Chippla Vandu of Chippla’s Weblog has posted an outstanding account of one persons heroic effort to vote in the Gubernatorial Elections in Nigeria Yesterday.
Let us hope that the Presidential Elections next saturday (21st April) will go more smoothly.
The Guardian (UK) has a story in their ‘comment is free‘ section.
It doesn’t really add anything new to the news from Nigeria but it’s quite a good background piece on the current political climate.
I’ve had a number of comments asking why I’m not back in Nigeria.
Simple fact is that I was Supposed to be starting work on a new project in Nigeria at the beginning of the year but as those of you who have done business in Nigeria will no doubt know, such things very rarely happen on time in Nigeria, especially when elections are due.
I work with a formula, which I’m sure is a re-utterance of many other more enlightened people:
Time to do Business in Nigeria = Time Anticipated * Nigerian Factor
The Nigerian Factor is a concept quite hard to grasp without spending time in Nigeria. In my experience, in this formula it can be expressed as a number between 2 and infinity. The number is proportional to the number of people involved in the contract process with weighting for the political seniority of those involved and inversely proportional to the amount of bribes thrown around. Clearly bribery is out of the question if we want to keep our morals intact, so waiting is what we do.
Unless the miracle happens and a contract is signed I will be sitting here in the UK. I can’t wait forever, so I may be making some difficult choices soon.
Meanwhile, I am just submitting my first sets of coursework for my two OU courses for this year, M256: “Software Development with Java” and T209: “Information and Communication Technologies: people and interactions”.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It is, apparently, the encryption key required to decrypt HD-DVD and Blu-ray content. Hmmm expect lots of 20GB Torrents soon.
See: How it was done.
I know many of my readers are from the UK so this only applies to them.
How many people, after watching Wednesdays Dragons Den are now desperate to try Reggae Reggae Sauce?
After having a nice 6 or 7 inches of snow we thought we’d make a snowman before it melts.
Nigeria and Ghana played a friendly match in London this evening.
If I’d planned better I could have been there to watch, but I didn’t so I hoped to watch it on one of these channels I have on cable… No chance. So I resorted to hunting the web to find the score… And that’s Much Harder than you think.
Eventually I tracked down the result on the Ghana FA website. Ghana won 4-1.
Well done Black Stars. Sorry-O Super Eagles.
I don’t know if you have seen the adverts or not, but I thought it was humorous enough to share.
Also check out the alternative viewpoint in the copy of the printed ad.
Are there any sensible alternatives for flying to Nigeria?
Stealing links from other blogs is not a habit I like, but this article in the National Geographic, which came to my attention once again via Jeremy’s blog, is worth spreading far and wide. The photos in the photo gallery will stick in my mind next time I fill my tank with Petrol.
As a side note, the company I work for has often been involved in community projects sponsored by the oil companies, some are very successful, others, especially the most recent projects have suffered delays after delays. Mostly because of Political interference as far as we can tell.
I’m still in the UK, no confirmed dates for my return yet.
I’ve spent my time working on a new CMS enabled corporate website for my employer, and in my spare time a new template for this blog, hopefully to include the new blogger features.
Apart from the dreadful Christmas Oil Pipeline Explosion that killed 260 people and the complaints about the ongoing fuel shortages, I haven’t heard much from Nigeria. Shamefully I admit I haven’t been reading much of the Nigerian press websites
It seems every other blog has jumped in on the “Celebrity” Big Brother Racism row. In my opinion Programmes like Big Brother are good reasons to throw away our televisions, but it seems some people do watch avidly including many Nigerian friends here in the UK. I’m not going to add anything to it myself, except suggest you read Nkem’s posts (Bigot Brother, Bigot Brother coverage)
