When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.
You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.'
Women in Africa, generally a lot needs to be done for women. Women are not being educated, not only in Angola but my trip to Nigeria, one point I would make over and over again was that women need to be educated too.
This has a lot to do with the unrest in Nigeria, but also with the production loss after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, the decline in Iraq since the 2003 war, and the decline in Venezuelan output since 2002.
I looked down at the brochure nearest me."We're going to Nigeria," I threatened. "I hope you like elephant polo." -Liberty Jones
I am making this trip to Africa because Washington is an international city, just like Tokyo, Nigeria or Israel. As mayor, I am an international symbol. Can you deny that to Africa?
The history of slavery and the complication of slavery is that it is an international concept. It is something that affected people who were our people. For example, there were people from the west of Nigeria who were taken by the hundreds of thousan...
The Nigerians have been very instrumental in preserving stability in Sierra Leone. They have done this at considerable cost in dollars and Nigerian lives. The US should encourage Nigeria to stay in Sierra Leone.
My mother was English. My parents met in Oxford in the '50s, and my mother moved to Nigeria and lived there. She was five foot two, very feisty and very English.
When I was younger, my father was in the Foreign Service and we lived in Nigeria, Panama, and London, but for the most part I grew up in the South and D.C. I got the travel bug as a little person and I've bounced around a lot.
I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we'd never smelled the fumes of petroleum.
The biggest opportunity in 2013 is in Africa. It has seven out of the ten fastest-growing economies in the world. In Nigeria alone there are 100 million people with mobile phones. In total, 300 million Africans - five times the population of Britain ...
Listening to the type of music I grew up with, like King Sunny Ade, Fela Kuti and experiencing different things and conditions and hardship, as well as the good times in Nigeria, has definitely carved me into who I am.
The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
I come from Nigeria, and we live by the idea that it takes a village. So my entire team. I live by my team: my friends, my neighbors, my teachers - they're the people who taught me how to be a free actor.
After the death of the sadistic dictator Gen. Sanni Abacha in 1998, Nigeria underwent a one-year transitional military administration headed by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who uncharacteristically bowed out precisely on the promised date for military ...
So many times I've encountered people who are just kind of like, 'Yeah, Nigeria,' and, you know, thump their chest and seem very sure of, like, being Nigerian. And I'm just kind of, like, I wish I could be that sure.
If you're able to grow up in Nigeria and go through certain things, you're able to tackle anything around the world because you're able to live wherever, if you can survive in a city like Lagos or Warri or Niger Delta, as far as I'm concerned.
Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price.
You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
We want to lead a country where people will be less greedy. Where people will know that the commonwealth of Nigeria belongs to all Nigerians, where people's wealth depends on the people around you. If you become a rich person and everyone around you ...
