₦airaland Forum

wetin happen US dey vex

so, are you saying MEND and NDVF kidnapped the girl?

what does it cost to register a company

You have not seen anything. These MEND boys will behead that child if their demands are not met.

They have killed before and they will kill again. They have started to realise that adults are taking extra security measures, so they have to get to the children.

They have to hit the enemy at their weakest spot and what better weak spot is there than their babies. This will speed up the measures taken to pay up the ransom.

stop lying. behead the child? maybe in kano or iraq, but not in the ND. these guys may kill, but thats usually soldiers in combat.

Stop the gibberish, banks have always been financing businesses. I wonder how they survive if they finance nothing!

by living on government funds. which is why soludo took it away, asked them to clean up thier act before they got it back

Lagos, Abuja, Lagos, Abuja. . .Unequal development if any, leads to nothing but disaster. You have to pay attention to every region so that the rising tide can lift all boats. I see huge potential in Nigeria but we need individuals who know how to truly organize and manage productive resources towards efficient outcomes.

Why build resorts when kids are dying of malaria?. . .Why not hospitals and schools?. . .Aren't those much more crucial for continued development. Who're we trying to impress with ABJ and Lekki or Tinapa when hospitals and schools are moribund?

you dont have to solve every problem before you buil resorts and the like. especially when th emoney from the resorts help fight malaria. im sure jamaica and dubai still suffer from certain diseases but they work to still build more resorts. income ultimately solves all

I look at the Police force of Italy of greece of USA and i tell you those guys will scare the hell out of you by their motivation.

i dont know about greece or italy, but as far as USA is concerned thats a lie. these police here are crooks and violent. especially towards blacks and the poor

its worse in egypt by far. anyway, i think they need to stop the practice on men and women

Donald Duke

nigeria will definately be a top dog in Africa. As for SA, I respect them, but they are not different from anyother if the whitees leave.
rubbish. the blacks there built kingdoms b4 the whites came. the whites could not have acheived what they did if they didnt find the resoruces in SA and the forced labor

SA ironicaly owes its succes to arpathied because when it was closed to the outside world they had to source for practically everything internaly and necessity is the mother of invention. When aparthied was pulld down the world suddenly grew fascinated with with them and direct investment flowed.

despite aparthied SA had tonnes of investment from the west. dont believe that mother of invention thing at all

Obong


Verify your post before sending next time. The guy retired from lecturing long ago to joing the private sector, serving in the board of different companies and purchasing securities long before joining politics.

We nigerians are never satisfied for once. Obj never declared his assets and no body quesioned him, now because declared his asset and happen to be a rich man, you call him a thief. It is unfair. That means all the rich men in your country are theives abi?

you are right. i should have added first that he has done well by doing this. now we have to create a system that shows his declaration is in fact legit.

i never called him a thief though. i jsut wish it was easier to know how he got the loot

i wouldnt say we have passed them in telecommunications because its more than size,its quality of service as well as teledensity. also, with mtn dominating th e landscape, it still benefits South africa. we need to buy of mtn or beat it by competition

why does anyone even respond to militia

this is rubbish. means nothing if it cant be verified. its a show. besides, if true, being a chemistry lecturer must be one of th e most lucrative professions in naija

be specific. who are you referring to with these unfinished projects. and how does that equal theft?

explain to me how nigeria has laged behind ghana economically. politically yes. but how so economically.

Billionaires in terms of dollars are in Nigeria, but there wealth are stolen so they don't declare them, and its not mandatory for them since they are not having publicly declared shares in public companies (they usuallcy use proxies).

But most of them may be exposed after their death like Rafik Hariri in Lebanon.

the wealth of dangote and jimoh are not stolen. why smear them with that BS

whats the big deal, real or fake. i dont see wha he is doing thats sinful or whatever

most def.

but then again your monthly bill will be off the roof

the monthly bill is actually about the same as other phones

they are too expensive though

oil and gold are two different devils. have you ever heard of any country destroyed by gold?

depends on what parts of ghana you wish to compare. our financial sector is better managed, as is our telecom arena. and in certain pockets, like calabar and abuja the roads are just as good as ghana's

[b]It is true and it is good for Ghana, but I am very disappointed at the usual Nigeria bashing, people here obviously have lost touch with the progresses Nigeria has been making. Ghana has been able to get itself together somewhat, but with a population the size of Lagos and without the challenges that plague Nigeria why wouldn't they? I'm sorry but I get really sick of Nigerians who contantly put Nigeria down and think it's just the same as the day they left it.

Ghana has had gold and cocoa for years, their people have the same complaints about how little it has benefited the people and how politicians have dealt with it for their own gain, so please wake up and smell the coffee. Nigerians are not bad by virtue that they are Nigerian.

I hope Ghana can use it for the good of its people, but sometimes people don't steal billions because they have never been in a position to, lets wait and see.


