By David Hundeyin
“This is the Facebook fan page
of Ms Olukemi Omololu-Olunloyo aka Snitchlady. It's either you call my whole
name or it's MsKemi or Snitchlady, a Music Industry Executive in Music
Journalism and Publicity. SNITCHLADY aka "Mskemi" Ms Olukemi
Omololu-Olunloyo is a Publicist, Journalist and retired Pharmacist and the CEO
of Keminications Media and PR and the Kay Jeezy Kids foundation which is a NEW
non profit GRASSROOTS organization mobilizing Kids in the Toronto Community in
bringing PEACE to their streets.”
A little over a decade ago, before Twitter became ubiquitous, the best known platform for all-access public discourse in the Nigerian online space was a web forum called Nairaland. Nairaland was what would happen if you took Reddit and forced it to have an antichrist baby with the offspring of 4Chan and an anonymous Telegram group chat. It had useful information. It had copious amounts of utter nonsense. It had interesting and colourful characters. It had epic flame wars, some of which have continued to rage for over a decade, even as the participants change over the years. It had fun - lots of fun. It had the very worst of Nigerian humanity. It also had Musiwa.
Musiwa, or Emperor Ademusiwa as
he styled himself, was a Nairaland OG and a true legend of the forum, having
been a member since around 2007. Not that you would know it, because Musiwa had
zero interest in engaging in normal conversation with other forum members. His
sole reason for incessantly posting on Nairaland was to inform anyone who cared
to listen that he was the “Premier of the Republic of Western Nigeria,” or
“Emperor of the Western Region of Nigeria.” Following this declaration would
ensue several megabytes of data-heavy images and satellite maps to support the
existence of his fictional republic.
A newcomer to Nairaland might at
first see the funny side of an eccentric individual who apparently did nothing
else with his time except post maps on a web forum where he talked about
himself in the third person, using a grammatically terrible but strangely
endearing writing style. This would quickly turn into exasperation as Musiwa’s
high resolution maps and images disrupted completely unrelated conversations,
and exhausted people’s data packages in the days when N1,000 could buy less
than 100MB. The mods of course, banned Emperor Musiwa. Repeatedly.
5 times.
30 times.
75 times.
100 times.
It made no difference. Musiwa
would simply register a new handle each time and return to post his maps and
speak in the 3rd person about governing his quixotic Republic of Western
Nigeria. Each one of the multiple handles he spawned would have a number after
it, apparently signifying the number of times he had been banned. Upon getting
to “Musiwa112”, he added a tributary handle called “Becomrich”, which did the
same things as the infinite Musiwa handle - high-res images, never-ending maps,
ban-resistance and all. The mods tried everything - keyword bans, IP bans, registration
restrictions - but nothing worked on Emperor Musiwa.
Eventually even Nairaland founder Seun Osewa saw the funny
side of it and gave up trying to banish Musiwa from the platform. Everyone
learned to adjust as best they could and find ways to go around, instead of
against him. Nairaland was Emperor Musiwa’s world, and the rest of us were just
living in it.
Kemi Olunloyo: An
Overview of Nigeria’s Real Life Musiwa
In August 2012, a 48 year-old woman landed in Lagos,
Nigeria. Olukemi Ajoke “Ashley” Omololu-Olunloyo had just been deported from
the Canadian province of Ontario, and she was back to the land she had only
briefly known as home since she was a teenager. At 14, she had left Nigeria and
moved to the USA, where she lived a broadly prosaic and inauspicious life,
before apparently veering into a dizzying chain of bad decisions that
culminated in a failed asylum claim in Canada, and ultimately deportation to
Nigeria.
Born in May 1964, Kemi was the daughter of former Oyo State
governor Victor Omololu-Olunloyo. She moved Stateside as a teenager, and
eventually obtained a Degree in Pharmacy at the Philadelphia College of
Pharmacy and Science in 1988. She subsequently met a man, fell in love and
moved to the city of Baltimore in Maryland. She would go on to have 3 kids, and
really this story ought to end here. Competent Nigerian immigrant achieves
stable middle class life in the USA - hardly groundbreaking stuff.
