₦airaland Forum

Chimakel: My dear, history shows that gatecrashers hav passed d test more than doz dt were invited. My candid advise is 'dont wait until ur invite rolls in, just do d gatecrashing thing.'

Owerri is far, I'm in Kano! Still hopeful sha..

Latifahed: In kaduna?

Yeah, I submitted in Kaduna.

still hoping to get my text, the girl i submitted my cv with in Kd has just been invited today[email][/email]

Please has any one in the house been invited for Abuja(north)? I'm expecting the text too

I love naija, but if it takes disintegration to get things right, I'm all for it. Tired of this slaughter house we call a country!

innersecret: Can one really find a date on narialand?just curious oooo and if its really.

Yes, is possible to find a date on here, you will never know until you give it a try. I almost clicked a relationship with a particular lady here, just that her responses shows she wasn't ready for something serious yet, so I had to back out! Goodluck in your search..

Maxwell

Blimz feat Wizkid - Chameleon Love rmx

Nairaland has lost focus, so I use my spare time for more productive research than coming here to read silly tribalistic conjured crap. Rubbish!!! As if Achebe cares what NL thinks of him, the man has already written his name with gold, dared the odds and status quo.......a global icon that is 100x more popular than nairaland itself, not to talk of you pathetic lots seeking relevance on this forum. Only a fool would approve of a thread like this one. ENJOY YOUR MARKET SQUARE DANCE OF SHAME!!! It doesn't change the fact, the truth still remains out there for even your unborn children to read!

No oh, this one is outrageous for Christ sake! @change the Nigrrian Igbo partner. Why?? Then this country is definately not going to work. Imagine! 80% to him, if it were in a Malaysian government, he will face execution.

HIGH COMMISSIONER OF MALAYSIA
4A,Plot 2232b, Rio Negro Close
Off Yedseram Street, Maitama
P.M.B. 5217, Wuse, Abuja
Telephone: 234-9-7800370
E-mail: malabuja@kin.gov.my Our Ref: SR(247)100/18-1 Vol 2
14 June 2012
H.E. Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan(GCFR)
President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria
State House, Abuja
Your Excellency,
MALYASIAN GARDEN MASS HOUSING PROJECT, SARAJI DISTRICT, ABUJA
As mentioned during the farewell call on you on 7 June 2012, my only regret during my tenure as High Commissioner in Abuja is regarding the Malaysian Garden project. Your Excellency has kindlyrequested me to write to you on the matter
2.
The US$600 million mass housing project was in response to former olusegun Obasanjo's initiative to welcome Malaysian investors to Nigeria including real estate development. it is envisaged to provide 14,085 housing units including medium,and low income groups in Abuja. This would greatly address housing supply in the city and add value to the Federal Capital.
3.
It is sad that the project is still uncolpleted after six(6) years despite the best efforts of the global Formwork Nigeria Ltd, the developer of the Malyasian Nigeria joint venture. The developer was taken to court by the then FCT Minister, Mr. Aliyu Modibbo Umar, having accounts frozen and being investigated by the EFCC and numerous bureaucratic obstacles. The building plan approval wa only given after 5 years [/b]during the time of former Minister Adamu Aliero. As of today, the engineering drawings namely for roads, sewage, electrical, storm, water etc, submitted since 2004 have yet to be approved. it is pending for [b]8 years now, Excellency
"4.Despite those challenges, none posed so much hardship to the developer than the present difficulties created by the current Minister, Senatir Bala Mohammed. The Minister on 21 February 2011, had threatened to take back the land (land originally given by past ministers for the Malaysian assisted mass housing project) unless the developer agrees to give as much as 400 hectares to him which is 80% of the total area of land of the project which willeffectively kill the mass housing project. He also asked the Nigeria Igbo partner to be changed which the Malaysian side would not agree. The minister even hinted the possibility of using EFCC and the Police against the Developer if his demands are not met. All efforts to find amicable solution failed.Senator Bala Mohammed has refused to approve all the engineering drawings or even register the housing project. This puts the developers in a dilemma. The developer cannot proceed with the project at all. If the developer hands over 1800 units which are nearing completion, the buyers will not be able to occupy or sell the houses due to lack of certificate of Occupancy.
Excellency,
5. I really believe the Minister is not doing all those actions to protect Nigeria's interests, but he is driven more because od selfishinterests. In this regard, I appeal to you sir, in the best interest od good brotherly bilateral relations between Malaysia and Nigeria toask the Minister to urgently approve the engineering drawings and cease harrasing the developer si that the project can proceed.
6.
I enclose a copy of Chief G.N Ebom's letter to you datd 13 June 2012 and my letter to Chief Olusegun Obasanjo dated 15 March 2011, detailing the problems faced by the developer in executing the project, for your information. You may also check with former Minister Prof. Dora Akunyili and Chief Emeka Anyaoku, who are aware of the role of Senator Bala Mohammed, in trying to scuttle the project which may deter other Malyasian ventures in Nigeria.
7.
As I leave ABuja, I wish to put on record my desire to continue working as a friend of Nigeria. I am happy to assist Nigerian Ambassador in Romania to promote this great country which is like my second home to me.
Please accept , Excellency, the assusrances of my highest consideration.
DATO' NIK MUSTAFA KAMAL NIK AHMAD
High Commisioner
SOURCE: Daily Trust, Monday November 12,2012, Page 26.

