Ifygurl:


N-way @ poster
We have overpopulation, etc. Do you actually think we need more people in Nigeria. I heardthe AA's going to Ghana, ends up living in that country. Abeg, we have other African livingin Nigeria. We have overpopulation, etc. N-way, ifthey fix the tourism in Nigeria, then that's Good.

Nigeria has population density of 142 ppl / km2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density and is only 74th in the world. Rich countries such as UK, Switzerland, Japan and Hong Kong have more "overpopulation". It's not how many people you have per sq km, but how much money there is per sq km.

Nemeziz9ja:

Thank you blonde1.
Statistics is the name of the game. If they won't miss the income from Nigeria, then let them move it online then.
Whereby you will submit all your documents online (without payment of course) and if they are satisfied after their evaluation that you qualify for a visa, then they can invite you for interview or processing.
That way, they won't collect twice and treat us nice.

What, you suggest they pay with their own money for people who would read the applications? That's hard work. What sane person would pay from their own pocket for supplying a service the "customers" are willing to pay for? You'd pay somebody you don't know for the privilege of preparing a meal for him? If you have something people are willing to pay for, you don't give it away for free to strangers. That's how the market works, everywhere.

Oh this one made me laugh.

go to http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/statistics/ - they say the income from visa applications worldwide (of which Nigeria is only a small part) was 190 milion (pounds) for the year.

Now, the UK budget (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_budget) is 519229 million pounds. The visa application income is only 0.00036 of this. And that's the income from all the world, before expenses - they pay from it for the people who process the applications, the buildings and all. If Nigeria boycotts UK visa - UK will go bankrupt indeed!

They won't even notice. It looks like big money to you, but it is insignificant for them.

Also, it's not that bad - http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/resources/en/docs/2958881/stats2006-07 here on page 7 you can see that about every second application gets accepted in Lagos. In stats further down you can find countries with a 100% refusal rate!

I talked to a Tanzanian who spent another two years in Poland after his student visa ran out. He said they had a work visa and to get it the employer must prove to the authorities that they can't find a Polish citizen with the right qualifications. During studies he befriended someone who had a business and they made up a story that the business owner wanted to import handcrafted stuff from the region the Tanzanian was from, and that they need someone who speaks the right language to negotiate with the producers (don't remember which language, but they have lots of them in Tanzania - I guess finding someone who speaks even Swahili in Poland would be next to impossible, so the authorities believed that the company couldn't find a Polish person). He was employed, signed the payslips but this money was not really paid, the business owner had more business costs and paid less taxes, the Tanzanian was happy with it even paying the small tax from his fake income because it allowed him to stay in Poland with his girlfriend while he processed his visa application to a better country.

I heard this story at a party and it was from a few years ago, so it may not be accurate or things may have changed, but you could find out more about this option from somebody who is more informed. It could be an alternative option if the one you think about would be too hard or impossible for some reason.

Dis Guy:

And can't the experience of corruption and underdevelopment bond all tribe seeing as the WHOLE country is underdeveloped, no particular region is without some sort of major issues that is affecting the tribes or inhabitants
of that region. The problem is we are wasting so much energy fighting the wrong fight-tribe and ethnicity is related but
development and corruption is the major issue affecting everyone- if all the states/ethnic group fight for proper laws that will ensure the country is governed like a federation made up of individual states with some level of independence no one is going to be complaining about marginalisation.

It does not work this way. Everywhere, poverty and underdevelopment ignites ethnic conflicts while abundance brings peace. You see, all the countries you mentioned before as examples of different ethnicities coexisting peacefully are rich countries. In South Africa, a lot of people live in poverty and while the apartheid experience bonded them enough to prevent fight between them, as soon as other people arrived to compete for resources and jobs, there was violence. It's all about fighting for resources - if the resources like jobs, business opportunities, land are insufficient, people will see every competitor who they do not fully identify with as an enemy.

Corruption is a form of this fight for the limited resources - not everybody loses! The corrupt one, his family, his friends and allies benefit from him stealing the money.