It is at this point however, that the story enters the
realms of Emperor Ademusiwa, so I’m going to need you to stay with me here. No
matter how puzzling or eccentric you expect this story to be, I can assure you
that it is significantly worse than that. In putting this story together, I
pored through hundreds of pages of news reports, blogposts, self-written
hagiographies, police records, real estate records, academic verification
records and every other type of documentation I could get my hands on to
establish exactly who or what we are dealing with here.
Most people typically use lies, distortions, exaggerations
and mischaracterisations as narrative supplements to go along with a core of
things that are broadly true - a flavour cube that enhances a soup, if you
will.
Kemi Olunloyo is not most people.
Like Emperor Musiwa, she is one of those rare individuals
who exclusively inhabits a world of her own choosing. Where regular people use
fish stories as Maggi cubes to season a pot of soup, Kemi regularly tosses
hundreds of Maggi cubes into the pot and brings it to boil, occasionally
tossing the odd vegetable into the bubbling chemical mass just for the shits
and giggles.
Below is a short overview of some of Kemi Olunloyo’s bold
and vivid claims, taken from a 2011 snapshot of
her Facebook fan page.
These claims range from the believable to the eye-raising to the absurd, but
there is one thing they all have in common. They are all false, misleading or
overstated in such a way as to make them look like achievements. This is a good
entry point into the story of one of the most headscratching characters I have
ever dug into.
Profile
1. Editor and Founder of HipHossip.com (Canada's Leading
Music Blog-VH1 & MTV (Canada's Leading Hip-Hop site-BET.com)
2. Former VeeJay MTV Base (MTV Africa)
3. Radio Nigeria on-air music radio personality Premier FM 93.5
4. Canadian Correspondent BET's "The Deal"
5. Music Reporter, news anchor and Talk show host since 1996 (NBC News,
WBAL-TV, V103-FM and Heaven 600AM, Baltimore USA, Premier 93.5FM Ibadan
Nigeria)
6. 2008 Presenter Live Urban Award (TIMA) Toronto Independent Music Award/2010
Presenter of Best Alternative Rock.
7. Member of the Board of Governors of Kingston General Hospital in Southern
Ontario
8. Freelance Columnist for Central Newspaper in Oshawa, Canada, Nigerian
Canadian Newspapers and Guest Columnist for the Toronto Sun.
9. Member of the Canadian Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS)
The JUNO AWARDS and a voting member in the 40th JUNOS.
10. Member of the Hollywood Foreign Press (Golden Globe Awards)
11. Member of the National Academy of TV Arts and Sciences (NATAS) The Emmy
Awards
12. Member of the Nigerian Association of Women Journalists (NAWOJ)
Awards
1997 Maryland's Most Beautiful People (Volunteer of the
Year)
1998 America's Volunteers of the Year White House ceremony
Personal Information
Conservative commentator and media expert, Journalist,
Publicist, US licensed Pharmacist (3 states), The Black Ann Coulter, The Queen
of Jane Street, Toronto, EIC of HipHossip.com, MyYoungToronto Digital mag,
Anti-Gun activist, Crime Victim Advocate, Youth Advocate, Author and SNITCH.
Personal Interests
Everything.
Fish Story #1 - Kemi the “Doctor”
In October 2020, I penned an investigative story about Marek
Zmyslowski, the Polish tech entrepreneur who has never been short of a word
or three about his time in Nigeria. The story established that Marek was a
master in the 3-part conman-in-Africa grift - Be suitably foreign; Look like
you know what you are doing; and Be a consummate storyteller. Marek I argued,
was not simply a “liar.” He was actually more of a storyteller. The difference
between a liar and a storyteller in this context, is that while the liar claims
that blue is red, the storyteller mixes in the right amount of truth for their
narrative to fly painlessly.
Marek for example, would never claim to have worked at say,
Deutsche Bank, because it would be too easy to refute such a claim
comprehensively. Instead, he claimed to have “founded Jumia Travel.” In
reality, he was hired by Jumia as the launch MD of a small travel division
called Jovago - which he left acrimoniously 5 months before it was collapsed
into the Jumia brand. Clearly, he was not in fact, the “founder of Jumia
Travel,” but if you did not know these contextual details, you would easily
believe his claims. See the subtlety involved in dishonest storytelling?
