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From Vox
The $5,000 quest for the perfect butt -
The quest for the perfect peach can be costly in more ways than one. | Getty Images
How the Brazilian butt lift, one of the world’s most dangerous plastic surgery procedures, went mainstream.
When she woke up from surgery, Kayla Malveaux found herself alone in the clinic recovery room, slumped over in a wheelchair. She felt sharp pain around her face and swollen eyes, but she wasn’t sure why. The operation she’d just had involved fat taken from her abdomen and transplanted into her bottom, an increasingly common procedure called the Brazilian butt lift. Though she can’t say for sure what really happened between the time the surgery was over and the time she woke up, she has a guess. “It’s like they threw me in the wheelchair and then I must have hit my head,” she says.
As the 22-year-old was wheeled out of the Miami cosmetic surgery clinic, she understood. In the waiting room was “a herd of girls,” she says, all waiting for their own procedures with a single surgeon. “I couldn’t see how a doctor can do that many patients a day without overworking themselves, you know?” she says.
Kayla is one of thousands of women who’ve flown to South Florida — or Turkey or Mexico or Thailand — for questionably cheap operations, where a complex, multi-hour surgery not covered by health insurance can run as low as $3,000, although most clinics advertise BBL packages for around $5,500 (not including aftercare, which can double the cost). These procedures often take place in small clinics, where doctors who might have been trained as dermatologists or pediatricians are legally allowed to advertise themselves as “board certified” physicians even though the extent of their plastic surgery training might have consisted of a single weekend course. To make up for the high cost of running an operating room, they squeeze in as many as eight patients every day.
You can see where the Brazilian butt lift — a physically taxing surgery for the doctor as well as the patient — might start to get dangerous. But this hasn’t stopped the thousands of women who’ve undergone it over the past few years; the number of BBLs globally since 2015 has risen 77.6 percent, according to a survey by the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, and is now the fastest-growing cosmetic procedure in the world.
As Kayla arrived at the airport after her surgery, she was told the terminal didn’t have any wheelchairs left. On her flight back to California, she realized she was one of several BBL patients on the plane.
You spend enough time on TikTok and Instagram, and it can start to feel like you’re the only person in the world who hasn’t had their butt done. The BBL silhouette is omnipresent and unmissable, an impossibly tiny middle resting atop a plump bottom and thick thighs; at its most extreme it presents a cartoonish version of a fertile woman, a cross between the Venus of Willendorf and Jessica Rabbit. At its most subtle, a BBL just looks like good genes, the kind of golden ratio associated with the most iconic sex symbols of the last 100 years.
The BBL aesthetic of the 2010s and the present day, however, is most often associated with the Instagram influencer, whose body exists to be consumed by the most people possible (whether or not it has been photoshopped is almost beside the point). After Kim Kardashian, one of the ur- examples of the modern influencer, proved with an X-ray that she hadn’t had butt implants, the next logical question was, “Well, how?” The answer, many have speculated, is that she and many of her sisters had gotten Brazilian butt lifts, which wouldn’t have shown up on an X-ray because the procedure involves the removal and retransplant of one’s own fat.
The platforms that provided the foundation for the rise of influencers are also the reason why the BBL has penetrated the mainstream. Consider “Instagram face,” the button-nosed, cat-eyed, pouty- lipped look popularized by professionally sexy models like Emily Ratajkowski and Bella Hadid, that for the vast majority of the population is only achievable through skillful makeup or, more often than not, a click of a button. Apps like FaceTune bring that same kind of one-touch wizardry to bodies, which can be stretched, slimmed, and smoothed to infinity — and can do it convincingly. The BBL, just like any of the fastest-growing cosmetic surgery procedures, attempts to recreate the way we look when our bodies are filtered through the internet.
Until the last decade or so, the BBL was not common practice in the US. Its origins, as its name suggests, are in Brazil, where cosmetic surgery has a storied background, largely due to the country’s history of eugenics. In 1918, Dr. Renato Kehl founded the Eugenics Society of São Paulo, which aimed to erase all signs of Black and Indigenous physical appearance in Brazil. In 1960, a surgeon named Ivo Pitanguy founded the world’s first plastic surgery training center in Brazil, where he pioneered what became known as the Brazilian butt lift and taught surgeons all over the globe how to perform his techniques.
From there, the practice traveled north and exploded once pop culture began to shed its preference for the “tits on a stick” silhouette and started to revere stars like Jennifer Lopez and Nicki Minaj. As the mainstream media began to incorporate the beauty standards that have long been held by Black and Latinx cultures — e.g. that big butts are hot — it continued to idealize the white women who conformed to these standards and, furthermore, allowed them to profit over Black and Latina women whose bodies the fashion establishment had previously critiqued. The idea that certain body types can be considered trendy at all, of course, is a history that has always been laden with classism, racism, and sexism, and it’s easy to argue that the media only began to celebrate big butts when it became financially beneficial to do so.
South Florida quickly emerged as the plastic surgery capital of America, in part because of its huge Latinx population and the fact that Floridians can comfortably wear bikinis year round. By 1999, more than one in 10 plastic surgery procedures performed by board-certified plastic surgeons took place in Florida, and the history of malpractice goes back just as far. Florida, just like every other state in the country, allows medical doctors to practice and treat patients in any field, as long as they obtain consent from the patient.
“You can set up your own clinic and you could be doing liposuction tomorrow with no training in liposuction whatsoever, and it’s perfectly legal,” explains Adam Rubinstein, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Miami. Though these doctors wouldn’t be able to perform plastic surgery in a hospital or legitimate surgery center, where regulations are stricter and have far more oversight, there’s nothing stopping them from opening a clinic of their own, and no higher board they must answer to.
The field of medicine largely relies on the industry policing itself, which makes it difficult for legislators to address the issues. “We have the expertise to do that, but we don’t have the legal authority,” explains Arthur Perry, a plastic surgeon who spent 10 years on the New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners and who refuses to perform BBLs. “So yeah, I could call myself a cardiac surgeon today, set up an operating room, and do cardiac surgery in my office. You can sue me for malpractice, but that’s a civil penalty as opposed to criminal.”
