₦airaland Forum

fstranger: So you are saying that the admissions standards of Ife/Ibadan/etc were low in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and thus the population of those who got in wasn't at a high percentile?

So then what percentile would you put them at relative to the Nigerian population?

Clearly they are above 50%. How much higher would you ballpark it at?

Nebeuwa: LOL @ the "fit in" part. I already know what you mean by that unfortunately. But can you blame many of our brothers and sisters? Their culture is the dominant culture amongst the black community in the United States, but that is another subject altogether.

Well, there is the option of taking the "Huxtable" route rather than the ghetto route. You can choose which way you want to fit in, lol

dayokanu: Are you sure you can differentiate between Pakistani and indians regarding these gas station and Taxi jobs?

Yep. I for whatever reason strike up random conversations a lot when in cabs. Plus Sikhs are easy to identify, and to my knowledge all of them are from India (no such thing as a Pakistani Sikh, I think).

So the point I am making is, If you are not poor like abject poor in America, your chances of going to college increases

But here is Texas the Indians are like tops among immigrants in terms of education and earning power.

Almost in every college. Top programs in Science, Finance, Healthcare are dominated by Indians in large numbers

I went for the High sch grad of a Niece at a very top school in Dallas (Texas academy of maths and Science) of like 120 graduating students almost 70 are Indians, 30 Chinese 7 blacks (of which 4 are Nigerians)

In top Engineering, Medicine Sciences and other course in colleges too, the ratio is similar to the above

TAMS? Yeah, amazing school...I know some folks who went there. We were considering having my sister apply there too. But she got into somewhere else for high school that was closer and a better fit.

TAMS is also kind of annoying in that you can only do your last 2 years there iirc?

Anyway yeah, Indians are pretty good, have a lot of talented people.

Dede1: True. Nigeria is a bit more of a dysfunctional country...probably who you know is more important than what you know, how smart you are, how talented you are, etc.

Then again this is probably true of most countries.

What I like about the US is that I think it is easier to rise from the bottom of society to the top.

My good buddy from college, his father is an illegal immigrant from Mexico (or so I believe), doesn't speak English well, and I dunno what the guy does for a living. But my friend is fairly sharp...salutatorian of his HS class, got into our college, finished law school and is now is working making good money.

Where else in the world can you go from poverty to comfort in ~5 years purely on the dint of hard work and ability?

No wuruwuru, nobody that he had to scam or cheat.

2nd generation Nigerians in the US...man a lot of them try to fit in too much. Involved in too much nonsense, from what I've observed.

Not sure what the aggregate stats look like though

A lot of Indians drive cabs though. Hotels too, and gas stations. All three are common stereotypes about them.

I've noticed too that they are into office supply stores. Like most of the copy shops where I live are Indian-owned, for some reason.

But yeah, not much in the way of manual labor..that is about the closest they get.

Mostly IT, medicine, engineering, science, banking, law for the rest of them. Just ordinary middle/upper class sort of careers.

There is something though to this point of not everyone having the financial means. So perhaps poverty artificially decreases the competition.

Effectively you have two population groups..Group 1 for whom money is not an issue regarding education, and Group 2 for whom it is. Let's say that in Nigeria today Group 2 is locked out.

If I'm in the top 1% of Group 1 (and say ranked X out of this group), and Group 2 is given access, certainly my rank will probably fall a lot...I'll only be the Yth best guy out of the merged populations. So maybe before this group was given access I'd have gotten a spot at Princeton. Now Princeton runs out of spots and I get kicked down to the University of Chicago.

But unless we believe that Group 2 is brighter on average than Group 1, I'll still be in the 99th percentile (well under reasonable assumptions about the two populations, anyway).

So the point is, those dudes who studied at Ife/Ibadan/etc in the 50s/60s/70s are at a pretty high percentile relative to the Nigerian average, and thus it isn't surprising that they and their children are doing really well in the US..

First, yes Nigeria's population was smaller in the 70s. But as you say, so were the # of universities and # of spots.

This is a percentile sort of thing...if you were in the top 5% in the 70s when there were X people and are in the top 5% now when there are 10X people, in both cases you are still in the same percentile.

So I think your Harvard/Stanford/IIT/Sharif analogy supports my argument rather than detracts from it.

I ask again.

Can someone demonstrate the reconstruction after war/civil war is standard practice?

This is implicitly assumed here. But I don't think that it is empirically true..

Lmao @ "mallam ekt_bear"

I have zero connection/interest in Islam, just fyi. And if I ever decide to change my religious beliefs, it would probably be to the religion of my ancestors (Shango worship) or agnosticism, not Islam

Nnenna1: @Ekt Bear, For what it's worth neither of my parents went to university. My Dad had very little formal education actually - But he is one of the most literate, smartest and well traveled Nigerians I know.

