₦airaland Forum

ElRazur:
Haaaa. Now let us go back to the point I made all along. We are indeed witnessing a vicious cycle. Perhaps we need a war of some kind to change this sort of thinking? I know you already say you don't agree, but I feel strongly about this point I have been making.

ElRazur:
Oga/Nna/Aboki. lol I respect you view, but do you not think it may be doing more harm than good? Why can we not work for a common goal? Why do we see the need to keep spilting ourselves with boundaries and borders? Where does it stop?

PurestBoy:
Which Hope for this country?? when the younger generation seems to be worse and every young Nigerians _{including me} already have the plan to embezzle at the slightest opportunity

Badriyyah:
War in Nigeria? You're inviting the Western Govt to come and take over, Never forget our Land has OIL.

spikedcylinder:
As if they will allow an Emir of Anambra or Abia to even breathe reality.

otokx:
Nigeria is about darkness - no nepa, generator noise and fumes, hold up caused by bad roads, police check points, fuel scarcity. Plenty churches with pastors collecting the little that the people have.

manmustwac:
Give a man a fish, and you'll feed him for a day; Give him a religion, and he'll starve to death while praying for a fish.

http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/home/index.php



[BA Issue] Fix Your Own Problems - Stop Blaming Other People
Written by Nick Clements
Friday, 08 May 2009
The following is something I sent some months ago when everyone was unhappy with BA. Of course it never got published. What I said then is just as relevant now,


_____________________

During the past two weeks or more I have been reading ad nauseum about the 'BA incident' and what I am reading sounds more and more pathetic. You Nigerians are all jumping on the ‘shared indignities’ bandwagon, without a full knowledge of the facts and with a lot of prejudice and self-pity, and you are beginning to sound like a rabble.

Why don’t you forget about all that for a moment and spare a thought for the gross indignities we 'Brits' and other expats suffer every time we have to negotiate Murtallah Muhammed Airport.

Most of us in the oil industry have 'protocol' staff who save us from the worst of these indignities (the work of 'protocol', in this context, being more or less a business of handing out bribes.) However, the last time I arrived at Murtallah Muhammed Airport I discovered, to my great dismay, that some new minister had recently banned expat protocol staff from the terminal building in an effort to ease congestion, meaning that for the first time I was going to have to 'run the gauntlet' alone.

As soon as I entered the baggage 'security check' area it was evident to me that the staff there had knowledge of the minister's new directive because they were praying on the expats with unusual rapacity. Describing the two security agents I had the misfortune to deal with as ‘unprofessional’ would do them too much honour: they were aggressive, presumptuous, offensive, rude, insulting pigs. They upturned everything in my bag as though they were going through a garbage dump, continually asking unnecessary and intrusive questions about every small item they found - when not single thing in my bag needed to be identified or justified. To be frank, I just wanted to tell them to Bleep off and keep their hands off my stuff. That is precisely what they deserved.

Finally - predictably - they found something to take issue with: a carton of cigarettes. They took these out and wanted to confiscate them, saying it was illegal to take them out of the country. I told them it was not illegal. Their insistence that I would ‘not be getting on a plane’ unless I gave them the cigarettes was both sinister and threatening. But I refused. I even asked them to go and get a senior official to confirm whether or not I was carrying anything illegal, which of course they didn’t see fit to do because I wasn’t. So I stood my ground for several minutes and it was only the pressure of the waiting queue behind me (replete with fresh 'victims', of course) that finally persuaded these vultures to let me to pass - with my belongings intact, thank you God, but in complete disarray.

These two travesties of the security profession are, of course, scum - and Murtallah Mohammed Airport is full of them. But don't get me wrong, there is white scum as well as black scum and there is even British scum. The difference is that you won't find British scum systematically raping and pillaging the belongings of innocent passengers at Heathrow, Gatwick or any of our other airports: we try to put as many of them as possible in prison.

I remember a very revealing and entertaining BBC documentary series entitled 'Airport' that explored the workings of Murtallah Muhammed Airport – famous at that time for being the 'worst airport in the world'. As I recall, it finally took a healthy dose of British management and British expertise to teach the airport how to operate with at least a modicum of decency and dignity (not to mention efficiency). Now, it seems, everyone is falling back into their old ways!

As far as the ‘BA incident’ itself is concerned, I will say this. I have been flying all over the world for years and have no particular feelings for BA or any other airline: they are all much the same at the end of the day. Also, I think that airline staff are, for the most part, carefully-selected and well-trained to deal with ‘difficult’ passengers or incidents: they have to be. In the many years I have flown on planes with tough oil industry workers who, more often than not, board a plane tired and/or under the influence of alcohol, I still cannot recall a single incident that was remotely serious enough to delay a flight or require the removal of a passenger.


Although actually, now I think about it, that isn’t quite true. I can recall such an incident – just one. But this wasn’t on a long-haul flight full of drunken oil workers, it was on a local Virgin Nigeria flight to Accra – full mostly of what looked like ‘locals’. And it left at 9 in the morning, so I don’t think we can blame this on alcohol.


