₦airaland Forum

Sunofgod:
You resurrect with a new FB username and profile,

And who will be my new friends on the new fb page? Those ones will not ask for help?

I just dropped the phone a few minutes ago after speaking with one of these old friends, got very angry after telling me he lives in Adamawa (Boko Haram) and needs money to relocate to his state of origin. This coming after I sent $700, respectively to a sister and a sister-inlaw this am

Dem wan kill me?

Sunofgod:
Announce your death to them on FB

You dey craze oh! After that what happens?

Neophyte12:
Hello Astrodome,

Most of the companies on the list have either shut down or are out of business. What exactly do you want From them? Do you want to buy NPK Fertilizer I can give a good referral. Call 08091208555

Neo

No I want to make an R& proposal on how to improve their products

Reddit:
I sensed pride

How so?

overdrive:
what's ur fb handle let me add u.

Seriously? You want to add to my woes? I rather you advise me here, openly

OREMUSSANCTUS:
Carry cocaine to indonesia, if u want to end it once and for all.

You mean I should send myself to my death (for that is the reward for drug trafficking in Indonesia) to avoid them?

Help!! Friends, family, former school mates and others are killing me with financial demands. Everyday I receive facebook (fb) messages, phone calls, email messages and messages from other communication avenues from family members, friends close and distant, school mates I have not seen in 20 years but with whom I reconnected on fb, and even random fb friends (meaning I do not know them personally but somehow we managed to be friends on fb). They all have the same story: please send me money, anything.

Each month I send nearly 3k to Nigeria and they keep asking for more.

Do they think I pluck money from trees in America?
Do they think every Nigerian in America is doing drugs or credit card fraud to make money?
Are they thinking that since Akin or Emeka made it in America (in many cases by selling drugs and doing credit card fraud), I should also make it and therefore be able to satisfy their unending demands?

How do I explain to them that I have bills (auto, mortgage, water-sewer, electricity, gas, phone, credit card) to pay. And then I have to run my family (of 4) and fuel 2 cars, and on top of that, I have to save also for the rainy day - for when kids get to college.

I am able to resist the random fb friends because I do not have any personal connection with them, but how do I scare the ones I know off without sounding rude and unhelping? I know that when you stop giving, you become an enemy.
Help! Before a fellow nairalander runs amock on the streets of America because of pressure from Nigeria

Just for disclosure: I am well-heeled in the US mid-upper middle class, earning a 6-figure pay, holds a PhD, and involved in R4D activities. But I live in a US city (name withheld) where mortgage payment alone takes 25% of my monthly income. So you can imagine that after paying all bills, I do not have tons of money left over to give out on frequent basis.

Please advise on how to handle this, Naija style . Thanks

hm

Dear Nairalanders,

I am looking for the contact information of these fertilizer companies. I am only able to find that of NOTORE (NAFCON). I need to contact them as a matter of national urgency . Could anyone help with this request? Do these companies (except for NOTORE) actually still exist?

Thanks for the help

Moderators; can this somehow make front page for more visibility, please. Thanks

celeron40:
I couldn't agree more..Most youths today are interested primarily in entertainment..I was asking my niece who is in her second year in a Fed. University what she thinks about the crisis in Ukraine..she replied "What crisis?" The level of ignorance is baffling..This country will not crawl out of the abyss we are basking in now until the youths begin to make a difference..We have the brains..Most of my friends who were opportuned to have their M.Sc degrees from foreign Universities, all topped their classes..The average young Nigerian is so shallow minded, conversations with them will drift towards disgust..Its not about "catching them young" in the sense of it, but a revolution of young minds.

The people's power can make the change. The first thing would be voting for the proper persons who have the vision to change the system. One way to ensure this is for Nigerians at home to strongly advocate for the inclusion of Nigerians abroad into the voting system. Their 17 million votes can help to elect the right candidates to make needed changes. Diasporan Nigerians wear the shoes, and so know where they pinch (so to speak).

How America gets it right by catching them young

Many people have often wondered how America is such a great country. There are many things that America does ‘‘righter’’ than other countries in the world. One of them is the phenomenon of assimilating the best brains from all over the world (if you have a good education, a good work experience, and has something to offer, America would be interested in keeping you- folks call it brain drain) and the other is catching them young. These two phenomena have made America both the source and sink for brain power that would take years and years of hard work to match. In this presentation, I will dwell on the concept of catching them young, using an example from my own past work at University of Utah (UT).

If you are a university professor of any ranking (assistant, associate, or full), in the United States, I am sure you would have received letters from persons, requesting to intern or work in your lab, often without pay. ‘‘We just need that lab work experience’’ such letter would often end up with. Well, while serving as a Research Assistant Professor at UT, a position I held until last March, I had the opportunity to receive many of such letters. Two of them came from two very interesting sources: T. Fang and J-L Watson. Fang is an American of Chinese origin and Watson is an American of French descent. So, what made These folks interesting for me? They were just high school (secondary school equivalent) students.

When I received their letters I thought to myself ‘‘what would these young kids do in my research? They will just be a drag on me’’. So I consulted a senior colleague, a full professor, and she told me ‘‘duh!! We get these letters from high schoolers nearly every day. Just decide whether you want to have them or not’’. At that time I already had two university undergraduate students working in the lab, so I was not really ready to have the place clogged up with extras. But I thought, well, let me give them a try, it’s pay-free, after all. So I invited them over and when they came, I informed them that before having them in the lab, I would test them by giving them scientific papers to take home with, read and come discuss their understanding of the paper, next time. In addition to that test, they would, of course, undergo the mandatory laboratory training session which every new worker in American university labs undergo. Within two days, they came back and were ready to discuss. I was expecting some oral discussions, but they both had prepared PowerPoint slides from their papers. I was awed by their understanding of the subjects that I had no reason not to accept them - without pay, of course.

Cutting a long story short, Fang and Watson worked with me and other colleagues for nearly a year. They would come in after their classes and work through the early evenings. Sometimes in the weekends they would come in to take data and do other measurements. Remember they did all this without pay. The product of their work are the two peer reviewed scientific publications exhibited in the photos. As teenagers, they already have scientific publications to their names, more so as first authors. Wow!!. Both of these guys have since graduated from high school, and on the strength of their individual brilliance, and supported by the recommendation letters we wrote for them as research mentors, they are now in top-short universities with scholarships, studying different scientific courses. You can only imagine what these kids would become in future. They got their scientific groove early. During the duration of their stay, we received another student, a Native American high school student, who came all the way from New York to work with us for 6 months.

These examples are snippets of how America gets its greatness going. It is traditional for young high school students to want to conduct actual research work in the area of scientific interest to their future. It was only strange to me because I had not had that experience (with high school students, I mean) before then. Before coming to America, I had been in laboratory settings for a considerable number of years in Nigeria, Belgium and Germany, and never, ever did I experience such zeal to engage at that early stage in life. This is a good lesson for developing countries such as Nigeria to learn from. The pool of brain power would always come from the young, not the aging or aged. Nigeria needs to start getting it right by creating the environment and culture where young students would become interested and motivated to pursue scientific and technological skills acquisition at the stage of their lives where they are most impressionable.

Nigeria needs to get her educational laboratories up and running again, and there should be schemes that connect basic academic pursuits to practical orientations, even from the secondary education level. Nigeria needs to start catching them young. While this may already be happening in elite private schools attended by the kids of the rich, high and mighty, it should be a routine for every kid. Brilliance and intelligence often come from economically emasculated minds.