For those of us who are out of the loop about some of the more positive steps Nigeria is taking in our absence, this may make useful reading.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=441211[/b]

thanks for your post . i get tired of the same bashing nigeria gets many times. the oil ghana has isnt that much and their population is small, so its difficult to compare to two. the amount of environmental degradation and corruptioni s likely to be smaller than nigeria because of this.

nevertheless ghana with more resources than many countries in the world, and quite a few even in africa lags behind the,. the same problems exist but on a smaller scale because of the size of the country. let
s give nigeria a chance to continue to right itself and stop knockign it down. seems to be the favorite past time of nigerians that never even bother to go to nigeria

I guess the govs and LGA chairmen have the vision and political desire to make a difference. Yet states like Rivers and Delta with Annual Budgets more than some west african states have simply achieved nothing.

what states have larger budgets than some west africa countries. and what ar the comparable populations

http://www.businessinafrica.net/leadership/988609.htm
LEADERSHIP
Dangote: Leading businessman and billionaire
Toun Aderele
Published: 21-JUN-07

Aliko Dangote isn’t your run-of-the-mill successful Nigerian businessman. He is always simply clad — no three-piece suits, no natty ties, no fawning aides, no airs, and no long speeches. Just a simple babariga, the long robe favoured by Nigerians for leisurely activities, topped by a small roundish cap.

But beneath that cap is one of the smartest business minds in Nigeria, a mind that has helped this modest and shy 50-year-old businessman to become Nigeria’s undisputed Number One industrialist and business king, sitting atop a multi-billion dollar business empire, from a humble beginning that does not include a college education.

Unlike many of Nigeria’s other big businessmen, Dangote is averse to publicity. Getting an interview with him (for example, BIA made efforts to get an interview with him for weeks to no avail), as journalists have discovered is seldom a successful affair.

“I have always been a bit shy with the press-I don’t want too much publicity,” he said during a rare interview with The Guardian, one of Nigeria’s leading dailies, in 2000.

So how big is Dangote? Given the dearth of statistics on the holdings of most of Nigeria’s super-businessmen, there is no proper estimate of Dangote’s wealth. But his businesses’ sheer presence, its reach and supply of the majority of basic items lend credence to the commonly held belief that he is Nigeria’s richest. Dangote, with his Dangote Group of companies, runs about 13 companies with interests in oil, banking, agriculture, manufacturing, textile and transportation spread across the West African Sub-region. Recently, he listed two of these companies on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and analysts put his stakes in these two alone as being more than $4bn. His on-going projects are said to be about $10bn and this include the world’s biggest sugar refinery, a 300,000 barrels a day oil refinery and a 5,000 megawatt power project. Already, he owns one of Africa’s biggest cement plants, the $800mn Obajana cement plant (three others are nearing completion); co-owns a charter airline; several dollar-denominated luxury high rises; and the most viable of Nigerian textile and flour mills. And much more. Among Nigeria’s small tribe of billionaires, rivalry is intense and often very deep. Seldom is a member of the group willing to admit that the other is richer or smarter. But Femi Otedola, Nigeria’s undisputable leader in the diesel market (Otedola, a canny businessman whose company, Zenon, though less than a decade old has pushed locals and multinationals aside to emerge the leader in this highly sub-sector, will also make good material for another story) and a billionaire wasted no time in admitting that Dangote is in a class of his own. “This is the richest man in Africa,” Otedola, a good friend of Dangote, told a BBC reporter earlier this year.

Although, he is modest to the point of being reticent, Dangote is a very shrewd and capable businessman. His rivals, such as the big businesses he ran out of the rice and sugar markets, accuse him of underhand and ruthless tactics. But Dangote likes saying that his tactics-such as the time, he imported a huge consignment of rice to crash high prices at the behest of government- are normal. One other thing that has helped Dangote is his political correctness. Although he is Obasanjo’s good friend, he has equally good rapport with opposition politicians and likes reiterating that he is a businessman and not a politician. He has however said that he has no interest in politics.

“I am a businessman, pure and simple,” he once said to another interview, “Our intention is to do business, and help the communities where we do business. My father was actually a member of the Federal House here; he was a politician and a business man. You know at that time you could combine being a business man and also a politician. And really my father was quite big in politics but that doesn’t mean that I have any ambition. I have been living here in Lagos (or about 20 years but people hardly know me.”

His unlikely run to the top of the Nigerian business sector started at the age of 20 in 1977 when he got a loan of N500,000 from his maternal grandfather, the patriarch of a very successful trading family, the Dantatas. That loan was what he parlayed into enormous wealth. His father, a notable but less-business inclined politician, left him two buildings. “I did not really inherit anything apart from, maybe, two buildings. I had three (Benz) 911 (10 tonner trucks) which my grandfather bought for me and they were working and he was keeping the money for me at that time. So by the time I came out, I had about N127,000 or so. And then my grandfather also gave me a letter to collect N500 000 as loan to be paid back in two years but there was no interest,” he told The Guardian.

Before then he had worked for his uncle. In fact, in his word, he ‘squatted’ in the latter’s office when he started with two staff: a manager and a secretary. “I started with the business of cement, which was giving us a lot of money because at that time Nigeria was making so much money and we were doing a lot of constructions. On a vehicle which I normally get from my uncle, I was making about Nl,350 to Nl,4000 and everyday I had an allocation of about 3-4 trucks including Saturdays and Sundays.