Helly Larson, a 26-year-old podcaster in Georgia, got her BBL in 2019 at a Miami clinic. Though she’d known plenty of women who’d had BBLs through her work as a stripper, she was making enough money with the body she already had. “Then literally, one day I just was like, ‘Okay, I’m doing it,’” she says. “I scheduled a consultation with a doctor who had done a YouTuber that I was watching, they approved me and I paid my deposit all within a week.” She’d done further research on the website RealSelf, which acts almost like a Yelp for cosmetic surgeons, where former patients can post reviews and photos.
Like Kayla, she didn’t get the sense that something was off until she was in the bed waiting to start the surgery. Four hours after she was supposed to be anesthetized, she says the doctor came in and complained about the lack of professionalism by the anesthesiologist. “As I’m sitting in the gown, all of the red flags start to come through and I was just like, ‘You’re gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,’” she says. “I didn’t even know about the death rates.”
The death rates for BBLs have been, historically, not good. One 2017 study placed the worldwide mortality rate at a whopping one in 3,000; 25 of those deaths occurred in the US in the five years prior. Thanks to more widespread education and better safety techniques, that ratio is widening: In 2019, one survey estimated the mortality risk at one in 14,921, and as of 2020 it is one in 20,117. That’s still higher than the mortality rate from liposuction (1.3 in 50,000) or for outpatient surgery (0.25-0.5 in 100,000). (All figures via the International Open Access Journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.)
BBL deaths have, for the most part, occurred because of improper technique. The problem with inserting fat into the buttock is that your butt contains a lot of very large blood vessels — “as big as drinking straws,” one doctor put it — which, if accidentally injected with fat, can cause that fat to travel to your lungs and cause a deadly pulmonary embolism. That’s part of the reason why most reputable surgeons have a limit to the amount of fat they’ll insert — there’s less likelihood of dead fat, which creates lumps and lopsidedness. (In popular BBL destinations like Turkey, doctors are willing to insert much more fat.)
These issues are compounded when doctors are pumping out clients as fast as they can. At a single plastic surgery clinic, eight women died over the course of six years, seven of them working-class Black and Latina women who reportedly were targets of the clinic’s advertising campaigns. In 2018, a patient died three days after getting a BBL at New Life Cosmetic Surgery; the cause of death was determined to be from liposuction and fat transfer procedure complications. “Miami is the chop shop of plastic surgery,” Helly says. “I think the doctor had, like, five BBLs the day I had mine.” In the lead-up to her surgery, the clinic had been emailing and checking in regularly, but once it was over, she says, “It’s crickets.”
One aspect that many clinics don’t always fully explain is what happens after you get a new butt. Many aren’t upfront about the fact that there are limits to how much fat surgeons can remove and implant, and therefore what a single BBL procedure can accomplish. For many women to achieve their desired look, they must come back for two or three procedures. What’s more, not all of the fat inserted into the butt will stay alive — it’s a common complaint among BBL patients to fall in love with their post-surgery butt, only to watch it shrink over the next few months.
Aftercare guidance depends on the patient’s existing body type, but all of them must wear a faja, a corset-like garment that keeps the body shape in place, for about three months as the new fat learns to connect with the existing fat. Sleeping must be done face-down for at least six weeks, and sitting requires a special pillow. To help with circulation, patients must schedule regular post-op massages, which are often painful. Peeing, by the way, is its own hurdle. “I’ve seen people where they’ll keep [the garment] on while they go to the bathroom, they’ll literally just pee all over themselves and live like that,” Helly says.
Outside of the network of cheap clinics, Miami has also seen a spate of surgery recovery centers that offer pickup and dropoff, massages, and other post-op assistance, with names like Prima Dollhouse, Barbie Dolls Recovery House, and Sassy Queen, though it’s also typical to rent an Airbnb and use trusted loved ones as temporary nurses. Sites like YouTube are filled with women’s experiences with their own post-operative care, some decent, some awful; vlogger Latausha Denn chronicled her terrible recovery process in a video titled “THE WORST EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE.” For Helly, the first week was “absolute hell;” she described walking around a coffee table like running a mile. Long-term effects are common as well; both Kayla, who got her procedure last fall, and Helly, who got hers in 2019, still experience abdominal numbness. Helly also has lingering circulation issues when sitting down, back pain, and trouble sleeping.
These aftereffects are rarely present in the many Instagram and TikTok accounts run by doctors advertising their prowess in creating sculpted hourglass figures. Some have built huge audiences with cheeky sketches on how a BBL means freedom from the gym or how all their patients are having hot girl summers. They field dozens of DMs a day from women hoping to recreate the bodies they’ve seen online.
Edward Chamata, a doctor who works under popular TikTokker Dr. Jung at Premiere Surgical Arts in Houston, Texas, sees this as a boon to prospective patients, who enter the consultation room with far more knowledge about different procedures than they would have access to otherwise. “Every kind of plastic surgeon is on Instagram, and it’s a massive reach on those platforms,” he says. “It’s a big part of empowering the patients and informing them on their care, so they almost have a lot of education already at hand.”
Other doctors see it differently. Perry believes that “as doctors, we’re not supposed to be salesmen.” On the rash of self-described BBL experts, Perry quotes Willie Sutton, a famous robber from the 1950s who was asked why he robbed banks and replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”
“Why do these doctors do these procedures? Because that’s where the money is,” Perry says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s right.”
The best — and only, really — way a patient can make an educated choice about where to get any kind of cosmetic surgery is to research as much as they possibly can. Resources like certificationmatters.org and the American Board of Plastic Surgery allow people to look up doctors’ certifications in particular areas. Rubinstein also warns against any surgery that sounds too good to be true: $5,000 isn’t enough to cover the costs of running an operating room, he says, without cutting some serious corners. “I’d say you probably shouldn’t pay much less than $8,000 for a BBL in Miami,” he says. Often, he’ll operate on women who’ve had a botched operation from a less educated doctor.
BBL fashion has defo taken over. No style or quality, just cut out everything and vibes.
