Focus on Africa

City of Maiduguri submerged in heaviest flooding

Devastating floods caused by a burst dam in northeastern Nigeria have submerged entire residential areas, displacing tens of thousands of people and animals. Authorities say at least thirty people have died. Two hundered prisoners also escaped from the Maiduguri state prison. It's been described as the worst flooding in thirty years, reports our correspondent Azzezat Olaoluwa in Maiduguri.

Also, how the influence of so-called Islamic State in Mali is making things worse for women and girls in the Sahel.

And the long history behind naked protests in Uganda. Three young women who staged a nude protest against corruption in front of the country's parliamentary buildings recently, are facing charges in a court of law.

Presenter: Audrey Brown Producers: Yvette Twagiramariya, Bella Hassan, Susan Gachuhi and Alfonso Daniels. Technical Producer: Nick Randell Senior Journalist: Karnie Sharp Editors: Alice Muthengi and Andre Lombard

Duration:: 36m
Broadcast on:: 13 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Hello and welcome to this podcast from the BBC World Service. Please let us know what you think and tell other people about us on social media. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. Selling a little, or a lot. Shopify helps you do your thing, however you're teaching. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch, your online shop stage to the first real-life store stage. All the way to the, did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout. Thirty-six percent better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Get a one dollar per month trial period at Shopify.com/broadcast. Shopify.com/broadcast. Explaining football to the friend who's just there for the nachos, hard. Tailgating from home like a pro with snacks and drinks everyone will love, any easy win. And with Instacart helping deliver the snack time MVPs to your door, you're ready for the game in as fast as 30 minutes. So you never miss a play or lose your seat on the couch or have to go head to head for the last chicken wing. Shop game day faves on Instacart and enjoy zero-dollar delivery fees on your first three gross reorders. Offer valid for a limited time. Other fees and terms apply. Hello, I'm Audrey Brown and coming up in Focus in Africa We are talking about how Islamic State in the Sahel is enforcing dress and behavior codes on men and women in parts of Niger. They clearly deem preferable that women and girls stay at home, so in some villages they're no longer able to collect firewood to work in the fields. The group does also impose restrictions and rules on men and boys. They are, for example, keeping young men from like having their normal social gatherings in the streets, drinking tea and they tend to punish men and boys more violently. And why did you choose to do a naked protest? We felt like when we got naked we should drop attention to our demands. We wanted people to look at tasks and feel embarrassed. So is this simulation look at corruption? We are not just exposing our bodies or we are exposing corruption. We will be taking a closer look at the long history of so-called naked protests from the colonial era to present day Africa. How effective are they? It's Friday the 13th of September. First we go to Nigeria. There are catastrophic floods in the northeast of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have watched their children, their homes, their fields, their livestock wash away as they try to scramble to safety. Adama and Ibrahim have been describing their experiences in recent days. Adama first. We left my husband behind when we had to cross the bridge. We don't know whether he was able to leave and go to safety because he is blind. In this camp they cook food but we don't get it. I have never eaten the food they distribute here because people are so disorganized and I can't fight for food with my kids with me. We have been drinking water but we thank God. The floods started around dawn. We had blocked where the water was coming from with bags of sand but the water eventually forced its way. The water started flowing into our house and it got to my chest. I have 17 kids and 14 are here with me. Some of them were in front of me and I held two in my arms as we left home. Their mothers held the small ones. We didn't pick any of our belongings. We just left. Thanks to Adama and Ibrahim for taking a moment in those difficult circumstances to talk to us. The floods were one thing but in my degree things were made considerably worse when a dam collapsed resulting in a deluge bearing down on half of the city. The governor issued evacuation orders. It's difficult to estimate the number of fatalities but preliminary figures suggest more than 30 people so far. Certain rescue operations are underway in my degree and those affected need to be fed and sheltered. My colleague Azizat Alulua is reporting from my degree. It's been very chaotic. People are frustrated, helpless and medially hungry, especially the displaced persons that have gone to the settlement camps and the authorities have set up for them. But the numbers keep increasing and it seems that what the authorities are doing are just not enough. The state government is overwhelmed but they are getting support from international organizations that also the national government. The National Emergency Management Agency is first to share food. I know some other organizations are doing same as well but we've seen many people telling us that the essential supplies are also not getting to them. Yesterday we went to some of the communities where people are still trapped. I saw hundreds of people, tens of them on rooftops of their homes that have been submerged in water and