After the August 10 2022 protest that was carried out by number of Sierra Leonean who took to the street unlawfully, the police conducted an investigation and find out that ABDULRAHMAN BANGURA photo shown above has been named as one of the organizers and key influencer of the protest against the current government, the police went to the address of the said suspect to invite him for questioning but he is nowhere to be seen. After several efforts to locate suspect Abdulrahman Bangura which proven futile, we therefore declared him wanted on today’s date 11 October 2022.
IF SEEN PLEASE CONTACT CID HEADQUARTERS, PADEMBA ROAD, THE NEAREST POLICE STATION.A HANDSOME REWARD WILL BE GIVEN TO ANYONE WHO PROVIDES INFORMATION LEADING TO THE ARREST OFABDULRAHMAN BANGURA.
Mr Daryl Victor Wellington a member of the above named movement was declared wanted after he democratically exercised his democratic right on Monday 28th March 2022 by demonstrating over the hike in fuel pump price. The movement cannot and will not dissociate itself from Mr. Wellington and his actions as his leadership and boldness has always motivate young people to always stand and speak up against all form of corruption, injustice and bad governance. He will continue to be a member and a strong pillar to this movement always until such a time he deemed otherwise. We therefore ask all sierra Leoneans to remain calm as we engage the law enforcement body for a better way forward.
It could be recalled that Success Lamarana Sall who had been recognize as one of the organizer of a gay fiesta which held at very odd hours within Freetown, escaped from police custody following a visit to him by someone also suspected of being a gay activist.
Reports reveal that Success Lamarana Sall, born on 24th April, 1997 and his cohorts were being monitored by a group of vigilantes who are helping the government (though discreetly) to crack down on gay activists. Gay and lesbianism are practices which are heavily frowned upon in Sierra Leone, not only by the authorities but also by religious groups among other groups that make it a habit to clamp down and in some cases murder in cold blood anyone caught practicing gay and lesbianism in any part of Sierra Leone.
In the case of Success Lamarana Sall, he and his partner were engaged in a gay beach fiesta (kissing and making love) on 24th March, 2022 when they were discovered and attacked by a vigilante group. He was severely beaten and left bleeding along with his companions but luckily for him, he escaped summary execution as is done to gays and lesbians in Sierra Leone, when a Police patrol arrived on the scene.
However, our investigations revealed that the gay activist Success Lamarana Sall drenched in his own blood and that of his colleagues who narrowly escaped, blessed his stars when the Police arrived and took him from the hands of the mob. But it was then that his troubles actually started.
The Police instead of taking the gay activist Success Lamarana Sall to hospital for treatment of his gaping wounds, they took him instead to the station and flung him into a dark and cold cell where he was consistently abused verbally and physically, making his condition worse and he reportedly lost hope of getting justice or having his case heard as the police who were supposed to be his rescuer turned out to be his teaser.
On 6th April, 2022 the gay activist took the opportunity of escaping from Police custody when he was visited by a friend who was suspected to have given kickback/bribed to the officer on duty to bring the gay activist Success Lamarana Sall out from the cell for fresh air and for them to talk about his arrest.
Fortunately, it turned out that the officer forgot about them and he made his escape and since that day he has not been seen. A man suspected to be his uncle later went to the police station but he was told that he had escaped, the man is still of the opinion that his nephew had been murdered by the police and his body dumped in a secret place.
Meanwhile, fifteen million Leones (Le15 million) reward placed on the gay activist’s head is still in place and his family members fear that if he is still alive he would face a worse fate but that if he is actually dead they leave their case with Almighty God. Investigations continue.
After Njoku Emmanuel’s father seized his laptop for “coding too much” and not facing his studies, he dropped out of school to focus on coding. 3 years later, he has become one of the best blockchain engineers of his generation, travelled the world, and now runs his own startup Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway.
Njoku’s greeting was casual, like his outfit—a black round-neck t-shirt on jeans. His boisterous laugh set a natural mood for what would become a long but interesting conversation. It was a busy day in Lagos, and the murmuring voices around him indicated he was joining the video call from his office. The walls behind him had “Lazerpay” and some motivational quotes written all over them.
“Sorry for the noise, bro,” Njoku said, running his fingers through his locks. “It’s a busy week. We are going out of beta sometime next week, so all hands on deck!”
To avoid internet fluctuation, we switched off our cameras and dived into our conversation.
Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway startup Njoku co-founded with Abdulfatai Suleiman and Prosper Ubi, was launched in October, and the reception has been massive. During its beta phase, the crypto startup has been endorsed by several tech and blockchain enthusiasts as a necessary innovation needed to accelerate crypto adoption in Africa. But what is even more remarkable about Lazerpay is Njoku, its 19-year-old CEO, who seemed to have emerged from nowhere to become one of the most sought-after young tech darlings in Africa.
Except he wasn’t a sudden emergence.
The Njoku we see today is a product of a seed planted about 7 years ago in Port Harcourt, the biggest city in the South-South region of Nigeria. In 2015, at 13, Njoku and his brothers were casually introduced to computer programming by their aunt, who was a robotic engineer. Since then, Njoku chose to write code and never looked back.