Sheer hard work (via entrepreneurship, business etc), and drive to succeed through honest means count. Maybe that's why I'm not as excited about this educational attainment business with the Nigerian immigrant community.

Virtually all of my family are in Nigeria though - I'm currently in grad school here but I have plans to relocate. But Much of the bad news I read here is very discouraging.

I think you'll always be able to find counterexamples...folks who are making it in the US whose parents are impoverished, illiterate, un or undereducated.

But I think the general trend holds.

However, this very well may be a trivial observation...presumably the vast majority of people who immigrate to the US have some sort of "edge" over the average person of their native land.

My hypothesis though is that the "edge" is higher in the case of Nigerian immigrants rather than say Indian or Chinese immigrants. Of course, I don't have data to back this up, so I could very well be wrong. But I suspect it to be true.

solomon111: Well his remains won't be brought back to the abstract entity called "Nigeria."

But instead to XYZ town. The town of his ancestors, who've lived there for 400 years or whatever.

That one doesn't much care about "Nigeria" doesn't mean that you don't care about the welfare of your town, state, people. The latter are a lot easier to connect with on an emotional level at least for me than "Nigeria."

How many of you NLs or Nigerians who have made it in the US/Europe/etc (or are in the process of making it) have illiterate parents? Impoverished parents? Parents who've never been to university?

I think part of the thing here is that a lot of us like to downplay certain advantages we've had to sell the story better.

Oppressed immigrant from Africa rising to the upper echelon of US society is a lot more compelling a story than dude whose parents were pretty well-off relative to the median/mean in his country and who were easily in the top 1% or 5% as far as education goes

Sam Ikenna.

Not too sure how old you are. But are you saying that your parents were not amongst the upper echelon of education in Nigeria?

The problem is I think some of you are defining "elite" only by the amount of money in someone's pocket.

But the way the world has been for the past 30 or 40 years of so, this isn't the case...if you have brains but no money, you can easily earn an excellent salary.

If your parents went to somewhere like UNN or whatever the best Eastern Nigerian schools were at that time, then I'm not sure it is fair to pretend as if you are just an ordinary guy, or the child of ordinary folk

Not many were able to do what your parents did..

So I suppose no one is concerned about a contractor "donating" a church to GEJ's hometown.

Heh.

Absolutely no chance of corruption from that, eh? After all, the contractor won't be looking to recoup his expenses elsewhere? E.g., with a nice, fat and juicy contract from the FG?

And we wonder why corruption is so rampant in Nigeria...even the citizens bury their heads in the sand when hearing news of very questionable practices..

Beaf: The primate said there was nothing wrong for a contractor who is working in the President’s home town to build a church in the community, in fulfillment of its corporate social responsibility.

This "corporate social responsibility" sef....maybe we can have a contractor wipe the azzes of Otueke indigenes after they take a sh1t as part of its corporate social responsibility..

Okoh assured the president that the Anglican Church was solidly behind him and advised him not to be distracted.

Elaborate? What exactly does he mean by this?

“The call for the impeachment of the president over the renovation of the church in his town is satanic and it is capable of causing religious bigotry which we don’t want. The ACN should apologise and retract the statement. We call on the National Assembly to disregard the call,” he stated.

Religious bigotry Satanic?

The issue is corruption and cronyism, not religion.......

Nnenna1: Would be nice if they use some of that education to bring Nigeria out of its mess.

Else it's pretty much useless as far as I'm concerned. Getting an "education" is not as hard as people are making it out to be.

Well, not everyone's ambition in life is to save Nigeria. Most people, they are interested in the benefit of their own self and family, not abstract entities/concepts like Nigeria.

So it is pretty damn useful (for both them and the US)...just not necessarily useful to Nigeria.

"Common practice everywhere."

Citation?

The US tried to have reconstruction in the south after the civil war, but arguably didn't do a very good job.

Germany was not rebuilt after WW1 by the allies..

US rebuilt Europe after WW2.

But in general, I am not sure that this is "common practice everywhere."

lmao @ g unit.

"Giiguu ggggiigu GEEE UNIT!"

PhysicsQED: ekt bear,

I think you have to define "upper class". I think most Nigerians I meet in America would be upper middle class or middle class in Nigeria, but not necessarily very rich (financial elite) or from the most educated families in their respective towns or cities in Nigeria (intellectual elite).

I define upper class not necessarily purely by money (since I'm not even sure that if your family got rich off of say cocoa farming in the 40s and 50s that this necessarily implies that your family will still be wealthy today.)

For me, if you are a Nigerian-American and your parents went to some of the best schools in Nigeria (or abroad) at that time, then I classify you as from the "upper class." Even if said parents emigrated to the US and then wash dead bodies or something. Obviously, the raw talent is there, regardless of your parent's current occupation...they scaled heights in their native country that very few were able to reach.

