₦airaland Forum

, and full of gun crimes

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dnative:
my guy - why you go wan pay 6,000 to 8,000 pounds for a masters degree in barbados. How acceptable are these degrees in nigeria (except you don't intend to use it to work in naija) and the guy on ground has just told you, no work there o especially for west africans. shine your eyes before you drop that cash.

Depending on your course of study, in my own opinion, if you have up to 8k pounds to burn, why not pursue your master's degree in a top school in nigeria. Until I'm proved wrong, except you are in the tourism or hospitality industry, I don't see rationale in going to pay that much for a masters degree in the WI. Or except you are just looking at studying anywhere else but Nigeria. My 2 cents.

The QUALITY of education in Barbados is FAR much better than what obtains in Nigeria, from Primary school to University Level. The University of West Indies have lots of Researchers and lecturers working as Consultants for so many US and UN organisations and they are world class. Which is the top school in Nigeria you are asking him to burn his £8k ? He could rather  use his £8K and pay for his first year in UK and get a job to off-set the associated costs. Barbados is a harsh place to live for foreigners because the cost of living is very expensive and very few jobs to go round.Most residents usually ask visitors to bring foodstuff from abroad to them due to the cheap cost. As an ex-british colony Barbados still maintains the high UK educational standards. My nephews are on scholarship from the Barbados Govt there and they are much better products than your average Nigerian students. Globalisation has made education abroad a bit more interesting,its not just about schooling in UK or US as lots of Eastern European and South American countries (including the Caribbeans) have very high standards of University education with lecturers from all over the world. I have lots of friends schooling in Ukraine and Czech Rep on scholarship for Phd courses by the host countries. If Nigeria does not recognise the foreign qualifications thats their loss, at least they are better than all those State and private Universities that have been accredited by NUC by borrowing facilities from each other.

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Try Afriqiyah Airlines , they fly from Lagos-Tripoli-London

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pappy2000:
i work in a place where they sell it,if i tell u i will not be given the commission

Do you work in a Mosque ?

Chydozie:
I got back from Dubai two days ago.
It's really a beautiful and well-organised place.
You can't believe they use 2007 (or is it 2008?) Toyota Camry and Nissan Altima as taxicabs!

Hope to post a couple of photos as soon as I can.

One Taxi driver told me there that after 4 years the Taxi's are removed from the fleet and new ones are bought by the Government. The Government controls the Taxi business in order to maintain its Tourism pedigree.

This article was published in todays Financial Times 2008 Report on Nigeria

Do you agree with the authors opinion?  


Cross River: When the rhetoric runs ahead of a shabby reality
By Barney Jopson

Published: June 23 2008 17:47

The name Calabar was bestowed on the capital of Nigeria’s south-eastern state by Portuguese explorers, says Joseph Ushie, a tour guide, as his car purrs along the smoothly-paved streets of the spacious, equilateral town. Today, he says, it has been turned into a marketing acronym: “Come And Live And Be At Rest”.

It is hard to conceive of any foreign visitor coming to Nigeria with such ambitions, infamous as the country is for its pushiness and dysfunctionality, its crime and shoulder-shrugging familiarity with man-made disaster.

But Calabar has sought to shake off the images projected on to the whole country from Lagos, the thrills-and-spills commercial capital, and Port Harcourt, the besieged centre of the oil industry. The town is the apex of Cross River state and Donald Duke, its energetic former governor, tried from 1999 to 2007 to turn the region into a tourism hub.

In the end, the rhetoric ran far ahead of the reality and Mr Duke’s successor has picked up the tourism mantle with rather less enthusiasm. But the experience of Cross River still holds lessons – both dos and don’ts – for the rest of the country.

The former governor wanted to exploit assets that set Cross River apart from much of the rest of Nigeria. One was the relative calm and safety of Calabar, which he augmented with measures such as making motorcycle taxi drivers carry helmets for passengers and by employing street-sweepers to clear dust from the roads every morning at dawn.

“In the popular mind, Nigeria is associated with kidnapping and violence and the blowing up of oil installations,” says Bassey Ndem, who manages one of the ventures established by Mr Duke. “Calabar is the only place I see people sitting by the side of the road having a beer. It’s the only place I’ve seen a single white girl walking down the road at 10pm.”

Outside the town, Cross River also has several natural attractions that pale into comparison with those offered by Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa, but are nonetheless impressive by Nigerian standards. Chief among them are the Obudu Cattle Ranch, located in the state’s misty highlands, and the Drill Rehabilitation and Breeding Centre, where a US couple are working to protect endangered drill monkeys found only in the Cross-Sanaga region.

The goal behind the tourism plan was one that lacks obvious commitment in many other states: to reduce Cross River’s near-total dependence on oil revenues, which are channelled through the federal government and give the state a monthly credit of between N3bn ($25.5m) and N3.5bn.

“We say tourism empowers others: the taxi drivers, the waiters, the people making crafts,” says Mr Ndem. “They provide goods and services for those coming from the outside with their money, so they will benefit and you can tax them. You are sucking up resources from the roots rather than pushing down from the leaves.”

Evidence of the theory becoming a reality, however, is scant. The concrete cubes that are a staple of Calabar architecture are broken up by numerous hotels – the state government says there are 2,000-plus beds – and those visited on a weekday by the FT feel echoey, though receptionists say they fill up at the weekends.

Many of the visitors got to know of Cross River through an expensive advertising blitz paid for by the previous state government. Some are expatriate oil workers from Port Harcourt who want to see something other than the interior of their locked-down compounds.

“The people who come to our place are never disappointed,” says Liza Gadsby, one of the founders of the drill centre. “But are they going to come back? Are they going to tell their friends? Or are they going to say: ‘Yes I liked it, but it’s over-rated.’ That’s the million-dollar question because tourism is made by repeat visitors.”

The number of annual overnight visitors to the drill ranch has climbed steadily to more than 500, but Ms Gadsby says: “If I was in business, running a tourist destination, we’d be bust. But we’re not. We’re here for wildlife conservation.”

The new state administration of governor Liyel Imoke has accepted, implicitly, that too much hope was invested in tourism. “We are consolidating the things done, but also looking at other areas,” says Nzan Ogbe, a special adviser to the governor, who is trying to attract oil and gas companies to set up in Calabar. “Tourism in itself is good, but you have to broaden your priorities.”

Waiting in the dim lobby of Calabar’s Serengeti Hotel is a group of academics from Georgia in the US, who are on holiday. They have just returned from the Obudu Ranch, which took 12 hours to reach after their bus got lost and was then stopped in the dark by “vigilantes”.

The meaning of the Calabar acronym, to them, does not quite ring true.


Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

No wonder the Bible prophecies call the place Babylon-a foretaste of what to come (lol)

This is another Black consciousness Poem that you may find interesting


The Bridge Poem
by Donna Kate Ruskin

I've had enough
I'm sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me

Right?

I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to the my friends' parents. .

Then I've got to explain myself

To everybody
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.

Forget it
I'm sick of it

I'm sick of filling in your gaps

Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people

Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness

I'm sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long

I'm sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves

I am sick
Of having to remind you to breath
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self.

Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die
The bridge I must be
Is the Bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful

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avoided.

[quote author=big_bumper link=topic=129914.msg2218291#msg2218291 date=1209811672]And by that you mean the sound financial system of bolting the stable door once the horses had bolted. And I am sure you know how easy it is to become a mortgage broker regardless of your immigration status. [/quote]Its one thing to take CiMap exams to become a certified mortgage broker (anyone on a visit visa can get it) , its another to become an FSA approved mortgage broker-(thats where the stammering starts)

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