Yeah, Kemi does not do that.
Subtlety is not Kemi’s thing. Kemi prefers her dishonesty
loud and bold, instead of couched in contextual misdirection. For example,
sitting boldly on the Twitter bio of her erstwhile self-promotion brand HNN Africa, sits a loud claim that -
for whatever reason - nobody has ever bothered to fact check. “30 years
practising as a doctor in the USA” is not intended as a joke or ironic
reference of any kind - Kemi openly claims to be a US-trained medical doctor
with a 30-year work history.
In fact on at least one occasion, she openly chided an
Instagram follower for not referring to her as “Doctor.” Apparently in addition
to the long list of accolades above, Kemi is supposedly a doctorate-level
healthcare professional. Naturally, since arriving in Nigeria 9 years ago, she
has been able to parade this assumed title around, seemingly without any
questions from the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria.
The only way to end this charade would be to get hold of
documents confirming Kemi’s actual academic qualifications from source. That is
exactly what I did, and the results are below. A downloadable PDF copy of the
DegreeVerify document is available here.
It turns out unsurprisingly, that Kemi does not in fact
possess any medical qualification other than a BSc in Pharmacy from the
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. She is lying about being a
medical doctor, never mind with “30 years of experience,” and she is also lying
about having a PharmD. She in fact graduated with a Bachelors degree and got a
job filling orders in a pharmacy. More on that later.
The second loud and unsubtle lie Kemi peddles about her
alleged medical pedigree is that she was once apparently a “Member of the
Governors Advisory Council of Kingston General Hospital in Southern Ontario.”
This is a claim that is regularly repeated and reinforced in the Nigerian
blogosphere as content writers copy each other while chasing clicks, without
the slightest attempt at a fact check.
On closer inspection, it turns out that this claim is based
on her attendance at the 2010 Annual General Meeting of the Kingston General
Hospital, proven by a PDF copy of the minutes of the meeting, which is
conspicuously linked on her Wikipedia page.
The list in question, it turns out, is actually a list of
“Members” of the Kingston General Hospital, and not a list of people on the
“Governors Advisory Council”. Kingston General Hospital does not in fact, have
any such thing as a “Governors Advisory Council”. What it does have is a Board of Directors,
whose professional and academic profiles significantly exceed those of a
Pharmacy BSc who filled orders for a living, to say the least.
What Kingston General Hospital also has, is something called
the Kingston General
Hospital Auxiliary, which is a membership program that anyone can join for
free. This membership entitles one to, amongst other things - you guessed it -
attendance at the hospital’s annual general meeting.
What this essentially means is that in 2010, Our Lady of
Musiwa joined a free hospital program that allowed her to attend a meeting and
have her name included on a list that specified that she was a non-voting
member. She then took the absolute non-achievement of being part of a volunteer
team and rebranded it as heroic and important service on a fictitious
“Governors Advisory Council.” This is an example of the quintessential Kemi
Olunloyo fish story - loud, brash, bold, completely divorced from reality, and
devoid of the slightest hint of shame.
And we’re still only just getting started.
Fish Story #2 - Kemi
the “Showbiz Industry Hotshot”
One of Kemi’s most ubiquitous claims is her alleged heft in
the music and entertainment industry. Just take a look at the raft of claims
below:
Editor and Founder of HipHossip.com (Canada's Leading Music
Blog-VH1 & MTV (Canada's Leading Hip-Hop site-BET.com) Former VeeJay MTV
Base (MTV Africa). Radio Nigeria on-air music radio personality Premier FM
93.5. Canadian Correspondent BET's "The Deal". Music Reporter, news
anchor and Talk show host since 1996 (NBC News, WBAL-TV, V103-FM and Heaven
600AM, Baltimore USA, Premier 93.5FM Ibadan Nigeria) 2008 Presenter Live Urban
Award (TIMA) Toronto Independent Music Award/2010 Presenter of Best Alternative
Rock.
Member of the Canadian Association of Recording Arts and
Sciences (CARAS) The JUNO AWARDS and a voting member in the 40th JUNOS.10.