Could there be a hidden agenda behind all these Kano/Niger integration? Especially now that Niger has abundant oil, couple with the fact the core north's born to rule heritage has been seriously shattered by BH. Perhaps only in true SNC would we know where our giant "weak" country is heading.

Somebody should please tell Kwankwaso the south needs his philanthropisms too!!!

Please guys, just let go of this e-madness, it's embarrassing for God's sake!!! Are we not suffering kidnaping from our fellow Igbos? Positive traits should be our heirloom and not trying to window-dress the evil that has remained one of our greatest undoing.......no amount of bigotry can justify it. These and many more reasons are why I clamour more for a united southern front than any of the gibberish we expend energy agitating for both here and offline. No title should change one's line of thought, otherwise it becomes a psychological prison.

Guys I see all these blame-game very unnecessary, everyone has a right to his/her opinion. I really respect her opinion on what you all are holding her accountable for.

First and foremost, love as it is known today through the fairytale movies and novels fed this generation doesn't exist in my book. As far as I'm concerned it's a conscious effort and a mutual thing between two people regardless of financial affluence. So why are you all reasoning like the lady is just a piece of art, it's a union of two people and not just for the man to build the woman's wild imaginations, fantasies and utopia.

Meeeee....Maxwell Okechukwu

No matter how we look at it......Chinua Achebe has overcome all these our foolish tribalistic bigotry. The man is my Hero!

**I'm a citizen of the world, to hell with all you tribal war mongers#

Federal University of Technology Yola(recently renamed to MAUTECH)----> Action speaks louder!

ABU Zaria (Msc.)-----> Confirmed!!!

