Nigerians have such terrible comprehension problems, my god. They didn't say *you* can't use these words. They said *they* (Twitter) are going to stop using these words. My god this is a country of IQ 65 people!

Lol. Mad o.

Evaberry:
Hey exhusband hope you’re good you never came around to writing on your diary, cheers

I'm great, just been extremely busy (in a good way) this past couple of years. Don't even post here anymore.

Nigerians are genuinely horrible human beings.

Olumyco:


Sir Oil only contribute appr. 40% to our economy making it the highest single commodity contributor others appr 60% are from other goods and services. I hope you know this.

So? It still accounts for 96% of exports. The 40% figure is oil's GDP contribution, not its share of export earnings. IF you don't know something this basic, why do you feel entitled to comment on this issue?

The definition of an emerging market, according to the old investment joke, is one from which it is impossible to emerge with your money intact. Few seem to prove this truism better than what was once Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria. Indeed, if the dictionary definition of an emerging market is that of an economy with low income but high growth prospects, Nigeria fails the test; it is most certainly low income but in recent years, it has also been low growth.

Both in absolute and per capita terms, Nigeria’s GDP has been in sharp decline for the best part of four years, and in the past year it has again fallen behind South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. Only now is it beginning to pull out of this long recession. Meanwhile, its currency, the Nigerian naira, has suffered a catastrophic collapse, devaluing by nearly 70pc against the US dollar over the past 10 years. It is with good reason that some pundits call Nigeria the next Venezuela in the making.

This might seem an unduly harsh verdict, but the similarities between the two are striking. Nigeria is a relatively oil rich economy with a newly re-elected left wing populist, Muhammadu Buhari, at its helm whose chief of staff is an avowed admirer of Jeremy Corbyn, himself a devotee of Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez.

Both economies – Nigeria and Venezuela – have recklessly alienated international capital and utterly failed to harness their oil wealth. Even Ghana, less than a seventh the size of Nigeria in terms of GDP, receives more foreign direct investment these days than its near neighbour.

Global investors and companies have lost faith in the country and are leaving in droves. So too has its middle class. Nigeria is estimated to have lost about a tenth of its wealthier citizens to emigration in recent years. Its brightest and best have been voting with the feet in ruinous numbers – doctors, nurses, engineers, accountants, entrepreneurs, lawyers and so on. Success and wealth are routinely demonised by the Buhari regime. The grubby process of populist vote buying has triumphed over sound economics and pragmatic policy.

Nigeria's newly re-elected president, Muhammadu Buhari: during his campaign, he glorified poverty and vilified success
According to the Nigerian political blogger, David Hundeyin, Buhari’s recent election campaign was characterised not by any serious acknowledgement of Nigeria’s extreme investment deficit in education, healthcare, power generation and transport infrastructure, but by attacks on the usual populist scapegoats – “corrupt people”, “treasury looters,” and “arrogant elites”. Poverty was glorified, success was vilified.

What has all this got to do with the West? Nigeria may be a country of nearly 200m, but at less than 1pc of global GDP, it is neither here nor there. Like Venezuela, it might be a cautionary tale in the politics of left-wing populism, yet its wider significance seems at most marginal.

Well perhaps, but the fact is that even as Western populations age and decline, Nigeria’s, like much of the rest of Africa, is on an explosive growth path. On the present trajectory, Nigeria’s population is expected to more than double over the next 30 years, reaching a scarcely credible 750m by 2100, according to projections by the Census Bureau of the United States. That’s plainly not going to be sustainable, and therefore quite unlikely to occur in practice, but even if only half right, it creates, in the absence of extremely rapid per capita economic growth, myriad problems for the West.

The challenge of mass migration from sub-saharan Africa we see today threatens to turn into an exodus of positively biblical proportions. However vigorous, conventional border controls would struggle to prevent it. It is therefore very much in the West’s interests that Africa follows Asia into rapid economic advancement.

But here’s the paradox. Experience suggests that migration from the developing world peaks when national income reaches the $6,000 to $7,000 per capita range. Much below that, and only the middle classes and the enterprising have the wherewithal to make the break. Once income reaches that level, however, it provides the means for mass migration.