The incident centred around one man – a ‘local man’ - and the big, heavy video camera he carried with him onto the plane. When he boarded, the cabin crew obviously assumed he was going to store this camera in an overhead luggage compartment, just as all the other passengers do with their luggage. But they were wrong. He wanted to hold the camera on his lap, for safe-keeping, throughout the flight. (For those of you who don’t know how things work on a plane, let me explain that this is obviously dangerous and therefore, strictly against the rules. It also begs the question why, if the camera was so valuable and so fragile, did the owner not even have a protective carrying case for it !!!!!!!!!


The cabin staff made repeated but fruitless efforts to persuade this passenger to put his camera in a locker but he flatly refused and the camera stayed on his lap. Continual refusal and continual arguing-back were the only strategies he could offer to resolve the situation. First, he argued very childishly that ‘all the other airlines’ let him carry the camera on his lap, so why wouldn’t Virgin Nigeria? This was obviously a blatant lie, because no airline – except perhaps a Nigerian one - would ever allow it. Then he demanded (naively and childishly) a written guarantee from Virgin Nigeria, on the spot, that they would pay for any damage his camera incurred. And so it went on…and on…and on.


Finally, the Virgin Nigeria captain announced over the speakers that he was holding the plane on the runway indefinitely. So an entire planeload of passengers was forced to sit and watch in complete disbelief, for some 40 minutes, as one pain-in-the-ass passenger was gently and patiently persuaded, by a highly professional and well-trained cabin crew, to accept their offer of a specially-emptied, specially-lined locker for his very special camera. It was just like being in a kindergarten!


Without attempting any deep psychoanalysis, what can we say about this incident and the man who caused it – apart from the fact that he was an embarrassment to humanity?


That he didn’t know the rules? Not knowing the rules is easily remedied, normally, with the appropriate instruction. But clearly, this man did know the rules. For some reason though, he preferred to play a perverse and confusing game with the rules, based on lies and deceipt, in order to get his own way. Besides, when the rules were formally explained to him – on repeated occasions - he flatly refused to accept them!


This is the behaviour of a dysfunctional misfit. He will always be in conflict with society and he will make very little contribution to society. He basically doesn’t know how to behave. He also has a diminished sense of social responsibility – not caring what damage or inconvenience he causes others in the pursuit of his own ends – as well as a diminished sense of personal responsibility – always looking for ways to place the responsibility for his problems on other people’s shoulders.


CONCLUSION: We will never know whether or not there were any people like this on board when the ‘BA incident’ occurred, but one has to admit it’s a possibility. Nigerians don’t have a reputation for stuff like this for no reason.


Finally, I read on Sunday 27th April that the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, in its great wisdom, is now traducing British Airways with the additional ‘offences’ of baggage delays, flight cancellations and overbooking - ‘among others’ - !!!!!.)


Come on Nigeria, GET REAL! Apart from having – still – the world’s worst airport you also have, arguably, the world’s worst airline industry. If Nigerians ran the world’s airlines, the entire world economy would probably grind to a slow and painful halt!


In making the ‘BA incident’ a focus for your ‘shared indignities’, you are once again making yourselves the laughing stock of the planet.


STAND UP - FIX YOUR OWN PROBLEMS - STOP BLAMING OTHER PEOPLE


(I hope you will print this in the interests of providing your readers with a ‘balanced view’. I am a white Brit with a black Ghanaian wife and a mixed-race young son. So, ‘rejoinders’ suggesting racist attitude should be kept to postcard-size please! Better to address what I am actually saying!)

Emperoh:
Sauron
You don't get my point, our midfield is very versatile
Barca is more like two attacking midfielders (Iniesta and Xavi) and one defensive midfielder(Toure) to clean the mistakes
Fletcher, Anderson and Carrick can inter changbetween mid field and attack.
With Arsenal, Anderson was always supporting the attack, but the speed with he returns to help the defence is amazing.
Messi won't drift back, Xavi and Iniesta rarely does.

Messi was TERRIBLE last night. He has never really done well against English sides
I wonder what all the hype is about?
He was just not it yesterday!!

spikedcylinder:
I don't get. Why are they protesting their chieftancy title in a land that is not their own?

Who are these "most" you speak of? There appears to be a lot of people agreeing with the ban.  And a lot of people criticizing the guy who made a stupid statement from the beginning

nuzo:
Most of you here sound exactly like the morons suing lagos govt.
F.Y.I, Igbos are are happy with the ban.
Those jobless morons dont speak for any Igbo in and outside Lagos.

A solid midfield is what is needed to decimate barca. They are good going forward but suspect at the back. Let UEFA allow both fletcher and abidal, abidal will be easy meat for C Ron. No valdez no Marquez, how will barca survive. United ain't no chelsea. barca go sabi