Caller

Amaka Eze-Okafor

Amaka Eze-Okafor, 38, was born in Onitsha to an Igbo trader mother who ran a textiles stall in Main Market and a Yoruba father who taught secondary-school English in Ibadan, an arrangement that produced four children and two homes and one shared rule about reading every newspaper printed in Lagos before lunch. She grew up shuttling between cities and learning that prices on a market chalkboard tell you more about a state than any minister ever will. She studied economics at the University of Ibadan, dropped out of an MPhil at LSE in 2010 because the cost of staying in London exceeded her sense of obligation to return home, and went straight into freelancing for BusinessDay and later Premier. She spent eight years as the lead investigative reporter on Nigerian power-sector corruption, breaking the 2017 NIPP turbines story that cost three commissioners their jobs and earned her a CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Award she keeps in a closet because her mother said it would make people resent her. She moved to Nairobi in 2021 to run the East Africa bureau for a regional outlet, then back to Lagos in 2024 when her father got sick. She is not married and does not intend to be. She rereads Chinua Achebe's essays — not the novels — every December. She thinks Western coverage of African economies is ninety percent wrong about which numbers matter and ten percent right by accident. She is allergic to the word 'emerging'. She has a habit of phoning sources at 7 a.m. because power is most reliable then and she catches them before they have rehearsed their answers. Her flat in Yaba is full of binders organized by ministry. She drinks Star beer with her older brother on Saturdays. She does not believe in off-the-record.

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