Nigeria, at independence from British rule in
1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large
population, an educated elite and many natural
resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to
fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it
is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a
government model, was closer to a dictatorship
than a democracy. Nigeria was a young nation,
created in 1914, as Nigerian children would learn
in history class in the endlessly repeated
sentence: ‘Lord Frederick Lugard amalgamated the northern and southern protectorates to form
one country and his wife gave it the name
Nigeria.’ It is debatable whether, at independence, Nigeria
was a nation at all. The amalgamation was an
economic policy; the British colonial government
needed to subsidise the poorer North with
income from the resource-rich South. With its
feudal system of emirs, beautiful walled cities, and centralised power systems, the North was
familiar to Lord Lugard – not unlike the Sudan,
where he had previously worked. In the South,
the religions were more diverse, the power
systems more diffuse. Lugard, a theorist of
imperial rule, believed in the preservation of native cultures as long as they fitted his theories
of what native cultures should be. In the North,
the missionaries and their Western education
were discouraged, to prevent what Lugard called
their ‘corrupting influence’ on Islamic schools.
Western education thrived in the South. The regions had different interests, saw each other as
competitors, and became autonomous at
different times; there was no common centre. A
nation is, after all, merely an idea. Colonial policy
did not succeed in propagating the idea of a
nation: indeed, colonial policy did not try to. In the North colonialism entrenched the old elite; in
the South it created a new elite, the Western-
educated. This small group would form the core
of the nationalist movement in the 1950s,
agitating for independence. They tried to
establish the idea of ‘nation’ and ‘tribe’ as binary, in opposition to each other, a strategy they
believed was important for the exercise of
nation-building. But the politicisation of ethnicity
had already gone too far. After independence a vicious regional power
struggle ensued. The ‘fear of domination’ of one
region by another was everywhere. Elections
were rigged. The government was unpopular.
Only six years later a group of army majors
carried out a coup and murdered top government officials. In the North the coup was
seen as an Igbo coup, a plot by the southern Igbo
to gain dominance. It didn’t help that the new
head of state, in a clumsy attempt to calm the
nation, instituted a unitary decree. Instead of
regional civil services Nigeria now had a single civil service. A second coup by northern officers
saw Igbo officers hunted down and murdered.
Then the murders became massacres. ‘Massacre’
may seem melodramatic. But perhaps because
the events leading to the Nigeria-Biafra war are
so often eclipsed by the war itself, so little remembered, it seems an apt word for the
thousands of Igbo civilians in the North who
were killed between May and September 1966,
their homes ransacked and set on fire: Nigerian
civilians killed by Nigerian civilians. The numbers
are still disputed, but most agree that at least seven thousand died. The federal government
seemed incapable of stopping the killings. Had the
massacres not occurred, or had they been dealt
with differently, the south-eastern region would
not have seceded and declared itself the
independent nation of Biafra. The darkest chapter of Nigeria’s history: the
Nigeria-Biafra war that left a million people dead,
towns completely destroyed and a generation
stripped of its innocence. On the Biafran side,
intellectuals actively participated in the war,
buoyed by their belief in the secessionist cause. They drafted press releases, served as roving
ambassadors, made weapons. The best known
and most influential African poet in English,
Christopher Okigbo, joined the Biafran army. He
was a romantic, unsatisfied with the
administrative or diplomatic roles his fellow intellectuals took on; Chinua Achebe, his close
friend, describes him as a man about whom there
was a certain inevitability of drama and event.
Mere months into the war, he died in battle.
Achebe’s recollection of Okigbo’s death in There
Was a Country is brief, and no less moving for that. Achebe hears the announcement on his car
radio and pulls up at the roadside: The open parkland around Nachi stretched away
in all directions. Other cars came and passed. Had
no one else heard the terrible news? When I finally got myself home and told my
family, my three-year-old son, Ike, screamed:
‘Daddy don’t let him die!’ Ike and Christopher had
been special pals. When Christopher came to the
house the boy would climb on his knees, seize
hold of his fingers and strive with all his power to break them while Christopher would moan in
pretended agony. ‘Children are wicked little
devils,’ he would say to us over the little fellow’s
head, and let out more cries of feigned pain. In the years since the war, Okigbo has become
an icon to writers throughout the continent:
venerated, enmeshed in myth, his death a
striking example of the great tragedy of the war.
Achebe almost died too. Before the war started,
when Igbo people were under siege in Lagos, soldiers raided his house and only just missed
him. Later, his home and his office were bombed,