For a country to develop, you must have people contributing to it more than they take from it - at least for some time. People will sacrifice only if they have a reason to be loyal to the country, full identification. If you have them sacrifice long enough, the country gets rich and people can relax, USA and Western Europe achieved this stage. In China, most people sacrifice heavily and work their a**es off for little pay instead of trying to steal or get rich quick by unlawful means. And the country grows quickly. In Nigeria, everyone is selfish and (except in family) is trying to get more than they give. As long as this will last, they won't be any change. And I believe that lack of identification with the country and all its people is the most important reason for this.

blackspade:

If you're suggesting Nigeria should be split because of ethnic and language barriers, then I must say you shouldn't be so ignorant on the issue.

There are so many more examples to counter your suggestion that Nigeria's split is imminent because of ethnic/language barriers. South Africa is a nation of numerous ethnicities, and languages, and they're still intact. Matter of fact, they have 11 Official Languages (Afrikaans, English, Southern Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu), and many different ethnicities that make up that nation, and they're still intact. Other good examples are: The United States, Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland. These nations are all made up of numerous ethnicities, have more than one official language, and are still united.

We're not talking about if it's imminent but if it would be good.

I sometimes think it would be. Nigeria has a huge problem with identification of individuals with the nation. Corruption, employing family and friends instead of competent people and many other reasons of Nigeria's poverty stem from not caring about the whole of the nation, just yourself, your family, your ethnic group. When the nation is equivalent to your ethnic group or other group you can strongly identify with for some important reason, people are more willing to contribute to the common good and sacrifice instead of selfishly grabbing what they can and running away with it leaving the whole nation at a loss.

In South Africa, the experience of apartheid and a common enemy has bonded people from different ethnicities so that they do not see the country as an arena for competition between them (as it is in case of Nigeria). America and Canada are multiethnic because they are immigrant countries and the experience of immigration bonds them. In case of Switzerland, all the different language groups have their own independent countries like France and Germany where their language is the dominant one and therefore they do not feel insecure and in need of competition.

Nobody likes immigrants. Remember what was happening in South Africa not a long time ago? The British are very kind compared to SA

UK is a popular destination because it is relatively easy to get there. I know people have all sorts of visa problems, but believe me, getting into most European countries or the US (legally) is harder. And it is an English-speaking country and it is a popular language, most people prefer to go to a country which language they know. It is very hard to live in a place where you do not know the local language, I experienced that.

Poles and other Eastern Europeans do not go there in such numbers because they love UK. It is because UK and Ireland were the first to open the job market for them (that is they do not need any visas or permissions to work there). All European Union countries must allow this for new EU members within a few years, but most of them want to do it as late as they can. So again, they went there because it was the country that was most open to receiving them and allowing them more than other Western European countries.

blackspade:

Canada is one of the easiest countries in the world to immigrate to, along with Australia. These countries are in an extreme shortage of workers, and the governments are really open towards immigrants. Australia can be a bit tricky though, they sometimes discriminate against immigrants coming from African nations, but Canada is for sure open to ALL.

True as far as the immigration paperwork is concerned (if you fulfill the requirements) but once you get there, reality can look like in that BBC article. Employers in these countries do not believe in the quality of African degrees/work experience, they also sometimes don't believe the candidate is telling the truth and it is difficult for them to verify. So you have overqualified immigrants doing jobs like logging and cab driving. Actually, when I was looking on the Internet for opinions about different countries, the countries recruiting skilled migrants had the most stories of disappointment about them. It's probably because people go there with high expectations - shortage of workers, they let you in because they need you, so you're sure that employers will be fighting over you and trying to outbid each other to hire you, and then it doesn't happen. There's even a website notcanada.com, somebody posted a link here a while ago.

Don't worry. Some of them may indeed have problems understanding a foreign accent. And yes, people who speak English as a foreign language are better at understanding other non-native accents, while native speakers understand other native speakers' accents without problem. I do not know why it works like this, but this is not limited to Nigerians and Brits. Australia and New Zealand have a distinctive accent/pronunciation and on the immigrant forums there are a lot of European non-native speakers with complaints similar to yours, so it's not necessarily race.