“Later I realised that I was making a lot of money though then I didn’t have a lot of ideas of what to do. It was only cement business that I knew and I stuck to it up till 1980 when I started knowing Lagos, becoming a Lagosian, understanding where to go and finding people to buy import licences from. Within three months I paid my grandfather back because I had no further need of his money,” he said. Dangote would always credit his move to Lagos in the 1980s as one of his biggest breakthroughs. Kano, his family operating base and business headquarters though one of West Africa’s biggest trading hubs, lacks Lagos’ many opportunities. He was afraid that his family wouldn’t want him to come to Lagos. They felt Lagos’ fast-paced life could corrupt him. “In fact, when I told my grandfather that I will like to be given the opportunity to come to Lagos, I just tried him because I thought the answer was going to be no but he allowed me to go,” he said. And again he felt he should leave the family business and strike out on his own. “Working with family, you hardly succeed because you have other children. You know, it is difficult when you come from a large family,” he said.

Dangote’s greatest fear when he started business was that of failure. “I had that fear of being totally on my own because if there is a failure it will show immediately but if you are with somebody and there’s a little failure, you’d still have a cover up because they’ll be looking at that bigger signboards,” he said. Fortunately for him, shortly after his arrival in Lagos and after he had made good money in the cement business, the military came and clamped all the leading businessmen into jail after accusing them of working with corrupt politicians. It was an opportunity of a lifetime for Dngote to take over the market left by this huge vacuum. He seized it with both hands. He cornered the sugar market and also made massive inroads into the importation of rice.

But he has also made mistakes. His biggest was his initial foray into banking, where a bank that he invested in heavily went bankrupt. But before it did, he had pulled out and cut his losses saying that he felt he should only operate a business that he understood. He said one of the reasons for the fast growth of his businesses is its prudence and wise investment decisions, the biggest of which is decision to always plough his profits back into Nigeria. “The difference between our company and others is that we always invest. We don’t go on buying this one, or that one, spending money the normal (way) Nigerians kill business. We always try to re-invest whatever we make in the business not to take the money and keep it in an offshore account. (It is) not that we don’t have money abroad. We have but not the majority of our money. We try as much as possible to invest our money here,” he said.

But his biggest break was his shift from the importation business to manufacturing. That shift was inspired during a trip to Brazil in the late eighties. “The first company I visited was a company called Arisco, a company that produces 503 different items. I was impressed when I went to one of their factories. They had over 4,000 workers. Even though in Nigeria at that time we were not in manufacturing, the only manufacturing company we had at that time was textiles.

“Going to Brazil I thought that we were at the same level with Brazil because I used to hear of Brazil as a debtor nation owing so much money. But when I went there, I saw massive industrialisation, it was unbelievable. I started thinking that how come they have these things in Brazil and we don’t have it in Nigeria. So with that now, when I came back I said okay, fine, I want to venture into industry,” he said.

But he said he realised that the safest way of venturing into industry was to avoid a situation where both manufacturing and the marketing side of business will compete for his attention at the same time.

“So, the easiest for me to do is to now pick the same item that I am now trading in and do a backward integration, which will be much easier and faster for me. So we started with sugar refinery. Then when we met again we said what about spaghetti we are doing (importing) about 360 containers every year, we should go and do spaghetti. So, we jumped into spaghetti. Polypropylene bagging, because we didn’t want somebody to hold us to ransom in terms of bagging. “Believe me, each and everyone item that we’ve gone into has been a blessing because there’s not a single one that we are not making good money out of today. I realise that it is much better than trading, even though industries too have their own headaches (in terms of margin). If you have good margin like we have, you won’t have any problems,’ he said. -Business in Africa Online



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why does te federal government control the price of petrol?

yet lagos, which gets even more flood, continues to get investment and no ones questions it

First of all, please provide a link to this story. sounds completly made up. Nigerian reporting is full of rumors its sickening. its pretty easy to verify the owner of tinapa or who manages it. also if indeed sam anani is being paid 4m despite being fired, doesnt that mean the money is not from the government, or perhaps never came out of the coffers of the state? after all if imoke is saying he isnt paying him anymore and someone is, whats the crime in that

ive also noticed a drive to tear down the image of duke in order to set the bar very low to enable new government blame their failures and stealing on him.

im still waiting for one iota of proof to back up these allegations.it looks like imoke can't handle tinapa or any of the things duke did and will blame his failures on him

the oil can't threaten nigeria because it's so small, but ghana can do good for their economy if they manage it well.

by the way a nigerian company found 3 times as much oil in liberia not too long ago. i wonder why that didnt make as much news

http://www.afrol.com/articles/25791

i have heard of safari hot air ballons, where you can take it over yankari game reserve and look at the animals. just dont run out of petrol while up there :-)

i like tibetan mastiffs but i think they would suffer from the heat in nigeria. i also like azawaks also