Member of the Hollywood Foreign Press (Golden Globe Awards)11. Member of the
National Academy of TV Arts and Sciences (NATAS) The Emmy Awards.
Let’s start with HipHossip.com, which she loudly claimed to
be “Canada’s Leading Music Blog” according to VH1 and MTV, and “Canada’s
Leading Hip-Hop site” according to BET.com. Unsurprisingly, there is zero
attribution for those supposed quotes. To anyone with a faint understanding of
the industry, it is basically impossible for MTV or BET to have issued such
comments about a little-known website with just 7 pages of available Google
search results. The site by the way, is currently defunct.
Worse still, of the top 10 search results for this supposed
market leading platform, 7 are by blogs and websites run by Kemi herself. This
will become quite the recurrent theme as this story progresses, because apart
from telling bold lies with the confidence of Cristiano Ronaldo taking a
penalty, Kemi has also mastered the art of the artificial echo chamber. Using
her dizzying array of blogsites and social media accounts, she successfully
controls much of her own online narrative and reinforces the lies she has told
in other places.
When writing about her, bloggers and less rigorous
journalists of course, find it only too easy to copy the available information
which she controls. This is how for the past 9 years, she has got away with
having a Wikipedia profile claiming membership of a fictitious “Governors
Advisory Council” at Ontario’s Kingston General Hospital. Again, more on that
later.
NBC News, WBAL-TV, V103-FM and Heaven 600AM, Baltimore USA
did not respond to my request for comment at press time, but there is
absolutely zero online or public database record of Kemi Olunloyo “hosting a
talk show” on any of these major regional and national US platforms. As you
will discover as you go further into this story, she was in fact the subject of
a police arrest that
these platforms found interesting enough to do a story on. She did not at any
point host a talk show on NBC News - she actually was the
news. Once. For a few minutes.
That brings us to one of the most pernicious and consistent lies that Kemi tells about her professional background - her alleged past as a music industry high roller. For example, she claims to have been a presenter at the 2008 and 2010 editions of the Toronto Independent Music Awards (TIMA). To the unaware, that might sound like an achievement. Until one does some digging and finds out that this is what TIMA is:
Worse still, it turns out that presenting awards at said
TIMA was something one could literally volunteer for.
Putting this on your CV as a supposed music industry hotshot would be like
using grainy mobile phone footage from a pickup game of street football to try
to convince a Premier League club to give one a contract. The same goes for
being a “Member of the Canadian Association of Recording Arts and Sciences
(CARAS)” which oversees The JUNO Awards and being “a voting member in the 40th
JUNOS.” Being a “member” of the “prestigious” JUNO Academy in fact, is open to
anyone with valid Canadian residency who can pay the princely sum of $75 plus
tax. Here, have a look yourself.
As for being a “member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association?”
Simply not
true. Not now, not at any time. In true Kemi style, that claim was picked
completely out of thin air. Oh, and the National Academy of TV Arts and
Sciences (NATAS) membership linked to The Emmy Awards? Open to anybody willing
to pay $125 a year.
It is important to point out how important these deliberate
mischaracterisations are to the Kemi myth. She has built a successful grift out
of convincing less perceptive Nigerian internet users that she is a
well-connected, person who is somehow “in the know” about happenings in
Nigeria’s entertainment and political spaces. She has pictures with local and
international celebrities - Drake, Rihanna and Kanye West among many - so this
must mean that she has ties to these people, yes?
It is the picture above that inadvertently gives the game
away. The Much Music Video Awards (MMVA) are a well-attended award show that
allow people to volunteer.
Ordinary members of the public can volunteer to work backstage, where they get
to meet with celebrities and sneak the occasional picture like the ones above.
In other words, Kemi took these pictures as a fan, not as an associate - but
good luck getting her to admit as much.
This story is only about halfway, so go have a stretch and a
drink then come back because there is more. There is a lot more.
Such as the little matter of Kemi claiming to have another
academic qualification that she does not have. Remember the Instagram and
Twitter bios earlier in the story where she claims to be a “PR Specialist”?
