@brooklyn99

Im sorry to say but there is a world of difference between Africans and Black Americans. There is a world of difference among Africans too.

Southern black and white Americans have almost everything in common. Just about everything.

Aba should be a premier city in the continent. The city has so much potential and could be the industrial heart of the continent.Everything naija needs could have been manufactured in the city. Anything under the sun. If Aba's potential was harnesed Naija wont need to import much.  A city of about 1,000000 people with no roads and no organization and is about to totally collapse from neglect.

Aba is a continental tragedy. If the city is well developed it could play a bigger part in leading Naija to self sufficiency than Abuja with all the millions poured into it can.

Both Orji governors should be brought to book and dealt with harshly. What a disgrace Orji Kalu is for not investing in his own city . How more foolish can a person be?

Aba downtown should be a lovely sight, one of the best from Cairo to Capetown. It should be showcasing the latest product styles in shoes, electronics, clothing etc for people from all around the world to see but instead I weep when i remember the city. A big trash dump. So sad



@JohnKent

When Nigerians in Nigeria use the word Oyibo for anybody it is not an insult. It is used to refer to foreigners in general and some Nigerians use the word for black Americans too. It is the same in Ghana where the locals refer to both white Americans and Black Americans with the same word.

A Nigerian in Nigeria will refer to a Puerto rican as Oyibo, a Nigerian in the United States wont.
A Nigerian in Nigeria will refer to mestizos, castizos, pardos etc from South America as Oyibo, a Nigerian in America wont.

A Nigerian in Naija will call Jennifer Lopez Oyibo, a Nigerian in America wont.

Nigerians use Oyinbo sometimes to refer to foreign culture regardless of the skin shade of the person practicing it.

Nigerians dont use skin color as a sign of commonality otherwise Igbos, Yorubas Hausas etc will just be "Bruthas" and "Sistas" like people do in America and identify as one and the same. Culture is the defining factor.

Nigerians in the West are mainly the ones that use Oyibo to refer to only those that they think are "Pure White"

There is NOTHING insulting about refering to any American of any shade as Oyibo

Imagine

The guy is posting pictures of dirty homes as if it gives him any credibility

make una begin they post full pictures of regular Naija cities. Non of them including the major ones like P.H has a credible downtown picture that captures a cross section of the city.

Minus certain parts of Lag and Abj no Nigerian city is really habitable. Il swap all of them any day for the average mini city of 100,000 people in the U.S because the average small city in the U.S is 1000000000000000000000>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> than cities in Naija

This guy wey dey post pics from Gariki and V.I. come they compare am with natural disaster pictures from overseas na joke the guy be.

Average city of 50,000 people in the U.S is better than anything in Naija including Abuja.

In Nigeria you can only paste pics from Abj, Lag or Obudu Ranch in a country of 160 million.

Anybody care to post DOWNTOWN pics of regular Naija cities like Aba, Onitsha, Warri etc?? I mean downtown pics where you capture at least 30 buildings in one picture.

There are millions of average 100,000 resident cities that are far better than the best pics from V.I or Gariki.

What a bad joke.

If you want to dispute my post start by posting general pics (capturing a cross section of any city or a whole area) in Naija.


Starting in Alphabethical order


1  Aba

any takers

Nah dude, you are the one that is clueless.

It does not matter how light or dark that they are. Take a half white person who is dark to Nigeria and people will look at the person and correctly identify the person as half white in a split second.

You seem to think bi-racial is only about half white and half black. What of people like Kimora Lee who are half asian half black but look Asian? What should they be classified as-black or bi-racial? What are you going to classify somebody who is half Japanese and half Mexican?.

Guy clueless racists invented the one drop of blood rule. Africans are under no obligation to adopt such a rule, especially given the fact that once they see a half white, half asian of half whatever, they know.

Africans are correct to identify any bi-racial as such

@topic

Nobody hates Nigeria, it is our birthplace. Nigeria hates herself. The country was founded on shaky foundation and that needs to be resolved first.