As things stand, Nigerian GDP per head is only £2,450. It could therefore be argued that the West perversely has an incentive to keep Africa in relative poverty. With an anti-business politician such as Buhari in charge, we perhaps don’t have to worry too much about an African invasion. We can cynically take our pick of its most educated, while leaving the rest to cope as best they can.

Building on analysis by the American economist, Mary Jean Bowman, Charles Robertson, chief economist at Renaissance Capital, has developed a neat little system for determining whether a country is capable of the sort of industrialisation necessary to achieve middle income status or better. Bowman established that one prerequisite was a minimum literacy rate of 70pc. India achieved that level in 2015, some 20 years after China. Nigeria is still some way off. Riven by ethnic and religious division, it is struggling to make progress.

Robertson adds another two pre-conditions - that a country needs a minimum investment rate of 25pc of GDP and that electricity consumption must reach an average of 300 kilowatt hours per person, enough to power a TV and three low energy lightbulbs. Again, Nigeria is well short of these thresholds, particularly on investment, which is only half that level.

Robertson is more optimistic than most about Nigeria’s prospects of eventually getting there. He also points out that Buhari’s government is not the totally unreconstructed hard left populist cabinet it might seem. It contains some notable reformers whose anti-corruption crusade can only be applauded. Even so, Nigeria for now remains an economy linked inextricably to the fortunes of the oil price and, like Russia, apparently incapable of decent levels of growth when the price is low. For Nigeria, abundant oil has proved as much a curse as a blessing. Again, the problem is population. Production per capita is too low to make a material difference to average incomes but just high enough to remove the incentives for other sources of income growth. The next Venezuela? It’s all too possible.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/03/05/nigeria-become-next-venezuela-signs-not-good/

snrman:
All this foreigners shld mind their business. We kw buhari failed if only pdp gave a credible candidate we for no say talk all this long story.
.
.
As for me buhari should just forget all this fight against corruption and focus on human development. Any corruption case that is not frm 2015- till date should b forgotten
.
As for infrastructure he should continue his good work cus if all infrastructures in all sectors of the economy is working then the economy will grow on its own
.
If ur reading this u would hv heard that Nigeria is one of the most religious countries yet bad things befall us
.
We should stop mixing politics and religion abeg
.

As for the igbos u people should not generalize cus i kw most of them on nairaland are fool but down south we hv some real one's there
.
To the real igbos not the online warriors
GOD BLESS UR HUSTLE

The article was written by a Nigerian.

AOC, Trump and Farage In One

Weaving together the anti-elitist appeal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the bloviating news-magnetism of Donald Trump and the skilful sophistry of Nigel Farage, Buhari’s campaign painted a picture of a country held hostage by “corrupt” elites, “treasury looters” and their middle-class subalterns who wanted to vote in a pro-business candidate to preserve the corruption status quo.

In 2015, Buhari defeated an incumbent candidate with a Ph.D. who was perceived to be incompetent due to being an airy-fairy ivory tower resident. This time around, his challenger’s wealth was portrayed as a moral failure in a manner reminiscent of how Ocasio-Cortez has portrayed the existence of billionaires amidst poverty as morally unjust.

While the world of shouty Fox News anchors and social media-savvy Congressional freshmen may seem relatively tame in comparison to the literal life and death politics of Africa’s largest country, it is important to note that Nigeria itself was not always this way. The unfortunate sequence of military coups and poor economic decisions that saw the country lose an entire generation of talent to the developed world could not have taken place without popular support from the very people most affected.

It may be difficult to picture Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Donald Trump leading the U.S. into a dystopian future where middle-class professionals are disparaged as the “enemy”, and widespread poverty is held up as a virtue, but such situations can take decades to incubate. The incubation takes place in three stages that often overlap – an anger and dissatisfaction phase, a demonization phase, and then the catastrophe.

Demonization and Scapegoating

The first phase is already well underway across most of the developed and developing world. From Bangalore to Baltimore, everyone is united in anger about something. Regardless of the wide disparity of living experiences around the world, the general mood is that things are worse than they have ever been, and something or someone must be held to account for it. Politicians eagerly feed the narrative that something has gone terribly wrong, and they will fix it.

