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By Henry Akubuiro
Fast rising Nigerian writer, Akwaeke Emezi, has lamented how the $25,000 she donated to less privileged Nigerians during the COVID-19 pandemic was misappropriated by a non-profit organisation in Nigeria she channeled the support through.
Recounting her ordeal on her Facebook page, the American based writer said she had contacted the nonprofit organisation to give them a $25,000 grant to help the needy in Nigeria struggling to survive the pandemic, but the money developed wings.
The author of Little Rot wrote: “In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I contacted a Nigerian nonprofit organisation and gave them a $25,000 grant so they could help the underprivileged who are struggling to make ends meet.
“I can’t believe when I eventually discover that the fund was embezzled by the organisation’s administration; I don’t see why a charitable organisation would do that.”
The writer has decided to sue the NGO to retrieve the missing funds, ” I can’t bear to do that again now! However, I’m willing to spend a lot of money suing them this year, and I’m sure they will regret defrauding the underprivileged.
“That won’t break me at all, because, right now, I’m prepared to spend five times the money I lost in 2020. I will handle this on my own with a charity organisation from the USA.”
Emezi, fondly called The Deity, was born in Umuahia in 1987 to a Nigerian father and a mother who was the daughter of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants residing in Malaysia. She grew up in Aba, Abia State.
The writer, who started writing short stories when she was five years old, relocated to the US when she was 16 years old to attend college, after which she enrolled in a veterinary school and dropped out before receiving her MPA in international public policy and nonprofit management from . Emezi, in 2014, entered the MFA creative fiction writing programme at Syracuse University, where they started the draft of her debut novel, Freshwater.
She has won a number of prizes, including the 2017 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (African Region), Nommo Award and Otherwise Award with Fresh Water in 2009, Nommo Award with The Death of Vivek Oji in 2021, among others.
She has published more than ten books, including the novels, Freshwater (2018), The Death of Vivek Oji (2020), You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty (2022); young adult novels, Pet (2019), Bitter (2022); the poetry volume, Content Warning: Everything (2022), and the nonfiction, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (2021). As a creative writer, she specialises in speculative fiction and romance.
