₦airaland Forum

Broveens42:
Stop hallucinating
Abuja is not even close to many African cities in terms of beauty and infrastructure.
Abuja is just like Owerri, with no portable(PB) water. Abuja has better roads than owerri, but owerri has no slum areas like Abuja

Moro.n, who told you Abuja has no potable water? You clearly have never been there in your wretched life to be comparing it to Owerri.

Plus Abuja has no ''slum areas'', you ignorant peabrain.

greymiles:
Please change that ur “wheels for Nigeria”
It’s wheels for biafra
At least, none of them in that zoo is patronizing us except in South East
Let them afonjaz and their masters come and beg b4 selling to them

ANIMAL, the news is different from your lies and ethnic hate, you evil entity.

''Nigerians have taken to social media to commend the Federal Government of Nigeria for patronizing indigenous vehicle manufacturing company, Innoson Naija News reports
This comes after the Federal Fire Service took to its social media page to share fleets of ambulances buses bought from the vehicle manufacturer.'

https://www./2022/03/09/nigerians-react-as-fg-spends-millions-on-innoson-vehicles-photo/

Innoson Group To Establish Vehicle Manufacturing Plant in Owerri

The Guardian

Nigerian indigenous car maker, Innoson Vehicles Manufacturing (IVM), says plans are underway to establish another manufacturing plant in Owerri, Imo State.

Chief Innocent Chukwuma, Chairman, Innoson Group, made the disclosure when he received members of the Correspondents’ Chapel, on a facility tour of his plant in Nnewi, Anambra on Friday.

Chukwuma said that the current expansion effort was to actualise the group’s mission to become a giant in vehicle manufacturing in Africa by serving the country’s and continent’s vehicle needs.

The Wheels of Nigeria - Innoson Motors
https://technext.ng/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Capture.jpg


“The Innoson factory expansion will be situated at Naze Owerri in Imo state. We have already acquired about 150,000sqm land for this project and construction works are ongoing,” he said.

He appreciated the media for their continual support and partnership with his organisation.

Also speaking, Mr Cornel Osigwe, Head, Corporate Communications, Innoson Group, who led the group round the facility, expressed excitement over Gov. Charles Soludo’s endorsement of Innoson vehicle as the official vehicle for Anambra state.

Osigwe said that the endorsement by Gov. Soludo showed the durability and capacity of the made in Nigeria vehicle.

“Gov. Soludo is the first governor to use Innoson vehicles as official vehicle and we are hopeful that such endorsement will increase patronage from other state governments, corporate organisations and other well-meaning Nigerians.

“Presently, IVM is producing vehicles for about five countries in Africa including Sierra Leone, Mali, Congo, and Côte d’Ivoire,” he said.

Osigwe said the company was currently migrating from manual production to a fully automated production plant.

“The manual production plant has the capacity to produce about 10,000 vehicles annually but at the completion of the migration to a fully automated production plant, it will have the capacity to produce about 60,000 annually,” he said.

https://www.nyongesasande.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/8-cars-made-in-Africa-by-African-manufacturers-Business-Insider-Africa-5-9-2021-9-34-05-AM.png

Earlier in his address, Mr Emmanuel Ilozue, Chairman, Correspondents’ Chapel, Anambra state said the visit was to strengthen media partnership with the group.

“You are breaking grounds in the automobile industry and contributing to the economy of the state and country at large. It is commendable and worthy of emulation.''

“We are here on this facility tour to see and get firsthand information on your entrepreneurial activities to help the media educate and inspire residents of the state,” Ilozue said.

Highlights of the event was the presentation of award of recognition as ‘Craftsman’ per excellent to the company by the Correspondents’ Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists, Anambra state council.


https://guardian.ng/news/innoson-group-to-establish-vehicle-manufacturing-plant-in-owerri/

Richwallet:
Anglo Saxons, Celts and Franks were Israelites. Blacks were the first to occupy Europe and Asia. Shem was given parts of Asia and Ham was given Africa. Shemtic people are not the owners of Africa. That land belongs to the Hamitic people to live whatever religion they like.

As I said the Anglo Saxons, Celts and Franks were Black. During the persecution of the Protestants and the Black Plague many of our people settled in the Americas. Not all of us came to America from Igbo slaves that the pagan kings and Moors sold to the White imposter Jews.

Why wont you let us tell our own story? Black Jews ruled Europe. Black Hebrew Edomites were the Greeks and the Romans. This is the actual story as the Whites were the Slavs known today as slaves from Odessa. Yes Blacks enslaved Whites for thousands of years.

Ok, now I get your drift.

