Nigerians have been shocked and bemused after huge piles of cash have been unearthed in various parts of the country in recent months. Journalist and writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani looks at what is going on. In February, $9.2m and £750,000 were discovered by Nigeria's anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, in a property belonging to Andrew Yakubu, a former director of the national oil company, NNPC. In March, large sacks containing bundles of "crispy" banknotes worth a total of $155,000 (£130,000) were found in Kaduna airport. In April, a stash containing $43.4m, £27,800 and 23.2m naira were recovered from a Lagos apartment with its owner yet to be identified. And these are just the tip of the iceberg. Whistle-blowers rewarded EFCC head Ibrahim Magu was quoted in the local media as saying that the total amount recovered by the agency in the past few months was about $53m, £120m and €547m, on top of hundreds of millions of Nigerian naira. He credited ...

Yinka Shonibare Books: 'Flash of the Spirit' by Robert Farris Thompson is a book I am reading now. It's about African and African-American art and philosophy. I often express ideas in my work related to current affairs and on a weekly basis I tend to read 'The Economist' and the weekend 'Financial Times'. For 'Crash Willy, a piece on show in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, I was influenced by the credit crunch and drew from both non-fiction resources as well as fictional tales, such as 'Death of a Salesman'. Television: My guilty pleasure used to be 'Desperate Housewives'. I was fascinated by it because it is a window into suburbia, a way of knowing and relating the most banal kind of existence. I was also touched by the resourcefulness of the people featured in the BBC's 'Welcome to Lagos'. They seemed to make a lot from the little that they had. Yinka Shonibare MBE: Looking Up is at Nouveau Musé...