Well it so happens that on Kemi’s self-curated BizCommunity page,
she not only made this claim, but included the name of a prestigious school
- Goucher College School of Public
Relations - and a 1996 graduation date. This meant that it was
possible to fact check this claim. And of course…
So far, that’s “Doctor,” “Doctor of Pharmacy” and “PR
Specialist” on Kemi’s Instagram bio that will need changing pronto. By the end
of this story, “Investigative Journalist” will join that list too, but we’ll
get there. For now, I know you’re wondering - surely there cannot be any more
Kemi fiction within this subhead that will top all of this? And the answer is
In December 2012, just a few months after being deported to
Nigeria, Kemi finagled her way into a byline at the Nigerian Tribune, where she
proceeded to pen a lengthy ode to herself and her nonexistent media empire.
Toward the end of said article, at the point underlined in red, Kemi claimed to
have previously “judged or co-hosted” the Grammy Awards. Amazingly, this got
past the editor and this article was actually published. You can see an
archived copy of it here.
Fish Story #3 - Kemi the “Anti Gun Violence Advocate”
Now I know at this point, it seems pretty clear that the
person in question here has a very tenuous relationship with the truth, or even
the concept of objective reality. It is important to point out that this may
have been the cumulative result of untreated traumatic experiences. Kemi as it
turns out, is not stranger to severe trauma.
For starters, there is the relationship with her father,
which has always been complicated, to say the least. In this 2015 post, she
accused her dad of killing family members in a series of occult rituals. Of
course this IS Kemi Olunloyo, so that on its own does
not count for very much, but there are deeper reasons that could explain the
direction she chose to take in life.
These reasons become clear when one digs into Kemi’s past
and pays special attention to the period from 1999 to 2007. I mentioned earlier
that she had been in trouble with the law, and it was serious enough to receive
coverage on television. For the purpose of not straying into private territory
unnecessarily, I will direct the reader to this story by the Toronto Star to
get a clearer background on how Kemi left the USA and found herself in Canada.
Cliff Notes: She had domestic problems involving an autistic
child and his apparently less-than-supportive father. She got into trouble with
the law after threatening a judge. She then jumped bail and fled to Nigeria
after submitting her passport by obtaining a passport renewal from the Nigerian
embassy in 2006. In 2007, she and 2 of her 3 kids showed up in Canada and
claimed asylum. In 2012, after 5 long years of deliberation, the Canadian IRCC
deported her to Nigeria.
What this story did not mention is that Kemi already had
quite the rap sheet before her 2006 run-in with the law. I got hold of criminal
records from Baltimore and Georgia showing her arrest for malicious destruction
of property and trespassing on private property, among other things. The full
reports are available here and here.
It is no coincidence that almost as soon as she arrived in
Canada and found herself immersed in a struggle to strengthen her asylum claim,
Kemi found a convenient social cause to jump into - anti gun violence advocacy.
According to US government numbers, gun violence claimed 661 lives between
2006 and 2007 in the Atlanta municipal region where Kemi lived before jumping
bail. Kemi was not at this time involved in any kind of anti gun crime
advocacy. Upon getting to Canada however, Kemi suddenly found this to be her
new calling. According to Toronto Police Service numbers, 70
people died of gun violence in 2008.
Coming from Atlanta which had about 9 times the amount of
gun violence, the year before, Kemi suddenly realised that gun violence is bad.
At this point, she busted out one of her favourite party tricks that you will
recognise from her music industry antics - the overstated “volunteer.”
Overnight, Kemi became the loudest advocate against gun
violence in all of Toronto. In what was certainly not an obvious and cynical
attempt to strengthen her asylum claim by ingratiating herself with local
authorities, Kemi anointed herself as the anti gun crime High Priestess of
Toronto. The locals were divided. Some, like the journalist below were amused at her pantomime drama routine,
but gave her the benefit of the doubt.
Some, like this mother of a gun violence victim did not see
the funny side of Kemi’s use of her son’s death to push a clear and obvious
personal agenda. Speaking to The Toronto Star, Vesna Cikovic,
mother of Boris Cikovic expressed relief
when Kemi eventually got deported in 2012.