these people have gone for days without food and clean water because water sources have been contaminated due to the collapse of the synergies in the state capital. So there are fears of an outbreak of waterborne diseases. We're here from the state governor in just a moment but give us an idea of how bad it is. The numbers of people dying. I know that those numbers are rising. The number of people that are displaced. I mean it seems like the infrastructure of the city basically has collapsed. Absolutely. The governor told me that the affected patients cannot be less than 2 million. They are estimating about 400,000 displaced patients. We think that a number could go higher. There are no official casualty figures yet but independent agencies are estimating at least 30. The governor says they are waiting for the water to receive. So they can ascertain the level of damage. If the structure wise is worried, he said this is going to set the state back a lot because many public structures have been affected. We understand that one of the most equipped cancer centers in the country is getting mercury and it's been submerged in water. One of the medical directors in the state university of medical school said that there could be another potential catastrophe in the waiting because the cancer equipment may cause radiation. And that is something that is of course for concern. So what are the authorities actually doing to help the survivors? There seems to be a concerted effort from all actors to support these people but like I said earlier, it seems that it's not enough because there are so many people in need. I spoke to some displaced patients in one of the IDP camps and settlement camps made for these people and they said that they had to sacrifice the warm meal they gave their family for their children. A woman for team of sociastics children for example and she was able to get just one plate of meal and they had to show you for that day. Some said they got meal tickets, they have not been able to get anything. And so it's really worrisome because most of these people have been displaced from where they had to flee due to insurgency that has ravaged the state for 15 years. So it's like double jeopardy or triple jeopardy feeding insurgency coming somewhere else and now you've been dislodged by the deluge in the settlement camp and you're not even getting the supplies you need to survive basically. So hunger, insecurity and I believe also that the prison was breached and some of the people escaped and they had particular worries about that. Absolutely, Governor Zulu is particularly worried about that. He is the first public official to somehow admit that there was actually jailbreak and some leaders of the Boko Haramis, their insurgency group escaped. I'm worried. Yes, I'm still afraid of worried. What you also have to bear in mind that Bonus did come in and establish what we can't bore no more than. Our rehabilitation that has allowed many surgeons to repent within the last three years, over 200,000 Boko Haram members of the Boko Haramis have repented. And I think this has also yielded positive results in ensuring a return of peace and stability to Bonus states. And that's the Governor-General Babakana Zulu there. It seems like much of the damage was actually caused by this dam collapsing. Could it have been prevented? I asked the Governor the same question and he said that he could have been prevented if Proclup dam maintenance was carried out. I understand that the allowed dam belongs to the federal government, the national government of Nigeria. So the state government doesn't really have so much responsibility to take care of it. They will not educate with them, but the Governor said that with this horrible experience, they will be forced to walk with them and they show that in national water resources does what is expected of them to show this kind of disaster. Never happens again. And what about the future? These are people who've lost their crops. These are people who are now hungry. The children can't go to school. They've lived under the terror of Boko Haram and that insurgency. What next for them now? That's the question many of us are waiting to hear the answer to, well, as Nigerians, personally as a mother, I am worried and the Governor is worried as well because there will be possibility of diseases. And so, dead bodies floating on the floodwater and in another area, someone was beating inside the water. Someone was washing their clothes in the water. Someone was using it to clean their pyramids and get to know. And I've even heard that some people who have a trap were forced to drink the floodwater because they didn't have access to anyone. So imagine what a future holds for these people who have lost everything. They lost all the belongings, you know, in soft water. So they need to rebuild, start afresh, basically, both. They get the support they need. The people have the resources they need personally. Most of these people are very poor. They do not have access to the basic things that, that every generator have access to. The future looks bleak really to be stressed. Do you think that the government, the state government can rise to the occasion because you're describing sheer desperation here? Well, the governor already came out and said that his government cannot show that this alone, that is too huge for the state authorities to handle, that you need support wherever they can get it from, that most of the funds they got a recent time, that they were supposed to use to develop the states and now be diverted for this emergency situation. So imagine how this has set the impact financially. So he said, flatly, the state government cannot handle this situation alone. They need help. That's the BBC's Azizat