Nigeria

MTN Says Sabotage, Attacks Hampering Nigerian Services
BusinessWeek
The company only pays fees and operating taxes to the NCC. Nigeria needs to have one consistent set of taxes and regulations that it enforces, Goschen said. MTN is investing $1.4 billion in Nigeriathis year to improve infrastructure and capacity.

Doctor firings expose medical failings in Nigeria
BusinessWeek
… so the state hospitals represent a crucial safety net for the poor in a nation where the political andbusiness elite routinely fly out of the country for care. “In the 1960s here, even in the 1970s, the golden days of Nigeria, people came from …

Scomi Group sells Nigerian operations for RM123.9m
Malaysia Star
Scomi Group said on Thursday it had entered into a conditional share sale agreement with AOS Orwell Ltd to dispose of the stakes in the two companies which are involved in the machine shopbusiness in Nigeria. “The proposed disposal is to enable Scomi …

Shell Begins Repair Of Nembe Creek Trunkline In Niger Delta
Fox Business
IBADAN, Nigeria -(Dow Jones)- The Shell Petroleum Development Co. of Nigeria Ltd., or SPDC, said Wednesday it has begun repairing the Nembe Creek Trunkline after shutting it down on May 2 because of alleged crude thefts. The shutdown of the pipeline in …

Lee Ropiak Announces New Business Partners in Africa for Infinity Medical …
Houston Chronicle
Nigeria is no longer an empty field for medical diagnostic imaging. Competition has arrived. There,business is built on trust and trust is built on good communication and service. As the proverb “Through people to people” proves, it is references and …

Nigeria, France seal $200m power deal
The Nation Newspaper
He said the Minister of Power, Prof Barth Nnaji, and the Chief Executive Officer of the TransmissionCompany of Nigeria (TCN), Mr Sola Akinniranye, executed the MoU with the executives of the French companies, Mr Jean Paul Mairesse of the Electricite …

How to enter Nigeria’s booming consumer market
African Business Review
Nigeria ranks 133 from 183 in the ease of doing business index. This is a result of different factors like electricity, contracts, permits and tax issues. Also corruption has to be understood before entering the market. The most important aspect while …

Industrialisation holds key to unlocking Nigeria’s wealth – Aganga
BusinessDay
… the Ministry of Trade and Investment had started brainstorming with the Organised Private Sector and the Ministry of Power to reduce the cost of doing business inNigeria and ultimately increase the productivity of the manufacturing sector.

Nigerian Case Study Wins 2012 Emerald/AABS Case Study Competition
BusinessDay
A case study about popular Nigerian entrepreneur Nike Davies Okundaye has won the first prize for the 2012 Emerald and Association of African Business Schools (AABS) Case Study Competition. The announcement was made today at the AABS annual meeting …

Two Nigerian Oil Firms Take Over Shell In Kenya
Leadership Newspapers
Two Nigerian oil and gas firms Helios Investment Partners and Vitol Holding BV are set to buy over Royal Dutch Shell Plc business in Kenya. This deal is expected to bring about Kenya Shell petroleum trading business changing ownership in the next three …

NCC Slams MTN, Etisalat, Airtel, Glo With N1.17 Billion Penalty Over Poor …
AllAfrica.com
By Prince Osuagwu, 12 May 2012 The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, yesterday, slammed four major Nigerian telecommunications operators, MTN Nigeria, Etisalat, Airtel and Globacom with a cumulative fine of about One billion, one hundred and …

When he was six weeks old, his parents – a Nigerian couple studying in London – gave him to a white working-class couple in Essex, he says in a new interview with The Guardian. He lived in his foster home with more than 10 other African children, including his two sisters. The climate at the time was such that he grew up fearful of being physically attacked because of his skin color. And although he was black, Akinnuoye-Agbaje thought of himself as white and developed a fear of his own race. So much so that when he occasionally saw black sailors in his town, which had a naval dockyard, he would run away from them. “I just remember being petrified,” he said. “It was as if they were the bogey man to us. Fish and chips and corned beef, that’s what I knew.”

When he was 8, his biological parents arrived unexpectedly and took him and his sisters to Nigeria. He couldn’t speak the language and had trouble fitting in, so his parents became frustrated and sent him back to England – without his siblings – a year later. Settling back into life with his foster family took its toll and he had what he called a cultural identity crisis. “I wanted to assimilate and go back to the abnormal normality I knew,” he told The Guardian. “I wanted to wash off the experience of Africa but obviously I couldn’t because that’s who I was.”

As a teenager, Akinnuoye-Agbaje turned to violence to defend himself, but he also attacked others. “It was a time of standing up and standing your ground or running, and there wasn’t anywhere to run,” he said. “The local skinhead gang really ran the streets. They made my life – and anyone’s who was a shade darker than pale – a misery.”
So he made a drastic decision – he became a skinhead. Not only did he take on the look of one, shaving his head and wearing the clothes, but he adopted the racist attitudes as well. . .” -Yahoo News

Please don’t try this one at home. (Or at the airport. Definitely not at the airport.)

On Saturday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested a Nigerian woman who’d allegedly ingested 180 thumb-sized pellets of heroin.

That amounts to four pounds, 12 ounces.

Bola Adebisi, 52, arrived at Dulles from Nigeria on Wednesday, March 14. During a secondary inspection, Adebisi said she was going to stay with her brother, but was unable to provide her brother’s address, phone number or physical description, authorities say.

During a routine patdown, a female CBP officer noticed that Adebisi’s stomach was abnormally rigid, and an X-ray at a local hospital discovered some hidden cargo.

By the time an affidavit was submitted for criminal charges, Adebisi had passed a number of pellets that had a combined weight exceeding 100 grams. She remained in the hospital until Saturday night, when X-rays confirmed she’d passed them all.

Adebisi will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

“The amount of pellets and heroin this woman ingested is incredible, a serious health risk, and very troubling if these numbers become the new normal,” said Christopher Hess, CBP Port Director for the Port of Washington, D.C.

The previous largest “internal pellet seizure” at Dulles was March 30, 2011, according to CBP. A 46-year-old Nigerian man was arrested after expelling 100 pellets of heroin with a combined weight of a little more than four pounds.” – First published by NBC Washington, March 2012.

Watch and enjoy.