The lofty dream that followed was wanting to build an operating system like Bill Gates had, or a social media platform like Mark Zukerberg did. He wanted to be the African Mark Zukerberg and told everybody that cared to listen so, including his mother who wouldn’t stop jesting him for it. Njoku began to ask questions and pored through every content on computer programming he came across.
Born to an engineer father and a school teacher mother, Njoku was a mathematics whiz. He represented his school in the mathematics olympiad, won several medals, and lost a few. When his mates had a single mathematics textbook that had different topics like geometry, permutation and combination, and more, Njoku had a different textbook for each topic—each textbook as big as the all-encompassing ones.
“My father forbade us from using a calculator to solve our mathematics homework. Every computation had to be done with your head—why else do you have a head?” Njoku said. With this, his problem-solving skill was already top-notch; little wonder he was quick to embrace programming.
Because gaming was one of his favourite activities—having played video games with his siblings—at the time, he began to learn game development and started using C++ to build games. In 2017, he wrote his final secondary school exams and cleared all his papers, with A+ in mathematics and further mathematics.
Surprisingly, his next challenge will be finishing University.
“University was a waste of my time”
Like most Nigerian parents, Njoku’s parents wanted him to become a medical doctor—his older brother was already studying medicine. But Njoku had chosen his own path, one he wouldn’t let go of for the world.
He got admission to study electrical engineering at Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT) in 2018. This, his engineer father could live with.
Njoku during one of Lazerpay early ideation sessions in Dubai
In the same year, he joined Quiva Games, a gaming company based in Enugu, as an intern. Everything was going okay; his plate was full—a tasking engineering course and a job where he could build his coding skill. But, after a few classes in his first year, he realised engineering wasn’t as tasking as he had anticipated.
“I thought everything would be advanced, but it was people packed into a small hall to learn social sciences and general studies. I was like ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And the maths they were teaching at 100 level was like my JSS 3/SS 1 maths. So, it became a waste of my time.”
He knew he wasn’t going to do this for another 5 years, so he became laser-focused on coding. “Any time I was going to school, I was going to charge my laptop and code. I didn’t tell my parents. When they gave me money to buy textbooks, I used it to buy coding courses on Udemy.”
His father somehow found out he has been missing classes and invited him home. “I didn’t know it was a trick to seize my laptop. I went back to school and had to borrow laptop to finish some projects at hand and keep learning.”
COVID-19 was a blessing in disguise
When COVID-19 hit in 2020 and everywhere was locked down, everybody panicked and scared, Njoku was somewhat happy; he’d be away from school without getting into trouble. So, he upped his game and started coding 12 hours a day. He didn’t want to go back to school, and the only thing he had was to learn as fast as he could and get a remote job.
In March 2020, he got a job as a mobile application developer at Kwivar, a buy-now-pay-later company based in Port Harcourt.
“The salary was ₦70,000. When I got it, nobody could talk to me. I was the biggest boy I knew. My parents couldn’t believe you could get a job during the pandemic when companies were laying people off. Though the salary isn’t enough reason to not study medicine, they finally saw what I had seen since 2015.”
Introduction to the blockchain
Before the pandemic, Njoku had already started learning about blockchain. He’d taken Udemy courses on blockchain and had entered the finals of a hackathon project that would be held in Lagos in 2019—the first time he’d ever be in Lagos.
2019 was Njoku’s first time in Lagos: Njoku and other participants at the hackathon.
In April 2020, a month after he started working at Kwivar, he got another offer as a blockchain developer at Project Hydro, a blockchain company based in the British Virgin Islands. He would be paid $700 monthly in Hydro tokens. At this point, he knew he wasn’t going back to school; everything happening to him agreed with that decision.
Fast forward to September 2020, he wanted to leave Kwivar and needed something to replace it. So, he reached out to Ugochukwu Aronu, the co-founder of Xend, the parent company of Quiva Games where he’d interned for 5 months, to check if there was an opening. After sharing what he’d done at Project Hydro—decentralised wallet, snowflake infrastructure for decentralised identity—Aronu invited him to come to Enugu and join his new venture Xend Finance, a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform for credit unions, cooperatives, and individuals, backed by Google and Binance.
At the time, the pandemic was already easing up, and students had started going back to school. So, Njoku told his father he was going back to school. Aronu made him an offer—₦150,000 net salary, a MacBook, and free accommodation.
The days at Xend Finance: Njoku and Emeka Nweke, the lead blockchain engineer who taught him how to deploy complex smart contracts
“I went to Port Harcourt to show my parents the offer and told them I was dropping out of school. It was obvious they couldn’t do anything about it. Going back to school just to graduate and earn about half or as much as I was already earning wasn’t wise,” Njoku said.
It was at this point that his parents knew and accepted Njoku’s crazy idea to drop out. At Xend Finance, he had to step in when the lead blockchain engineer was unavailable, and that accelerated his blockchain knowledge. Despite the close call—since they’d already scheduled to launch by December 2020—he led the build but not without a hiccup.
