…. joy, sadness, regret, longing, love, pain, laughter, tears…that’s what Nigeria does to you… like an exasperating yet exquisite lover, it is capable of making you feel these emotions.

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 29, 2009 Ms Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid is about the problems of foreign aid. She not only claims that aid does not work, she also claims that aid is what is retarding the development of poor countries. The book brings together a combination of an indictment of foreign aid and a complex [...]

The NigeriansTalk.org Weekly Linked List #1 The following are some interesting stories we have found this week from the Nigerian blogosphere.  We plan on featuring such links every Thursday. Chxta gives a blow-by-blow rundown of Anambra gubernatorial politics from 1999 onwards. BellaNaija reveals exclusive photos from Nollywood heavyweight-turned-evangelist Liz Benson’s wedding At the Bombastic Element blog, news is in that [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 21, 2009 Part I Regular readers of this column would probably realise by now that I have a thing for stereotypes. Well, the current interest was raised by the recent debate that surrounded two issues: the Sony Playstation advert, in which there was a mention of a Nigerian 419er, and the South [...]

Nneoma, of Pyoo Wata, reviews the reactions of Nigerian bloggers to the recent sci-fi fim, District 9, and also cautions against the use of the rebranding mantra for the purposes of censorship. Ever since the Dora Akunyili was charged with the task of cleaning up the national image, the nation, including its bloggers, has been even more keenly aware of [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 15, 2009 Permit me to introduce you to Dawit Shanko. He was born in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, in 1968, and spent his early teenage years working as a shoe-shiner. It was through this that he supported his education. He was awarded a scholarship to go to East Germany to study surveying [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 8, 2009 I was walking down the main street in Neukölln, an area of Berlin, when a middle-aged man stopped me to ask for direction to Hermannplatz, a square in the area. I was rather surprised that someone asked me for directions; I had noticed that in Berlin these kinds of things [...]

As it appeared in the BusinessDay of September 1, 2009 Act One A couple of days ago I joined one of my friends to pick up his daughter at the kindergarten. This was the first time I was seeing her in close to two years; the last time I saw and carried her she was just about 4 months old. [...]

A review by Arin Since the breaking news on what has been dubbed ‘The Friday Bank Massacre’ by one Nigerian newspaper, many Nigerians and friends of Nigeria have, judging by the number of article comments and the thread lengths on discussion forums, devoured every piece of available information on the even as at now still emerging story. The breaking news [...]