Wasn't there one poster on here (bawomolo) who was going for his master's in mechanical engineering at a highly regarded private university before he was killed, and his father was a taxi driver?

Did you listen to one of the interviews they had of bawomolo's father? Excellent English, minimal accent. Dollars to donuts that his father went to somewhere solid in Nigeria for college.

That his father decided to drive cabs to sustain his family doesn't mean that his father was a bum in Nigeria..

Not saying he would be representative of most Nigerians in America or anything, but I guess my point is among certain groups of Africans (Ghanaians, Nigerians, Cameroonians, possibly Kenyans), but not necessarily all others, the economic/educational background of the family is probably not really the deciding factor.

Highly, highly, highly disagree. I never meet the children of random illiterate African villagers at any of these good schools.

I don't think the "intellectual elite" of Nigeria have really been transplanted to America and the UK or anything.

Yeah I disagree. A large fraction of these high-achieving Nigerians are effectively transplants, or the children of transplants.

I think you have the impression that most Nigerians in America are from a situation like that of the first family mentioned above where the patriarch of the family is some highly educated chap who got a medical degree or doctorate in the 70s or 80s, but I don't think that's really the case for the majority. Many could have very financially or educationally regular (rather than extraordinary) parents but high achieving children. I wouldn't be surprised if most Nigerians in America were either like the second family I mentioned or somewhere in between the first and second family.

Like I said, I don't think the money aspect is the determining factor. In a Nigerian setting with massive inflation, etc, etc...well, how many of the richest families from the 40s and 50s are amongst the richest today?

Also, how are you defining "educationally regular", in a Nigerian context?

I don't even know the names of the ordinary schools in Nigeria say in the 70s. But if you got into one of the best ones an entire country has, then in my opinion you are well above average. Or at least, probably are..

Dede1: You do not need to excoriate Nigerians who have abdicated their initial commitment to return to what is generally considered a cesspit for country such as Nigeria after they have acquired academic laurels in USA.

Well I'm not blaming anyone for leaving for greener pastures. But the issue is that it sucks for the country they've left behind. It is a case of the rich (the USA) getting richer and the poor (countries like Nigeria) getting poorer.

A lot of these talented folk immigrating to the US, I'd love to "kidnap" them and move them to my own homeland, if this were possible.

Kilode?!: What can I say but that you've made a phenomenal post and brought up some very interesting issues. Yeah, a lot of dominoes seem to be falling with the recent ouster of Ghadaffi. And I agree, I don't think all of the dominoes have fallen yet..

Arosa: ^^^ The Tuareg are nomads,they claim a large area of land as theirs. Do you think its fair to hand them these area of land at the expense of other tribes that live there, even though their population is very little.

Well, first of all, much of that land is the Sahara desert. So pretty much useless land.

Second, they are indigenous to that land. So it isn't really anyone "handing" it to them....it is their ancestral land.

Basically what is happening is that a large fraction of the best talent Africa has is being drained away to America.

Contrast this with India or China, which still has craploads of its best folk still in the country.

Indian/Chinese kids I know, a much larger fraction of them come here to get education but either return or plan on returning.

Naija man leaves Nigeria, he is only coming back for vacations...ain't ever coming back

In fact the random bumpkin Africans I know aren't too distinguishable from akata...don't go to college, baby mammas all over the place, etc.

Eh...I think we are upper class Africans, to some extent. It isn't the children of random bumpkins from Africa/Nigeria who are achieving this things.

Most of the high-achieving Nigerians I know around my age, their parents went to Ife/Ibadan/some school in the UK, parents were pretty well-educated, etc.

Granted, the same might be true of Indian and Chinese immigrants. But I'd have to see data to know for sure.

It isn't hard to dominate America if you select from essentially the top 0.1% of Africa or something..

People oriented gestures are nice. But you always have to ask, who is paying for this? Where is the money coming from?

Free bus ride for X days per year is financially feasible. It effectively means the other 365-X days cost slightly more than they should. At least in that case it is clear where the money comes from..slightly higher fees.

However, in the case of trains, it is not as clear where the money is coming from.

Also, train transportation is probably at least an order of magnitude more expensive than intracity bus rides.

I doubt the US or my state government could afford to give me a free train ride.

So just wondering where the money is coming from from Lagos to Osogbo (not a small distance and thus presumably not cheap..)

Interesting

So I apologize in advance for bringing up the racial dimension (I know that it is poor form)...but nobody feels slightly twinged that black folk are in the process of losing half of this country to the Tuareg (certainly an indigenous African people, but appearance-wise closer to white)?

I know it is irrational, but there is something...annoying...about this to me.

Interesting..up to the 9th minute mark so far.

Do you all support the Tuareg independence movement?

Perhaps put up a poll.