The second phase is also underway across much of the world. During this phase, scapegoats must be identified and separated from the assumed ‘virtuous masses’. In Nigeria, the scapegoats are “elites”, which translates practically to “anyone who is not poor.” Anyone with a university-level education and a stable source of income is an “elite” who is collaborating with “corrupt treasury looters.” Across the developed world, the scapegoats may vary from immigrants to Blacks, to Muslims, to “the 1 percent.”

To the impoverished and angry Nigerian voter, their predicament is down to “people who are stealing Nigeria’s money,” regardless of how easily that argument falls down when challenged by the most cursory analysis. Their world is a zero-sum game, where if someone eats three times a day, lives in a comfortable modern residence and drives a car, they must have those things because they “stole” them, or they work for someone who stole them.

However intellectually redundant such a viewpoint is, it has a powerful emotional resonance that is often amplified by lack of education and existing ethnoreligious divisions between North and South.

To the angry voter across much of the developed world, their discontent is caused by immigrants coming over and being given all the jobs and housing, or it is down to the Muslims and refugees being allowed to come into the country and create their own laws and live outside the constitution unlike the long-suffering, salt-of-the-earth natives whom nobody ever listens to.

Perhaps it is the Blacks who are committing all the crimes and nobody can criticise them for fear of being called racist, or most recently, it is the 1 Percent (or even the 0.1 Percent) – the globalist plutocrat oligarchs who pay fewer taxes than everyone, and who have taken away all the jobs and healthcare and placed everyone in debt.

Nigeria’s Unfolding Catastrophe

For most of the world, the catastrophe phase is not underway yet, so perhaps a look at Nigeria, where it is well and truly underway will be instructive. A poor economy dependent on a single export resource looks set to continue on its self-imposed implosion, driven by generous subsidy regimes, ridiculously unsustainable social intervention programs, rapidly ballooning foreign debt and a growing annual recurrent expenditure bill that it cannot hope to afford.

In a wrong-headed attempt to plug this funding shortfall, the government has embarked on a high-handed tax collection effort, repeatedly violating the law by unilaterally freezing bank accounts belonging to small businesses and private individuals in the absence of valid court orders or even demand notices. Understandably, this has spooked investors and accelerated the outward flow of investment, which is conveniently labeled as “corrupt money” leaving the country, as against a policy failure driven by envy and fuelled by incompetence.

Alongside this is the growing spectre of oil losing its value, as the world’s biggest oil buyers including China and Europe switch to renewable sources over the next couple of decades, which will effectively render Nigeria’s government penniless overnight. Amidst all this, due to a populist aversion to promoting family planning, Nigeria’s impoverished population over the next decade will add another 137 million to its numbers – the biggest growth of any country on earth excluding India.

Already, tens of thousands of middle-class Nigerians are upping sticks and moving to destinations like Canada, Germany, Australia and the U.S. in preparation for the impending crisis. An entire generation of highly skilled labour including doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers, nurses, pilots, accountants, entrepreneurs, artists, programmers, artisans, academics and management personnel is being lost to the developed world, leaving behind an exploding population of people living in extreme poverty.

The Sahara desert meanwhile, is also claiming an estimated 3,500 sq. km of arable land from Nigeria every year, which is a contributing factor to the presence of Boko Haram and the Fulani herdsmen – two of the world’s deadliest terror groups responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, maimings, and abductions over the past decade.

Envy Politics is Deadly Politics

Through all of this, a class of anti-intellectual populists in Abuja continue to raise clenched fists before adoring crowds, admonishing them to “live within their means” while demonizing economic ambition and wealth. They have achieved great political success by weaponizing the economic envy of a large, impoverished population, publicly glorifying poverty as a virtue while collecting the world’s most generous compensation packages for political office holders.

Outside in the real world, however, following the news of Buhari’s re-election, the Nigerian Stock Exchange lost 196 billion nairas (about $542 million), as the investment outlook continues to dim on Africa’s largest economy. The net result of years of envy politics and demonizing wealth and intelligence is a country that has hit the metaphorical iceberg, and continues to cheer while the band plays as the ship sinks.