Benin City, The Mighty Medieval Capital Now Lost Without Trace

Fri 18 Mar 2016

UK Guardian Newspaper

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/27/9e/14/279e14bf0319884c68486a0bdd7697ff.jpg
Artist Reconstruction of the 16th century Benin City Palace

With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder’. So why is nothing left?



This is the story of a lost medieval city you’ve probably never heard about. Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century.

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”.

Situated on a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls in the south and deep ditches in the north. Beyond the city walls, numerous further walls were erected that separated the surroundings of the capital into around 500 distinct villages.

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours ...to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”.

Barely any trace of these walls exist today.

Benin City was also one of the first cities [on Earth] to have a semblance of street lighting. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace.

When the Portuguese first “discovered” the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the middle of the African jungle. They called it the “Great City of Benin”, at a time when there were hardly any other places in Africa the Europeans acknowledged as a city. Indeed, they classified Benin City as one of the most beautiful and best planned cities in the world.

In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket”.

African fractals

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

At the centre of the city stood the king’s court, from which extended 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120-ft wide. These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water. Many narrower side and intersecting streets extended off them. In the middle of the streets were turf on which animals fed.

“Houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other,” writes the 17th-century Dutch visitor Olfert Dapper. “Adorned with gables and steps … they are usually broad with long galleries inside, especially so in the case of the houses of the nobility, and divided into many rooms which are separated by walls made of red clay, very well erected.”

Dapper adds that wealthy residents kept these walls “as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland can be made with chalk, and they are like mirrors. The upper storeys are made of the same sort of clay. Moreover, every house is provided with a well for the supply of fresh water”.

Family houses were divided into three sections: the central part was the husband’s quarters, looking towards the road; to the left the wives’ quarters (oderie), and to the right the young men’s quarters (yekogbe).

Daily street life in Benin City might have consisted of large crowds going though even larger streets, with people colourfully dressed – some in white, others in yellow, blue or green – and the city captains acting as judges to resolve lawsuits, moderating debates in the numerous galleries, and arbitrating petty conflicts in the markets.

The early foreign explorers’ descriptions of Benin City portrayed it as a place free of crime and hunger, with large streets and houses kept clean; a city filled with courteous, honest people, and run by a centralised and highly sophisticated bureaucracy.

The city was split into 11 divisions, each a smaller replication of the king’s court, comprising a sprawling series of compounds containing accommodation, workshops and public buildings – interconnected by innumerable doors and passageways, all richly decorated with the art that made Benin famous. The city was literally covered in it.

The exterior walls of the courts and compounds were decorated with horizontal ridge designs (agben) and clay carvings portraying animals, warriors and other symbols of power – the carvings would create contrasting patterns in the strong sunlight. Natural objects (pebbles or pieces of mica) were also pressed into the wet clay, while in the palaces, pillars were covered with bronze plaques illustrating the victories and deeds of former kings and nobles.

At the height of its greatness in the 12th century – well before the start of the European Renaissance – the kings and nobles of Benin City patronised craftsmen and lavished them with gifts and wealth, in return for their depiction of the kings’ and dignitaries’ great exploits in intricate bronze sculptures.

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/e8/2d/5e/e82d5e7b0204d1e836fb49aa07fd712c.jpg

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/66/a3/06/66a3061d6b77f70597dfba0a0409512c.jpg

“These works from Benin are equal to the very finest examples of European casting technique,” wrote Professor Felix von Luschan, formerly of the Berlin Ethnological Museum. “Benvenuto Celini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone else before or after him. Technically, these bronzes represent the very highest possible achievement.”

What impressed the first visiting Europeans most was the wealth, artistic beauty and magnificence of the city. Immediately European nations saw the opportunity to develop trade with the wealthy kingdom, importing ivory, palm oil and pepper – and exporting guns. At the beginning of the 16th century, word quickly spread around Europe about the beautiful African city, and new visitors flocked in from all parts of Europe, with ever glowing testimonies, recorded in numerous voyage notes and illustrations.

Lost world

Now, however, the great Benin City is lost to history. Its decline began in the 15th century, sparked by internal conflicts linked to the increasing European intrusion and slavery trade at the borders of the Benin empire.

Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground. My great grandparents were among the many who fled following the sacking of the city; they were members of the elite corps of the king’s doctors.

Nowadays, while a modern Benin City has risen on the same plain, the ruins of its former, grander namesake are not mentioned in any tourist guidebook to the area. They have not been preserved, nor has a miniature city or touristic replica been made to keep alive the memory of this great ancient city.

A house composed of a courtyard in Obasagbon, known as Chief Enogie Aikoriogie’s house – probably built in the second half of the 19th century – is considered the only vestige that survives from Benin City. The house possesses features that match the horizontally fluted walls, pillars, central impluvium and carved decorations observed in the architecture of ancient Benin.