Olulua in Maidugari. We report on the geopolitical shift in the Sahel quite a lot here on Focus in Africa. There's a lot happening in that region that spans the largest part of the continent from west to east. We've been hearing about Russia besting France in countries like Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger and Islamist insurgency has been raging in the region for the better part of the century. A recent report from the International Crisis Group, which follows events closely, snagged our attention with a line about the lives of women and girls in Niger. And it goes. In recent years, an Islamic state branch has deepened its influence in rural television, near Niger's border with Mali. Women there have long navigated difficult conditions, but the jihadists have made things worse. We thought we should take a closer look at this. So we did. With the person who compiled that report, her name is Floor Killiers, senior analyst for gender and conflict at the International Crisis Group. First, a quick explainer from Floor as to which groups are operating in the region, because there's quite a tangle of them. So in this research, we've been looking at the Islamic State Sahel province, which is one of the Tahari coalitions in the central Sahel. It's important to say that it's actually not the most rapidly expanding one. That is an al-Qaeda-affiliated group of Tahari organizations, which is called Janim, which has its sort of heartland in the central Mali and has been quickly expanding from there. And for a long time, these two groups are the al-Qaeda-associated coalition, and then the Islamic State-affiliated coalition has been in competition with each other and have been sort of fighting it out on the battlefield. That said, ISA-Hell is very firmly embedded within the number of zones, and so this includes the Niger-Mali border, so the Abalad Department in Niger, which we've looked at, kind of Northern Tilaberry more broadly, the Menaka region of Mali, and then also parts of northeastern Burkina Faso. And so in these zones, ISA-Hell is really the preeminent group of the two. Now to the substance of the report, the effect IS in the Sahel is having on the lives of just women and girls in this part of Niger, but men and boys as well. So the way in which ISA-Hell has been asserting itself into the lives of the civilian populations that are under its influence is very gendered. So it enforces different rules on women and girls on one hand, men and boys on the other, and also different punishments. And so for women and girls, specifically, they were quite strict dress code in villages that the run the strong Islamic State influence women and girls have to wear this sort of head-to-toe black, a hijab that leaves only their eyes visible, a long black dress and a full-length black robe and a bioblast socks. They've also imposed restrictions on interactions between unmarried men and women, and they have also imposed a model where they clearly deem preferable that women and girls stay at home and they kind of confined to the domestic sphere. And so in some villages, they're no longer able to click firewood to work in the field. And so what this is doing is that it's further restricting women's livelihoods and their ability to participate in public life, and it's worsening longstanding gender inequality that already existed in the area. The group does also impose restrictions on men and boys, perhaps important to point out as well. They are, for example, keeping young men from having their normal social gatherings in the streets, drinking tea, and they tend to punish men and boys more violently for infractions on rules than they do women and girls. And then there are a lot of impacts of insecurity in a broader sense, so beyond Sharia law, but the fact that a lot of schools have been closed, that it's very difficult for women to travel to health centers when they need to give birth, for instance, so it's really had a tremendous impact on their everyday lives. Have these restrictions, the social restrictions, have they been coming on gradually or have they been there right from the start? I think the restrictions have been communicated quite clearly from the start, but we see differences between extreme villages, even within a department between different areas in the extent to which the group is able to enforce them. And so the more isolated a village, and so this is especially the case where village is closer to the border, the less leeway people feel, basically, in terms of obeying the restrictions imposed by the group. Whereas in villages that are a bit closer to the main town in the department, which confusing is also called Aballah Aballah town, there might be slightly more leeway because people are not in contact with Islamic State writers quite as often. They don't do incursions into their villages quite as often, and so people feel a little bit more flexibility. No, I'm wondering how you were able to gather testimonies from women in the report. Yeah, we of course had to be very, very careful in going about this research, so we made sure that we explained the purpose of our research very, very well to women who we invited to speak to us, that we created a safe space for them to do so, that we are, of course, keeping all of their testimonies and their stories anonymous, because there is an enormous amount of distrust and fear among both women and men, because ISIL uses this network of informants to control populations in the areas under its influence. So they don't have kind of a permanent territorial presence. It's not like all of these villages have jihadist fighters inside the village all the time, but it's more that people feel like at any point in time they're being monitored, they're being watched, and