The next time a politician – be it AOC or Donald Trump or Viktor Orban or Nigel Farage – tells you that your life is terrible because of this or that group of people, it would do you some good to think about whether this is what you want your future to look like, before giving in to your base instincts.

The unfolding lesson from this part of the world is very clear – the politics of populism and envy may be very good at winning elections, but they clearly are not good at running successful economies.

by CCN.com https://www.ccn.com/the-socialist-politics-of-envy-what-the-world-can-learn-from-nigerias-unfolding-disaster

Africa’s most populated country and the world’s 26th largest economy is heading for a meltdown as a direct result of envy politics.

It was an election between a multimillionaire pro-business candidate seen as part of the establishment and a self-proclaimed hero of the masses who railed against corrupt elites and promised to fight for the little guy. While this may seem to be the story of pretty much every election nowadays since the shock victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the results of Nigeria’s recent elections contain a very important message from an imperiled country about the dangers of using socialist rhetoric and envy politics as a tool of governance.

It is a story that shows how the populist tactics deployed by Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have infected the global political discourse, becoming powerful tools for emerging dictatorships and incompetent governments to entrench themselves in power. Whether dressed up in right-wing clothes as in Trump’s case or presented as new age “socialism” as with AOC, the basic method is the same – the weaponization of envy and use of scapegoats to achieve political goals at the expense of good economics and common sense.

If the collapse of Venezuela got the world’s attention, the impending collapse of Nigeria, with six times the population of Venezuela, will be positively seismic. This is what happened, and here is how the world can learn from it.

‘Poverty is Good’

Typically decided along ethnic and religious lines, these elections took on a decidedly economic posture, with the generally prosperous South voting as one for the first time in favour of Atiku Abubakar. This was an economically liberal challenger and successful businessman who promised to introduce comprehensive cryptocurrency regulation in his campaign manifesto after Nigerians were forced to become prolific crypto traders due to the woes of the naira, which fell over 85 percent in 2016 alone. The largely impoverished North, however, voted almost unanimously for the famously statist incumbent Muhammadu Buhari.

Following four years of woeful economic performance, including Nigeria’s first recession in a quarter of a century, Buhari’s campaign message was no longer that fighting corruption would grow the economy – which it clearly failed to do in his first term. The message was something altogether different – that Nigerians should learn to accept poverty as the price for “fighting corruption.”

While this message elicited stunned reactions from many voters, it turned out to be right on the money in terms of hitting the emotional lever of an even greater number of people.

Despite being far behind where it should be on a per capita basis, Nigeria’s $411 billion economy has a significant population of US Dollar billionaires and millionaires, in addition to a large population of middle class professionals in cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Enugu and Ibadan – predominantly in the country’s South. This fact is often overshadowed by the preponderance of extreme poverty, particularly in the North.

The glaring economic divide between North and South has been used alongside with ethnic and religious politics in the past, but this election was the first time that no attempt was made to promise economic growth to those in need of it. Instead, the message was that poverty in Nigeria is a sign of virtue because only the “corrupt” are able to live well. Like a certain social media sensation-cum-Congresswoman across the Atlantic, Buhari was the “man of the people,” campaigning with a message that their honest poverty is not their fault and is nothing to be ashamed of.

Like in the U.S., this approach worked brilliantly, with voters responding positively to a message that absolved them of responsibility and found a comfortable and suitably visible scapegoat. On the surface, AOC’s message is “billionaires and corporate money are distorting democracy,” but what voters are actually expected to hear and respond to is a class warfare dog whistle saying “rich people think they are better than you.” Similarly, the message Nigerian voters really got from the “live within your means” mantra was “those smug city people feel superior to you because they have some money which they probably stole.”

Populism is Good Politics

For Buhari’s campaign team, it meant avoiding discussions about real issues like Nigeria’s bloated, inefficient, and excessively powerful central government and the unsustainable nature of its welfarist federal budget.

Almost 70% of Nigeria’s 2018 budget is reserved for recurrent expenditure | Source:
Daily Trust

To have such a discussion would mean explaining why amidst the naira’s 85 percent fall against the dollar in 2016, Buhari’s government chose to maintain an unrealistic official exchange rate which was used to subsidise religious pilgrims heading to Mecca for the Hajj.