@9jaganja

Half whites are half whites period. It does not matter what racists think as they have no right to tell anybody to classify a 50% white person or 75% white person as black. Us accepting that is the definition of insanity.

One drop of blood does not make anybody black. It just means the person is a white person with one drop of black blood. Its people like you that refer to Ryan Giggs, Mariah Carey, Wenworth Miller, Rasheeda Jones, Jennifer Beals, Soleded O'Brian etc as black even though those people are white people with some African Ancestory.

And the word Half-Caste might not be the best of words and is politically incorrect but it is not a word Nigerians use as a slur or with malice. Nigerians can tell the differences between each ethnic group and when they see a half white person they correctly identify the person as half white.

The wrong thing to do is to incorrectly classify somebody who is genetically 50%, 75% or 90% white as black. That is unbridled insanity. Even racists have to learn to accept their own people too including all Whites who are part-black.

The average Nigerian in Nigeria who has not heard of the stupid one drop rule invented by foolish ignoramuses in the dark ages will call any of the people that I listed above and many more white if they meet them in Nigeria

This topic is an Anomaly

RACE DOES NOT EXIST. It is a concept developed by ignorant middle age Europeans. Who told them there was any such thing like Negro, Caucasian etc This was a foolish concept that they came up with and even more foolish is the idea of some people on here adopting their ignorance and talking crap.

How can you use some stupid construct and hold on to outdated classifications and try to find a connection to intelligence??

This discussion is a waste of time because intelligence has nothing to with "race"

End of story

e be like say this Pokasoka guy think say all the people on top this forum na small pickin

Person turn to cat?? What a joke!

I didnt want to comment on this topic but i had to laugh out loud on that. Regardless of if Juju exists or not

1. No human being has the ability to turn to an animal, or yam or cocoyam etc

2. The sun cannot rise from the west and set in the east.

3. The rotation of the earth will be the same, no human beign or juju can change the earth's rotation to west to east

4. No juju can turn sahara dersert into rainforest overnight

5. Juju no fit make person fly, disappear of torpedo into space

6. Person wey hold gun power pass person wey hold juju power, Fact

@cap28 what exactly do you mean by saying at least Obama did not sell out? Are u saying that if a 50% irish Obama married a woman of irish ancestry he will be selling out?? Selling out to whom and y?

N/B: Please people in Nigeria are not looking up 2 Obama for anything. Infact people in Nigeria do not define themselves as primarily black. Nigerians have very distinct ethnicities and cultures with which they define themselves. In Nigeria, there s no such thing as what "black people do". If Obama's dad had been a black american, nobody in Nigeria wold give a hoot about him.

sad that such ignorance exists today. And people there is no such thing as different races, just divisions ignorant people invented a few centuries ago.
All humans are by and large the same. This clown should be fired and sent back to the 16th century

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2009/08/30/kidnapping-in-the-east-is-the-revolt-of-the-oppressed/

By Obi Nwankanma
SOUTH-Eastern Nigeria has finally, fully collapsed under the weight of years of neglect and containment. It is now a no-go area for any one who treasures safety.

Increasing kidnappings and a high rate of other violent crimes reflect the terrible truth, that the East has become ungovernable.

There is in fact very little government in existence. We certainly have sitting authorities in place, but they are at best, symbolic and mostly engaged in a circus: the visual elements of power: sirens, billboards, the occasional empty speeches – just the circus.

The situation in Eastern Nigeria today is the most important signifier of the rapid siege of the civic space that will eventually envelope Nigeria if we fail to heed the signs and act urgently.

The South-East of Nigeria is an important flashpoint and an indicator of where we may eventually end up: the absolute collapse of the regulatory power of the state and the rise of the atomized spheres of influence and the dangerous, unmanageable frontier.

Any honest and courageous visitor to the East will certainly feel the skepticism among the population about the meaning and value of government in their lives. People are alienated and do not feel themselves part of a civic order.

There is a massive sense of insecurity. Marauders roam the night, and seize the day, kidnap people, and foment siege on the social landscape of the East. There is massive divestment. Increasingly folks are moving their families and businesses out of the East.