and later still the Biafran army set up an armoury
in his porch overnight; his family woke to the
sound of shelling and knew it was time to flee.
His story is a story of near-misses, of deep scars left by what could have been. After an air raid in
Enugu at the beginning of the war, Achebe stares
at the ruins of what had been the office of Citadel
Press, a publishing company he had started with
Okigbo, and thinks: ‘Having had a few too many
homes and offices bombed, I walked away from the site and from publishing for ever.’ Achebe is the most widely read African author in
the world, and was already a known and
respected writer in 1967, when he joined the
Biafran war effort. He served as an ambassador
for Biafra, travelling to different countries to raise
support for the beleaguered nation, and participating in various committees, one of which
came up with the Ahiara declaration, a moving if
starry-eyed document that was the new nation’s
intellectual foundation. He has written poems and
short stories about Biafra – Girls at War (1972) is
a magnificent collection of stories set there. But many have waited and hoped for a memoir, for
his personal take on a contested history. Now at
last he has written it. Although it is subtitled ‘A
Personal History of Biafra’, There Was A Country
is striking for not being very personal in its
account of the war. Instead it is a Nigerian nationalist lament for the failure of the giant that
never was; Achebe is mourning Nigeria’s failures,
the greatest and most devastating of which was
Biafra. This is a book for Achebe’s admirers, or for those
not unfamiliar with his work. Parts are similar to
passages from previous essays, and interspersed
in the narrative are poems which, even if
tweaked here, have been published before. Keen
followers of Achebe will be interested in some of the new material about his life in the first section
of the book. But the second section, about the
war itself, mostly forgoes personal memory. In
writing about the major events, Achebe often
recounts what he was told rather than what he
felt and the reader is left with a nagging dissatisfaction, as though things are being left
unsaid. There are a few glimpses. On a visit to
Canada as a Biafran ambassador, one of his hosts
at the Canadian Council of Churches made a joke,
and in the middle of the loud laughter that
followed, it occurred to Achebe that Biafra had become different from other places, where
laughter was still available. And, later, hearing a
plane take off from Heathrow, he instinctively
wanted to dive for cover. There are other small
details, but all tantalisingly brief, sometimes
oblique. I longed to hear more of what he had felt during those months of war – in other words, I
longed for a more novelistic approach. The book’s first section is much more satisfying
in this respect: more involved and personal.
There is his happy childhood, his close-knit
family, with portraits of his father, an upright
missionary teacher, and his mother, about whom
he writes: ‘It is her peaceful determination to tackle barriers in her world that nailed down a
very important element of my development – the
willingness to bring about change gently.’ The
first section is also a celebration of the richness of
Igbo philosophy and cosmology and its inclusive
culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white
missionaries, he writes about ‘how
wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from
thousands of miles away, with their different
customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a
Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo religion, which he
found more ‘artistically satisfying’. Much of his
work is rooted in this tension between old and
new, between the Christian religion of his
parents and the retreating older religion of his
ancestors. He began to write Things Fall Apart after a British
lecturer told him an earlier story he had written
lacked ‘form’, but was then unable to explain to
him what form meant. ‘I was conscripted by the
story,’ he writes, ‘and I was writing at all times –
whenever there was any opening. It felt like a sentence, an imprisonment of creativity.’ He is,
famously, one of the writers who ‘wrote back’ to
the ‘West’, who challenged, by writing his own
story, the dominant and reductive Western
images of his people. In his essay ‘The Novelist as
Teacher’ he wrote that he would be happy if his work did nothing more than show his people
that theirs had not been a life of darkness before
the advent of the Europeans. ‘The writer,’ he
says, ‘is often faced with two choices – turn
away from the reality of life’s intimidating
complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon
runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired
fiction.’ On the other hand, his work never sinks
under this burden of responsibility. He describes the situation in eastern Nigeria in
the months leading up to war. In Nigeria’s urban
mythology, the war would not have happened
had it not been for the personal ambition of the
Biafran leader Ojukwu. It is now known that the
British high commissioner, David Hunt, wrote a memo to London describing Ojukwu as an
overambitious man who had engineered the
secession and manipulated his people into
supporting him. Many others have repeated this
view. Achebe vigorously disputes it: ‘I believe
that following the pogroms, or rather, the ethnic cleansing in the North that occurred over the four