Such conversations would include discussing the opposition’s stated plan to privatise NNPC, Nigeria’s state-owned oil firm that essentially functions as an independent country on its own, with no practical oversight by or accountability to government. Also included would be the federal government’s opaque and inefficient public contracting, procurement and funds disbursement process.

Rather than discuss a lack of investment in education and healthcare, extremely poor power generation and transport infrastructure, or the lack of proper separation of powers making the executive a law unto itself, the campaign was instead spent attacking the convenient fig leaves of “corrupt people”, “treasury looters,” and “arrogant elites”.

In the absence of reasoned debate or actual policies and achievements, a large vote-buying effort was also deployed, in what some have referred to as the “weaponization of poverty.”

justtoodark:


you must be kiddin,do you even know how a emp attack works....??

first go inform yourself before talkin rubbish....

do you think you are talkin on radio biafra or what....??

Refrain from quoting me please.

In the event of a full scale aerial and naval onslaught coupled with an EMP to take out Nigeria's communication infrastructure, I'd estimate about 1 hour 20 minutes.

Sansan404:
Your PHONE NUMBER

Scammer oshi

Sansan404:

Call for Price. Thanks 08151420225

Babatunde Olasanya Adio the scammer. You're still here?

Babatunde Olasanya Adio will never stop being a scammer. His other handle here is "baddy404".

Babatunde Olasanya Adio is the poster. He is a scammer.

SpecialAdviser:
Something remarkable happened last week I visited the village.

My friend gave me his car to drive home from Lagos as my car was in bad shape. His car is an SUV more tushed than my Toyota corrola.

Reaching home, old granny came out and welcomed me like everyone. My aunty asked me if the new car is mine.

I snapped and asked rhetorically " FOR THIS BUHARI REGIME?".

My granny started laughing non stop. I was embarrassed and questioned why she laughing.
She told me dats exactly what my dad told her in 1984 when she asked when he will complete his house project. She laughed and said Nigerians will never learn. A man that made history with the statement came back to repeat history again.

I couldn't speak again.

This is heavy.

Any other atheists in the house? Please let's know ourselves. Would be nice to create an offline community that can be our little oasis in this...place.

Monday morning, the rest of the world is innovating, inventing and producing.

The same Monday morning Africans in the global HQ of extreme poverty are congregated to argue about who is worshipping "god" better.

These Africans somehow cannot see the link between their stupid obsession with religions and their total lack of status in this world.

I mean if "god" is real, then you only have to look at the state of Africa compared to elsewhere to know which people "god" is interested in.

Your god clearly hates all of you and does not value your existence at all.

Dude it's better to be single than to be married to someone with psychological issues. Take it from me, speaking from experience. Run the f**k away while you can. Don't bring innocent children into a situation they didn't ask to be born into.

Babatunde Olasanya Adio with Diamond bank account number 0077639432 is back to his scamming ways on this thread. Look at his topic history!

This is a scammer. His name is Babatunde Olasanya Adio and he uses a Diamond Bank account and a UK number. BUYER BEWARE!

Lifting photos from LaoTze on Skyscraper City and then putting your watermark on them as if you sourced the photos yourself is precisely the behaviour of a typical Nigerian.

Horrible person.

Thanks to Nairaland as usual for never disappointing. Got the candidates we need now.

The role is all about turning over 400-word articles within the space of 2-3 hours each. If anyone cannot do this within the space of nearly 12 hours, then they cannot do the job.

[modified]

@lalasticlala very interesting story.

The rehearsal was rough. It took three takes to get through the first fifteen seconds of the show. The opening graphics kept freezing, and ill-timed applause cues from a producer threw off Bakassi. Case paced around the office, drumming his pen on his “Comedy for Change” notepad, absorbing bad news like body blows.

