiers, local sources told AFP, in the latest violence in the region.
The attack happened overnight in Sabon Gari in remote Borno state, which has been the epicentre of an Islamist insurgency by Boko Haram and its Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) offshoot rival since 2009.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and nearly two million others forced to flee their homes.
"The death toll runs into dozens," said Ibrahim Liman, a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force militia that helps the Nigerian military against the militants.
"More bodies are still at the base while many soldiers are missing," he added.
Liman said 20 bodies, including those of five soldiers and 15 construction workers, and local hunters were taken to the general hospital in the nearby town of Biu.
Bukar Yamta Ali, secretary of a local hunters' group in Yamarkumi, near Biu, and two nurses at Biu hospital confirmed they had recovered bodies and wounded from Sabon Gari.
The victims were working on a road bridge that was destroyed last year in another jihadist attack, and were returning to their base when they were attacked.
Military and militia sources said on Tuesday that at least nine Nigerian soldiers were killed in an ISWAP ambush near Damasak near the border with Niger last week.
ISWAP emerged from a split with Boko Haram in 2016 and primarily targets Nigerian security forces, although civilians in the region have been caught up in the violence.
The attack happened overnight in Sabon Gari in remote Borno state, which has been the epicentre of an Islamist insurgency by Boko Haram and its Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) offshoot rival since 2009.
More than 40,000 people have been killed and nearly two million others forced to flee their homes.
"The death toll runs into dozens," said Ibrahim Liman, a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force militia that helps the Nigerian military against the militants.
"More bodies are still at the base while many soldiers are missing," he added.
Liman said 20 bodies, including those of five soldiers and 15 construction workers, and local hunters were taken to the general hospital in the nearby town of Biu.
Bukar Yamta Ali, secretary of a local hunters' group in Yamarkumi, near Biu, and two nurses at Biu hospital confirmed they had recovered bodies and wounded from Sabon Gari.
The victims were working on a road bridge that was destroyed last year in another jihadist attack, and were returning to their base when they were attacked.
Military and militia sources said on Tuesday that at least nine Nigerian soldiers were killed in an ISWAP ambush near Damasak near the border with Niger last week.
ISWAP emerged from a split with Boko Haram in 2016 and primarily targets Nigerian security forces, although civilians in the region have been caught up in the violence.
Thursday, January 29, 2026
Makoko demolitions leave thousands displaced as Lagos clears floating settlement
Makoko, one of Africa's largest floating settlements on the lagoons of Lagos, has been demolished, leaving thousands of residents without homes or livelihoods. Families say they received no warning before authorities razed the community, citing environmental and public health concerns and the need for development. Many residents, who depended on fishing, sawmilling and informal trades, now sleep in the open with their children, unable to salvage belongings. Schools have been destroyed, disrupting education, whilst no formal resettlement plan has been announced, echoing past forced evictions criticised by human rights groups.
Related story: The Nigerian Government Destroys Orphanage in Makoko
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