Ethical guidelines state that doctors should use rigorous screening processes that weed out people who aren’t optimal patients for a BBL — people who are severely under- or overweight, people with a history of eating disorders or body dysmorphia, people who maybe haven’t thought through the enormous decision they’re about to make. “I always ask my patients to bring in wish pics, and many times, they’ll bring in pics from Instagram,” says Chamata. “And a lot of times those photos are photoshopped, with obviously unnatural proportions that just aren’t achievable in the real world.” He says around 30 percent of the patients he sees aren’t appropriate candidates.
Yet looking “unnatural” has often been one of the goals for many people who’ve undergone plastic surgery. “It’s an interesting sociological phenomenon,” says Perry. “It started with breast implants in the 1960s, where there were so many bad breast implants — too big, too high — that women began to think that that was normal. I’ve actually had people request me to put implants up a little high, so that the bulge is visible under the collarbone. I try to explain to people, this is not normal. It’s the same thing with brows.” (He mentions a certain powerful politician as a particularly bad example of a brow lift done wrong.) “My goal as a plastic surgeon is to help people look normal, and sometimes we forget about that as plastic surgeons who are very interested in just getting everyone and their sister operated on. My job is not to do whatever you ask me to do. It’s to use my aesthetic and ethical judgment, and do what’s right.”
Unsurprisingly, Perry believes the BBL boom will fade out, and perhaps is already starting to. “The people coming in are no longer saying, ‘I want it as big as possible.’ Now they’re saying, ‘I just want it to be round,’” says Rubinstein.
That specific bodies can be “trendy” is, again, an ugly concept with an uglier history. The BBL, however, has an even more complex one. As Sophie Elmhirst put it in her thorough investigation on BBLs at the Guardian:
Following the chain of cultural appropriation that has led to this point is bewildering. The notion of the idealised Brazilian bottom, which some rich white Brazilian women disdain because of its stereotypical associations with biracial women, has become the desired shape among certain white women in the US and Europe, who are in turn emulating a body shape artificially constructed and popularised by an Armenian-American woman, who is often accused of appropriating a Black aesthetic, which some Black women then feel compelled to copy, not having the idealised body shape they believe they’re supposed to have naturally. “You steal a version of what a Black woman’s body should be, repackage it, sell it to the masses, and then if I’m Black and I don’t look like that? That’s a mindfuck,” summarised [Alisha] Gaines, [professor of English at Florida State University].
The stereotype of the Instagram-faced, BBL-bodied influencer is now almost bigger than a person’s physical appearance. On TikTok, where advertisements for and real-life stories about BBLs proliferate, so too does a meme known as “the BBL effect.” 23-year-old Antoni Bumba came up with the idea for the character, which they call “Miss BBL,” after idolizing a certain type of influencer who weaved seamlessly between the ranks of Hollywood and Instagram baddies — Amber Rose, Kylie Jenner, the Real Kyle Sisters.
“We have 20-something seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, where you see these girls taking 45, 60 seconds just to get out of the car and into the restaurant because they have to serve every single angle for the paparazzi,” says Antoni. Miss BBL is recognizable not with the way she looks but in the little motions that let others know she’s a bad bitch — taking ample time to flick her hair behind her shoulders, eating slowly and carefully, and wearing a constant camera-ready smize. “People who get work done essentially have no problem holding up people’s time to be able to cater to their needs,” they explain. “And it’s so fire because it gives all of these people, especially women, this sort of edge, invoking confidence and self-sufficiency into their day-to-day lives.”
While Kayla and Helly ultimately ended up happy with their results, both wish they’d done more research before going under the knife. “If I were to do anything else again, it would probably be in California,” Kayla says. “Most places in Miami, after they take your money, they don’t really care.”
Helly described how her body dysmorphia got worse after she had the surgery; for about a year, she could barely look at herself in the mirror. “I would say to anybody looking into getting procedures, you’re not just going to magically be a brand new person that has this work ethic and great motivation. You need to find that before you go in and change your whole body.” she says. “If I had seen a girl on TikTok or YouTube talking about the reality behind it, I don’t even know if I would have gone through with it.”
It’s certainly possible that within a decade, the BBL will continue to fade out, just as body types have risen and fallen in popularity throughout history. “Think about the way that nobody has these huge watermelon titties anymore,” Helly says. “Working in the dancer industry, I had a lot of clubs that wouldn’t hire me because I had thick thighs and their mindset was still stuck in the ’90s. All these women are going to start getting their hips and butt reduced because it’s going to go out of fashion.”
Whatever the next most desirable silhouette looks like, what will remain is the cosmetic surgery industry’s willingness to follow aesthetic trends at any cost, offering “pioneering” procedures that haven’t been properly vetted, or doctors who’ve decided they could make more money jumping from podiatry to plastics. Until lawmakers catch up with the reality of the field, over time the BBL could just be one of any number of dangerous operations that promises to build the perfect body.
How kidnap-for-ransom became the “most lucrative industry in Nigeria” -
The remaining wares of students from Bethel Baptist High School collected inside the schoolyard as parents of abducted students pray for their return. The children were taken by gunmen in Nigeria’s Kaduna State on July 14, 2021. | Kola Sulaimon/AFP via Getty Images
Bandits have extorted $4.9 million from ordinary Nigerians this year.
Since December, more than 1,000 Nigerian students and staffhave been abducted and held for ransom by criminal gangs in the dense forests of the country’s remote northwest.
These gangs, locally called bandits, have been operating in northwestern Nigeria for more than a decade, but when they were infiltrated by members of the Islamist militant group Boko Haram in December, the abductions and violence escalated. There are still 300 students who have not been returned to their families.
Earlier this month, officials in the northern Nigerian state of Kaduna tookthe drastic step of suspending all schooling out of concern for students’ safety.
So why do these mass abductions keep happening? Well, for starters, “kidnap-for-ransom is the most lucrative industry in Nigeria today,” Bulama Bukarti, senior analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said.
Not only has Bukarti studied violent extremist groups in sub-Saharan Africa, including Boko Haram, for over a decade, he also hails from the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, just a mile away from where Boko Haram originated.
So I called him up to find out more about why the Nigerian government has failed to rein in these bandits and stop the kidnappings and what, if anything, the international community can do to end the crisis.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
These particular abductions are being carried out by economically motivated groups, locally referred to as bandits, which have recently been infiltrated by some elements of Boko Haram. The bandit groups have been operating in the northwestern part of Nigeria for over a decade. But they have grown in strength and sophistication in the last few years, especially during the previous eight months.