months starting in May 1966, which was
compounded by the involvement, even
connivance, of the federal government …
secession from Nigeria and the war that followed
became an inevitability.’ To him it is self-evident that an ethnic group known for its independence
of mind could not easily be manipulated into
supporting a war. He writes about the reaction
among Igbo people after the Northern massacres: One found a new spirit among the people, a spirit
one did not know existed, a determination in
fact. The spirit was that of a people ready to put
in their best and fight for their freedom … But the
most vital feeling Biafrans had at that time was
that they were finally in a safe place … at home. This was the first and most important thing, and
one could see this sense of exhilaration in the
effort that the people were putting into the war.
Young girls, for example, had taken over the job
of controlling traffic. They were really doing it by
themselves – no one asked them to. That this kind of spirit existed made us feel tremendously
hopeful. One gets the sense from Achebe’s memoir of a
man who is effortlessly himself, who will keep
silent rather than say what he doesn’t believe. He
is meticulous and sincere in his expressions of
praise and gratitude – to fellow writers, to people
who helped him or helped Biafra. He has a sense of humour, but very little cynicism. Today, when
many Western male writers of a certain age are
mythologised for their bad manners – rudeness,
selfishness etc – as though great male talent must
be accompanied by boorishness, it is refreshing
to encounter a great male talent of a certain age who feels no need for posturing. Achebe has sometimes been characterised as a
writer lacking ‘style’, that word often used by
people for whom prose, to be noteworthy, must
be an exercise in flashy phrasemaking. If style is
that, a form of pyrotechnics, then this is a fair
characterisation of his work. But if style is a distinctive way of writing prose, whatever that
may be, then Achebe’s style is quite evident. His
sentences are confident. He writes a Nigerian,
and sometimes a distinctly Igbo English. His
writing is quiet, and in this regard he is similar to
writers like William Trevor and Okot p’Bitek. He is free of literary anxiety. My kind of storytelling has to add its voice to this
universal storytelling before we can say, ‘Now
we’ve heard it all.’ I worry when somebody
from one particular tradition stands up and says,
‘The novel is dead, the story is dead.’ I find this to
be unfair, to put it mildly. You told your own story, and now you’re announcing the novel is
dead. Well, I haven’t told mine yet. His prose, which often has the cadence of spoken
Nigerian English in his fiction, is sometimes
plainly conversational here. I was reminded of
my father, a contemporary of Achebe’s, telling
stories of his past, in the circuitous storytelling
tradition of the Igbo, each story circling in on itself, revelling in coincidence. I imagine Achebe
would tell the stories in this book in much the
same way as he writes them, with an elegiac,
gentle vagueness, a lack of interest in adhering to
hard fact. He ‘came first or second’ in an exam;
his wife’s father died ‘in the mid-1980s’. There are many repetitions, schoolfriends are
introduced more than once, there are digressions,
and he casually uses quaint words like ‘lad’ and
‘serpent’. There is more of what writing teachers
call ‘telling’ and less ‘showing’. Sometimes, his
stories are fable-like, with the simplicity – and simplifications – of that form. In Nigeria under
colonial rule, he could travel from Lagos to the
south-east at night without worrying about
armed robbers. This, he argues, is because the
British managed their colonies well. His
simplification is rooted in disappointment. He is a member of Nigeria’s generation of the
bewildered, the people who were fortunate to
be educated, who were taught to believe in
Nigeria, and who watched, helpless and
confused, as the country crumbled. He was a
Biafran patriot, as were most of his Igbo colleagues, because they no longer felt they
belonged in Nigeria. He still seems surprised,
almost disbelieving, not only at the terrible things
that happened but at the response, or lack of
response, to them. ‘As many of us packed our
belongings to return east some of the people we had lived with for years, some for decades,
jeered … that kind of experience is very
powerful. It is something I could not possibly
forget.’ Later: I was one of the last to flee Lagos. I simply could
not bring myself to accept that I could no longer
live in my nation’s capital, although the facts
clearly said so. My feeling toward Nigeria was
one of profound disappointment. Not only
because mobs were hunting down and killing innocent civilians in many parts, especially in the
North, but because the federal government sat by
and let it happen. Achebe mourns Biafra, but his anger is directed
at the failures of Nigeria. His great
disappointment manifests itself in a rare moment
of defiance towards the end of the book: There are many international observers who
believe that Gowan’s actions after the war were
magnanimous and laudable. There are tons of
treatises that talk about how the Igbo were
wonderfully integrated into Nigeria. Well, I have
news for them: the Igbo were not and continue not to be reintegrated into Nigeria, one of the
main reasons for the country’s continued
backwardness, in my estimation.