At two-thirty, the audience—seventeen Channels employees—filed into the studio and sat in plastic chairs about thirty feet from the purple-and-gray stage. There was no camera for crowd-reaction shots, so the plan was to shoot them laughing uproariously before the show and edit in the shots later. A burly bearded correspondent who goes by the stage name Dan D’Humorous was tasked with eliciting the laughs. “It’s a live show, so laugh as if you paid for it and you need to get your money’s worth,” he said. Someone shouted at him to tell a joke. He declined. “Just imagine something hilarious,” he said. D’Humorous began to let out big, fake belly laughs. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” He raised his arms like a conductor. The audience members started to laugh, too, and as the absurdity of what they were doing dawned on them the laughs became real.

Eventually, the producers showed up and the teleprompter operator was tracked down. A headset for Bakassi replaced the white iPhone earbuds that had glared in the test episode. The script worked, more or less. The episode covered the Ooni video, a major corruption case, and a recent debate over restructuring Nigeria’s federal system. There was a field piece by Williams and D’Humorous that dealt with the Minister of Science and Technology’s triumphant announcement that Nigeria would be manufacturing its own pencils. (“What’s next, erasers?”) There was an unfortunate joke comparing a corrupt minister to a woman who couldn’t keep her legs closed. The high point, most agreed, was Bakassi’s interview with Reuben Abati, a newspaper columnist and former spokesman for Goodluck Jonathan, in which they reflected on Nigerian youth’s anger at the state of the country, and in which Bakassi pulled from him a story about the evil spirits that he believed haunted the Presidential complex. Bakassi, wearing a suit with a bright-red handkerchief, seemed energized by the presence of a live studio audience. Perhaps most important, the Open Society representatives were pleased. “It was excellent,” one of them said. “I laughed until I had tears in my eyes.”

After the taping, the crew gathered for a postmortem. Case scolded someone for letting his phone go off during the recording. The applause sign needed to be wielded more carefully. “Everybody has areas where they can improve,” Case said. “I think, on the writing side, there were a lot of clips and—whoops.” The power went off. A few seconds later, the generator kicked in, and as the lights came back Case’s tone lifted. “It really is amazing, guys, the thing we just recorded, so why don’t you pat yourself on the backs,” he said. “It’s going to keep getting better. It’s going to be in a league of its own, and I can’t wait to read about you guys in the Emmys.” With that, the crew dispersed quickly. There was still a lot of work to do, and they had only seven days until the next episode.

Defying technology failures, skittish lawyers, and power outages, a new episode of “The Other News” aired every Thursday evening at seven-thirty for the next twelve weeks. Nwabudike became the head producer, and, episode by episode, the flow of the show and Bakassi’s delivery improved. The first big hit was a segment in which Dan D’Humorous reported from the “jungle” of Nigerian politics, the green screen behind him filled in with a C.G.I. rain forest. Unauthorized clips of the segment started popping up all over the Internet.

Yet there were issues. “The Other News” rarely displayed the kind of critical bite that some of the writers aspired to; shots were off; the show was accompanied by a distractingly fake laugh track. There was a minor controversy, after a well-known actress appeared on the show and said that women bore some responsibility for preventing domestic abuse by not provoking their husbands. The incident made Case cringe, but the outrage that it sparked online raised the show’s profile. Before the end of Season 1, Channels had secured enough sponsors to renew the show. Sustainability achieved. When I stopped by Case’s apartment recently, he said that the final episode had been the highest-rated show in its time slot, reaching 1.7 million viewers. P.M.I.’s contract had ended; the staff was on its own.

The third episode of Season 2 was about to air. We sat in his basement and watched it live on the Channels YouTube page. There was a long piece on a new bill to spend a billion dollars fighting Boko Haram; the bill had attracted criticism, because President Buhari had boasted in 2015 that the insurgent group was “technically defeated.” Case was impressed. “Man, this is going to go viral,” he said, at the end of a segment that made fun of the role that Buhari, a former general, had played in three military coups before being elected President. Afterward, he showed me a rough draft of some surveys indicating that the show was having a positive impact on its viewers’ political knowledge. But he seemed more excited by a different sign of success. He had heard a rumor that a rival TV station was creating its own political-satire show. “You know you’re onto something hot when people are copying it,” he said.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/using-comedy-to-strengthen-nigerias-democracy