This human divestment impacts on new investments in the East. This is a dangerous situation, but it has its roots in the 1970s when the federal government of Nigeria, as part of its vicious post war policies against the Igbo squeezed the East of much needed economic development, containing its industrial capacities, and restraining its expansion in a move that led eventually to the collapse of its economy through capital flight.

Aba ’s industrial belt collapsed.
Onitsha’s commercial growth was repressed. As a result of the policies between 1983 and the end of the military regime in Nigeria, and particularly the regime that came to the fore from 1984 till it stepped aside, the East experienced the greatest moments of neglect, capital squeeze, and infrastructural decay.

Military governors sent to the East, including those who were Igbo military officers, often thought their assignments to the East was a continuation of the civil war by other means. Their mandates, it seemed, was not to develop the East, but to slow it down.

It was precisely the mindset that led then Brigadier Ike Nwachukwu who was appointed military governor of the old Imo State in 1984 to take one good look at the industrial projects and the development plan that the late Dr. Sam Mbakwe had embarked upon and declare them “white elephant projects,” and went into the business of dismantling them; in effect destroying the emergent base of the post-war economic resurgence that would have saved the East and expanded opportunities.

Those projects he could not dismantle, he privatized and sold off, like the Paint and Resin industry in Mbaise and which now equally lies prostate. What he did not complete by way of depredation others finished. For example, Captain Joe Aneke’s government dismantled the Izombe and Amaraku Power Projects, the first independent power project in Nigeria embarked upon by any state and established by the Mbakwe government through international loans.

Indeed by 1980, the South East of Nigeria had the vastest investment in local machine tools industry in West Africa and would have entered the phase of an industrial revolution by 1987, a fact noted by the research economist Tom Forrest, of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, in his fascinating book, The Advance of Capital: The growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise in 1980.

The question that people ask is: what happened to all that industry and enterprise? We know its sum effect: economic and civic degradation, and a certain desperation that has led to terrible unemployment, cynicism, and crime. Citizens of the South Eastern Nigeria ignored military rule, hoping to wait it out, and restore a civic leadership that will revamp the East. That was not to be.

They have not been allowed, since the so-called return to democracy, to elect their true leaders, and they have lived under something of a Carthaginian mandate since 1983.

The result is that leadership remains lax, unresponsive, alienated, flatulent and unimaginative. Hear the current governor of Abia State, and I quote from a recent newspaper report: “It would be unfair for people to compare the level of development in the South-South states or Lagos with that of the state” he (T.A.Orji) said, adding that deductions were still being made at source from state’s monthly allocation.

“If I get half of what they get, you will see wonders. For instance, we received N2 billion last month. We spent N1.4 billion on workers’ salaries. How much development projects can the remaining N600 million execute?

“They gave me N205 million as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) for last month, this money can’t even cover asphalt for a 12-kilometre road. Yet people expect me to do magic and unfortunately, people don’t pay tax here.”

This is, I’m sorry to say, the lamest gubernatorial excuse of all time. The governor infers that Abia is insolvent and incapable of generating self-sustaining revenue.

If that is so, let us then declare Abia bankrupt and dissolve the state, and cede it to a more solvent state, like Rivers State.

But of course this kind of leadership and its thought process that is full of impotent excuses has unraveled the beast in the East: an angry army of unemployed, unemployable, impoverished young men and women, who have seen that there is nowhere else to go, and nothing else to do but to live by their own wit.

These are easy recruits to crime. They have nothing to lose. This state of mind- the fatalism of discontent- is at the roots of the upsurge of kidnappings and other violent crimes in the East of Nigeria.

The rich and the powerful are now moving targets in the East. The scope and geography of these criminal operations will spread nationwide, inevitably. That is the nature of the beast.

We better be very wary because the revolt of the oppressed and the restless is terrifying and it’s well nigh by our doorsteps.

I guess the originator of this thread must have forgotten the most recent case of ethnic diversity in Europe and the the problems it caused ie Yugoslavia.

Multiethnic countries create big problems. Its not like they can not be managed but its problematic. Even the whole European Union is not as diverse as Nigeria.