Hey guys, check this out:

KANO DONATES 52 TRUCKS OF RELIEF MATERIALS FOR NIGER REPUBLIC FLOOD HAS NOTHING FOR NIGERIAN VICTIMS
Written by Alaba Johnson with reports from Leadership on 07 October 2012.

The Kano State Government has donated 52truckloads of relief materials to flood victims in neighbouring Niger Republic. There have been floods in other Nigerian states but the Kano State government has not felt the need to assist its fellow country men. This action feeds into the stereotype that states like Kano share more affinity with neighbouring nations like Niger than with their fellow Nigerians calling into question the idea of one Nigeria.

One commentator even said that the Kano state governor did this because "they are his brothers and we are not". It is widely Suspected that Boko Haram terrorists operate out of Niger Republic a suspicion that caused Nigeria's President Jonathan to close the border between Nigeria and Niger. Those
borders remain closed so it is curious that Goverrnor Kwankwaso's 52 trucks passed the border despite the closure making some question what else crosses the border unbeknownst to the Federal Government.

The items include 5,000 bags of maize, 5,000 bags of millet, 5,000 bags of guinea corn, 5,000 blankets, 5,000 pieces of ``Shadda’’ brocade and 5,000 pieces of female textile wax.

Gov. Rabi’u Kwankwaso, who presented the items at Bandirawo, Dawakin Tofa Local Government Area of the state, said that the donation was aimed at alleviating the suffering of the flood victims.

``The gesture is a way of expressing our appreciation for our relationship with Niger Republic,’’ he said. Kwankwaso, who spoke about the long-
standing relations existing between Kano State and Niger Republic, stressed the need for people to be their brothers’ keepers so as to strengthen
harmonious living. He promised to continue to work with the Nigerien government in efforts to promote socio-economic ties between Kano State and Niger
Republic.

The governor, who noted that many states in Nigeria, including Kano State, were equally affected by floods, stressed that the state government also assisted flood victims in the country with relief materials. Kwankwanso expressed the optimism that the relief materials would cushion the effects of the flood disaster on the victims. He, however, appealed to the people of Kano State, who were living in flood-prone areas, to relocate from the areas to safer places.

The governor said that the state government would reconstruct houses affected by floods in Makoda, Kunchi and Warawa Local Government
Areas.

In his remarks, the former National PDP Chairman, Chief Vincent Ogbulafor, commended the state government’s gesture, saying that the donation would alleviate the sufferings of the flood victims. He, nonetheless, advised the Nigerien authorities to ensure that the items were used for their intended purpose.

Also speaking, Alhaji Umar Saidou-Isiaka, the governor of Zinder in Niger Republic and Alhaji Muhamman Rabi’u, the Emir of Tirmini, also in
Niger Republic, thanked the Kano State Government for its benevolence. They said that the gesture would go a long way in strengthening the cordial relations existing between the people of the state and Niger Republic

SOURCE

Hello sir, I'm so happy to come across this thread in my search for answers and how to go about thesame CILT certification. Pls I need advice from you and possibly if you have ebooks to share with me,I'd be most grateful to hear from you. I studied Urban and Regional Planning from a Federal Uni. of Tech.

Maxwell Okey

as long as we share this common national identity with these animals, we'll continue to be at the mercy of their bombs, guns and jihad. This colonial deception must be put to an end now before they finish us!

The way i see it, we are not one.....disintegration is now or they'll extend this madness down south when there are no more christians there to bomb. we will be better of as different republics with possibly a bilateral relationship, that is if they wish oo!

There is bomb explosion in Panshekara too, right now serious gun battle is still going on between the security operatives and the islamic militants.

@Goldenboi or anyone pls help check this:25692589ic. My kid bro is really worried.