In December 2020, they started a string of mass abductions of students. These are different criminal gangs without any central leadership. Official estimates from affected states indicate there are about 30,000 members. They operate primarily in the northwestern and central parts of Nigeria, where there are vast mountainous forests that have been mismanaged for years.
There’s no access roads or government presence there. So what these gangs do is get out of the forest on motorbikes and abduct students or anyone they can find and take them into the woods and hold them for ransom.
Jariel Arvin
So what influence did Boko Haram’s abduct- for-ransom plots have on the bandits?
Bulama Bukarti
Everybody in Nigeria, including the criminal gangs in the northwest, saw Boko Haram receive a ransom payment of€3 million (about $3.7 million)[to free some of the Chibok schoolgirls]. In 2018, there was another mass abduction in which 110 girls were taken. Reports surfaced about how the hostages were released, and there were rumors of many being paid, including in a UN report. And in the last two years, at least one of the criminal gangs was infiltrated by Boko Haram.
As I said, since December [2020], there have been eight mass kidnappings affecting six different states of Nigeria, in which over 1,000 students and teachers were taken. As we speak, three different gangs are holding more than 300 students.
Jariel Arvin
So does that mean that the other 700 hundred students have either escaped or been released?
Bulama Bukarti
The 700 were released after providing proof of paying the ransom. After the first kidnapping last December, the state government negotiated with the criminals, ultimately delivering the ransom but denying it publicly. Shortly afterward, audio circulated over WhatsApp in northern Nigeria, in which one of the middlemen who took the ransom from the government to the criminals tells the gang leaders: “This is the amount they gave you.” That audio has never been published, but the released boys told the Wall Street Journal they were also told the ransom had been paid.
A couple of months ago, the Nigerian president asked governors to stop paying ransoms to avoid making matters worse — further evidence that ransoms were being paid. In some cases, they were paid by the [state]governments. But many governments have stopped paying now, so the burden falls on the parents of abducted students.
Over 100 million Nigerians live below the poverty line, so parents struggle to raise enough money to save loved ones. Some end up selling their homes or land. Some incur colossal debt that they can never repay. Others go to markets, mosques, and churches to crowdfund the money.
This tells you about the level of poverty, but it also reveals how brazen the transactions are. It’s not a secret anymore. If people are raising money in markets by saying, “Please help us pay a ransom,” the security agencies are definitely aware that ransoms are being paid. Police officers themselves have been kidnapped, and their families have been forced to pay ransoms for their release.
Jariel Arvin
Why is this happening?
Bulama Bukarti
Kidnap-for-ransom is the most lucrative industry in Nigeria today. Two weeks ago, I made a Zoom presentation with the deputy director of Nigeria’s intelligence agency, the Department of State Services. In the first six months of this year alone, he said, kidnappers have extorted 2 billion naira ($4.9 million) from ordinary Nigerians.
First, because kidnapping pays, it continues to grow. Secondly, there are no consequences to crime. In the eight mass kidnappings since December, none of the gang leaders responsible have been arrested. None of them have been brought to justice for their crimes.
Jariel Arvin
Why are the abductors not prosecuted? Why are there no consequences?
Bulama Bukarti
That’s a bit of a difficult question. For starters, prosecuting these criminal gangs requires arresting them, which requires robust security to track them and stop them. That’s just not happening right now.
The second factor is the Nigerian government. In a national TV interview last month, President Muhammadu Buhari said he has become overwhelmed by the situation in the northwest. Nigerian security forces are stretched too thin because at least six different violent hot spots are creating crisis situations in Nigeria today.
In the northeast, there’s Boko Haram, while in the northwest, there are these criminal bandits. In the north-central region, there’s a cropland crisis [with the amount of arable cropland shrinking and conflicts between herders and farmers erupting over resources]. To the southeast, there’s a separatist movement. And in the Niger Delta, there are oil-pipe pirates. At the same time, in the southwest, kidnap-for-ransom, a cropland crisis, and separatist tensions are all raising concerns.
In addition, Nigeria’s military is now deployed to over 90 percent of the country on active duty, so Nigeria is currently a country at war with itself. The only thing missing is a formal declaration.
There are also fundamental logistical challenges, like not enough access to communication equipment. Villagers often speak of how they could spot an attack before it happened, but the closest military formation said that they didn’t have the means to confront the criminals who end up attacking.
Along with the mass kidnapping of students, hundreds of villages have been razed. Security forces are spread thin. Nigeria is a country of 200 million people, but there are less than 350,000 police officers. Officially, virtually 50 percent of these officers are attached to VIPs like governors, private citizens, and companies. Another 20 percent of police do administrative work. So you can say that only 30 percent of Nigerian’s 350,000 police are fighting crime in the country.
Moreover, their budget and capacity for fighting crime are meager, and they lack basic technology. The police are also poorly paid. So, as a result of all this, you’ll find a local government responsible for 2 million people with only 30 police officers. For example, in Katsina State, where the president is from, the governor said there were only 30 police officers for 100 villages in August last year. That’s a preview of the entire country.
But there are also theories that the abduction situation in the northwest is getting worse because of political choices. Many Nigerians feel that since most criminal gangs are from the president’s tribe, he’s treating them softly. This theory may not be accurate, but it is passionately held in many communities in Nigeria, further exacerbating tensions and stoking social divisions.
Jariel Arvin
To recap, the kidnappings continue happening because they pay well, there are no consequences to crime, and security forces are ill-equipped and overburdened?
Bulama Bukarti
Yes, but I’d also mention the geography of the northwestern part of Nigeria, where there are dense, mountainous forests that have been mismanaged for years. The northwest also borders Niger. So, it’s close to jihadist groups operating in the Sahel. Because of porous borders and corruption, weapons are easily smuggled from Libya through Niger to Nigeria.
The official estimate is that there are now over 6 million illegal weapons, primarily AK-47s, in a country where possessing any weapon is prohibited.
The last thing I would mention is that by arrangement, Nigeria’s public boarding schools are located on the outskirts of towns. Most of these schools are vulnerable because they lack even basic fencing.
