₦airaland Forum

shymmex: How's that possible?

How is it not possible? The black people in the UK are a minority, right? I don't see why the Ghanians, Nigerians, Kenyans, etc. in the UK have to live with and amongst the blacks in the UK that are going through the same kind of social struggle black Americans are going through in the US. Are they afraid of not being around other blacks or something?

shymmex: ^^^ I already answered the OP's questions there. And I may add lack of role models to the list.

"Poverty" (calling what poor blacks in the UK experience "poverty" sounds ridiculous by the way, are they really impoverished in the real sense?) is not an explanation. It's a description, at best. Same for "class".

"Long working hours" also isn't an explanation. That's an excuse at best. My (middle class) parents also had and have long working hours.

"Lack of role models" isn't an explanation (see African Americans, who have role models in all areas of human endeavor even before affirmative action or even civil rights, yet their youth have the same problems)

shymmex: My point is that, the system is institutionally racist, and they're not letting anyone through - except if you're into sports, or music. Most of the names you listed are old money, their parents, or grandparent made their money in other countries - before coming to the UK. And in the case of Mo Ibrahim, he made his money before coming here.

David Lammy for example, is from a middle class family - he went through the private school system - and there is no way any of these kids can see him as a role model. There are no rags to riches stories in the UK - except if you do sports, or make music. Most people maintain the status quo from birth - to their death bed, that's the reality.

The situation is the same in America for African Americans, except harder for them. Black America is sill largely segregated from White America and there are the exact same allegations of institutional racism and complaints that music and sports are the only way out.


The answer to the OP's question was already provided by SEFAGO a few posts ago: if the Nigerians there avoid the blacks there who are stuck in the same quagmire in the UK as African Americans are in the US, they'll do better and won't join gangs or engage in violent crime at high levels.

SEFAGO: As for the crime wave this is not surprising. A lot of Nigerians have to live in poor neighborhoods in the UK (read neighborhoods with large black- Afro-Caribbean, African and native black British communities) when they arrive the UK. And their kids could easily get influenced by other black youths (most of Caribbean descent) who are in gangs- its all peer pressure.

I think this is the only thing posted in this thread so far that has any validity or relevance to the question posted by the OP. Everything else seems like whining and cop-outs.

shymmex: I don't even how deep they had to dig to find the twenty people they listed. I have never even heard about most of the names on the list. Listing twenty successful role models in Nigeria won't take me thirty seconds - neither would listing 20 successful Nigerian Americans, or African Americans. I know they had to research those twenty names for months - and the net worth of most of them, apart from Mo Ibrahim, and the Senegalese guy - won't make the top 100,000 successful people in the world lol.

1. Listing 20 successful role models in Nigeria? lol, the population of Nigeria is over 100 million and it's a sovereign country. Of course there are going to be some achievers.

2. What does how many successful Nigerian Americans or African Americans there are have to do with what the youth are doing? There are loads of successful African Americans both dead and alive and yet the African American youth are not turning out to be ideal or achieving at high enough levels in general.

@ shymmex

I guess I don't really see your point. Let's just agree to disagree.

shymmex: How many of the twenty people you listed were born and raised in the UK?? Even the names listed included some sportsmen, and the rest of them - are not even in public eye.. Keep defending the indefensible, and you don't even live here.

So if they had all been born in the UK and were all millionaire business moguls and never sportsmen, what difference would that make as far as what black youth in Britain are doing?

Katsumoto: [b]Did I state that there weren't/aren't any Black role models in the UK? [/b]The point I made to Naijababe was that Indians have done better than Black folks in the UK. The lists you provided buttresses my point.

No you didn't, but that seems to be a running theme in this thread. I just kind of seized on your statement because it fit what I was going to post. Wasn't a rejoinder or anything, so maybe I shouldn't have quoted you specifically.


Anyway, I don't really understand the "there are no role models/business moguls for us to imitate" justification. Who were those Indians imitating when they made their fortunes?

Katsumoto: This is a list of Asian folks, mostly Indians, please find a list for BLACK folks in the UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/aug/26/pressandpublishing.raceintheuk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/05/britishidentity.race

http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/uk%E2%80%99s-hidden-black-middle-class

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/05/britishidentity.race1

Murder_X: Please we need to educate those who have never travelled out of Lagos all their lives that not every tribe after Ijebu Ode is Ibo.