One other thing of note. Language is the biggest division known to mankind. Its bigger than skin color or anyother thing. Nowhere is this more amplified than in subsaharan Africa. Unlike Europeans who put skin color first, we Africans put language and subsequently culture ahead of everyother parameter in indicating commonality among ourselves.

A white looking girl named Oluchi regardless of her skin tone, eye color or hair color would consider her self as sharing more in common with an Ijeoma who has an extremely dark skin than a Bunmi or Ayesha who might have the same skin tone as Oluchi.
I doubt a Chioma would consider a Kudirat born and raised in the North or a Funmi in the west as her sisters ahead of an Ngozi born and raised in the east if they all have very dark skin color and Ngozi was a very yellow girl with very light eyes.

In majority white countries like the USA for example a White guy born in the USA might see more commonality with a visiting European who does not even speak his Language as opposed to a Black American who was born in the same country as speaks English like him and might even attended the same high school with him!!!!!!!!!!

Pls people while delibrating this issue
1.Let us not forget how we see commonality among ourselves.

2.The idea of seeing commonality as primarilly based on skin color irrespective of massive differences in Language and culture is, in my personal opinion, a foreign idea to us Africans.

The Europeans created artficial states all over Africa becoz they saw us and expected us to see ourselves primarilly as just "Blacks'. The reality on the ground though is that Emeka will not see Mohammed or Abdullahi and go and imagine all of a sudden that there is little difference between them and that he is one of his "black brotha". Neither will Adekunle see Yusuf who speaks a diff language and practices a diffrent culture and imagine that all those dont matter. What matters is that he is a a "black brotha"

my 2 cents

to sum up our current problems

No roads, no light, no sanitation, no security of lives n property

but We use almost 50% of our budget to pay salary to thieves posing as politicians in the name of democracy

Between 1-1.5 trillion Naira used to pay legal and official salary to big men

if corruption went down to 0%, i mean 0% we would still be using half of our money to pay bigmen


How are we ever going to develop or make progress?

We were not ready for independence and i still dont think we are ready now.

Infact the root cause of our problems is too much to list. dont know where to start

@viewlekan turns to hurling insults at Lugard. U dont need to walk in a peoples' shoes to know if theyy are planning for the future, etc

A couple of writers have noted that Africans seem incapable of self examination and get defensive when ever an issue is raised screaming racism and imperialism.

When I raised the issue of what Lugard had written a couple of months ago, some people where screaming blue murder. But i was struggling to to comprehend why folks where mad at what Lugard said.

Take a look at our society collectively

Is it full of personal vanity to an extreme level------------------yes
Have we shown any foresight or planning for the future--------------------no
Do we display placidity regarding our pathetic circumstance, yes (siddon dey look, suffer n smile)
Do we display an irrational fear of the supernatural, yes
Have we shown the ability to run one single thing in our country well, no
Do we love the display of power, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes

Am I missing something?
Lugard had a condescending view of Africans, but that does not invalidate points that he made

Prostrating has nothing, i repeat not a single thing to do with somebody beign respectful or not

Whatz disrespectful? Not falling to the ground Uve got to be kidding me.

So only if he falls to the ground is he respectful? The only way he is respectful is if he falls to the ground and if he does not prostrate he is a disrespectful person?

Guy are u hearing urself at all?

u guyz are joking right??

Prostrate to Who?? Why and for What

Which kin Yeye prostrate be that? His inlaws should understand that he comes from a diffrent culture and respect that 2. No be prostrate they go chop

African man mentality, o boy i tireooooo

@tpia, are whites Biracial??

And how is somebody who is 95% white of African descent again??

This is the height of insanity. Unless u agree that blackblood is an inferior contaminant why else would somebody that is 90 or 95% white be referred to as beign of African Descent?? That person is of European Descent


Disagree?

This man is a descendant of Irish Kings right.

I find it funny that Europeans that europeans refer to somebody who is 50, 70 90 percent white as black and of African descent.

How is somebody who is 95% white of African Descent??

Whites must accept there half spawns

If they dont, why should we?