Even though the government declared the Safe Schools Initiative in 2014, following the Chibok abduction, there are still many vulnerable schools that criminal gangs can easily break into. Students are then used as a bargaining chip to get governments and politicians on their knees, praying for their release, while the criminal gangs make millions.
Jariel Arvin
Okay, so how do we end the crisis of mass abductions in Nigeria?
Bulama Bukarti
The first thing is to step up military and intelligence efforts, which requires building up the capacity of the Nigerian military and intelligence agencies to contain the criminal groups. It’s tough to avoid [having to use] violence against groups committing massacres of students and civilians every week or taking mass numbers of people into the bush for ransom.
The capacity of the Nigerian police also needs to be built up. Police need more manpower, equipment, and, most importantly, better leadership, which also requires tackling corruption. When it comes to the situation in the northwest, there’s also a need for transnational cooperation, especially with Niger, which shares a 1,600-kilometer border with Nigeria. About three of the six most-impacted states border Niger.
And we now know that the criminal gangs operate in Nigeria and slip into Niger to hide and vice-versa. One clear example of this is when an American, Philip Walton, was abducted in southern Niger last October; he was rescued in the northwestern part of Nigeria.
So the criminal gangs are already operating transnationally. Unless the Nigeria-Niger border is secured, the bandits will continue working transnationally. Weapons and ammunition will be smuggled from Libya to Niger and from Niger to Nigeria.
As we speak, there are lots of military operations going on in the northwest. But there is no emergency number [for citizens to call] the military to inform them when attacks are underway. Right now, they must get in touch with a politician who knows someone in the police, who knows someone in the military, for help. Not having basic phone numbers for contacting the military indicates that even basic technology isn’t used to its full advantage.
Even deploying basic technology to track the numbers the gangs use to communicate with parents isn’t being done. It would be easy to find their location. Criminal gangs have now started accepting ransom payments through bank transfers.
Jariel Arvin:
So they could easily track down these criminals?
Bulama Bukarti:
Yes, but Nigerian banks are so archaic that they need a court order to freeze the accounts. And while that happens, the delay in the legal system means that the criminals have time to withdraw the money and disappear. Since I tweeted reports of criminals using bank transfers for ransom earlier this week, several victims have shared with me and publicly that they were stopped and forced to swipe their bank cards and empty their accounts to the gangs.
This shows how normalized paying ransom to bandits is becoming in the country and that basic technology is not being used to track and crack down on the criminals.
And that goes back to this question of political choice, and that’s why some Nigerians believe that maybe it is because the federal government doesn’t want to tackle this problem. This feeling is partly fueling separatists groups in southern Nigeria.
More broadly, there are 17 security and law enforcement institutions in Nigeria — all of them under the federal government and directly answering to the president. Since state governors have minimal powers to do anything about physical security, the problem lies in the federal government’s hands. But the government isn’t doing enough to tackle the situation.
The last thing I would mention is that there’s no central body for coordinating these security groups. In some cases, there’s a rivalry between the police and the military. The military doesn’t want the police to succeed because then that means the police will have more public goodwill.
The security architecture is in complete disarray because there is no coordinated policy among security agencies or governors in affected states. This weakness is exploited by criminal gangs. Ending the crisis requires leadership from the federal government, which means developing a clear policy on the northwest and the criminal gangs. It also means getting state governors on the same page to pursue a single policy that can work.
Jariel Arvin
Is dealing with security concerns going to be enough to help Nigeria recover from years of mass kidnappings?
Bulama Bukarti
Thanks for asking that question, because a critical point I wanted to mention is that security efforts can help contain the situation, but they will not solve the underlying causes. There are deeply seated socioeconomic and political grievances pushing young people to criminality and violent extremism in Nigeria’s northwest and central parts.
We know that the overwhelming majority of these criminal gangs, if not all, have never gone to school. So they’ve never had the opportunity to get an education — and that’s one of the grievances they’ve expressed in their messages. Without proper education, many of these groups can’t find employment in the Nigerian system — so they resort to crime.
So investing in quality education is one of the ways to get at the root causes. Today there are 10 million Nigerian children who are out of school. Over 70 percent are located in the northern part of Nigeria, where this crisis is going on. The more children we leave out of school today, the more candidates for committing crimes and terrorism we will see tomorrow.
Besides quality education, we need to invest in the economy and develop infrastructure in these rural areas, including in the remotest areas. Building essential access roads will stop many of these criminals because security forces can then pursue them into the forest. Investing in infrastructure can help create good-paying jobs that will take people away from criminality and extremism.
Another important thing that must be done is to add other initiatives to strengthen the social contract between ordinary Nigerians and the state. The average Nigerian doesn’t see the worth of democracy in the country because it hasn’t worked for them. Nigeria’s democracy works for the few in Abuja, the federal capital, and those in government in the states, so there is this widespread frustration with democracy.
The lack of good governance must be addressed through investment in the economy, education, infrastructure, and other initiatives to take people out of abject poverty and strengthen the social contract.
Jariel Arvin
I spend most of my time reporting on climate change. Do you see any connection between environmental issues and the current violence plaguing the country?
Bulama Bukarti
Climate change is a key driver of this conflict. Most of these criminals were once pastoralists (animal herders). They feel their grazing reserves have been taken over by climate change impacts if not taken for further urbanization of big foreign companies. So Nigeria must tackle environmental issues too.
There is also increasing desertification, turning fertile agricultural land barren and increasing rainfall, leading to floods or prolonged droughts, which take a toll on subsistence farms. Competition over scarce land and water resources, exacerbated by the impact of climate change, is leading to communal tensions, complicating the security situation in the northwestern region and across Nigeria.
Jariel Arvin
We’ve spoken a lot about what Nigeria must do to end the kidnapping crisis. So what can the US and the rest of the international community do to support the effort?
Bulama Bukarti
Money alone won’t be enough to help. Simply too many militants have made what I call a “great discovery”: They can become rich by abducting people. So it will be tough to take them back to pastoralism. Getting them to return back to their old ways of life is almost impossible.
But I think the West can help in two significant ways. The first is to help with capacity-building for the Nigerian security forces with weapons and ammunition. The US recently delivered six jets to help the military fight extremism and criminality, which was welcomed across the country.
