₦airaland Forum

What sort of failed state is this? Where a bunch of wondering bandits equipped with AK47s and pick up trucks can simply walk into a school and abduct not 10, 20 or 30 children, but nearly 300 children? Do you not have any sort of local or national security apparatus at all? Nigeria does have an army, air force and federal, state and local police, right? Yet these thugs roam in your country unimpeded and strike seemingly when and wherever they want?

About three weeks ago, one of these same thugs tried to shake down some poor decent hard-working local farmers (who hadn't even harvested their crops yet). They captured him and handed the thug over to police. Shortly after dozens of these farmers (many young men) were killed by this same group. I saw pictures of many of the farmers with their heads cut off and placed by/on their bodies. Sickening.

Some school girls were captured several years ago. It is reported, the Nigerian state paid these AK47 carrying pick-up driving bandits £ 3 million euros to release them. Over a hundred of the girls still haven't been heard from since their capture.

Please stop branding yourselves as "Giants" of anything because your country is rapidly becoming a joke in the eyes of the international community and an embarrassment to Africans. "Giant of failure" seems a more appropriate motto.

It is the nature of the african (and yes, I spelt that with a small a) to be hateful and wicked to each other. Note that South Africa has immigrants from all over the world, Indians and Chinese included. But the attackers wouldn't dare lay a finger on these other people. Africans will allow these other types of people to treat then openly disrespectfully but see how they will massacre each other at the slightest provocation. Where does this tendency to act like brutes and savages from? And we wonder why the world looks at us the way it does? No wonder nobody puts the words intelligence and Africans in the same sentence.

May the poor man's soul RIP.

Why do some Nigerians take such pride in referring to their country as "The giant of Africa"? The facts certainly don't bear this out. I read an article about Nigeria in Time magazine. Here were a couple of the highlights:

In Nigeria, one hundred million people are classed by World Bank standards as officially poor. That is they exist on less than the international poverty datum of less than $1.25 a day.

Another 20 million people are unemployed.

The official poverty rate is 68%.

No country can consider itself to be an economic giant if 68% of it's people are officially poor by international standards.

So you have a few billionaires and several thousand millionaires. But you measure the economic well-being by how the living standards by the majority of the populace, not by a few billionaires and millionaires, who compose a small sliver of the population.

And this for a country which has earned billions in wealth from natural resources and has very little if any thing to show for it in terms of a properly functioning infrastructure.

And a few thousand religious radicals can take over the north-eastern corridor of the country with impunity due to an inept national military.

A "giant" by what standards