anything they say or do might make its way back to the group and could result in them being punished. Let's listen to some direct quotes from people who've been affected by these changes. The jihadists ask girls for marriage, especially in the camps around the grazing areas, but marriage will happen if the girl says yes. They also pay the bride price, but people are scared, so they don't dare say no. As women, our political role is limited to voting. When it comes to managing conflicts, women are not called upon. Our knowledge is being underestimated. Our children haven't been to school for two years. Terrorists whip them, set school supplies on fire and destroyed the school. The teachers were scared and left our village. Fro told me more about how people are reacting to the jihadists' directives. I think what I found very, very interesting is that the views of these women are very diverse and they're very nuanced, so a lot of them are very opposed to the presence of the Islamic state and to the norms that are being imposed on them. They say this is not how we traditionally dressed. It is not how we want to dress. They regret they're being made to stay at home. They regret that they can't go to ceremonies and festivities anymore like they're used to, but it's not the case that all women are uniformly opposed to the rules that ISIL is trying to impose on these communities. Some of them say, well, actually, the norms that they impose for behavior that women and girls should have. I tend to agree with others say that young girls can be quite attracted or interested in a marriage with a member of the group because they actually hope that this model that the group imposes can actually give them some respite from very hard work. And then I think lastly, a very important point to come through is that when women have negative views of the group, it is less, I think, due to norms being imposed on them and on their daughters, which they might agree with, but I think what kind of grieves them most in many cases is gender-based violence against men and boys. It's very interesting, actually, to note that. Is it to punish and intimidate them into not running away or to intimidate them into joining the group or what? Men and boys are seen as potential recruits for jihadist groups, including the Islamic state, and so pressure might be put on them individually, but also on their families to join the group? I hesitate to use the word, but governance seems to be close to it. Is there a state presence and then, you know, then sort of traditional structures and then, are there related structures or what? So in terms of the state presence, what we see in our beloved apartment, which we looked at is similar to other parts of the region. And so, basically, you have the main town where, as I said, the state is in control. There are security forces permanently there, which offer protections to a population, which ensure that there is continued service provision, health posts, schools, a weekly market, that kind of thing. And so this is where a lot of the displaced populations will flock to. And then outside of the main town, the rural areas see very little government presence anymore because government representatives, like village chiefs, but also teachers have really been target of ISA hell. And so many of them have either disappeared or have been executed or have fled before that happened to them. In terms of governance, it seems that for the last year or so, there are some indications that ISA hell is trying to improve its relation with civilians. Floor colliers, senior analyst for gender and conflict. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those owners to your contracts, they said, "What the f*** are you talking about? You insane Hollywood s***?" So to recap, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at Mint Mobile.com/Switch. What do you find always up for three months plus taxes and fees? Promoting for new customers for limited time. Unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month? Slows, full turns at Mint Mobile.com. Selling a little? Or a lot? Shopify helps you do your thing. However you're to change. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch or online shop stage to the first real-life store stage, all the way to the... Did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Get a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/broadcast. Shopify.com/broadcast. At the International Crisis Group. This is Focus in Africa from the BBC World Service. Now you may have heard about our next story. Three women were arrested last Monday in Uganda during a protest on the streets of Kampala. This wasn't just any protest though. It was one of the oldest and most powerful forms of protest women through the ages of stage. It was a naked protest. The three women in Kampala were following in the more recent footsteps of women from the colonial era Nigeria to apartheid era South Africa, Kenya and now Uganda. Naked protest reaches back into mythical history and has made quite a comeback around the world in the last decade or so. We'll be hearing about specific examples from Africa and how effective naked protests are in just a moment. But let's first listen to one of the women who'd been arrested in Uganda for doing it. Her name is Nora Kobissini. And when I spoke to her, she had just been released from detention following her arrest last week. She told me that the levels of corruption in Uganda were what motivated her. And she was particularly incensed by the official response to the Kitezi Land Full Site Collapse in Kampala last month in which scores of people died. Here is Nora's story. How are you? You were in jail for 10 days. Oh, I'm just trying to figure out everything just upside down so