I know that there are human rights concerns regarding the military and the police. Some of those are valid concerns, but the way out is not [for the US and other Western countries]to stop helping but to use the assistance to get the army and the authorities to respect human rights and the rule of law.
Second, the US can support the Nigerian government, civil society organizations, and companies to help create jobs and educate young people in Nigeria. The US is currently doing a lot of work in Nigeria; unfortunately, its military assistance is not yet taking place in its northwest region.
Last August, the US Africa Commander told the media that al-Qaeda has infiltrated the northwest and criminal gangs. Unless we do something to tackle criminality through security and treat the root causes in the medium and long term, we allow a fertile soil for extremism to develop.
For example, suppose extremist groups like Boko Haram [which is located in the northeast] were to consolidate in the northwest. In that case, they will quickly make the situation worse, furthering a vicious cycle where you have criminal groups working with violent extremists. So the US and other countries have a solid impetus to intervene to help the Nigerian government in the security sector and with long-term development.
The best way forward is for the Nigerian government to build its security capabilities with international support, address underlying root causes, and stop paying lip service to these issues by saying they are doing their best. Because, unfortunately, their best is nowhere near enough.
What does work from home mean for the coffee cart guy? -
Customers stand in line outside a coffee cart in Manhattan’s Financial District on May 12, 2021. | Amir Hamja/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Who wins and who loses in the remote work revolution.
When Ozzy Qurbanzada dropped off his coffee cart at a garage at the outset of New York’s Covid-19 outbreak, he thought it would be two weeks before he was back to the spot in downtown Manhattan he’d been selling from for some 25 years. Instead, it would be a year before he decided to go back, and even as the city creeps toward more normalcy, business is nothing like it used to be. It’s expensive to run the cart — his spot at the garage costs $400 a month, plus tolls and gas and supplies — and it’s impossible to plan how much inventory he needs week to week.
“Regular customers, I know what they want, what they get. Right now, I don’t know what I’m going to get or who I’m going to get,” Qurbanzada says. “Every day, I’m guessing.”
The future of Qurbanzada’s business is largely out of his hands. Instead, it’s in the hands of thousands of strangers and whether they return to the office. “When you look out at New York City and all those offices and all those buildings, they are made for people to work, not for people to sit at home,” he says. He wants to know what my plans are. After all, he notes, I work in the area.
There’s a lot of potential good in the rise in remote work. It can provide flexibility, cut down commuting time, and make many workers more productive and happier. But the work-from-home shift has important implications for people who can’t, and many of them are negative. Some of the businesses and workers that have struggled the most over the past 18 months are those that count on business from people who are currently working from home — the local lunch spots, nail salons, coffee shops, office maintenance crews. And as the future of remote work remains in flux, so does the future of some of those in-person positions, at least in their pre-pandemic iterations.
“This revolution in flexibility is not a bad thing,” said Rakeen Mabud, managing director of policy and research and chief economist at the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank. “But it feels like we’re trading the well-being of the privileged for the well-being of those who work at coffee shops, at lunch counters, that depend on office workers. That’s the inevitable outcome that’s predicated on inequality.”
The pandemic has exacerbated existing divisions in the United States economy in myriad ways, including when it comes to work. Higher-educated, better-paid people are much likelier to be able to work from home than less- educated, lower-paid people, who at the outset of the Covid-19 outbreak were furloughed, laid off, or were declared essential and kept going into work.
According to Gallup, 72 percent of white-collar workers are still working from home at least some of the time as of this spring, while just 14 percent of blue-collar workers are. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that just one in 10 people with less than a high school diploma and one in four people with a high school diploma can work from home. Meanwhile, two-thirds of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher have that option. Black and Hispanic workers are less likely to be able to work remotely than white and Asian American workers.
In other words, when we are talking about the shift to remote work, we are talking about certain people in certain jobs.
“What this does, in many ways, is exacerbate existing class or socioeconomic or racial divides,” Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist, said at a recent symposium on the rise of remote work. “White, professional knowledge workers are many more times more likely to have the privilege of working remotely than minority essential workers.”
And the ability of the former group to stay home has a tangible impact on those in the latter. Qurbanzada hopes his office customers will be back soon, but it’s hard to know what will happen. “A lot of people got used to working from home, but a lot of people are complaining they’re not happy working from home,” he told me.
A Manhattan microcosm
Manhattan’s financial district has weathered figurative and literal storms in recent decades — the September 11 terrorist attacks, the financial crisis, Hurricane Sandy. But John Moran, the owner of the Killarney Rose, a local bar that’s been in the area since 1968, has never quite seen anything like this. “9/11 and this are totally different, because people weren’t told to stay home after 9/11,” he said. Of the current situation, he said plainly, “It sucks. There’s no businesses down here, there’s no office businesses.”
When I wandered down the largely empty street to interview Moran on a late Monday morning in July, he had begrudgingly decided to close the bar for the day. Being open seven days a week, at least during the summer, wasn’t worth it. He recalled looking around the place at 7 pm the Friday before and counting just seven patrons. Business would pick up later in the evening, but that was because of the young people who live in high-rises in the area, not workers. “There’s no businesses down here, there’s no office businesses,” he told me. “I’d give it years before there’s any kind of normalcy in the city, especially down here.” He, too, wanted to get a sense of my job’s back- to-work plan. Did I expect my floor to be full?
According to the Alliance for Downtown New York, which manages the area’s business district, just a quarter of workers in Downtown Manhattan’s commercial offices are coming in at least part time. While that’s an improvement from just 10 percent in the depths of the pandemic, it’s a far cry from what it once was. Some companies, such as Goldman Sachs, are asking for their workers to come back full time, while others are opting for a hybrid model or are going fully remote. The future remains highly uncertain: Most remote work plans aren’t set in stone, especially as the pandemic continues to evolve.
“We’re certainly not going back to Monday to Friday, 9 to 5,” said Jessica Lappin, president of the Alliance. Still, she hopes the situation will improve. “I think when the fall comes, it’s that natural kind of shift back into a routine.”