It usually depends on how much you listened to a specific accent. Most people in the UK understand the Eastern European accent now, because there are a lot of Eastern Europeans there and they learned to understand it. I had a problem understanding the Chinese accent when I first heard it, I asked for everything to be repeated a couple of times and I imagine they felt bad about it, but I genuinely didn't understand. After a few months of contact with it I have no problems anymore. So maybe they simply never heard your kind of accent. In this case, they'll learn. If it is prejudice, then the only solution is to work your way up the ladder so that you have contact with more educated and open-minded people - as you say, there's no problem with your supervisors and managers.

I haven't been to Nigeria. But it seems to me the main problem is infrastructure. Nigeria has one of the worst air safety records in the world and it's not just the planes, it's bad runways as well. No tourist would like to risk a crash while getting to the destination. Then, there's the NEPA problem - a tourist from a developed country won't accept power shortages that can cause interruptions in air conditioning and other devices he can't live without. I could go on, but this alone is enough to scare off the tourists.

Also, to attract tourists a country must have its unique attraction, because beautiful landscapes are to be found in many places. Egypt has the pyramids, nobody else has them. Zambia has the Victoria Falls, biggest waterfall in the world, wow. The question is, what does Nigeria have that is nowhere else to be seen?

I noticed that the Racism, Tribalism, Sectarianism section has been moved to childboards of Nairaland forum. I do not mind, but before there was a link to this forum from the General Discussion main page and now there's not and one has to click on Nairaland first and then find it. Seun, please add this link to the main page and make the access to this forum more convenient.

kudos to all who made me laugh in this thread.

And seriously, no, they aren't stingy. When I stayed in London for a short time, in Dalston, there were shops for sending money home on every corner and they had enough customers to exist and prosper.

I talked to some people too and you know what? Sending money home is draining a lot of them. Look at the Chinese. Some of them arrive poor, but they save everything they can, keep it and invest it in their own business or education of their children and in the next generation they are much better off than most African migrants. And Africans' savings go home, and many corrupt governments wouldn't exist anymore if not for the migrants taking care of what the government should take care of. Without the money sent by migrants many countries would go bankrupt.

Of course money in the UK or elsewhere is not easy, it is your sweat, you have limited resources and your closest family is the first to get it, then the true friends who were really close and helped you out many times, and after that there's nothing left. So this money won't go to people who you just casually know, or even met only a few times. If somebody thinks that a person whom he barely knows has any obligation of this kind for just knowing each other, he's stupid. Most people are too generous anyway and this has the effect of slower accumulation of wealth among Africans abroad than among other migrants.

So stop whining about stinginess, the money they send goes into the economy and you benefit of it anyway.

A car should be first only if you can make more money of the car than you spend on it. If a car allows you to get a job in a place you otherwise couldn't get to, or can be used to transport stuff for sale, or if the car in any other way can make money for you, then it's the car.

If the car would be only for convenience and showing off, then a house should be first, because it always brings money - you don't have to pay rent to somebody else, and you can sell a house even after 30 years while a car won't last that long.

This may be true for some people, but it's rather the minority. In rich countries like the US, only one out of four or five new companies still exists after 3 years, others just fail. I do not know what is the failure rate in Nigeria, but I would be surprised if it would be less than that. Besides, in Africa your contacts and family are important in business and if you are born into a family that can't help you with it, it's hard. In developed countries it's your own skills and work that matter more than contacts and everybody has a chance.

It looks to me like this guy who wrote this was born in a rich family with good contacts and things were easy for him. Good for him, but not everybody is that lucky. For many people the way he proposes is not possible.

Some people complain about taxes, or express a mistaken opinion that taxes are what you pay for amenities.

Taxes are what you pay for living in a system that does work. If there are plenty of jobs in USA, UK and other countries and if the companies are able to deliver quality services, it is in large part thanks to good governance.

I've heard people from Western countries complain about their governments a lot, but I know how things look like when there's no government or bad government and I'm happy to pay my taxes to pay people who run a country and do a good job. They just deserve it.