I'm just trying. Why were you protesting? When we are protesting against the rampant corruption in our country, particularly the government is handling a digital rubbish instinct with money accountability, justice and transparency in governance. Why did you choose to do a naked protest? We used this strategy because we felt like it was the best. We felt like when we got naked, she'll draw attention to our demands. She'll get attention from losing power to work on our concerns. But what we expected, we don't get it. And so you decided that you will go naked. When you completely naked in the second protest, we had big cuts, but we did help last. We wanted people to look at tasks and feel embarrassed. So it's the same way they should look at corruption. We're not just exposing our bodies. We're exposing corruption. How did you come up with the idea of doing that? We planned a protest over a few weeks using social media and sexual messaging apps to coordinate. We cannot coordinate using physical meetings, because they will still arrest us. And what was the reaction to you when you did the naked protest? Some people supported our broad approach, while others preside us on using nudity as a form of protest. So what's next for the three of you that were involved in this protest? We are going to still coordinate until we see that our country is packed. The corruption is called completely until we see that they speak on the permanent of Uganda and Tambogu, as we sign. Nora Kobisinye, just out of detention there. Now for a closer look at naked protest in the last 100 years or so on the continent. Anthony Nattif is an activist based in Kampala and leads a think tank called Public Square. He's been writing about naked protests. Are they effective? And if so, why? It depends on the context, because nude protests have been a mainstay in Africa. And really when you study them, they've been here more than 100 years. They are largely rooted in the recognition that society is patriarchal. So usually women's bodies are looked at as sacred in society. And because they are presumed to be weak, whenever they stand up against the patriarchy, they use the weapon of glass resort, which is their bodies. So it's how it's been looked at over time. But as society has evolved and women have taken greater positions in leadership, and the recognition that women and men shouldn't be separated, they are equal, but opposite sexes, I feel like a nude protest, as envisaged in the past, need to evolve with the times. Give us some examples of nude protests previously. And I call them naked protests because there's a nuance to it, which we don't necessarily have to go into. Just tell me about examples of this form of protest in the past. Yeah, so when you go back to next Dokina in the times of Wangari Mathai, the Nobel Prize winner, she led an organization called the Green Belt Movement to defend a 2,500-acre forest in the heart of Nairobi from encouragement by the government and land grabbers. That was way back in September 1998, all through August 1999. That time she was protesting a brutal government led by then-present Arab boy. They did all manner of things, including naked protests. Then later, still under moi in 1992, there's the notorious Sikhs, so it was a bunch of ladies whose children had been abducted by the moi government. So these ladies protested for 11 months until moi gave up and released their children. And then when you go down to South Africa, apartheid South Africa, they had naked protests and also back up in British Nigeria in the 1920s. There were so many protests among the evil women pushing back on the excesses of colonialism. In modern day Uganda, we have Stella Nianzi, a professor and a very respected, well-published professor who had a solo naked protest to push back against what she felt was administrative overreach by the people who run the largest university in Uganda. What is the reaction generally to women protesting naked? We can look at different reactions from the colonial era to now. Yeah, absolutely. So when you go back, our reference at Wangarimatai in her autobiography, she really positions the reasonest why naked protests are very powerful in our settings. She says that one of the most powerful of African traditions concerns the relationship between a woman and a man who could be her son. So we look at women as potential mothers or our mothers. Now in a city where in a society that is heavily patriarchal, the males will still look at the body of an older woman as sacred as a temple of dignity. So if power pushes these women to undress and show their bad scars to the public, it is taken as a cause. It is frowned upon for one to make a woman undress. So in that regard, it's the woman's last tool to speak up against power and oppression. So in that regard, it's fear. And because of that fear that the exposure of a naked woman's body elicits, power has to somehow work around that and listen. Then does power listen? Yeah, so when you look at the successful naked protests on the African continent, they just haven't happened overnight. It's not a flash protest where you just do it once and go home. The protests are referenced on the six mothers who are protesting the Moi government's abducting of their children. That protest took 11 months. The Green Belt movement took more than a year. Wangarimathai in February of 1992, when she was protesting the building of a government office structure in Hoorupak. I believe that was 1992, yes. That protest took weeks and it got her called a mad woman and it threat to the order and security of the country by the president. In Uganda, the president will say, well, the lot of these protests are funded by colonialists. colonial interests that just want to dictate how we live in this