For some businesses, it will be too late. In Downtown Manhattan, 75 percent of retail and hospitality businesses in the area were temporarily shuttered in March 2020, and last year, 12 percent of all businesses there — or about 160 — closed their doors permanently. This year, an additional 60 businesses have shut down. Between this year and last, 100 new businesses have popped up as well — the tiny Argentine coffee place I used to buy pastries from sometimes is now a smoke shop — but they’re still not keeping pace.
Moran has managed to stay afloat during the pandemic, and he’s lucky enough to own his building. But it’s still tough. “I’m still working at a loss, and I’d say a lot of other people are, too,” he said.
“It’s going to be very difficult to think that there’s going to be a surge in jobs based on the return to the office, because the return to the office is going to be gradual,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at NYU. “If we don’t have people working five days a week, then we’re going to see a real cutback in workers who support those people.”
Ibrahim, who has had a smoothie cart on Wall Street for about a decade, is among those who is on the brink of giving up. He tried coming back for a couple of weeks over the summer, but there was construction in his typical spot, and he wasn’t making any money. He’s going to try again next month, but for right now, he’s staying at home with his kids and has started to study computer science online — something he’d rather do while working at his cart.
“Because the business is closed, I’m trying to use it for time to help me right now or later. After the pandemic, I wish everything will go back and I can start back my business, because it’s better for me,” Ibrahim said.
“There’s a huge set of people who serve office workers,” Moss said. They range from selling coffee and lunch to delivering dinners because people work late to … those who shine shoes, those people who do nails, those people who clean the buildings. There’s a lot of maintenance in modern buildings, more than people realize.”
New York is hardly an outlier in undergoing economic turmoil during the pandemic. According to a report from Bloomberg CityLab, 80 percent of Chicago’s public transportation passengers plan to return to that mode of transportation, and San Francisco transit authorities don’t think ridership will reach the levels they were at before the pandemic until at least 2024. One recent poll found that one-third of Bay Area residents say they’ll commute to work less after the pandemic.
America’s reality is one of a segregated workforce and economic rifts. In many parts of the country, the activities of more well-off people — whether or not they go to the office, out to eat, or on vacation — directly impact the economic prospects of often lower-paid people who work in the service sector or other interconnected areas.
Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed, says that nationally there’s been a bigger decline and slower rebound in jobs listings in many in-person sectors, like retail and restaurants, in areas where more people can work from home. “Tech hubs and finance centers have seen bigger job losses in local service industries because people aren’t spending as much locally,” he said.
Job postings are growing more slowly in high work-from-home metros, where local businesses like retail and restaurants aren’t rebounding as quickly.https://t.co/4YfNSvyydA
Some of the demand has not dissipated altogether but instead has moved. People who used to go out to lunch near their offices are now grabbing food by where they live, or getting their dry-cleaning done locally. But, Kolko said, some of the demand is likely just gone — instead of going out to lunch at all, people are just cooking at home, and they have no office clothes for dry-cleaning at all.
Some researchers have identified a “donut effect” of Covid-19 in cities, estimating that about 15 percent of residents and businesses have moved out of metropolitan hubs during the first year of the pandemic, many of them into the suburbs. In other words, not only have commuters been lost, but city residents have been lost, too. The optimistic vision of what this means for workers whose jobs depend on those people is that their jobs will move to the suburbs, too, and that it will help local businesses in suburban areas. And for many workers, that might very well be true — most of the people who work in service jobs in Downtown Manhattan don’t live there.
“I think moving these jobs out of expensive city centers, the very worst places for a low-paid worker to have to commute to every day, will be a win-win,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford, in an email. He believes large cities like New York will see a permanent 10 percent decrease in retail spending.
But there are other wrinkles. Kolko warned that it might be harder to sustain public services for people who have to commute to work if fewer people are commuting altogether, specifically citing public transportation. The remote work divide might also exacerbate discord between white-collar and blue-collar workers, increasing inequality and, in turn, perhaps fostering animosity. And it’s not easy for anyone, let alone lower-wage workers, to pick up and move or go out and find a new job. Yes, there are a lot of jobs available right now, but not all of them are jobs people want or are able to do.
“For service sector employees, their options are limited in terms of who treats them well,” said Jhumpa Bhattacharya, vice president of programs and strategy at the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development, an economic justice organization. “Work is about relationships building, and it’s not easy, particularly for women, to just find another boss that they can trust again who understands their circumstances and gives them what they need to take care of their families.”
Remote work has boosted some sectors, such as warehouses and delivery, but moving from a job waiting tables to a job delivering food isn’t seamless, nor are all jobs equal. “The people who have lost their jobs in hospitality and tourism might not be able to get or take the jobs that are expanding in warehouse and delivery,” Kolko said. “There’s some overlap in terms of who works in each of those sectors, but there are differences in what those jobs are, the skills they require, the schedule.”
In New York, street vending permits are hard to come by (a controversy all on its own), and people who have them may not be eager to give them up. Whatever the case, work transitions are always hard. Qurbanzada’s been on the same corner for years; he doesn’t want to give it up. “I don’t have any choice,” he said, “it’s my business.”
Workers need help to weather big shocks
What the future of work will look like, including with regard to working from home, is impossible to predict. It’s true many workers do prefer an option to operate remotely at least sometimes, and with the rise of the delta variant of Covid-19, many of the companies that had wanted to bring workers back to the office after Labor Day might be rethinking their plans. On the flip side, more companies might start to require people to come in, or workers could decide they prefer to go back to the office more, too. A tension among office workers and managers is arising at places like Apple, where some employees are resisting going back to the office.
“The younger the worker, the less likely they’re going to follow the command. These old, bald men have built their careers by being with each other,” Moss said. “The country has made more technological advancements in how it does business in the last 15 months compared to how it’s done business in the last 50 years.”
Much of the discussion around remote work overlooks what happens to those for whom that’s not an option. That doesn’t mean that more flexibility for white-collar workers is bad, it just means that’s only part of the broader equation.
Some of the obstacles faced by service workers and small businesses in hubs like Downtown Manhattan might fix themselves. New York isn’t dead, and while it’s different, there are still plenty of economic opportunities new and old. Businesses and workers are also getting some support to help stay afloat, such as PPP loans (which Killarney Rose received) and unemployment insurance (which both Qurbanzada and Ibrahim say they were able to collect). Plenty of people who worked in service jobs prior to the pandemic aren’t eager to go back to them, and many are rethinking whether they want to go back to the restaurant or bar or salon they were at before. Or, they’re trying to revamp the business — Moran just started doing comedy shows at Killarney.