Even after getting deported from Canada and finding herself
growing popular with a Nigerian audience, Kemi would still occasionally carry
on performing social media advocacy against gun violence in Toronto. Not even a
topic as serious as gun violence however, was serious enough to avoid becoming
fodder for yet another one of Kemi’s legendary fish stories.
In the private world of Kemi Olunloyo, nobody and nothing is
safe.
Fish Story #4 - Kemi the “Journalist”
Most people reading this story have probably seen the
Twitter exchange below between Kemi and Stephanie Busari, CNN Nigeria Bureau
Chief.
Kemi is no stranger to telling whoppers, but this quite
possibly could be one of the very worst of the lot. If you look at the image at
the start of this subhead, you will notice that Kemi included a link to her
supposed “CNN Profile.” What you probably do not know is that the link in
question does not work, and has been defunct for at least 6 years. Because it
is not a byline, and it never was. Kemi Olunloyo in fact, never at any point
did any work for CNN.
The supposed “CNN Profile” was in fact, a CNN iReport profile. For those who are not familiar with what CNN iReport was, here is a little explainer below.
In other words, iReports was the mid-2000s equivalent of CNN
letting you join its live Instagram video. It was crowdsourced news content
before there was Twitter. After there was Twitter, iReports became increasingly
less and less relevant, until in 2015, CNN binned it
altogether and converted it into the Twitter hashtag “#iReports.” Presenting an
iReports profile as a “CNN Profile” would be like winning the annual Lagos
Spelling Bee and being “Governor for 1 day”, only to later demand a Lagos State
Governor’s pension.
This is key to understanding who or what Kemi Olunloyo is.
The problem is not that she tells lies - it is that she
seemingly has no self regulation capacity or process whatsoever to measure or
judge what sort of lie is worth telling. Take something as simple as someone’s
name for example. Why would this happen?
And then following a quick and humiliating smackdown,
refusal to stop digging.
Or take a claim about “being a columnist for the Oshawa
Durham Central Newspaper, only for a search on the newspaper’s website to show
that you were briefly mentioned in 2 stories, and you have never in fact, done
any work for it.
In July, Arise TV apparently forgot the rule about broken
clocks, and invited her on to discuss a serious story, as though she were a
serious stakeholder with something serious and of value to add to the
discourse. Inevitably, she went on and pulled a Kemi - visibly making up
stories on air and referencing her imaginary “FBI sources.”
Maybe that is actually the story here - that by simply
farting out the painfully elementary analysis dressed up as inside knowledge,
stealing other people’s content and placing a hashtag on it, making up fish
stories on the fly and occasionally proving the broken clock rule, every Tom,
Dick and Kemi can become a Nigerian media personality. After all Kemi Olunloyo
is now a bona fide public figure, and a number of people actually believe that
this heiress of Emperor Ademusiwa is an “investigative journalist.”
As was the case with the Premier of Western Nigeria a decade
ago, Kemi has mastered the incredible art of creating and existing inside her
very own private universe where she is everything she claims to be. She has
even gone a step further and somehow convinced hundreds of thousands of
Nigerians - presumably including many smart people - to give her real world
attention and social capital in return for colourful fish stories from her
private universe.
In that universe - the Kemiverse if you will - she is a
Grammy host, an award winning journalist, a PhD Pharmacist or a medical doctor
with 30 years of experience, a renowned social advocate, a music industry
executive, “the most important woman in Nigeria,” and who knows what else? Justin
Trudeau’s secret lover? Owner of a Harry Potter invisibility cloak? Nothing is
too much for Kemi. Nothing is too much of a reach. Nothing is too unlikely.
Nothing is too shameful.
The rest of us are now supporting characters in one woman’s
quest to discover how much power, fame and wealth can be achieved using nothing
but a fairly active imagination and an inexhaustible supply of bulletproof
audacity. If you can ignore the ethical problems and real danger inherent in
handing over increasing amounts of public attention, recognition and social
influence to the conceptual offspring of Vic-O and Emperor Ademusiwa, you would
almost have to respect the sheer amount of heart it takes to pull off this
grift.
Perhaps it really is Kemi’s world after all, and the rest of
us are just living in it.
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