country. First they ignore you, then they listen and then they change. So it's a concerted effort that takes not just one night. It takes days of religiously pushing back until they listen and then they reform. They do also visit violence on the bodies of those women, don't they? We saw that in Uganda just recently. Absolutely. Now Uganda's situation is a bit nuanced and again I started by saying the power of naked protests for women largely lies in the shock value and the dignity that society accords to bodies of older women. Now, the new ones in Uganda comes in when the women are younger and Uganda as many progressive countries this day have started embracing nudity the same way you will see say the West's embracing nudity as a celebration of the female body and freedom. So nudity in Uganda is ubiquitous. It's all over the place. It's an everyday thing. So for younger women, at least it doesn't elicit that same shock that nudity of older women elicits. When you look at the Ugandan reaction to that nude protest, it was either strong defense of these women's rights to protest as enshrined in the constitution, or it was deriding them and calling them all manner of names. Either that, and that's largely from people who support the government, and then there's these other ultra conservatives who just look at it as debasing the female body that shouldn't happen anywhere in society. And then you have police raining on them, and really usually that's the normal response that you expect from authorities to certain types of protest government is very fearful or civil unrest and all these things, and then there are undertones around for an interference in our political processes and all that stuff. So largely it draws the ire of government for good or bad reasons, I wouldn't say, but I think people should have a right to protest freely. Any form of protest is dangerous in Uganda, and we need to be cognizant of that fact and be creative around that process. Yeah, how effective would you say naked protest, given the fact that it's meant to shock and shame the authorities into responding to what people are asking for, or the women are asking for. Yes, absolutely now the value of the power in naked protest is in the shock. Now when you remove the shock by essentially rendering nudity a common occurrence in society, then you take away a very powerful weapon in pushback against excesses of power. So now we need to find the way of rediscovering the power of nakedness as a form of speech, and it's very difficult to do that in a society that has fully embraced nudity. If done over time, would that passive nuisance as the government called it, would that nuisance then compel them into trying to restore the order. And basically say you know what we can't take this nuisance anymore let's do something about it. So probably it will move from using shock as a way to get people to feel so guilty and so bad and fix whatever problems in society. Or you will have to be such a nuisance over a repeated period of time to still get them to listen. And really I believe that society to change, you need a certain level of quote unquote madness to be able to get people to listen to you and change because a lot of this abuse of power is what affords these leaders and politicians and you know the people who run society the comforts that come from them holding that power. So they will not give it away likely until we make them uncomfortable. So do this new protest actually work in this day and age once or twice I do not think they'll work, they will just be mildly amusing and the new cycle will pass and business as usual will happen. Now if this happens over time and you have 1000 women 10,000 women hitting the streets, perhaps the powers that we will listen but in the short term I do not think nude protests are as effective as we want to think as a conversation absolutely I mean we are on the BBC having a conversation about them. We are accessing international media because of them. That's a win but in terms of moving the needle in the sense that power will listen. It's extremely difficult to tell. Okay. Thank you so much. That's been really interesting. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Thank you. Bye. That's Anthony Nautif and activist based in Kampala. For further analysis do listen to the Focus on Africa podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Focus on Africa was pulled together by the titanic efforts of Alfonso Daniel, Bella Hassan and Yvette Dragira Maria here in London and Susan Gashoui in a Ruby. Kani Sharpe was our senior journalist. Nick Randal, the technical producer. Andre Lombard and Alice Moudengi are our editors. I'm Audrey Brown and we'll talk again next time. Imagine the softest sheets you've ever felt. Now imagine them getting even softer over time. That's what you'll feel with Bolin Branch's best selling signature sheets in 100% organic cotton. In a recent customer survey, 96% replied that Bolin Branch sheets get softer with every wash. Start getting your best night's sleep in sheets that get softer and softer for years to come. Try their sheets with a 39 guarantee. Plus get 15% off your first order at Bolin Branch.com code buttery. Exclusions apply. See site for details. Selling a little? Or a lot? Shopify helps you do your thing. However you change. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch or online shop stage to the first real-life store stage. All the way to the. Did we just hit a million orders stage? Shopify is there to help you grow. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the Internet's best converting checkout. 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Get a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/broadcast. Shopify.com/broadcast. [BLANK_AUDIO]