Curious tourists visiting Edo state in Nigeria are often shown places that might once have been part of the ancient city – but its walls and moats are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps a section of the great city wall, one of the world’s largest man-made monuments, now lies bruised and battered, neglected and forgotten in the Nigerian bush.

A discontented Nigerian puts it this way: “Imagine if this monument was in England, USA, Germany, Canada or India? It would be the most visited place on earth, and a tourist mecca for millions of the world’s people. A money-spinner worth countless billions in annual tourist revenue.”

Instead, if you wish to get a glimpse into the glorious past of the ancient Benin kingdom – and a better understanding of this groundbreaking city – you are better off visiting the Benin Bronze Sculptures section of the British Museum in central London.

Farfalla:
No. They were wrong.

The Earth isn't flat.

Strictly your opinion, with no real scientific backing.

Show us a picture of the Earth that is not computer-generated. None exist. Even NASA admits that its Earth images are computer-generated composites. Strange when you consider they claim to be in outer space a lot, with their space stations and shuttles that could easily send us genuine photos, but don't.

The reason they can't is that there may be no 'outer space' at all, and all their craft are simply orbiting the outer reaches of the Earth atmosphere above which is a hard, impenetrable metallic dome. The dome is actually recognised by modern science, and is called the Van Allen belts, although they describe it as a 'thick radiation field'. No pictorial evidence has ever been presented of reality beyond the Van Allen belts, meaning they haven't been able to penetrate it. That is why we only have computer generated images of the 'spherical earth' sitting in 'outer space'.

https://futurism.com/scientists-find-huge-star-trek-esque-invisible-dome-around-earth

OP IS PARTLY CORRECT. The real descendants of Abraham are black people. There were no 'Anglo saxons' or white folk among them. The original Jews were all blacks. It's in the bible if you wish to learn.

Amos 9:7

''Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? saith the Lord.''


Zephaniah 3:10-12

''From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants, even the daughter of my dispersed, shall bring mine offering..''


'Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia (ie the Nile)' looking from Israel is WEST AND CENTRAL AFRICA, WHERE HIS ''DISPERSED'' ARE TODAY SETTLED.
.

PoliteActivist:
You've been told to stick your nose out of YouTube. Have you ever wondered what really is behind demonization of Bill Gates. How come the most philantropic and most bleeding heart billionaire is also the most demonised?

Shut your lips and go and research Gates and his population-control agenda and crimes. It is not just on YouTube. Go on Google and do proper research, and not from corporate 'mainstream' media sources whose goal is to deceive and brainwash.

Ttalk:
Why didn't Dubai you mentioned didn't suffer similar curse, abi the curse doesn't affect Arab countries? What about Saudi Arabia?

The TINY populations of the gulf states means that they can afford to live off their oil wealth and literally do nothing else.

If you want to know how gargantuan the corruption of the gulf oil elite is, go and visit Millionaires Row in London, or the suburbs of Monaco and Beverly Hills.

They simply have enough oil funds to cater to their tiny populations even as they enrich themselves to stupendous levels.

UAE (capital, Dubai) has just 9 million people and they export three times the amount of oil Nigeria does. It's like giving a district of Lagos, say Surulere, the entire Nigerian annual oil wealth earnings TIMES THREE, equivalent to about 100 billion dollars a year.

Will Surulere not look like heaven on Earth after a couple of months or less?

Ttalk:
Let me burst you here before I go to bed.

You are quick to point out the comparative strength of Dubai but ignored the strength of Nigeria in areas of Population, land mass, rich culture, large deposit mineral resources, human resources etc. All of which command more value than oil.

Does anyone stop Nigeria from earning huge money out of her abundance resources?

Since when population becomes a determinant of country's wealth?

Why does USA, China with higher population have more wealth, just like small countries like Netherland, Swizerland are not retarding

Nigeria suffered from the phenomenon known as the Oil Curse.

An offshoot of the well-researched Resource Curse, it is the tendency, not unique to Nigeria, where a developing country gets sudden access to oil wealth, and it leads to the gradual neglect of other sectors of the economy, including hitherto booming sectors.

According to Wiki, ''many observers have likened the resource curse to the difficulties that befall lottery winners who struggle to manage the complex side-effects of newfound wealth''.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

The good thing is that Nigeria has learnt from the experience, and is diversifying its economy away from oil, into other growing sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, the services, entertainment, etc.

YOUR JOB is to contribute to that diversification, as a member of the private sector, instead of wasting time and energy telling yourselves you are naturally wicked and inferior people with no redemption.