“It was difficult because I had to take charge of an entire project in the middle of building. I fixed the bug, wrote, and deployed smart contracts. But I made a deployment error that cost the company $10,000.” So Aronu told him the money he lost would be deducted from his salary. At that point his salary had jumped to ₦300,000. He panicked and started applying to international jobs—at least those ones could pay him enough money to service the debt.
He would later find out Aronu was only joking, but by then he had gotten an offer from MakerDAO, one of the biggest DeFi companies in the world. He was the first Nigerian engineer on the team. As usual, he went home to show his parents his new offer and his mother couldn’t believe her dropout son could earn over $3,000 per month. But that was the beginning.
After MakerDAO, the offers wouldn’t stop coming. He got a contract offer from Instadapp, a DeFi protocol company, for $90 per hour. “I was like, these people don’t know me: I’ll work 20 hours per day!”
He resigned from Xend Finance and was ready to make his mark on the global blockchain ecosystem. He relocated to Dubai.
Dubai was his passport to the world
MakerDAO was having an offsite meetup in Portugal and Njoku was supposed to go, but his visa wasn’t approved on time. He was frustrated, so his aunt, the robotic engineer, advised him to try applying to travel to Europe from Ghana or anywhere outside Nigeria. “She also suggested Dubai, and I took it. After staying in Dubai for a month, I told her I’m not coming back home.”
In Dubai, more job opportunities came. He was on top of the world; he could now reject offers and travel the world. For an 18-year-old boy, there was enough money in the bank so he told his father to leave his brother’s medical school’s tuition to him. “My brother is in Bulgaria, so imagine earning in naira and paying tuition in euro. So it’s only right I took that off my father’s plate.”
He got a contract offer of $3,000 per week from Avarta, a blockchain security company based in Singapore. He joined them and built their entire blockchain infrastructure.
Njoku and Suleiman, co-founder and CTO at Lazerpay, in Dubai
Then he met Yele Bademosi, founder and CEO at Nestcoin, who would later become one of Lazerpay’s early investors. Bademosi then became Njoku’s mentor, so when he wanted to start Nestcoin, Njoku was one of the first engineers he reached out to. It was around this time that the idea to build Lazerpay began to form.
Njoku dropped everything to focus on Lazerpay. Avarta reached out with a full-time offer of $7,000 per month and $50,000 worth of Avarta token, but he rejected it. They came back with another offer of $15,000 per month, but Njoku was running with his new vision now. Before, the vision was to become a great engineer, but now it’s to become a great founder.
He knew what he wanted from a young age and stood by it. His steadfastness has turned everybody around him into a believer; his parents have now begun nudging his youngest sibling to study software engineering.
Njoku isn’t Zukerberg and may never be, but he’s building his own empire in the blockchain world. At 19, this can only be the beginning of his journey.
SIERRA LEONE POLICE DECLARE MOHAMED ALIEU BAH WANTED
It could be recalled that Mohamed Alieu Bah who has been recognized as the one of the organizers of a political protest that took place on 19th July 2020 in Makeni the northern part of Sierra Leone. The said suspect escaped from custody following a visit by some who also suspected of been a political activist.
Report reveal that Mohamed Alieu Bah was born 12/4/1995 cohorts were being monitored by vigilantes of the present government (though discreetly) to crack down political activists. Political protest are activities that are heavily frowned upon in Sierra Leone. Not only by authorities but also other political rivalries that make it habit to clamp down and in some case murder in cold blood anyone caught during and after such activities.
In the case of Mohamed Alieu Bah he was arrested by the Sierra Leone police and placed in cell after been rescue from the hands of other ganga members that are suspected to be members of the present ruling government who were beating him along with his companions but luckily for him, he escaped summary execution as is done to political activist who are against the ideology of the government in Sierra Leone.
However, our investigation revealed that Mohamed Alieu Bah drenched in his own blood and that of his colleagues who narrowly escaped, blessed his stars when the police arrived and took him from the hands of the mob. But it was then that his trouble actually started.
The police instead of taking Mohamed Alieu Bah to hospital for treatment of his gaping wounds, they took him instead to the station and flung him into a dark and cold cell where he was consistently abused verbally and physically, making his condition worse and he reportedly lost hope of getting justice or having his case heard as the police who were supposed to be his rescue turned out to be his teaser.
On 23 July 2020, Mohamed Alieu Bah took the opportunity of escaping from police custody when he was visited by a friend who was suspected to have given a kickback/bribed to the officer on duty to bring the said person out from the cell for fresh air and for them to talk about his arrest.
Fortunately, it turned out that the officer forgot about them and he made his escape and since that day he has not been seen. His family members who later went to the police station were told that he had escaped but they are still of the opinion that their son, brother and cousin had been murdered by the police and his body dumped in a secret place.
Meanwhile, fifteen million Leones (15,000,000/00) reward placed on Mohamed Alieu Bah is still in place and his family members fear that if he is still alive he would face a worse fate but that if he is actually dead they leave their case with Almighty God. Investigation continue.
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