Just for the record, Omoregie is indeed Edo, however Odegbune is Urhobo and Osoteku is Yoruba, not Edo, so the ethnic designations you put in parentheses weren't entirely accurate.

Kobojunkie, I see you've resorted to your habit of just re-posting whatever crap you previously posted. After that, we don't have any business discussing anything further and our conversation should end. Bye.

Kobojunkie: Did I make the above up?

The issue I have, apart from the "mini-country" nonsense, is this "won't make the problem seem as bad" comment. It's ridiculous. I am arguing that "the population problem" that is being claimed to exist doesn't really exist but is only an artifact, not that "the problem won't seem as bad." What exists is an industrialization problem.

Kobojunkie: @PhysicsQED is arguing that population IS NOT THE PROBLEM, but that by simply dividing the whole nation up into 9 or 10 mini-countries, somehow the problem will not seem as bad.

!!!!!!!

"Mini-countries"?!

"PhysicsQED is arguing that by simply dividing the nation the problem will not seem as bad"?!!

This is why I gave up on you. Please, for goodness sake, make your own analyses independent of what I posted and stop trying to impose your narrow perspective and your distortions onto what I wrote. IGNORE what I wrote and just move on, because it's incredibly frustrating dealing with you.

Kobojunkie: What you have done is akin to suggesting that dividing China into more countries will somehow make the population problems disappear. lol

Wow...For you to make this ridiculous comparison shows that you really didn't understand what I was getting at. I was too subtle about it. I'm really done. It's just a waste of time discussing this.

Kobojunkie: The article does not speak of lack of jobs but of a SQUEEZE . . a COUNTRY-WIDE congestion. I mean how do you make that problem go away, for instance in the school example, by dividing the same school up into 9 or 10 places??

^^^^^

And you think this makes any sense? So because someone went to Lagos and got confirmation that the place (Lagos) was congested, which it is, you reached the ridiculous conclusion that there's a "country-wide congestion" even though anybody with functioning eyes and half a brain can tell that in MANY places in Nigeria, there is lots of unused land? I've seen that Nigeria is not over-crowded or congested with my own eyes and I don't need to rely on the insinuations of one journalist that visited one place in the country to reach the appropriate conclusion.

This is why I didn't want to discuss the article with you. The article made a ridiculous insinuation at the beginning and you ran with it. Nigeria is not over-crowded, Nigeria is under-developed and virtually pre-industrial and THAT is the issue.

Kobo, I think what I was saying went waaaaay over your head, so I'm not going to bother to discuss it any further with ya. Goodnight.

Kobojunkie: That does not make any sense. Dividing Nigeria will make the squeeze go away?

I modified my post a bit because I realized that what I was saying might have been a little too subtle.

The point is, if the country is divided, this imaginary problem will go away, because nations of 30 million or 10 million or 5 million don't seem alarming to anyone - and they shouldn't be.

The real problem is not population in and of itself, but industrialization. Dividing the country will help those that want to industrialize do so faster and make those who are not really thinking about such things tighten their belts and stop just reproducing anyhow without regard to their economic/developmental situation.

Nigeria is three times the size of Germany (population 80 million) and many more times the size of Japan (population 127 million), but because this article was written by someone in the U.S. - where some states are as big or larger than countries - they tried to make it seem as if there was some sort of overcrowding problem in the very first sentence. There is lots and lots of unused land in Nigeria. The problem is industrialization not mere numbers alone.

This is an artificial problem. Divide Nigeria into 9 or 10 countries and it won't look like one country is ballooning to an enormous size. Also, in all likelihood, the divided pieces of Nigeria will adjust to the particular realities/limitations of their economic/developmental situation.

The drastic transition from high to low birthrates that took place in poor countries in Asia, Latin America and North Africa has yet to happen here.

That transition often brings substantial economic benefits, said Eduard Bos, a population specialist at the World Bank. As the last large population group reaches working age, the number of adults in the labor force is high relative to more dependent groups — the young and the elderly — for a time. If managed well, that creates capital that can be used to improve health and education and to develop new industries.

The specialist forgot to mention that many or most of those countries are actually individual/separate nations, unlike in some places where you have many nationalities joined as one. If lower population is believed to be an advantage in rapid industrialization, then it's pretty obvious that division of some existing countries can bring that about. He also forgot that some of the adults in Nigeria are not interested in education or new industries.