But all of these readjustments could be made easier. The work from home revolution doesn’t have to be a disaster for those left out. “Imagine if we had a labor market that allowed people, particularly in customer-facing jobs or service jobs, to actually weather big shocks. That economy would look really different from the one we have right now,” Mabud said. That could include a much stronger unemployment insurance system, work-sharing agreements, and more robust care infrastructure.
Bhattacharya said she believes the moment could call for something even bigger, such as a guaranteed income geared toward certain communities. “We have to be taking care of the people who we’re leaving behind if we’re changing the way we work,” she said.
At the very least, in-person and service workers need to be a bigger part of the future-of-work conversation.
Despite his diminished customer base, Qurbanzada hasn’t raised his prices yet. He thinks he probably should. “Everybody else did it already,” he told me. Right now, he’s in wait-and-see mode on whether anything will be different in the fall. “They keep talking about September, everybody says September,” he says. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
From The Hindu: Sports
Tokyo Olympics | Defending champion Wayde Van Niekerk out of 400m - The South African was dumped out of contention after a fifth place finish in his semi-final
Tokyo Olympics | Equestrian Fouaad Mirza qualifies for jumping final - Mirza knocked two fences in the jumping round to incur eight penalty points en route to finish 25th with an overall 47.2 penalty points.
Tokyo Olympics | American star Simone Biles to return for balance beam finals - Biles returns a little over a week after stepping away from the meet to focus on her mental health
What a recovery! Hassan falls, gets up and wins 1,500 heat - Sifan Hassan’s bid for a distance treble at the Olympics was nearly derailed Monday when the world champion tripped over another runner and fell at t
Brave Indian women create history, enter Olympic hockey semifinals for first time - Drag-flicker Gurjit Kaur rose to the occasion when it mattered and converted India’s lone penalty corner in the 22nd minute to surprise the Australians.
From The Hindu: National News
Students upbeat in Punjab as classes resume - Parents have to provide written consent before sending their wards, says Minister
Question Hour witnesses protests against Sivankutty - UDF members shout slogans and display banners against Minister
Mandapam wildlife range sets the highest record in turtle egg collection this year - A record number of 19,667 Olive Ridley eggs were collected from the Mandapam range alone this season, as against 5,433 eggs collected in 2020
Government assures safeguarding interests of Ordnance Factory employees - “The government has ensured safeguarding the interests of the employees of Ordnance Factory Board post corporatisation of the OFB,” Minister of State for Defence Ajay Bhatt said in Rajya Sabha.
On World Lung Cancer Day, expert advises awareness on risk factors - Long-term active smoking and long exposure to environmental carcinogens increase the risk of developing lung cancer manifold, the doctor said
From BBC: Europe
Belarus Olympian given Polish visa after refusing ‘forced’ flight home - Olympian Krystina Timanovskaya says she was almost forced on a plane home after criticising coaches.
Turkey wildfires: Eight dead as blazes sweep through tourist resorts - Firefighters battle blazes in soaring temperatures as wildfires ravage resorts in southern Europe.
Turkey: People flee popular tourist spots to escape wildfires - Footage has emerged showing people fleeing the deadly fires which have engulfed parts of Turkey.
Giant panda twins born in French zoo - The event is described as “exceptional” by experts, as panda reproduction is notoriously difficult.
Tokyo Olympics: Lamont Marcell Jacobs claims shock 100m gold - Italy’s Lamont Marcell Jacobs claims a shock gold in the Olympic 100m final, after Great Britain’s Zharnel Hughes is disqualified for a false start.
From Ars Technica
Big tech companies are at war with employees over remote work - CEOs want workers back at their desks. Employees and the virus have other plans. - link
What is LMDh and why are we so excited about sports car racing in 2023? - Acura, Audi, BMW, Ferrari, Peugeot, and Toyota can all race together in 2023—here’s how. - link
Review: The Green Knight weaves a compelling coming-of-age fantasy quest - David Lowery’s atmospheric film is as richly textured and layered as the original poem. - link
With help from Google, impersonated Brave.com website pushes malware - With a valid TLS certificate, faux Bravė.com could fool even security-savvy people. - link
The privacy battle Apple isn’t fighting - Browser-level privacy setting mandated by California is absent from Safari, iOS. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A man brings two ibuprofen and a glass of water to his wife of 30 years… -
A man and his wife are feeling like their sex life is getting stale -
They’ve already tried just about everything, so after some discussion they decide to really mix it up and try ear sex.
They plan a special night for it and when the night comes, they put the kids to bed and get ready for sexy times.
They start normally and work up to the ear penetration and they find that they’re actually both enjoying it quite a bit more than they expected. It doesn’t take long for the man to get close to completion but just as he’s about to finish, his wife wife pushes him off and tells him to stop, quickly covering herself.
Naturally, he’s concerned and immediately asks her what happened. After a brief hesitation she responds:
“I’m sorry babe, I could have sworn I heard someone coming!”
A woman places an ad in the local newspaper. “Looking for a man with three qualifications: won’t beat me up, won’t run away from me, and would be IMMENSELY good in bed”. -
Two days later her doorbell rings. “Hi, I’m Sam. I have no arms so I won’t beat you, and no legs so I won’t run away”. “What makes you think you are great in bed?” the woman retorts.
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a ravishing blonde and a homely brunette are sharing a compartment on a train as it winds its way through the Alps. -
Every now and then the train passes through a tunnel, during which time the compartment is plunged into complete darkness. On one such occasion, a ringing slap is heard and as the train passes back into daylight, the Frenchman is rubbing his sore, red cheek.
The brunette thinks “I bet that dirty Frenchman fondled the blonde and she struck the pervert.”
The blonde thinks “I bet that filthy Frenchman was looking to grope me in the dark, mistook the dowdy brunette for me and she slapped the beast.”
The Frenchman thinks “I bet that perfidious Englishman touched up the blonde in the dark and she slapped me by mistake.”
The Englishman thinks “I can’t wait for another tunnel so I can slap that French twat again.”
